The book I wrote, in pixel form. Credit: Amy J. Ko

I wrote a book about information!

This post describes my writing process for the book I just published online, Foundations of Information. If you’d just like to read the book, it’s free and online: just click the link above and start reading. (It’s about 90,000 words as of this writing, similar to a 200-page print book). Read it, share it, use it in your own teaching, and see how I use it in my course INFO 200 Intellectual Foundations of Information. If you’d like to learn more about why and how I wrote it, read on.

I am no expert in information. My background is in computer science, and to a lesser extent, psychology, design, learning, and education. But I did not study information as an undergraduate, or as a doctoral student. In fact, up until 2008, I didn’t even know that there was an academic discipline about information. It wasn’t until I began searching for a tenure-track faculty position and I stumbled upon a position at the University of Washington Information School that I realized the obvious: of course there’s a discipline that studies information. Information is everywhere and in everything; how could there not be? I applied for the job, I fell in love with the iSchool’s collegiality and commitments to people and technology, I was lucky enough to receive an offer, and I decided to take the leap into the unfamiliar.

Six years after joining the iSchool, I received tenure, but I still had little idea what the discipline was really about, as I had mostly taught HCI, Design, and Software Engineering courses, and mostly collaborated with other computer scientists. It wasn’t until I began directing the undergraduate program that I felt compelled to learn more. I read several of the field’s seminal books and papers; I ran a 1-hour activity with our faculty to try to gather the big ideas in the field; I read a lot of my information science colleagues’ writing. After a few years of studying, I felt like I’d gained a passable knowledge of the field—enough to know that information science is an eclectic and interdisciplinary community that intersects with so many other fields, including library sciences, communication, philosophy, and computing. I felt a little less guilty about my titles, Professor of Information Science, Informatics Program Chair.

Then something happened: one of our faculty left for industry, and as one of the program chairs in charge of teaching assignments, I had to teach our introductory survey course, INFO 200 Intellectual Foundations of Information. Suddenly, all of that reading I’d would be put to the test. I cobbled together some readings and lectures, trying to build a coherent narrative around the disparate ideas around information, while connecting them to the ideas in computing, data, and design that students found most compelling.

It was okay. I covered a lot of ground and engaged a lot of students; our major was popular, and so in a way, it didn’t really matter how intellectually sound or narratively coherent the material was. Students needed the course to get into our major, and so as long as they enjoyed it, it was mostly fine. And they did enjoy it: I earned some of the best course evaluations of my career. I really should have just stopped there, and continued on with the course as is.

But many things still bugged me, particularly about the readings. I had a narrative I wanted to tell, but the research papers that I had to support that narrative were impenetrably dense. There were more comprehensible reads in magazines, but they didn’t go deep. There were popular books that went deep, but weren’t broad enough to cover the course. There were introductory textbooks about information, but they were theoretical and devoid of any mention of diversity, equity, inclusion, or justice. And all of these sources were inaccessible to students dependent on screen readers, buried in PDFs and print. The motley and dense reading list I’d made made the field look like a jumbled, incoherent set of ideas, with no form or (ironically) foundations, while excluding students with disabilities. What I needed was an accessible, coherent, engaging introductory text that would help students see the world through the lens of information and social justice, exciting our students about information.

As I started to prepare for my Spring 2021 section last October, this need for a book bothered me enough that I decided to try to write it myself. I set aside me entire 2-week winter break to write it. My wife was working every day as a nurse anyway, with only Christmas day off. And so I took would should have been 10 weekdays of pandemic vacation and divided it into 20 four-hour writing sprints. I envisioned a book that would have 18 chapters, each mapping on to one of the 20 days of our 10 week quarter (minus opening and closing days), and each would cover the big ideas that I’d crowdsourced from our faculty’s expertise. In each four hour block, I followed a ruthlessly time-boxed writing process:

1. Literature review (1 hour). In this first phase, I gathered all of the prior readings, my existing slides, and additional research, building a reading list that combined seminal and recent works. The ideas in these readings would be the basis for each chapter.
2. Outline (1 hour). In this phase, I mapped the literature to headers and roughly 25–30 topic sentences, aiming for chapters that were roughly 4,000-5,000 words each. I began each chapter with a similar motif, giving a personal experience of information in my past, and contrasting that with a personal experience of information in my present, leveraging the fact that I’ve lived both pre- and post-internet to help make salient that information is about more than the web.
3. Write (2 hours). In this last phase, I briskly drafted my outline, watching the clock to keep myself moving. Throughout, I tagged placeholders for images and other figures, citing from the chapter’s reading list as I wrote. Sometimes I wrote for an extra hour to get to a complete draft, using the overflow of the last two writing blocks.

I followed this process twice a day with a 1 hour lunch break to recharge. By the end of most days, I’d written 8,000–10,000 words, and was completely spent. But in a way, it was also recovery for my introverted self: after an exhausting Autumn quarter of constant meetings, remote teaching, and multitasking, it was glorious to just write all day long, talk to no one, and only focus on one thing.

By the Friday before Winter quarter started, I’d finished: I had drafts of all 18 chapters. I planned out some time throughout Winter quarter to edit the chapters, add images, polish citations, and curate podcasts relevant to each chapter, to create some diverse supplementary reading for each. Within a few weeks, I’d completed my first draft of the book, and sent it out for feedback from my colleagues, trying to ensure that it captured the big ideas that inspired the book.

The book tells the following story:

• Chapter 1. Information is powerful, now and throughout history.
• Chapter 2. But it can also be harmful, destructive, and perilous.
• Chapter 3. And yet, we don’t really agree on what information is.
• Chapter 4. But we do know what data is, and its not information.
• Chapter 5. We know we need technology to make data useful.
• Chapter 6. We know we need systems of people to make them useful.
• Chapter 7. And yet, even with systems, finding information is hard.
• Chapter 8. Finding info can be hard because we keep it private and secure.
• Chapter 9. Finding info can be hard because we haven’t organized it.
• Chapter 10. Sometimes we address the problems above with regulation.
• Chapter 11. Sometimes we address it with design.
• Chapter 12. All of these issues play out in social media.
• Chapter 13. … and data science.
• Chapter 14. … and automation.
• Chapter 15. … and health.
• Chapter 16. … and democracy.
• Chapter 17. … and sustainability.
• Chapter 18. Sound fun? There are lots of jobs that tackle these problems.

Within this narrative, I cover power, oppression, knowledge, information, data, metadata, information technology, information systems, information seeking, search engines privacy, security, knowledge organization, information management, policy, design, ethics, diversity, equity, inclusion, and industry, while covering many domains in which information plays out, including social media, data science, computer science, health, democracy, and sustainability.

For my course this quarter, I assign two chapters a week, and have students select one of the readings or podcasts from each chapter, then write a reflection on the links between the chapter and whatever supplementary reading or listening they chose. I recap the readings in class, have students present what they read, ask questions, and then we do an activity that ties the concepts to analytical, empirical, and design skills. Thus far, student feedback has been quite positive; students report loving the personal way of starting each chapter, the clarity of the writing, the way that every topic engages questions of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, and the way that supplementary readings and podcasts take them deep into academia or out into the broader world of media.

One of the really exciting things about having the book purely web-based instead of print is that I can change it at any time. I’m constantly fixing typos, clarifying ideas based on feedback, finding better images and videos to include, and adding citations. If you read it and have ideas for improvements, send them my way, submitting an issue on the book’s GitHub repository or writing me an email. And if you decide to use it for something you’re teaching, let me know how you’re using it! It addressed a big gap in what I needed to teach about information; I hope it can help you too.