Reification in Library and Information Science (LIS)

"Reification can refer to various things:

  • (Lat. res thing + facere to make) n. the turning of something into a thing or object; the error which consists in treating as a "thing" something which is not one. Hypostatization, treating an abstract entity as if it were concrete, is a case in point. The other meanings stem from this.

  • Reification (computer science), the act of making a data model for a previously abstract concept.

  • Reification (knowledge representation), used to represent facts that must then be manipulated in some way.

  • Reification (linguistics), in natural language processing, where a natural language statement is transformed so actions and events in it become quantifiable variables.

  • Reification (Marxism), the consideration of a human being as a physical object, deprived of subjectivity." (Wikipedia, 2006).

 

Reification in LIS is the tendency to regard "information", documents, users etc. as things rather than as social and cultural subjects, actors and situation specific tools maintaining specific interests and functions.

 

 

An anonymous referee suggested in a submitted paper about the concept of information the term “reification” about information as a physical pattern or a thing and wrote: “The reification of “information” as physical patterns is maintained . . . Maintaining the reification is problematic because it requires either mentalist assumptions and/or a departure from contemporary semiotic theory which (I believe) rejects natural signs in favor of privileging the construction of meanings.”

 

 

 

 

Literature:


Frohmann, B. (1992). The power of images: A discourse analysis of the cognitive viewpoint. Journal of Documentation, 48(4), 365-386. 
 

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (2006). Reification. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification

 

 

 

 

 

Birger Hjørland

Last edited: 26-07-2006

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