Thinking Informatically

On being promoted to a personal chair in 1993 I chose the title of Professor of Informatics, specifically acknowledging Donna Haraway’s definition of the term as the “technologies of information [and communication] as well as the biological, social, linguistic and cultural changes that initiate, accompany and complicate their development” [1]. This neatly encapsulated the plethora of issues emanating from these new technologies, inviting contributions and analyses from a wide variety of disciplines and practices. (In my later work Thinking Informatically [2] I added the phrase “and communication”.) In the intervening time the word informatics itself has been appropriated by those more focused on computer science, although why an alternative term is needed for a well-understood area is not entirely clear. Indeed the term is used both as an alternative term and as an additional one—i.e. “computer science and informatics”.