Geoffrey Nunberg is giving the keynote at the iConf 2012 conference in Toronto and is offering a superb historical and linguistic overview of the term ‘information’. Who knew that the data-information-wisdom progression was such an old saw, to use his term, traceable back centuries. Information is “not a process” either he argues though stating that hardly makes it so (doesn’t something happen between data and knowledge?) Oddly, no push back form the audience on that one! Information used to mean refinement of thought, and Jane Austen seem’s to have used the term a lot that way, though not necessarily with nuances that have survived Hollywood versions of the books. Sadly, time may have worked against him as he rushed through tons of slides and it all sort of faded out at the end, though Jonathan Furner, as commentator, made a brave attempt to bring it all together. More to follow, the slides are promised….