Introduction

[Kristene Unsworth]

Hi,

 

I'd like to introduce myself to the list. My name is Kris Unsworth. I'm
currently working on my dissertation in Information Science at the
University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, USA. My focus is
information policy and ethics.  I am examining the way governments and
particularly national security agencies use social categorization in
analyzing data collected through surveillance. I will be looking at this
across a couple of different historical situations, namely, the East
German Secret Service and probably a case from the Washington state
branch of the un-American activities commission. I would also like to
make some insinuations about current issues in the US. 

 

To do this I will be analyzing memos, personal papers and policy
documents to get an idea of the actual categories used, how they were
determined and by whom and then look at an instantiation of these
categories in each case. This process will be facilitated by the large
amount of work done in Germany with the "Stasi" files and includes a
dictionary of sorts for terms or categories used by the State Security.
I am hoping that I will be able to determine similar types of
categorization by looking at US archives related to McCarthy and the FBI
at the time. One of my main points is to expose this process as
something that occurs regardless of ideology.

 

I'm still struggling a bit with how I'll actually interpret the
documents. The CDA person on my committee has suggested I read van
Dijk's book, Ideology, so I am and think I will be a great resource for
the project.

 

If anyone know of other work similar to what I'm undertaking I'd welcome
suggestions and input.

 

Nice to meet you all,

Kris

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/discours/attachments/20070810/458e9c43/attachment.htm>