Welcome to my Webpage. Here you will find information about my interests, teaching, research projects, publications and personal pursuits, along with corresponding links. Students of information behavior may find the bibliography published here of particular interest.

A Brief Biographical Statement. I am currently a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Communication and Information Studies, located in Lexington, Kentucky. I teach graduate courses almost exclusively, although I have also taught undergraduate students both here and at UCLA. My research interests include information behavior (including all aspects of information seeking) and information policy (including the social and psychological effects of information technologies). Among other writings, I am the author of Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behavior, published by Elsevier.

Most Interesting Thing I've Read Lately. Varela, F., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. I first encountered Berkeley professor Eleanor Rosch’s work on mental categorization in 1980 while taking a cognitive psychology course at Stanford. The evidence so fascinated me that I interviewed her a few years later in the course of a research project. I was recently surprised to discover that she had coauthored a book with Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela that intersects with two other topics of interest to me: systems theory, and Buddhist philosophy. This unusual combination only makes sense if we consider that both psychologists and Buddhists are concerned with the entanglement of mind and body. The intersection with systems theory is easier to understand; it found in the early stages of cognitive science, as an outgrowth of cybernetics. The cybernetic viewpoint came to be dominated by a vision of cognition as mere processing of symbol in the brain—a view that stumbled on the inability of psychologists to find biological evidence of the mind’s symbol-processing and representation. Although a second stage of cognitivism emerged, both approaches faced “the Cartesian Anxiety,” i.e., the separation of mind and world—subject and object. Is the world a stable reality, or is it only made up of subjective representations? So their work is a dialogue between Western cognitive science and Buddhist meditations. On the psychological side, this volume could be seen as a continuation of the work of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who maintained that Western scientific culture requires us to see our bodies as an outer physical structure with an inner biological and phenomenological experience. His phenomenological approach requires that “experience” itself needs to be examined, just as it is in the Buddhist tradition of meditative practice. The authors follow this line of thought into what they call a “third stage” of cognitive science, a model based on “enacted” cognition; i.e., we must have a body to perceive externalities, and thinking results from repeated perceptions—resulting in what we call “mind.” A cornerstone of Buddhism is the concept of an egoless being, without a strict distinction between mind and body. The Buddhist method of exploring this notion is mindfulness meditation. Those who have not studied Buddhism often assume that meditation means either to focus on an object, or to achieve a state of relaxation, like a trance. Yet Buddhist meditation is quite the opposite: it implies experiencing one's mind as it is, to be present with it, and with the rest of the universe; in doing so we coordinate our mind with our body. We cannot speak of a sight without a seer; they arise independently, yet together—codependently originated. I am describing these themes as much simpler than they really are; there are many variation in Buddhist traditions (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Tibetan—the latter dominant here) and a long history of Western thinking about the mind-body problem; this work explores the history of all of them. I think most Western readers will find the connections to Buddhism too much of a stretch, but I do not. I particularly like the exploration of the “tragedy of the commons” as a metaphor for the world situation. Varela, Thompson & Rosch say that this is based on Hobbes’ notion of an unconstrained, economic man who needs to be managed with external force, or socialization, or psychological manipulation. Thus, the implicit view of motivation in the social sciences is social exchange theory. Yet it is only a confused person who would try to define their “self” by acquiring all good things while relinquishing as little as possible; if one had everything, then what would one do to maintain the sense of self? If there is nothing to gain or lose, then we are truly “groundless.”

Selected Publications (with full text links) Case, D.,  Johnson, J.D.,  Andrews, J.E., Allard, S.L. & Kelly, K.M. (2004). From Two-Step Flow to the Internet: The Changing Array of Sources for Genetics Information Seeking.  Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 55 (8), 660-669 (Manuscript Version). Andrews, J.E., Johnson, J.D., Case, D. & Allard, S. (2005). Intent to seek cancer genetics-related information.  Information Research, 10 , (4) (Available at: http://informationr.net/ir/10-4/paper238.html). Case, D., Johnson, J.D., Andrews, J.E., & Allard, S.L. (2005). Avoiding versus seeking: The relationship of information seeking to avoidance, blunting, coping, dissonance and related concepts. Journal of the Medical Libraries Association, (Uncorrected Proof). Johnson, J. D., Andrews, J. E., Case, D.O., & Allard, S.L. (2005). Genomics: The perfect information seeking research problem. Journal of Health Communication, 10 (3), 323-329  (Uncorrected Proof). Johnson, J.D., Case, D., Andrews, J.E., Allard, S.L. & Johnson, N.E. (2005). Fields and pathways: contrasting or complementary views of information seeking. Info. Processing & Management, 42 (2), 569-582. (Available at: http://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0306457305000038). Case, D. (2009). Collection of family health histories: The link between Genealogy and Public Health. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 60, in press. [Uncorrected proof] Kelly, K.M., Andrews, J. E., Case, D.O., Allard, S.L. & Johnson, J. D. (2007). Information Seeking and Intentions to Have Genetic Testing for Hereditary Cancers in Rural and Appalachian Kentuckians. Journal of Rural Health, 23 (2), 166-172  (Uncorrected Proof).