My research is in the philosophy, history, politics, and culture of information, documentation, knowledge, and communication in the 20th and into the 21st centuries in the U.S. and Western Europe and in the discipline of Library and Information Science.

The approach that I take is that of Critical Information Studies/ Critical Informatics. In this approach I use rhetorical, conceptual, and historical analyses.

Along with many articles and book chapters, I have written Indexing it All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (MIT Press, 2014) and The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001). I co-translated into English and co-edited the mid-twentieth century French documentalist Suzanne Briet's book,What is Documentation? And with Claire McInerney I co-edited the book Rethinking Knowledge Management: From Knowledge Objects to Knowledge Processes.