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Abstract

Purpose In The Invisible Substrate of Information Science, a landmark article about the discipline of information science, Marcia J. Bates wrote that ".we are always looking for the red thread of information in the social texture of people's lives" (1999a, p. 1048). To sharpen our understanding of information science and to elaborate Bates' idea, the work at hand answers the question: Just what does the red thread of information entail? Design/methodology/approach Through a close reading of Bates' oeuvre and by applying concepts from the reference literature of information science, nine composite entities that qualify as the red thread of information are identified, elaborated, and related to existing concepts in the information science literature. In the spirit of a scientist-poet (White, 1999), several playful metaphors related to the color red are employed. Findings Bates' red thread of information entails: terms, genres, literatures, classification systems, scholarly communication, information retrieval, information experience, information institutions, and information policy. This same constellation of phenomena can be found in resonant visions of information science, namely, domain analysis (Hjørland, 2002), ethnography of infrastructure (Star, 1999), and social epistemology (Shera, 1968). Research limitations/implications With the vital vermilion filament in clear view, newcomers can more easily engage the material, conceptual, and social machinery of information science, and specialists are reminded of what constitutes information science as a whole. Future researchers and scientist-poets may wish to supplement the nine composite entities with additional, emergent information phenomena. Originality/value Though the explication of information science that follows is relatively orthodox and time-bound, the paper offers an imaginative, accessible, yet technically precise way of understanding the field.

Date

30. 4.2020 21:03:22

Theme

Information

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Abstract

Purpose Arts-informed, visual research was conducted to document the pictorial metaphors that appear among original drawings of information. The purpose of this paper is to report the diversity of these pictorial metaphors, delineate their formal qualities as drawings, and provide a fresh perspective on the concept of information. Design/methodology/approach The project utilized pre-existing iSquare drawings of information that were produced by iSchool graduate students during a draw-and-write activity. From a data set of 417 images, 125 of the strongest pictorial metaphors were identified and subjected to cognitive metaphor theory. Findings Overwhelmingly, the favored source domain for envisioning information was nature. The most common pictorial metaphors were: Earth, web, tree, light bulb, box, cloud, and fishing/mining, and each brings different qualities of information into focus. The drawings were often canonical versions of objects in the world, leading to arrays of pictorial metaphors marked by their similarity. Research limitations/implications Less than 30 percent of the data set qualified as pictorial metaphors, making them a minority strategy for representing information as an image. The process to identify and interpret pictorial metaphors was highly subjective. The arts-informed methodology generated tensions between artistic and social scientific paradigms. Practical implications The pictorial metaphors for information can enhance information science education and fortify professional identity among information professionals. Originality/value This is the first arts-informed, visual study of information that utilizes cognitive metaphor theory to explore the nature of information. It strengthens a sense of history, humanity, nature, and beauty in our understanding of information today, and contributes to metaphor research at large.

Theme

Information

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Abstract

What follows is an editorial that makes a case against the development of an empirical research frontier in library and information science (LIS) devoted to information and the body. My goal is to offer a sober and constructive counterbalance to this Library Trends special issue that is otherwise uncritical of its proposition. In asserting that original research into embodied information may be unproductive for our field, I draw from my personal experience and reflections as well as foundational conceptions of LIS from past and contemporary luminaries. My conclusion reminds all stakeholders in this Library Trends special issue of the many fascinating and urgent research questions that remain unanswered within the conventional boundaries of LIS.
In 2003 I was a doctoral student at the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and happily learning information behavior under Marcia Bates. I enrolled in a methodology seminar offered through the Sociology Department entitled Ethnography, Ethnomethodology, and Symbolic Interactionism, taught by the late Melvin Pollner. Our class read a book-length ethnography of one sociologist's experience as the paid caretaker of a teenage girl living with severe mental and motor impairments; the study reported the sexual way the child pressed her body against her older, male assistant during their daily routine and the inexorable sexual response of his body-two haptic forms of embodied information. The aspiring sociologists and anthropologists in the course found these microsocial physical dynamics to be riveting and discussed their meaning for two hours. The next week our enlightened professor assigned an article by Lucy Suchman about the coordinated flow of information via documents in a workplace-a brilliant paper. To my surprise, my classmates were dismissive of Suchman's study. One budding sociologist remarked, "Well, the research design is solid, but it's all about these [End Page 585] documents. I mean . who really cares?" This flippant criticism left me speechless, while everyone else in the class laughed in agreement (excepting the magnanimous Dr. Pollner).
To me the anecdote above is loaded with meaning for this special issue. For starters, other social sciences have long histories of studying what we are now in LIS discovering as embodied information. The German sociologist Norbert Elias's (1939) ground-breaking analysis of table manners (including blowing one's nose and spitting) established a research tradition within sociology that is centered on the body. Similarly, anthropology is home to subdisciplines devoted to research into body language and gesture (kinesics), the body in space (proxemics), touch (haptics), the experience of time (chronemics), and the use of vision (oculesics), and it goes without saying that these corporeal phenomena are seen as informative and communicatory. The aforementioned disciplines have well-developed theoretical and methodological tools to describe these bodily functions and to explain them through lenses of history, sociality, and culture. Hence, any LIS scholar interested in information and the body is a latecomer to a mature research domain; has much catching-up to do; and risks reinventing the wheel.
Another notable aspect of the story above is that certain phenomena-namely, the relationship between human beings and recorded knowledge-are deemed not compelling or research-worthy by other social sciences and are eschewed. The precocious protosociologist in my story sounded almost allergic to paper. Indeed, LIS stands as the resident expert and overseer of the universe of recorded knowledge, and there are no significant contenders, a chance blessing that should be leveraged and celebrated by LIS. On the library side, this authority dates to 2000 BC and the clay tablets in the palace at Nineveh. The information science side has roots in the European documentation movement of a century ago. Later luminaries have continued to position LIS as the singular mediator between people and the documentary realm. Jesse Shera proclaimed that the library brought humankind and the graphic record into harmonious relations. Howard White positioned LIS at the intersection of people and literatures. Marcia Bates cast LIS as a metadiscipline charged with the transmission of and access to recorded knowledge. Why turn our attention away from a nexus that is historically and rightly ours...

Content

Beitrag in einem Themenheft: 'Information and the Body: Part 2'.

Footnote

Vgl.: DOI: 10.1353/lib.2018.0018. Vgl. auch den Kommentar in: Lueg, C.: To be or not to be (embodied): that is not the question. In: Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 71(2020) no.1, S.114-117. (Opinion paper) Two articles in a recent special issue on Information and the Body published in the journal Library Trends stand out because of the way they are identifying, albeit indirectly, a formidable challenge to library information science (LIS). In her contribution, Bates warns that understanding information behavior demands recognizing and studying "any one important element of the ecology [in which humans are embedded]." Hartel, on the other hand, suggests that LIS would not lose much but would have lots to gain by focusing on core LIS themes instead of embodied information, since the latter may be unproductive, as LIS scholars are "latecomer[s] to a mature research domain." I would argue that LIS as a discipline cannot avoid dealing with those pesky mammals aka patrons or users; like the cognate discipline and "community of communities" human computer interaction (HCI), LIS needs the interdisciplinarity to succeed. LIS researchers are uniquely positioned to help bring together LIS's deep understanding of "information" and embodiment perspectives that may or may not have been developed in other disciplines. LIS researchers need to be more explicit about what their original contribution is, though, and what may have been appropriated from other disciplines.

Theme

Information