LIS590SI Notes: 02/16/2006: Historical Context of SI/ICT

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This page of notes demonstrates the reason why you should not wait a week and a half before posting your notes: I've forgotten the meaning behind some of my chicken-scratch.

Contents

[edit] Disciplinarity

Why do people create formal academic disciplines to encompass or describe a collection of research endeavors? What are the advantages? What are the disadvantages?

[edit] Creating an academic discipline

  • Facilitate communication:
    • Through the development of a common vocabulary to talk about certain concepts
    • By developing a shared conceptual framework which can be used to think about a topic.
  • Formally defining a field creates a way to gain institutional support for that reesearch
    • University resources to departments
    • Grants from granting agencies like the NSF
    • Gives a contextual framework researchers can use to justify requests for resources
  • Allows for filtering of information
    • Can focus on people who define themselves similarly
    • Can focus on journals which are the major publishinng sources for the field
    • Cite leaders in field, not others
  • Institutions manage uncertainty by creating expectations which can be used to make predictions.

[edit] Avoiding creating an academic discipline

  • Avoid creating a rigid disciplinary mindset that precludes certain approaches to researching the topic in question
    • Eg: Psychology at UIUC's rigid adherrence to highly quantitative methods.
  • Unneccessary
    • why draw artificial boundaries around your work? Why not just research what is interesting?
    • If you have to commit to a discipline, then you have to justify how your research fits within that discipline, which can limit creaative, exploratory endeavors.
  • Inhibits communication when people from different disciplines are researching the same topic, because they have usually developed the different vocabulary to refer to the same concepts.
  • Creates a situation where all discourse needs to be framed in terms of what came before, thus you are in a position where you have to either continue a discourse, or explicitly resist or counter it: there is no room for completely different approaches which are neither continuous or rebellious, thus some reconceptualizations of the field are nearly impossible to think of, and if thought of, nearly impossible to publish, because people will reject the premise out of hand because it does not correspond to or fit in with what has come before.

[edit] Other Thoughts & Concepts

  • Discourse Communities: (Jim Gee; John Swales; did I spell the names right?)
    • Fluid vs. Strictly Defined
    • Limited resources create stronger boundaries
  • Zone of proximal development:
    • Can a discipline or area of inquiry jump away from current stages of research, or is it a gradual process of building layer upon layer to create a house?
  • Kuhn, normal science vs. paradigm shift

[edit] Related Notes I made but don't understand

  • Social - recent empirical research
    • Kramer
    • Kling '80s
  • History Problem Orientatain?


[edit] What is SI & Discussion of Other Readings

  • What is SI?
    • What isn't SI?
    • Why define SI?
  • Why bother asking?
    • Instead of worrying about what SI is or is not, why not just focus on what researchers are actually doing?
    • Engage with articles
    • Engage with concepts
    • Engage with what is happening in the world
  • Headrick - Historical overlay
    • (others bring own perspective)
    • The strength of a model, theory, discipline is also its weakness
      • Choice of what to include, and what to leave out.
  • Trust is key for social aspects of Institutions.
  • Artifact, practice, belief triangle for understanding what is happening in a context
  • At some point, have to say what it is that you are studying
  • Computerization --> SI?
  • Instrumental progress vs. Moral progress:
    • Do researchers (in SI, in general) only focus on the instrumental, and ignore the moral, and its myriad of effects on the social?
  • Nardi
    • Method/object/impact (triangle?)


[edit] Other Readings

  • Baron: Expanding Definition of Technology
  • Jones & Stern:
    • What is a discipline & why?
    • Technology other than computers and the internet brought into conversation
  • Bruce: user as important (more) than tech; need to understand context.
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