Research Areas at GSLIS

From GSLISWiki

With the new webpage, the faculty at GSLIS have identified four major areas of specialty within GSLIS:

http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/research/areas.html

However, while these categories have been named better and rounded out from what originally was placed on the page, there is still controversy in the department about whether they accurately reflect the work that professors actually do.

The categories (as of 9/27/2005) are:

Information History, Economics, and Policy

Information Retrieval and Digital Libraries

This also contains the Information Organization and Access specialty, despite the fact that many people who specialize in IOA would not feel comfortable teaching an IR class.

Librarianship and Literature for Youth

Social Informatics

However, there are a number of specialties which don't fit into these groups very well. There are also themes which pervade many people's research, which are not captured very well by the above descriptions. Some of these areas and themes are listed below, with the idea of provoking discussion about whether these areas should become formally listed as research areas on our departmental homepage.

[edit] User-Centered Research

There are a number of people who focus on user-related aspects of things, everything from User Centered Design, Human Computer Interaction, and CSCW to Use and Users of Information and other investigations of people's information seeking behavior. Examples include Mike Twidale and Carole Palmer (who also happen to share an interest in Metadata).

Also, it is clear that focusing on user needs as opposed to document characteristics, a priori assumptions as to what will work and what will not, or functionality/features is a theme which pervades many people's research, such as Pauline Cochrane.

Currently, people who have this interest find themselves grouped both in Social Informatics and Information Retrieval and Digital Libraries.

[edit] Learning

Another theme which pervades many people's work is the idea of Learning and understanding how people learn. Chip Bruce, Mike Twidale and I (Ingbert) had a discussion about this, noting that while we are interested in learning in a holistic sense, as opposed to confined to what happens in the classroom or in formal training sessions (which is Education's focus). However, we noted that if we just talk about learning in general, we might not give the right impression. Thus Mike developed the following list of characteristics which we in LIS are particularly interested in. The claim is not that all learning research at GSLIS shares all of these features, but that many of these features recur, accommodating for example both peer learning about computer applicaitons by secretaries (OTSL), but also highly-skilled, K-12 library information specialists.

informal
non-traditional
outside the classroom
situated in settings usually not seen as learning
bottom up, emergent, ad hoc
done by 'just plain folks', not experts
fast & short
collective, collaborative, communal, social
inclined to be overlooked
having something to do with computer technologies as means of focus of the learning
not bound to a syllabus
open to the possibility of the tool changing the nature of the underlying activity, learning, and even the users' goals

It is also clear that interest in learning is one of the things that ties together some of the more disparate areas of the department: CSCW & HCI with Childrens Literature & Youth Services for example.

I (Chip Bruce) might add that "learning" like many such terms, gets used in not just different, but contradictory ways. For example, to me it is very broad, essentially describing what we all do as purposive organisms negotiating complex and changing environments. From my perspective, the list above is descriptive of learning in general, not simply of the special interests of LIS in learning.

But to most people, "learning" describes what students do in formal learning settings; the items above are "like learning," or "related to learning," but they're not "real learning." So, if we say LIS looks at peripheral, incidental, or non-standard learning most people are happy. It doesn't threaten the central role of Education in learning, nor does it threaten the status of LIS, as a discipline at least a step above Education (which typically has low status in the university). That's clearly the politically-appropriate stance to take, but it simultaneously reifies a fundamental misunderstanding about learning.

This reminds me a bit of the use of "unofficial" to describe this wiki. The argument goes that the official GSLIS web site represents GSLIS accurately, whereas the Unofficial GSLIS Wiki is a place for conversation or for trying out ideas (as in this section). But might we not flip that? If you were an investigative reporter, a discourse analyst, an historian, an ethnographer, or anyone seeking to identify what GSLIS really is, would you stop at its official presentation of itself? I don't think so. You would more likely decide that it was in the "unofficial" (replace with any of the terms in the list above) discourse that you had some hope of seeing what GSLIS really thought and did. The GSLIS web site would certainly convey performative speech acts (utterances that act on the world, such as admissions requirements), but you would be right to be skeptical of its presentational function. So, as a corollary to the argument about learning, I would say that wikis, blogs, etc. represent the core of learning/knowledge construction, whereas official representations are the special case.

[I hope someone can locate the exact quote] Jim Garrison says that it comes down to whether we see ourselves as spectators in a finshed world, or participants in an unfinished world.