CAIS 2014: Over the Falls without a Theory

The late May evening was warm, and the mist rising from the Niagara Falls was welcome.  The boardwalk was filled with tourists: delighted conversations in a dozen languages, and starry eyed couples walking arm in arm.  My own thoughts turned to the absence of theoretical grounding in new information science research.  Sigh.

I was in town for the 42nd Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science at at Brock University.  CAIS is only one of 75 academic societies that meet during Congress. The Brock News notes that over 8,500 delegates attended Congress, presenting over 10,000 papers at 2,500 events over 8 days. I will share some of my highlights in the next posts.

CAIS is a wonderful gathering of Canadian and International academics and practitioners interested in research around information. This year CAIS partnered with the Librarians' Research Institute, a CARL initiative to encourage and support Librarian's research. There were a wealth of great papers and you can peruse the program.  Several papers/posters/panels stuck with me.  Julien and O'Brien presented a study of trends in Information Science (IS) research.  Positive changes: more research on non-work/school contexts (health, hobbies, home, etc.), and more research in practitioner journals (escaping the Ivory Towers).  Negative findings: surveys/questionnaires remain the dominant research methods, and most research remains ungrounded in theory.

METHODS

"Hello, I am calling on behalf of BMO with a short survey about your recent experience with us..."

After the ten minute tightly scripted survey ("Uh, was five "mostly satisfied" or "generally satisfied") I thought about useful facts about my visit she might have asked but didn't. Oh well, BMO's loss.

Surveys/questionnaires are a very straightforward data collection methods. Easy to collect and analyze.  What's not to like?
But...data collected is only as good as the survey questions asked, and what people say they do, and what they do aren't always the same (gasp!) Using multiple methods allows researchers to consider their questions from different perspectives.  Experimental and observational methods allow researchers to discern between what I say and what I do.  Participant observation lets me walk a mile in the shoes of my participants, and I begin to understand why they do what they do. So many methods...so little time!

THEORY
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." (Newton, 1676)

Theory matters because I am not smart enough to do it all on my own. Whether I acknowledge it or not I owe an intellectual debt.  Also science is not only about theory building, it is about theory testing.  I reflected on my own research and how well I ground back what I discover.  I am usually comfortable saying, "My research supports X's theory" but less comfortable disagreeing, "who am I to disagree?"  I am a researcher with good data and credible findings. Time to get serious about building knowledge.

Next: Librarians Professional Identities and Collaborative Research

David

Oh, in case you wondered if you dropped your watch while leaning out to take pictures of the Horseshoe Falls, that study was completed in 1955. :-)

Sir Isaac Newton, Letter from Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, 5 February 1676, as transcribed in Jean-Pierre Maury (1992) Newton: Understanding the Cosmos, New Horizons(Paraphrasing John Salisbury who paraphrased Bernard de Chartres.)
"Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, Mushon Zer-Aviv, 2006, https://www.flickr.com/photos/mushon/282287572/

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Making sense...

On March 15-16, 2010 I interviewed for the position of Chief Librarian at the Sir James Dunn Law Library. As of May 2, 2009 no announcement has been made. Yes, it is stressful but that's Dalhousie.

On a positive note, the six month interview process gave me lots of opportunity to think about academic libraries and their future role. I'm not at all pessimistic about the future of academic libraries. I thought it might be of value to share what I had worked through thus far. Below is a slightly abbreviated version of the formal presentation I made during my interview process. It runs about 17 min. It is entitled "Making Sense: Rediscovering the Role of the Academic Law Library."

Note: The wallpaper used in this prezi is a Creative Commons work and found at http://steampunkwallpaper.com/?p=265.

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Dipped into a shallow pool?

So did your pastor download this week's sermon off the internet? J.M. van der Laan seems to be concerned that he might have. He has recently published an article on how the internet shapes religious life. He asks “what happens to churches and pastors and Christian religious life when those involved rely increasingly, maybe soon predominately, on such Internet sources and resources” (p. 275). The answer he seems to conclude is that this food for religious life becomes processed, diluted and artificial; “certainly, the sermon is sullied, and the word becomes wooden” (p. 275). Ouch.

He is correct in pointing out the dangers of relying completely on sites that offer whole sermons sometimes for a fee. Hey, we all know that you can't live on fast food and the same goes for downloaded sermons. That is why many of these sites also include warnings. I have mused about these same issues on this blog. But I think van der Laan has incorrect conceptions of information and the Internet. Information is not a thing to be picked up. It is constructed as we interact with the world around us. The internet is not a pool we dip into searching for a bit of useful information. The Internet shapes us certainly, but we are not done shaping it and particularly in religious contexts.

I've been writing an article in response to van der Laan. I think interaction between the preacher and the Internet is more complex than van der Laan is portraying. In the next few posts I'll share with you how that article is unfolding. I don't think it is about dipping into a shallow pool, rather it is the beginning of a deeper conversation.

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AAR...Pirates and religious work?

Here I am at the AAR conference in Montreal. This is a BIG conference and the Palais des Congres is a huge facility. I arrived by train at 7:45am and headed right over to the venue for my first session at 9am. Religion and Social Sciences make much more sense when you're sleep deprived! :-)

This session's theme was Velben's Theory of the Leisure Class: Rethinking Religion and Economy if the Age of Crisis. Yeah, I had to look it up too. In a nut shell, Velben was a foundational economist and sociologist who developed the ideas of conspicuous consumption and the ruler class as "the leisure class" because they really did not contribute economically to the survival of the group. Religion he would argue does not contribute to the economy of the tribe and really was a form of waste. One speaker made much of the image of Pope Benedict signing an Encyclical expressing concern for the poor and downtrodden surrounded by the trappings of wealth and separated from manual labour. I took exception to how he presented this but the point is taken. Those who actually know what they are talking about can critique my cartoonish oversimplification of Veblen.

I went to this session because information science research has payed little attention to religious questions because religion has been relegated to "leisure activities" like hobbies etc. and not been considered important for study. What caught my attention were two ideas. First, one speaker Richard Callahan talked about the idea of the "instinct of workmanship" from Veblen: our meaning, purpose and instinct is to work. Competition through War and Sport detracts from this and replaces the goal of work with the seeking of "booty." (See! I told you it would come back to Pirates in the end.) Most defenses of the Church from Veblenian critiques would point out how the church has acted to redistribute wealth thus serving a beneficial purpose in Veblen's economy. But there is more that that here. I thought about the Biblical idea of man and woman created to "tend the garden" and act as stewards over creation. Theologically we were created to work and to enjoy the fruits of our labour. Maybe Veblen had something here, that the church needs to think more about.

The second idea raised by Joerg Rieger was that in the information age we need to begin to rethink the definition of work. Life isn't so easily subdivided anymore into work/non-work. Technology is changing that. Is white collar work the same as blue collar work? Do they both contribute? what about volunteerism and other forms of unpaid work? Do these contribute to the economy? I think they do and there is a role for religion/community service is that new definition. Hmmm...things to think about.

Off to the next session (watch out for pirates)....

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Poetically thinking...

This is a bit of an aside but I experimented last year with new methodologies for analysis and representation in a study of how people are understood by the library system. I argued that the theories about people and information behaviour implicit in how we construct our services influence how we perceive people. A product of this study was three poems/videos.

http://www.iamproject.ca

The project has become part of a larger research article under review presently but I thought I would share the creative bit here.

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Why "informing faith"?

The nature of information is changing because how we communicate with each other is changing. This is a product of the digital age that we live in; we are discovering new ways to create, store and exchange information, and reinventing older ways. This is highly relevant for churches and people of faith because belief like other ways of knowing is constructed. Our experiences, upbringing, education and our personal encounters with God shape who we are are and how we will relate to the world around us. The digital world is changing information and changing how we construct ourselves. That is worth exploring and thinking about. IMHO. :-)

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