[Sighfis-l] Call for HFIS panels - January 21st deadline!!!!

[Joseph Tennis]

Hello all:

This is a general call for panel sessions for HFIS for ASIS&T Annual 
Meeting 2005 in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Please forward and 
distribute as you see fit.


I have included the description of panels, the deadline, and some 
brainstorming ideas I have heard from the 2004 conference, and from 
email.  Please let me know if you are interested in making these ideas 
for others into submissions for sessions.  Also please let me know if 
you any of you object to cosponsoring the Dervin panel below.  I hope 
we can pull together a stellar program for 2005.


WHAT: Technical sessions and panels:

Technical sessions and panels present topics for discussion such as 
cutting-edge research and design, analyses of hot or emerging trends, 
opinions on controversial issues, reports by practitioners on current 
information science and technology projects, and contrasting viewpoints 
from experts in complementary professional areas. Innovative formats 
that involve audience participation are encouraged. These may include 
panels, debates, forums, or case studies. Submissions should be in the 
form of a short paper (approximately two pages, no smaller than 10-pt. 
font), providing an overview of the issues, projects, or viewpoints to 
be discussed by the panel. Submissions must include title, sponsor(s), 
and names and affiliations of all participants (moderator, speakers, 
reactors, etc.). The final versions of these submissions will be 
published in the digital conference proceedings. Additional materials, 
e.g., Powerpoint slides or short papers by individual presenters, will 
be published in the digital conference proceedings at the author’s 
request.

WHEN: Deadlines for Technical Sessions and Panels is January 21st, 2005

HOW: just submit to me your ideas (title, abstract, and people), 
contact info, and I'll do the rest to submit


IDEAS FOR PANELS (combinations of these and/or others?):

Louise Limberg: user paradigms
Bernd Frohman: Social constructivism
Mark A. Spasser: Activity theory
Olof Sundin: Neopragmatism % sociocultural theory
Archie Dick: Critical theory/political economy
Birger Hjørland: Epistemologies as (normative) theories of information 
seeking and use

IDEAS FOR COSPONSORSHIPS:
Dervin, Fisher, Kulthau, Ross, and Savolainen

  TITLE:  Reports of the demise of the "user" have been greatly 
exaggerated:  Sense-Making and the methodological resuscitation of the 
user -- looking backwards, looking forward.

DESCRIPTION:  In 2003, an ASIST panel (Rosenbaum, Davenport, Lieuvrouw, 
Day, 2003) pronounced the "death of the user" suggesting that the new 
technologies undermine a concept that was already weak in its ability 
to account for agency in information seeking and use. The purpose of 
this proposed panel is to challenge that pronouncement by addressing 
the issue of how methodological approaches have created users in 
different manifestations --  emotional, cognitive, physical, and 
social  -- elusive users and capricious, barely visible, dead or almost 
so, overly demanding, disinterested, inattentive, individualistic, 
materialistic, culture-bound, active, passive, alienated....  Panelists 
will zero in on how they have used and struggled with Dervin's 
Sense-Making Methodology in their attempts to conduct parsimonious, 
heuristic, and useful user studies.  Starting with the seminal Dervin & 
Nilan (1986) ARIST review of information seeking and use studies,  
Dervin's Sense-Making has been often pointed to as sparking the turn 
toward user-oriented studies of information seeking and use in LIS. 
(cites)  Since 1986, the work has been much quoted and misquoted, 
praised and criticized, implemented and co-opted.  This panel will look 
backwards and forward using Sense-Making as an exemplar and foil for 
consideration of issues relating to the ways the philosophies that 
drive methodologies and the methods that implement them enlarge or 
diminish our conceptions of the user.

PANELISTS:
Chair:  Brenda Dervin, School of Communication, Ohio State University, 
Columbus, OH

SPEAKERS, PRESENTATION TITLES, BRIEF ABSTRACTS:  (tentative)

Brenda Dervin, Ohio State University
A beast with many arms:  How and why Sense-Making Methodology grew and 
mutated
What is now known as Sense-Making Methodology appeared in emergent 
forms in the early 1970s (cites) and was named as such in the 1980s 
(cites).  Purpose of this presentation will be to review the approach's 
history and impetus and the ways in which its twists and turns have 
attempted to struggle as a "methodology between the cracks" with this 
or that latest polarization of conceptions of the user.  Myths about 
users are legion, e.g:  users are dead; they are very much alive and 
want everything; they don't know what they want; most of them don't 
want us.  Primary emphasis in this presentation will be placed on how 
being explicitly methodological in user studies is not intended to 
solve the problem of how to study users but rather is intended to 
assist researchers in formulating research that advances our 
understandings and helps us avoid the use of methods in ways which 
create mythic users who do not exist creating instead as if seen 
through tiny keyholes useful pictures of "real" users with whom 
information systems can more meaningfully intersect.

Karen Fisher, University of Washington

Carol Kuhlthau, Rutgers University

Catherine Ross, University of Western Ontario

Reijo Savolainen, Uviversity of Tampere



All the best,
Joe Tennis
SLAIS
University of British Columbia