[Sigtis-l] iConference: please help us in "Exploring the Social Studies of Information"

[Thomas Haigh]

Dear SIGTIS people,

 

I'm sure you have already seen a number of calls to register for the
iConference in Berlin. I'd like to alert you to an item of particular
relevance there, a full-day workshop that I'm co-organizing on "Exploring
the Social Studies of Information." We have three months before the
workshop, and will be tweaking the exact format and lineup for much of that
period based on the number of people registering and the lineup of people we
can recruit to take part. The current description is at
www.socialstudiesof.info/workshop14, and as we firm up the program more
details will appear at the same place. 

 

However early registration for the iConference closes on December 15 so we'd
like to get as many people as possible on board by then.
http://ischools.org/the-iconference/registration/ 

 

This relates to, and is the launch event for, the idea of building a
meta-community around concept of "Social Studies of Information" (SSI). We
try to define that at http://www.socialstudiesof.info/about, but basically
you could interpret it as "STS for iSchools" (where STS = Science and
Technology Studies). We have a research group of the same name here at UWM,
but the idea for a broader community came from the realization that there is
no single email list reaching people with what I think of as STS interests
across the iSchool spectrum. The Social Informatics and Sociotechnical
research communities are relatively well defined (in part by lists such as
this one), but there are also people working on areas such as information
history, internet studies, information science, or archival studies who have
similar STS perspectives and training. These people may see each other at
meetings of the Society for Social Studies of Science but not do not coexist
within any of the many established tribes of iSchool identity.

 

The workshop will be quite informal, with no traditional research
presentations and few formal talks of any kind. The program is being
structured around roundtable "plenaries" and smaller breakout discussions on
specific topics. Everyone who comes will have a chance to introduce
themselves and their interests. This is a chance to get to know people with
complementary interests from different research traditions and to
collectively work out what, if any, steps could usefully be taken to
continue and institutionalize engagement across research communities.

 

.         We are still looking for participants in a couple of roundtable
discussions and people willing help to lead a breakout discussion on the
relationship of a specific research community/tradition to SSI. So if you'd
like to attend the conference and being listed on the workshop program would
help you to arrange this then please contact me ASAP.

.         If you are already going to the iConference, please do register
for this workshop and include it in your plans. (All workshops are held at
the same time, on Tuesday, 4 March. This means that you can combine
participation in the workshop with whatever session you may be scheduled in
on the main conference which runs Wednesday to Friday).

.         If you aren't going to the iConference and don't want to, perhaps
you would still consider signing up for the SSI listserv at
http://www.socialstudiesof.info/user/register or supplying a syllabus for
our growing repository at http://www.socialstudiesof.info/syllabi. 

 

 

Best wishes,

 

Tom Haigh

www.tomandmaria.com/tom 

 

 

 

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