When I can find somewhere to plug in my laptop, I will be doing a little liveblogging from the ASIS&T Annual meeting. Today I'm attending a panel on Multispecies Information Science with Niloofar Solhjoo (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand), Steve Fuller (University of Warwick, UK), Jenna Hartel (University of Toronto, Canada), Christopher Lueg (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA), Dirk van der Linden (Northumbria University, UK). This is just my immediate impression of what these scholars said.
Firstly Niloofar Solhjoo identified how people and animals are living in a "more than human world" (so should be focused more holistically, rather thanon humans' needs). She urged "Let's stop viewing the information worlds as one that sees humans as separate from (or better than) other life forms". She identified Marcia Bates as innovative in starting to include animals and non-sentient objects in her categorisation of information. She also talked about scholars who have talked about an evolutionary approach, embodiment and post-humanism, faculitating an animal turn in information research.
Solhjoo talked about how her own passion and enthusiasm for her companion animals had led to her research focus. In any situation, there is the human and the animal, and also the environment in which they live and move, and there are many aspects to investigate.
How can you you do multispecies information research? This can be through objective approaches (e.g. sensors, tracking devices) and subjective approaches (visual methods, sensory methods, art-based methods). Solhjoo mapped her own research path, which included observation of the animals and humans (through walking and day-in-the-life interviews), digital photo-diary, interviews with photo elicitation, photo exhibition and phenomenological writing. Solhjoo talked of the "red thread of information" which connected the experience of the animals and their humans. She identified Love, Living in co-existence and Learning as the key themes. Here research is published e.g. here, here and here. She say this as part of a wider movement to be kinder and more inclusive in our focus on different communities and species.
Following this Christopher Lueg talked about embodiment. He referenced is paper which is here. He noted "what a specific view of the world we humans have" - both individually and as a species. He asserted that "we can learn a lot about human perception from nonhuman animals", helping us to consider aspects of the world that we normally ignore or do not perceive. Lueg talked about the movement to de-centre human-centred design, and build in experience of selected animal views in our design process.
Then Dirk van der Linden talked about his journey from a software engineer, whose first experience of design for non human species was in designing a drone for dog walking. At that point he realised the difficulty of designing for animals (the dog kept trying to jump and catch the drone, they hedn't thought about dog behaviour). He realised that a tech solution to animal-human relations was not really the best thing since it focused on "solutions" that didn't actually solve underlying problems (but rather producing "cute tech"). Also he realised there was a need to think more carefully about what animal welfare meant (resulting in questioning things like domestication of animals).
Steve Fuller raised some further issues such as - what comprises "consent" in animals. He stressed too the need to think about domesticated animals (which may only exist because of humans) and undomesticated animals. It's important to consider - where does the data from animals come from - are you representing the animal properly? For information scientists this should include issues of documentation - how can you document an animal's consent to research, including experimentation. Unless you know how the species thinks, you don't know if they consent. Thus, Fuller thought that if we want to engage more with animals and research their information world, we have to consider these issues much more deeply, otherwise we are likely to be misrepresenting them.
Finally Jenna Hartel talked about her information videos and how they embrace a multispecies approach, including animal and insect guides within her videos, featuring the animals used as metaphors by scholars, and as a key way of telling stories e.g. in her plagiarism video (Hartel's videos are here).
There were also following question session there were questions about how this related to inclusion of the different human communities' voices, issues of what information & information use mean, and prejudice against specific animal species.
Photo by Sheila Webber, Tassie (my virtual Siamese Kittycat) observes me from under the tea trolley in Second Life.
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