The Experience of Information and the Formation of Information Culture #ECIL2023

The final keynote at the ECIL conference in Krakow is Interdisciplinary and Methodological Aspects of Diagnosing the Experience of Information and the Formation of Information Culture from Monika Krakowska and Sabina Cisek (at the host institution: Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland). This was a rich presentation and I had lots of thoughts about it, but I will will just note here the main points of their presentations.
They had done a search (not a systematic review) to start to scope the area of information experience (on Web of Science, LISTA and Google Scholar, also chaining from relevant items). In introducing theoretical aspects of information experience Monika used the famous Leonardo drawing of a man, which is idealised, whereas one’s behaviour and experience is not idealised. She started with John Dewey’s theory of experience who said that “experience is the basis of everything in life”, and she connected it with Wilson’s concept of information behaviour as he “treats information behaviour itself as the real life of human beings, who cannot survive without information” – including consciousness and knowledge building.
Monika included also personal construct theory (quoting Smith & McMenemy), phenomenology, social constructivism, Chatman’s theories, Threshold concepts. She also quoted (I think) from the book Information Experience by Christine Bruce and colleagues, referring to people’s life-worlds, people’s interrelationship with the world and phenomena around them (arising from the phenomenographic non-dualist approach).
Of course examining the theoretical approach also encompasses reflecting on what information is. Monika highlighted:
- The social constructivist approach = experiencing through learning and observing
- “A process through social and environmental interactions, where the exchange of knowledge, information, experiences must take place in a mutually created social context”
- “A holistic (multidimentional approach)” including embodiment, observation of the environment, sensory information experience, cognitive and emotional experience, sense-making (“making sense of reality” using all ones senses and observations of the world around them)
Monika identified an anthropocentric approach to information experience, characterised by:
- person in context
- personally meaningful activities (including experience of flow)
- auto hermeneutics (or I would say, auto ethnography)
- first person perspective
- phenomenological approaches (referencing Budd asserting that the “world has no meaning beyond consciousness”)  [I wouls also add phenomenographic approaches here]
Then Monika reflected about whether information experience is a subdiscipline or an umbrella concept.
Sabina then took over to talk about methodological aspects, and identified how she defined some terms. For her a strategy was whether it is qualitative, quantitative, mixed. Methods/research approaches were what I’d call approach such as phenomenography, case study. Units of analysis were individuals, features, groups etc. There were techniques for data collection. Overall, she defined the methodology of a particular field as meaning the way in which a discipline etc studies “its” part of the world.
Sabina identified qualitative strategies as dominant in studying information experiences, with no quantitative and some mixed strategies, with use of bricolage to assemble an appropriate strategy for investigating a specific problem. Sabina listed various approaches used, from action research through to phenomenography.
In terms of units of analysis (“What do we study?”), Sabina identified:
Behavioural units (such as types of information behaviour);
“People” units;
Objects (including one piece of information, an information source);
Time units (e.g. when does an experience start).
In terms of data collection, Sabina mentioned – card sorting; documents, materials or texts (which can be e.g. tweets, fan fiction); interviews of all kinds; observation; workshops including participatory. She said she hadn’t seen visual techniques so far (but I know that they have been used).
In terms of data analysis she mentioned constructivist grounded theory, thematic analysis; phenomenological analysis (I’d add phenomenographic analysis). She felt that there were not any novel methodologies being used, from her observation and she thought that information behaviour research was not being used as much as it could be.
As I said at the start I found this a really rich, interesting talk to debate with, but I’ll just add one question that arose for further discussion – chairs and their arrangement in a room may give you information, but is examination of that information part of our field? (what do you think!)
Photo by Sheila Webber: portraits in one of the rooms on the first day