Searching for Self
Context, Emotion, and Life-world in Research Practice
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21900/j.alise.2023.1387Keywords:
conspiracy theories, epistemic empathyAbstract
A significant corpus of work exists exploring the information seeking practices of researchers, including academic scientists (Ellis et al., 1993; Hemminger et al., 2007), social scientists (Ellis, 1993; Meho and Tibbo, 2003), historians (Duff and Johnson, 2002; Rhee, 2011), and humanities scholars more broadly (Buchanan et al., 2005; Given & Wilson, 2015). However, very little work has been done on research-as-information seeking. An activity that can be done by laypeople as well as students and academics, research differentiates itself from other kinds of information seeking in several ways: the information sought is often used to produce outputs, the duration of the activity is often longer (ranging from days to decades) than more casual information seeking, and the methods employed in research are diverse and systematic. This paper introduces the new framework of the Research Self. The Research Self is a holistic and flexible model, with seven interrelated dimensions, designed to deepen our understanding of research practice.
References
Buchanan, G., Cunningham, S. J., Blandford, A., Rimmer, J., & Warwick, C. (2005). Information Seeking by Humanities Scholars. In A. Rauber, S. Christodoulakis, & A. M. Tjoa (Eds.), Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (pp. 218–229). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/11551362_20
Chatman, E. A. (1996). The Impoverished Life-World of Outsiders. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 47(3), 193–206. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199603)47:3<193::AID-ASI3>3.0.CO;2-T
Denzin, N. K. (2007). Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470698969
Duff, W. M., & Johnson, C. A. (2002). Accidentally Found on Purpose: Information-Seeking Behavior of Historians in Archives. The Library Quarterly, 72(4), 472–496. https://doi.org/10.1086/lq.72.4.40039793
Eadon, Y. M. (2020). (Not) Part of the System: Resolving Epistemic Disconnect Through Archival Reference. Knowledge Organization, 47(6), 441–460. https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2020-6-441
Ellis, D. (1993). Modeling the Information-Seeking Patterns of Academic Researchers: A Grounded Theory Approach. The Library Quarterly, 63(4), 469–486. https://doi.org/10.1086/602622
Ellis, D., Cox, D., & Hall, K. (1993). A COMPARISON OF THE INFORMATION SEEKING PATTERNS OF RESEARCHERS IN THE PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES. Journal of Documentation, 49(4), 356–369. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026919
Given, L. M., & Willson, R. (2015). Collaboration, Information Seeking, and Technology Use: A Critical Examination of Humanities Scholars’ Research Practices. In P. Hansen, C. Shah, & C.-P. Klas (Eds.), Collaborative Information Seeking: Best Practices, New Domains and New Thoughts (pp. 139–164). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18988-8_8
Hemminger, B. M., Lu, D., Vaughan, K. t. l., & Adams, S. J. (2007). Information seeking behavior of academic scientists. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(14), 2205–2225. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20686
Kuhlthau, C. C. (1991). Inside the Search Process: Information Seeking from the User’s Perspective. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 42(5), 361–371. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199106)42:5%3C361::AID-ASI6%3E3.0.CO;2-%23
Marwick, A., Clancy, B., & Furl, K. (2022). Far-Right Online Radicalization (p. 83). Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life.
Marwick, A. E., & Partin, W. C. (2022). Constructing alternative facts: Populist expertise and the QAnon conspiracy. New Media & Society, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/ru4b8
Meho, L. I., & Tibbo, H. R. (2003). Modeling the information-seeking behavior of social scientists: Ellis’s study revisited. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(6), 570–587. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.10244
Rhee, H. L. (2010). Unique qualities of historians’ information-seeking behavior in historical research. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 47(1), 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1002/meet.14504701362
Woolley, K., & Sharif, M. A. (2022). Down a Rabbit Hole: How Prior Media Consumption Shapes Subsequent Media Consumption. Journal of Marketing Research, 59(3), 453–471. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437211055403
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Yvonne Eadon
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.