I usually write these pieces every 6 months, although I appear to have not done so at the end of 2022. They have tended to be my contributions to Social Informatics Research Group all-centre gatherings, because I tend to be incapable of speech by the time it’s my turn to report[1].This is mostly because I hate public speaking.
Click this link to see all the pieces in this series.
Continue readingI’ve had a bit of involvement with a visit to Edinburgh Napier by Professor Brian Detlor, culminating in the RIVAL Reunion event on 25 May. One of the events during Brian’s visit was lighting talks by members of the Social Informatics research group on 19 May.
Hazel has blogged about the content of these talks but the picture below doesn’t show me – thus relieving your eyestrain!
From left to right: Professor Diane Pennington, Drew Feeney, Maria Cecil, Tomasz Stupnicki, Aleksander Bielinski, Rachel Salzano, Dr David Brazier, Dr Peter Cruickshank, Emeritus Professor Hazel Hall and Professor Brian Detlor.
Along with my colleagues Professor Hazel Hall, Marianne Wilson, and Dr Iain McGregor, I am delighted that the submission that we made earlier this year to the Shaking the archive – reconsidering the role of archives in contemporary society conference has been accepted.
This conference takes place at Queen Margaret University Edinburgh between 23rd and 25th June 2023. Delegates at this hybrid, multidisciplinary event will discuss the power of/within archives, while also exploring ways in which archives may be interrogated, re-imagined, and represented.
Please read more about our submission on Hazel’s post. Meanwhile, I look forward to 3 days of interesting discussions. As an information scientist, specifically interested in information literacy (IL), I begin to wonder how IL theory and practice can be used to engage with archives. A very, very quick online search didn’t bring up any hits, so perhaps there is a research gap here. Of course I stand ready to be proven wrong!
The Platform to Platform project that I led, and which transformed Lorna Lloyd’s Diary of the war into a podcast series has been highly commended as a runner-up for the British Records Association’s (BRA) 2022 Janette Harley Prize. This prize, awarded in memory of archivist Janette Harley (1951-2015), is intended to generate interest in archives, and raise awareness of research and achievements in the world of archives.
Read more about it on Professor Hazel Hall’s blog: https://hazelhall.org/2023/01/16/national-award-recognises-the-platform-to-platform-project-british-records-association-janette-harley-prize-2022-runner-up/
Huge thanks to team-mates who worked so hard on the production of the podcast series: Co-investigators Hazel Hall and Iain McGregor; student production team members Alex Gencs, David Graham, James McLachlan, Andras Peter, and Michael Suttie; performers Bethany Ray (Lorna Lloyd), David Monteath (Theo Lloyd), Richard Godden (newsreader), and Katherine Stephen(announcer).
We are very grateful for the support of the wider community in bringing Lorna’s writing into the public domain, with special thanks to Jake Berger and Emma Gibbs (BBC Archive); Faith Renger (Malvern Museum of Local History); Marianne Wilson (researcher on the sister HOPSS project); Stella Wisdom (British Library); P2P project board members: David Darlington, David Monteath, Guy Puzey, Sarah Ames and Sue Dumbleton; the Blipfoto community; the project team at Creative Informatics; and the Lloyd family.
The final paper from the RIVAL project has been accepted for publication. In this paper, Hazel Hall, Rachel Salzano, Katherine Stephen and I examine whether strategies shown to work well in one model of network development for Library and Information Science (LIS) practitioners and researchers can be applied successfully in the development of a new network. The first model was centred the DREaM network, while the second was RIVAL.
We show that the model was indeed transferrable, and that it can be successfully adapted for online delivery of network events and activities. (I’m sure you remember all those moves to online as lockdown kicked in!) We believe that the strategies we tested can be used by yet further networking programmes, especially those aiming to bring together researchers and practitioners.
The paper can be downloaded from Edinburgh Napier University’s repository, via the outputs on my Napier web-page, or via the link on my publications and outputs page in this blog. There’s a personal/chatty description of the network model in my post about presenting at CILIPS conference 2021.
Time to be honest: while I did most of the grunt work in organising the RIVAL events, gathering the data reported in this paper and then analysing it (oh the joys of UCInet!), Hazel was the leader who made RIVAL happen and wrote the paper.
I’ve just updated my list of projects (on my CV page) to include 5 projects that are now current or imminent. They are
I’m also doing some marking in April, and contributing to outputs from some previous projects. This includes waiting to see what changes the reviewers want me to make to a paper submitted to ISIC 2022. I can’t tell you how much I want to go to Berlin!
And a big shout out to my colleagues on these projects and outputs: David Brazier, Alison Brettle, Peter Cruickshank, Pritam Chita, Wegene Demeke, Paul Gooding, Hazel Hall, Ingi Helgason, Iain McGregor, Marina Milosheva, Jon Mortimer, Gemma Webster, Marianne Wilson, 2 MSc students on the MSc/CPP programme.
I write these pieces every 6 months, usually for the Centre for Social Informatics’ all-centre meetings. (I’m usually incapable of speech by the time it’s my turn to report.[1]) I’m still really miffed that we still can’t get together in person. Click this link to see all the pieces in this series. There is a history of my academic work so far on my personal blog. Continue reading
I was delighted to speak about the RIVAL project Royal Society of Edinburgh funded Research Impact Value and Library and Information Science (RIVAL) project, at the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals Scotland 2021 conference (#CILIPS21) on Tuesday 8 June. This, and Hazel’s presentation at SCURL, would be a fitting coda to all the work I, Hazel and others have put into this project, and the successes it has generated. NB it’s a coda, not a finis. Continue reading
Tuesday 15 December was a bumper day for the Centre for Social Informatics (CSI), with the publication of six articles in Information Research. These were conference articles presented at ISIC2020 and a paper on ‘imagined citizens’. Together these showcase some of the work we undertake. Continue reading
I write these pieces every 6 months, usually for the Centre for Social Informatics’ all-centre meetings. (I’m usually incapable of speech by the time it’s my turn to report.[1]) Really miffed that we can’t get together in person this time. Click this link to see all the pieces in this series. Continue reading
Bruce's IT-ish world 