A Recent work in information studies re-engages with theories of subject enunciation first developed in the work of twentieth century structuralist and post-structuralist critics…
Abstract
Purpose
A Recent work in information studies re-engages with theories of subject enunciation first developed in the work of twentieth century structuralist and post-structuralist critics. To date this work has not been extended to the analysis of data visualizations. The purpose of this paper is to assert that information visualizations embody specific dynamics of positionality for which linguist Emile Benveniste’s formulation of a speaking and spoken subject provides a critical analytic framework. In particular, enunciative theory can be used to explicitly address the mechanisms of power formation in information graphics “spreadsheets, charts and interfaces” that are frequently seen as mere presentations of quantitative or statistical information. This approach is based on attention to the performative aspects of graphic expression and the ways familiar features such as frontality framing and scale can be read critically.
Design/methodology/approach
A theoretical argument that applies literature in enunciation as developed in linguistics, film theory, and psychoanalysis to information visualizations. The paper makes specific analyses of the graphical features of spreadsheets, common charts and graphs, and interfaces to show how they create speaking and spoken subject positions.
Findings
The theory of enunciation is useful in understanding the ways information representations, particularly visualizations of data, work to produce power relations.
Research limitations/implications
The topic may seem to draw on theoretical positions that are associated with structural and post-structural theory popular three decades ago, but since the study of enunciation was never applied to information visualizations, the work feels timely. Recent work in information studies has re-engaged with these theoretical issues, but not applied them to charts, graphs, and other visual forms. Information visualizations are so prevalent that any critical insight into their operations feels timely, even urgent.
Originality/value
The concept of information as enunciation in recent work in information studies has not been applied to visualizations. Analysis of the production of subject positions as commonly understood in other fields (linguistics, textual studies, film studies, visual studies, and psychoanalysis across a broad range of cultural studies fields) can be usefully applied to information graphics.
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This essay demonstrates how information systems — collections of documents, data, or other information-bearing objects — function internally as sites for creative manipulation of…
Abstract
Purpose
This essay demonstrates how information systems — collections of documents, data, or other information-bearing objects — function internally as sites for creative manipulation of genre resources. In the information systems context, these textual activities are not clearly traced to the purposeful actions of specific writers.
Findings
Genre development for information systems can result from actions that may appear individually to be rote, repetitive, passive, and uninteresting. But as these actions are aggregated at increasing scales, genre components interact and shift, even if change is limited to one element of the larger assemblage. Although these changes may not be initiated by writers in accordance with targeted work activities and associated rhetorical goals, the composite texts thus produced are nonetheless powerful documents that come to partially constitute the broader activities they appear to merely support.
Originality/value
In demonstrating “writerless” phenomena of genre change in distributed, regulated systems, this essay complements and extends the strong body of existing work in genre studies that emphasizes the writer’s perspective and agency in its accounts of genre development. By showing how continually evolving compound documents such as digital libraries constitute such sites of unacknowledged genre change, this essay demonstrates how the social actions that these composite documents facilitate for their users also change.
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To investigate possibilities for integrating recent interdisciplinary research on materiality with basic issues in consumer culture theory, this chapter discusses understandings…
Abstract
Purpose
To investigate possibilities for integrating recent interdisciplinary research on materiality with basic issues in consumer culture theory, this chapter discusses understandings of materiality-based concerns and concepts in consumer research and maps possibilities for the future.
Methodology/approach
A review focuses on concepts of materiality, agency, and intention that mark a shift to a relational metaphysics in consumption contexts. Drawing from design theory, digital humanities, and philosophy, notions of flickering and witnessing evoke models of relations and interactions between consumers and consumption objects.
Findings
In this chapter, a disciplinary proposition emerges: consumer research is a form of materiality studies wherein the consumer is designated an element of interest in the relationships and interactions that bring forth the world.
Research implications
An awareness of the fundamental role played in consumer research by materiality-related assumptions may inspire concomitant animation and explication of a relational metaphysics, opening opportunities to recognize processes and practices at the core of consumer behavior previously obscured by prevailing interpretations governed by a singularly agentic, autonomous, and effective human subject. Power relations must not be ignored.
Originality/value of chapter
The chapter makes several contributions: organizes and explicates often taken for granted concepts such as materiality, materialism, and agency, connects consumer research to high-level theorizations of materiality, and synthesizes diverse discussions in consumer culture theory with the possibilities of new materialities.
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This Chapter provides an overview of the field of digital humanities and examines the arguments that are helping to shape it in a variety of ways. This chapter explores the unique…
Abstract
This Chapter provides an overview of the field of digital humanities and examines the arguments that are helping to shape it in a variety of ways. This chapter explores the unique difference in perspective between the “code” as the basis of understanding the humanities in general and digital humanities more specifically and the focus of pedagogues, who believe that it is indeed the examination and expression of the humanities that help shape the code, thus giving the code meaning. There are also those who focus more on research within the field and are not conversant on how various tools work but instead why they are chosen in the first place. This chapter also explores how the work of students, as user of that which we in the field code, teach and research, impacts the discipline.
The US feminist art movement of the 1970s is examined through selected works written by artists, critics, and historians during the 1990s. Books, exhibition catalogues…
Abstract
The US feminist art movement of the 1970s is examined through selected works written by artists, critics, and historians during the 1990s. Books, exhibition catalogues, dissertations, and articles place the movement within the broader contexts of art history and criticism, women’s history, and cultural studies. The art includes painting, drawing, collage, mixed‐media, graphics, installations, video, and performance. An increasing historical perspective allows scholars to examine the movement’s institutions and unresolved issues surrounding class, race, and sexual preference. Background is provided by an introductory essay, which summarizes the movement’s facets of protest, pedagogy, networks and professional associations, and art making while noting examples of publications and institutions that form part of the record of the movement. This article will be useful to librarians and scholars in art, women’s studies, history, sociology, and cultural studies.
The purpose of this paper is to conduct a retrospective bibliometric analysis of documents about digital humanities, an emerging but interdisciplinary movement. It examines the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to conduct a retrospective bibliometric analysis of documents about digital humanities, an emerging but interdisciplinary movement. It examines the distribution of research outputs and languages, identifies the active journals and institutions, dissects the network of categories and cited references, and interprets the hot research topics.
Design/methodology/approach
The source data are derived from the Web of Science (WoS) core collection. To reveal the holistic landscape of this field, VOSviewer and CiteSpace as popular visualization tools are employed to process the bibliographic data including author, category, reference, and keyword. Furthermore, the parameter design of the visualization tools follows the general procedures and methods for bibliometric analysis.
Findings
There is an obviously rapid growth in digital humanities research. English is still the leading academic language in this field. The most influential authors all come from or have scientific relationships with Europe and North America, and two leading countries of which are the UK and USA. Digital humanities is the result of a dynamic dialogue between humanistic exploration and digital means. This research field is closely associated with history, literary and cultural heritage, and information and library science.
Research limitations/implications
This analysis relies on the metadata information extracted from the WoS database; however, some valuable literatures in the field of digital humanities may not be retrieved from the database owing to the inherent challenge of topic search. This study is also restricted by the scope of publications, the limitation regarding the source of data is that WoS database may have underrepresented publications in this domain.
Originality/value
The output of this paper could be a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners interesting in the knowledge domain of digital humanities. Moreover, the conclusions of this retrospective analysis can be deemed as the comparable foundation for future study.
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Jutta Haider, Veronica Johansson and Björn Hammarfelt
The article introduces selected theoretical approaches to time and temporality relevant to the field of library and information science, and it briefly introduces the papers…
Abstract
Purpose
The article introduces selected theoretical approaches to time and temporality relevant to the field of library and information science, and it briefly introduces the papers gathered in this special issue. A number of issues that could potentially be followed in future research are presented.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors review a selection of theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of time that originate in or are of particular relevance to library and information science. Four main themes are identified: (1) information as object in temporal perspectives; (2) time and information as tools of power and control; (3) time in society; and (4) experiencing and practicing time.
Findings
The paper advocates a thorough engagement with how time and temporality shape notions of information more broadly. This includes, for example, paying attention to how various dimensions of the late-modern time regime of acceleration feed into the ways in which information is operationalised, how information work is commodified, and how hierarchies of information are established; paying attention to the changing temporal dynamics that networked information systems imply for our understanding of documents or of memory institutions; or how external events such as social and natural crises quickly alter modes, speed, and forms of data production and use, in areas as diverse as information practices, policy, management, representation, and organisation, amongst others.
Originality/value
By foregrounding temporal perspectives in library and information science, the authors advocate dialogue with important perspectives on time that come from other fields. Rather than just including such perspectives in library and information science, however, the authors find that the focus on information and documents that the library and information science field contributes has great potential to advance the understanding of how notions and experiences of time shape late-modern societies and individuals.
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The artists' book is a hybrid art form: it has no home, no shelf upon which to comfortably reside. Nor is its readership easily described or accounted for. It is a book art form…
Abstract
Purpose
The artists' book is a hybrid art form: it has no home, no shelf upon which to comfortably reside. Nor is its readership easily described or accounted for. It is a book art form that is in transition; it is still evolving. This paper maps attempts to define the artists' book and explains why definitions fall short and what the slipperiness of the form might imply for library collections.
Design/methodology/approach
This article has been informed by a literature search, the examination of special collections of artists' books in libraries in Europe, the UK, North America and Australia as well as negotiations with librarians to acquire books.
Findings
The artists' book as a minor genre within both art and literature is also an interdisciplinary practice: as such is difficult to manage and display within the conventional library system.
Originality/value
This article suggests an approach to the inclusion of the artists' book in special library collections.
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This paper theorizes ubiquitous computing as a novel configuration of the archive. Such a configuration is characterized by shifts in agency underlying archival mechanics and a…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper theorizes ubiquitous computing as a novel configuration of the archive. Such a configuration is characterized by shifts in agency underlying archival mechanics and a pronounced rhythmic diminution of such mechanics in which the user's experiential present tense is rendered fundamentally historical. In doing so, this paper troubles the relationship between: archival mechanics such as appraisal, accession and access; the archive as a site of historical knowledge production and the pervasiveness of data-driven daily life.
Design/methodology/approach
By employing conceptual analysis, I analyze a classic vision of ubiquitous computing to describe the historicization of the present tense in an increasingly computerized world. The conceptual analysis employed here draws on an interdisciplinary set of literature from library and information science, philosophy and computing fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI) and ubiquitous computing.
Findings
I present the concept of the data perfect tense, which is derived from the future perfect tense: the “will have had” construction. It refers to a historicized, data-driven and fundamentally archival present tense characterizing the user's lived world in which the goal of action is to have had created data for future unspecified use. The data perfect reifies ubiquitous computing as an archive, or a site of historical knowledge production predicated on sets of potential statements derived from data generated, appraised, acquisitioned and made accessible through and by means of pervasive “smart” objects.
Originality/value
This paper provides foundational consideration of ubiquitous computing as a configuration of the archive through the analysis of its temporalities: a rhythmic diminution that renders users' experiential present tenses as fundamentally historical, constructed through the agency of smart devices. In doing so, it: contributes to ongoing work within HCI seeking to understand the relationship between HCI and history; introduces concepts relevant to the analysis of novel technological ecologies in terms of archival theory; and constitutes preliminary interdisciplinary steps towards highlighting the relevance of theories of the archive and archival mechanics for critiquing sociotechnical concerns such as surveillance capitalism.