Professor Steve Fuller

This year’s ASIST Annual Lecture takes place on Wednesday 30th November 2016 at Edinburgh Napier University. This is the first time that any lecture in this series has been presented in the UK.

The speaker at this event is Professor Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick. In a presentation entitled What, if anything, makes knowledge an improvement over information? Steve will discuss the tension between our thirst for easy access to vast quantities of information and our fears of information overload, and he will explore how concepts of information vary across contexts.

The lecture takes place at Edinburgh Napier University’s Craiglockhart campus on Wednesday 30th November. Doors open at 17:30. Assistant Principal Dr Sandra Cairncross will welcome all to the University and open the lecture at 18:00. At the end of the lecture Dr Diane Pennington (Chair Elect of ASIST Europe) will chair questions and answers. Thereafter all participants will be invited to join a drinks reception in the main foyer from 19:00 to 20:00. Registration for this event is free of charge through EventBrite.

The Twitter hashtag for this event is #asist_al16. The proceedings will be professionally amplified by Kirsty Pitkin of Event Amplifier (@eventamplifier), and a video of the lecture made available soon after its delivery.

A number of bursaries are available to support PhD students to come to this event and an Information Science Masterclass led by Steve on the same afternoon. 

The Masterclass takes place from 14:00 to 17:00 prior to the lecture. Here PhD students will explore a range of research philosophies applicable to Information Science and related domains. The session will be of value to students at all stages in the PhD process. At this Masterclass the bursary award holders will be joining PhD students based at Scottish universities whose participation is funded by the ESRC Scottish Graduate School of Social Science. The bursary places include refreshments.

To be eligible apply for the bursary funding you must be a current PhD student in Information Science (or closely related discipline) based outside Scotland. The maximum value of each bursary is £170. Any additional expenses associated with participation at these events must be met by the award winners or their home institutions.

Applications for bursary places should be sent by email to Professor Hazel Hall (h.hall@napier.ac.uk) by 17:00 BST Monday 31^st October 2016 in a document that includes:

• Student name
• Student email address
• Contact telephone number
• Name of the student’s Director of Studies/principal supervisor/main advisor
• PhD title and stage (e.g. Year 1/2/3)
• Statement on the benefits of attending the Masterclass and ASIST Annual Lecture (maximum 500 words)

Bursary award holders must be available to attend both events. They will be expected to write a review of each with a focus on their learning and how this will be applied in the research for their PhDs.

Bursary award winners will be notified in the week beginning 7^th November 2016.