Centre for Social Informatics colleagues Peter Cruickshank, Dr Laura Muir, Professor Hazel Hall & Visiting Professor Brian Detlor gather at #i3RGU
This blog post was updated in March 2018 to include links to the full text of seven manuscripts of articles developed from nine of the papers presented by CSI staff at i3 2017. These articles will be published in the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science (JoLIS) later in 2018.
Information: interactions and impact (i3) 2017 took place at Robert Gordon University at the end of last month from Tuesday June 27th until Friday June 30th 2017, with a packed programme for delegates who had travelled to Aberdeen from across the world. As in previous years, staff and research students from the Centre for Social Informatics (who didn’t have too far to travel) enjoyed participating at the event. We delivered a total of nine papers, as summarised in the table below.
We also had the opportunity to hear about the research of others in the conference sessions, and contribute to two plenary discussions. I particularly enjoyed the excellent keynote presentation on the last day Champions, deviance and information delivered by Dr Crystal Fulton of University College Dublin. Crystal spoke about the information behaviours of secretive groups such as Urbexers, who document the changing urban landscape, and gamblers. I also found interesting the work of Dr Kendra Albright (Kent State University, US) on unconscious influences in information retrieval: there’s more information on this in Kendra’s 2011 paper in Information Research.
I chaired two papers, both by colleagues based at the University of Technology, Sydney. The first was on the co-construction of learning presented by Dr Theresa Anderson (which recalled some of my own work on blogging in hybrid learning environments – see, for example, this paper that I published with Brian Davison in Library and Information Science Research in 2007), and the second on knowledge creation amongst weavers in Ghana based on the doctoral work of Henry Boateng.
Of course, participating at conferences isn’t just about the papers, but also (and often more) about the conversations between the sessions and the networking opportunities. The highlight of the evening social events was Thursday’s conference dinner at the Chester Hotel. As at i3 in 2015, this began with some superb comedy from RGU’s Professor Peter Reid and Simon Burnett, and ended with some excellent ceilidh dancing. The food that we ate between all this fun was delicious,as can be seen in the slideshow below.
Thanks are due to the local organisers of i3 2017 at Robert Gordon University for a great conference (again), and to all those on the wider international programme committee who selected an excellent range of papers from those submitted for peer review back in January 2017.
For further information about the event, please see the official conference web pages, and photos on Flickr. In addition, Sheila Webber of the University of Sheffield liveblogged many of the i3 2017 presentations on her Information Literacy blog, and others have posted their own reviews of the i3 2017 (as well as the iDocQ doctoral colloquium, which took place on the Monday before i3 2017).
Hazel Hall 