The next Organisational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities (OLKC) conference takes place in in Trollhättan, Sweden from September 7th-9th 2022. Several members of the Centre for Social Informatics have contributed to research outputs that will be presented at the conference. Continue reading
Do you know or work with adult refugees and/or asylum seekers who have lived in the UK for 5 years or fewer? If so, please could you let them know about this opportunity to contribute to an on-going research project within the Centre for Social Informatics by completing a short online questionnaire at tinyurl.com/culturepubliclibraries. Continue reading
My Centre for Social Informatics colleagues Dr David Brazier and Marina Milosheva are taking bookings for a series of participative design workshops for early career researchers. These take place on three consecutive Thursday mornings: 22nd and 29th April, and May 6th. The aim of the workshops is for participants to develop the skills required to benefit from informal learning in academia. The programme is described in greater detail in a recent post on Marina’s web site. Continue reading
It’s 15 weeks since I posted A month in coronavirus captivity. At that time I suggested that I might ‘revisit the themes discussed here in a future blog post and reflect on the changes in the intervening period’ – so here I am again! Continue reading
I rarely write personally on this blog. That said, I have used this medium to relay some very personal news in the past, and it currently feels like the right place to reflect on these first few weeks of coronavirus lockdown. I also thought that it would be interesting to share some of the photographs that I have been taking in the limited amount of time that I have been out of my house during this period, one of which has been selected by the BBC as one of its series Your pictures of Scotland for 24th April to 1st May 2020. Continue reading
We have a newly updated Centre for Social Informatics flyer for autumn 2019. Please follow the link to read about the work of our group, including details of research expertise, funders, recent PhD completions, and recent publications. The flyer includes profiles of the academic and research staff within our group: Continue reading
We have a newly updated Centre for Social Informatics flyer for spring 2019. Please follow the link to read about the work of our group, including details of research expertise, funders, recent PhD completions, and recent publications. The flyer includes profiles of the academic and research staff within our group: Continue reading
John Mowbray
The second of the seven articles that I recently co-authored for the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science (JoLIS) has now been published as an OnlineFirst paper. The article is entitled ‘Job search information behaviours: an ego-net study of networking amongst young job-seekers‘.
Through the analysis of a set of egocentric networks of young job-seekers, my co-authors John Mowbray, Professor Robert Raeside, Pete Robertson and I reveal the key informational role of network contacts in job-seeking as one that extends beyond the simple diffusion of information about employment opportunities.
In the article we develop some of the findings from John Mowbray‘s ESRC/Skills Development Scotland funded doctoral study that were presented as a conference paper at Information: interactions and impact (i3) 2017 in June last year (slides; liveblog). The full manuscript of the article is also available to download from the Edinburgh Napier repository. Continue reading
The Science, Technology, Innovation, Information and Communication Studies pathway of the ESRC Scottish Graduate School of Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (SGSSS-DTP) is currently inviting applications for the 2018 studentship competition. Successful applicants will start their doctoral studies in October 2018. Continue reading
Peter Cruickshank, Dr Bruce Ryan and I recently completed the Information Literacy for Democratic Engagement (IL-DEM) project. This work set out to investigate levels of digital and information literacy within Scotland’s Community Council system. It was supported by a grant from the CILIP Information Literacy Group.
We explored how community councillors develop the skills required to inform and engage with the citizens that they represent, and how libraries support this work. In doing so have extended further two established research streams within the Centre for Social Informatics: (1) Cruickshank and Ryan’s work on digital engagement in local democracy (such as our DigiCC workshops), and (2) mine with Christine Irving on information literacy and life-long learning. This work also builds upon our group’s track record in library and information science research. Continue reading
Hazel Hall 
