3 results
9 - Conclusion: Workplace Information Literacy as the Literacy of the Digital Workplace
- Edited by Gunilla Widén, José Teixeira
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- Book:
- Information Literacy and the Digitalisation of the Workplace
- Published by:
- Facet
- Published online:
- 17 December 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 June 2023, pp 145-152
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- Chapter
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Summary
The starting point of this book has been a growing realisation of the impact of digitalisation and digital information on the transformation of the contemporary workplace. Today's workplace is very different from how a place of work has been conceptualised previously. Information and informational skills, competencies and capabilities have a similarly radically different role in how people work and how work and workplaces are organised. All this makes workplace information literacy a crucial condition for their successful digitalisation.
Underlining the impact of digital information and informational competencies might sound like stating the obvious, especially when the massive impact on information literacies established itself as a cliché more than a decade ago (Francke, Sundin and Limberg, 2011). However, it has become all the more apparent that information literacies are a fleeting target that evolve alongside digitalisation and its contexts. Among literacies, workplace information literacy (WIL) and workplace as a site of literacies has so far received comparatively less attention than other information literacies in education and library contexts. This is an issue that this book aimed to address by introducing and discussing perspectives and approaches to how information literacy can function as a key concept in not only understanding but also making a difference in the workplaces of today and tomorrow.
In the preceding chapters, we have made excursions to different aspects of WIL and its role in the contemporary and future workplace. Some of these explorations have pointed to theoretical and conceptual issues, methodological considerations on how to investigate WIL, processual and transitional perspectives on what it takes to be information literate in different contexts, and what the outcomes and implications are in the workplace.
From a conceptual and theoretical perspective, the extensive literature review conducted by Teixeira and Karim (Chapter 1) points to the diversity of perspectives on the information literacy concept. The diversity can be seen both as an opportunity and a complication. It is a strength as long as it helps to address different aspects of being (information) literate in increasingly digitalising (information) work. However, it can become a burden if WIL research and practice loses sight of the essence of the concept: skills, competencies and mastery of the complex informational landscape of the contemporary workplaces. A prominent risk is also if the various WILs are too violently torn apart from each other by overemphasising their differences.
3 - Social tagging and commenting: theoretical perspectives
- from SECTION 1 - SOCIAL TAGGING AND COMMENTING
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- By Ina-Maria Jansson, Uppsala University, Sweden., Isto Huvila, Uppsala University
- Edward Benoit, III, Alexandra Eveleigh
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- Book:
- Participatory Archives
- Published by:
- Facet
- Published online:
- 25 October 2019
- Print publication:
- 30 January 2019, pp 33-44
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Summary
Introduction
For some, commenting and tagging may seem an appealing approach to open archival collections for public participation and engagement. Others see them merely as affordable tools to impress funders and taxpayers, legitimising the institutional existence of archives, without seeing much value in content or interest in the consequences of inviting users to participate. Similarly, there are many factors that motivate people to tag and comment online. Although individuals can tag items for their own sake, without spending thought on whether the tags are of use for others or merely for their personal use (for example books in LibraryThing or images on Flickr). It is an activity that cannot be separated from social exchange and community building.
However, irrespective of the approach to tags and comments – social annotation versus private notetaking – it is apparent that there are different reasons for inviting an audience to annotate. There is also a plethora of views on the usefulness and implications of social annotation, and on what is attainable by inviting users to tag or comment. Further, there are many reasons why people tag and comment, and they perceive the usefulness of their actions in different ways. Tagging and commenting has different effects on individuals and archives. This chapter investigates how to conceptualise tags and comments and the phenomenon of commenting and tagging in the context of archives. It highlights an assortment of theoretical perspectives with potential relevance in trying to understand what social annotation means for participatory archives.
Before turning our attention to understanding how tags and comments are functioning, we commence by exploring their variants and how they can be understood in different ways.
What are tags and comments?
Tags and comments have many similarities, especially from the perspective of archival description. However, as Gursoy et al. note, ‘User-generated tags are not quite like subject categories and not quite like archival descriptive metadata.’ Comparisons of formal metadata and tags have shown considerable differences. Tags are terms, but in comparison with subject terms, they are heterogeneous, stem from different forms of knowledge, and end up with a structure that is more rhizomatic than Aristotelian.5 Comments do not have similarly apparent counterparts in traditional archival des - cription.
Being Formal and Flexible: Semantic Wiki as an Archaeological e-Science Infrastructure
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- By Isto Huvila
- Edited by Mingquan Zhou
- Iza Romanowska, Zhongke Wu, Pengfei Xu, Philip Verhagen
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- Book:
- Revive the Past
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 23 June 2021
- Print publication:
- 17 August 2012, pp 186-197
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Summary
Abstract:
The multiple challenges of representing archaeological information both using relational databases and semantic web technologies have been acknowledged in the literature. The present paper discusses findings and observations from an action research study on developing an integrated semantic digital data archive and collaboration platform for archaeological and archaeology related research using a semantic wiki based approach. The observations and findings from the project demonstrate that the discussed approach provides means to address some of the problems related to pre-coordinated formal representation of archaeological knowledge. At the same, the study stresses the importance of a full understanding of the implications of the both old and new systems of knowledge representation. Otherwise the new systems may introduce implicit infrastructural bias comparable to the ones addressed by the novel approach.
Key Words: Semantic Web, Documentation, Linked Data, Semantic Wikis, Information Management
Introduction
Digital data archives are a central component of collaborative e-Science infrastructures in scientific and scholarly research (Borgman 2007). Archaeologists have acknowledged the need for standardised but at the same time flexible and contextually adaptable repositories of archaeological data (Lock 2003). Even if there has been a drive to develop universal solutions, the experiences have shown that many of the most successful digital repositories have been in some sense ‘local’ (e.g. Sure and Studer 2005, Shaw et al. 2009). Both technologies and individual repositories have their origins in certain areas and philosophies of knowledge that makes them particularly successful in those specific areas. For instance, a database of facts is ‘local’ and useful in contexts based on formal and atomistic modes of knowledge, but at the same time, such a database might be less useful for an individual who leans on the hermeneutic tradition of knowledge (Shaw et al. 2009).
Many of the challenges related to universality have been recognised for some time (Fox and Marchionini 1998). One of the central problems of many universal knowledge systems is the implicitness (Olson and Schlegl 1999) and incoherence of their underlying theories of knowledge. As Blandford et al. (2001) remark, users become easily disoriented with seemingly consistent, but internally inconsistent universal systems, which do not correspond with their own conceptions and experiences of how information should be organised (Huvila 2006). A poor match between digital repositories and their users means that a user does not get relevant information in exchange for his investment of time and effort.
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