Workshops
Memory practices in computer-mediated communities: a research methods workshop
Organizers:
Elisabeth Davenport, School of Computing, Napier University, Edinburgh EH10 5DT (e.davenport AT napier.ac.uk)
Howard Rosenbaum, School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN47405 (hrosenba AT indiana.edu)
Abstract
Community depends on memory; computer mediated community (CMC) depends on digital memory. Human memory is limited, corporeally bound, and subject to forgetting. As a consequence, communities develop other means of maintaining memory. Bowker (2005) argues that memory practices are infrastructure tools used to preserve memory in scientific communities. Information technologies are examples of memory practices that support community. In this workshop, we seek to explore the concept of memory practices in the study of community and broaden it beyond the scientific community to include CMC: communities of practice, interest communities, professional communities...We invite researchers of CMC to submit position papers describing the communities they are studying, the memory practices on which they are focusing, and the methods they are employing to study these practices. The goals of the workshop are to develop a typology of research problems and methods and a preliminary research agenda for studying memory practices in CMC.
Themes of the workshop:
- To bring together researchers with interested in memory practices in computer-mediated communities (CMC)
- To explore the range of methods that are used to investigate memory practices in CMC
- To evaluate and discuss ‘memory practices’ as an analytic frame and as a focus for systematic inquiry in the complex relationships among CMC, memory practices, and information and communication technologies
Format:
One day with the following activities:
- Pre-workshop submission of five page position statements that will be due in late April and peer reviewed
- Keynote/overview presentation on workshop topic (45 minutes)
Goal: To orient participants to the workshop schedule; to present an overview of memory practices in CMC - Brief (5 minutes or so) presentations of position papers by attendees (~2 hours)
Goal: to get a sense of the range of views of memory practices and the methods used to study them - Interactive moderated group discussions (~2 hours)
Goal: To separate into like minded groups to begin developing a taxonomy of methods - Plenary reporting session (1 hour)
Goal: To summarize the work of the participants and discuss the next steps - Ongoing discussion (6 weeks) and agenda setting on the conference wiki (SLIS can host the wiki if necessary)
Goal: to continue the work begun art the workshop
Outcomes of the workshop:
We envisage a number of outcomes that will be published on the conference website/wiki:
- A collection of empirical position papers that provides an inventory of methods that can be used to investigate memory practices in CMC
- A prototype typology of research problems and methods that emerges from discussions among participants Memory practices in computer-mediated communities: a research methods workshop
- A preliminary agenda for further research into methods for exploring memory practices in CMC
Target audience:
15 - 20 participants who are investigating computer mediated communities, and who can provide a systematic account of their research approaches. Participants will be working at doctoral level or beyond, or undertaking action research as experienced practitioners. The workshop should appeal to:
- Academic researchers who have conducted or plan to undertake empirical studies of memory practices in CMC
- Designers of application platforms who wish to embed/exploit insights from research into memory practices
- Managers of CMC who wish to embed/exploit insights from research into memory practices
- Participants in CMC who wish to account for their memory practices
Participants will be solicited through a call posted to multiple listservs including community informatics, AOIR, CITASA, ASIS&T, JESSE, AISWORLD, and others. The CFP will also be located on the web at the School of Library and Information Science at IU and at the School of Computing at Napier University.
Introduction and rationale:
Bowker (2005) describes memory practices in the sciences in terms of a rich set of infrastructures of differing reach and range. These emerge from complex chains of decision-making about who to involve and who to exclude, what to conserve and what to jettison, what to select and what to reject and so on. These trajectories vary across domains, and have considerable constitutive power. Historically, scientific communities are often distinguished on the grounds of different ways of framing problems, and different empirical methods. The investigation of memory practices has been undertaken in parallel domains - science studies and communication in science. It is only recently that these have been treated as core constituents of scientific practice as the research attention of different scientific communities converges on cyberinfrastructure and grid technologies. Very large knowledge infrastructures are the focus of an emerging field of study (Hine, 2006) where memory practices are seen not simply sinks for output, but as drivers of science entry points to the 'history of the present', Foucault's term for ways in which the world presents itself at a given point of observation, how things come to be as they are.
Domains in science, the focus of Bowker's exposition, are discursive communities, and we suggest that Bowker's framing of infrastructures, memory practices and the constitution of science can be extended to a wider discussion of computer-mediated community. Our proposed workshop is premised on this claim, but focuses specifically on methods that may be used to explore memory practices in communities. Bowker's text offers a number of examples – historical reconstruction/genealogy (the approach taken in his biography of the Shlumberger corporation and his tracing of the provenance of the International Classification of Diseases); discourse analysis (the study of the politics of classification co-authored with Star, 2000); ethnography (the study of the struggle to define the Nursing Classification Scheme, (Bowker et al., 1995)). Cognate research on memory practices in mediated communities provides examples of activity theory (Spinuzzi's (2003) analysis of traffic systems in a state police department) and structuration analysis (Rosenbaum's (1997) study of county government officers adopting new technology). These empirical projects offer more or less systematic accounts of work practice at different levels of organization, tracking decisions about memory practices and technology choices in their respective contexts.
Scope of the call for submissions:
We welcome submissions in three broad areas.
Theme One: Historical work on memory practices, technology and communities: There is a long tradition of relevant work (Yates, 1989; Poster, 1990) on classification and control in the modern period, inspired by Foucault's Discipline and Punish, which merges scientific and societal/organizational examples. An alternative historical tradition develops themes of identity and community - Anderson's 'imagined communities' (1991) can serve as an example, explicating the power of selective memory/myth in forging a national identity that must always be aspirational ('imagined'); we suggest that a skewed version of this, offering ‘inspirational’ community that can be engineered, appears in contemporary organizational discourse. Many infrastructures are implicated in such accounts – narratives, records, classification schemes, regulations – the technologies of the day.
A detailed account of how to analyse such contexts is offered by Deuten and Rip (2000) who use the term 'narrative infrastructure' to capture "the evolving aggregation of actors/narratives in their material and social setting, that enables and constrains the possible stories, actions and interactions by actors" in organizations. (They thus corroborate the observations of a number of other analysts who stress that 'story-telling' is an important factor in community cohesion). In explaining how coherence can emerge in a multi-actor, multi-level process, without any actor specifically being responsible, Deuten and Rip stress that narration, rather than text, must be the focus of attention, because it "occurs in interactions, informs and shapes them and makes action into something memorable." By analyzing 'narrative infrastructure' in a case study of product innovation in a biotechnology firm, they show "how actually, over time, attribution and typification in stories, and the implied stories contained in interactions link up, and an overall plot emerges" (p 69). Suchman and Trigg offer a comparable account of 'pseudo-narratives' in an AI community of practice that "are constructed for the specific purpose of reconstructing common sense knowledge as something that can be transparently read off of the particular technical representations to hand". (1993, p. 177)
Theme Two: Memory practices in communities of practice:
Situated learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991) is a strong research focus as acculturation in the memory practices that drive a line of activity: these define how to behave in a given group and what resources are fit for which purpose. Fleming, for example, states that 'situated learning' draws on the "ordinary, everyday, finely detailed methodic practices of participants to an activity in specific settings" (1994, p. 525) and learning, in this context, means being able to participate appropriately in the settings ... "where the subject or discipline is being done" (op cit, p. 526). He suggests that situated learning can be dis-assembled into constituent parts, using a structural anatomy, a functional anatomy, and an understanding of the machinery by which such activity works.
Internalised memory practices are important in distributed cognition – a feature of collaborative work in interdisciplinary communities - they ensure that collective activity unfolds in sequence and on topic. (Hutchins) Of particular interest in the workshop are memory practices that must be forged at the edges of communities in 'boundary' work - interdisciplinary alignment is a hot topic in infrastructure research. Berkenkotter (1995) describes domain communities as "contingent groupings of practitioners situated in multiple networks determined by such factors as objects of study, theories, methodologies, epistemological alliances, institutional sites and funding arrangements" (p. 177). She suggests (p. 179) that the production of boundary rhetoric ('the creation of a heteroglossic text') should be a focus of research attention. 'Key informants', trusted authorities in a number of fields (c.f the middle managers or brokers identified as cross-fertilizing agents in some of the knowledge management literature), can play an important role in enlisting and enrolling allies to support emerging rhetorics. We thus welcome accounts of structural and network analysis - tracing the moves that lead to the formation of alliances and the selection of artifacts.
Theme three: Memory practices in interest communities:
We also welcome studies of communities - gamers, shoppers, serious leisure and other interest groups - driven by social infrastructures. Our focus here is on the applications that shape/drive activity and interaction – the memory practices that are 'naturalised' in often proprietary software, unattributed and de-historicised. The work of the invisible producers of organizational infrastructure (those who undertake 'articulation work') has been analysed in seminal studies (e.g. Star and Griesemer, 1989); we would like to hear of methods to explore the phenomenon in the context of Second Life, for example. How does the game present in the way it does? Where and when were decisions made? Why does my shopping experience present the way it does? The memory practices of those who inhabit such large social infrastructures are also of interest to us, as is the merging of endogenous input and exogenous constraints in social learning environments. How do you become a star performer or producer? How do you sustain this? What kinds of analysis can inform researchers and players? How may they be presented?
Workshop organizers
Elisabeth Davenport is Professor of Information Management in the School of Computing Napier University and is a member of the Social Informatics Research Group there. She is also a research affiliate of the |International Teledemocracy Centre at Napier, and has been a Visiting Scholar at the School of Library and Information Science in Indiana University for over a decade. She has participated in a number of projects relevant to memory practices in communities. These include Living Memory, Net-Quality and OPaL. funded under the EU IST Programme, and Non- place, a project funded by the UK Research Councils. She has been a leader/instructor in a number of research methods workshops in the US and Europe, including two NORSLIS seminars in Sweden and Finland, and, most recently, a workshop with Brenda Dervin on ethnomethods at the 2006 ASIS&T Annual Meeting.
Dr. Howard Rosenbaum is an Associate Professor of Information Science in the School of Library and Information Science. He has an interest in social informatics and studies the use of information and communication technologies in electronic commerce, community networking, and egovernment.. Recently, Dr. Rosenbaum has published a book entitled "Information Technologies in Human Contexts: Learning from Organizational and Social Informatics" with Steve Sawyer and the late Rob Kling. He has led seminars and workshops on Electronic Commerce at Napier University Business School in Edinburgh, Scotland, the University of Bath , and the University of Greenwich, in the UK. He offers continuing education workshops for information professionals in XML, CSS, and web page design and will be conducting a workshop on team-based web site redesign at Museums and the Web 2007.
Rosenbaum is the chair of the ASIST Social Informatics SIG and was on the program committee for the social informatics workshop at the 2006 ASIST meeting. He is also on the program committee for the 2006 ICIS MIS-HCI pre-conference workshop. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics at Indiana University and in the Center for Digital Commerce at Syracuse University. He has had extensive experience using qualitative methods in a variety of settings to investigate a range of research problems in library and information science. He received the Frederic Bachman Lieber Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence, Indiana University in 2005, a state-wide MIRA Award for Technological Innovation in Education from Techpoint in 20003, the Indiana Partnership for Statewide Education Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology in 2002, and was named one of the first SBC Fellows at Indiana University in 2000.
Bibliography available upon request