Social Informatics: A View of the UK Tradition
Elisabeth Davenport
Professor of Information Management
Napier University, Scotland
2:00-3:30 pm on Friday, February 22, 2008
Indiana University Bloomington, Herman B. Wells Library, Room LI 001
Refreshments will be available prior to the talk at 1:45 pm.
Following the talk, all interested individuals, especially students, are invited to stay for an informal discussion with the speaker.
ABSTRACT
This talk explores affiliations between two historical lines of research: Social Informatics in the United States and Sociotechnical Studies in the United Kingdom. Examples of work from three long established UK research sites at Manchester, Edinburgh and the London School of Economics provide a sense of the sociotechnical work at different historical periods. Although the US and UK traditions share a common interest in the production of technology and work with complementary concepts and methods, formal links between the two have not been strong for much of the historical period under review. However, there are signs of fusion in the work of a current generation of researchers on both sides of the Atlantic.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Elisabeth Davenport is Professor of Information Management in the School of Computing, Napier University, where she is Research Professor in the Social Informatics research group. She is also a Research Associate of the International Teledemocracy Centre at Napier and, for more than ten years has been a Visiting Scholar at the School of Library and Information Science in Indiana University. Her current research interests include organizational informatics, workplace ethnography, discurse analysis, and critical knowledge management. More information about Dr. Davenport can be found at: http://www.soc.napier.ac.uk/people/op/onepeople/peopleid/101.
