In week 2, 2nd October, you will have a workshop on abstracting. An abstract is
"A concise and accurate representation of the contents of a document."
There are different kinds of abstract and you will learn about them in your workshop.
Being able to summarise articles is an important academic skill, and you will have to write abstracts of your own work for assignments in the iSchool.
Preparation is as follows: read this article before week 2, October 2nd
Erdelez, S. (1999) "Information encountering: it's more than just bumping into information." Bulletin of the American Association for Information Science, 25(3), 25-29. Retrieved 12 September 2012 from http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Feb-99/erdelez.html
Make notes on the following points, if you can find the answers in the article:
- What is the aim of the article?
- What is the aim of Erdelez's research, and/or her research questions?
- Why did she think this was worth investigating?
- What methods did she use in her research? (data collection and data analysis)?
- When and where did she do the research?
- Who were the research population? (the participants in her research)
- What were the main findings from her research?
- What does Erdelez think is new or important about her research findings?
- What does she think are the implications of her research?
- What are her conclusions?
Bring a copy of the article and your notes to the workshop session with you, on 2nd October. Do not forget them! You will be using those notes to write an abstract of the document and will need to refer to the full article.
This is Dr Erdelez' home page: http://education.missouri.edu/faculty/SISLT/Erdelez_Sanda.php
If you have any questions about exercise, put them as comments in this post.
I enjoyed reading the article and saw many traits of information encountering that I would attribute to myself. However, I cannot discover how she chose her interviewees or the precise research method, despite looking at journal article titles on Emerald and trying to find her original Phd thesis which I assume has the answer. Unless of course, I have misunderstood and the answer is staring me in the face!
ReplyDeleteNo, there are gaps in what she tells us about her research methods, we can discuss that a bit more on Tuesday. Her PhD was before they tended to get archived in an easily accessible form. There is a bit more information in a 1996 conference paper she produced, which has recently been scanned and put on the web: http://informationr.net/isic/ISIC1996/96_Erdelez.pdf
ReplyDeleteHere's a proper reference for that paper: Erdelez S. (1996) Information encountering: a conceptual framework for accidental information discovery. In: Vakkari P, Savolainen R, and Dervin B (eds.) Information seeking in context: proceedings of an international conference on research on information needs, seeking and use in different contexts: Tampere, Finland. London: Taylor Graham, pp. 412-421. Retrieved 27 September 2012 from http://informationr.net/isic/ISIC1996/96_Erdelez.pdf
ReplyDeleteThanks for the information and reference. It has been useful and allowed me to fill in the gaps for the questions. I did try searching some of the above author's names in Star but could not see the article in question.
ReplyDelete