Newsletter 2015
Call for I-Stories
SIG History & Foundations of Information Science
http://www.asis.org/SIG/
Information and communication phenomena are at the heart of our daily lives. They are how we know things and yet our understanding of these concepts and underlying phenomena are at best slippery. Just when we think we’ve pinned or penned them down nicely with a few well chosen phrases, we discover that those phrases are inadequate, that others disagree with our definitions or that many other conceptions abound. Not to bore you with the many varied conceptions of information, the aim of this call for I-Stories is to bring forth, through everyday experience, the many different things information can mean to different people or to the same person in different circumstances in a lively and entertaining manner.
The SIG History & Foundations of Information Science solicits stories on how information and its understanding affect our daily lives, be it in work situations, in our private lives, in our research. The stories of information and around information should showcase how effective or ineffective the concept may be, how it can mean different things to different people, how that may have got you into misunderstandings and how that has got you thinking about information in general. The stories may concern an event, something that happened to you or to someone you know, a talk you heard or involve well known scholars and how they have grappled with this open-ended issue.
We encourage scholars, practitioners, students to send us a text of not more than 1000 words which can be illustrated with drawings. A successful initiative in applying arts-informed and visual approaches to exploring information phenomena was initiated by Hartel in the shape of the iSquare international study. A story of Information also appeared in Hartel (2014)*.
A jury formed of HFIS advisory board will choose 5 stories that shed startling, informative and unexpected insights into our understanding of the phenomenon we call information and of the field we call information science/studies.
Stories by students will receive particular attention and if selected, their authors will receive a 1 year free membership to ASIST and to HFIS. Membership benefits can be consulted at http://www.asis.org/.
Stories written by practitioners or faculty members if selected will receive a gift card of $30 as well as 1 year free membership to SIG HFIS.
Please send your stories to fidelia.ibekwe-sanjuan@univ-
The jury will render the result of its deliberation by 30th June.
Fidelia Ibekwe-SanJuan
HFIS chair (2014-2015)
* Hartel, J. (2014, July). An arts-informed study of information using the draw-and-write technique. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 65(7), 1349-1367. doi:10.1002/asi.23121