Information encountering in the humanities: Embeddedness, temporality, and altruism

Abstract

Humanities research informs people's movements across time and reshapes cultural worldviews. While we know that humanists integrate information resources into their research program and that serendipitous discoveries enable truly transformative knowledge creation, our picture of discovery in the humanities is unclear. There is an important role for information professionals to better support humanistic discovery as routine practice. To fully comprehend the complex research activities of humanities scholars it is necessary to expand upon existing models of information encountering (IE) by analyzing discovery episodes and the temporal and topical factors in play. We take particular interest in studying how scholars in the art history and archeology disciplines conceptualize, pursue, and often complete research projects. Ultimately we present an amended IE model that reveals intricate connections between IE, rediscovery, and altruistic collaboration mutually evolving over distinct timespans.

Aha! Librarians’ predisposition for information encountering and serendipity in the workplace

“…Serendipity can help organizations be more creative and innovative (Cunha, 2010). Past studies on IE have looked at serendipity conceptually (Erdelez, 2005;Agarwal, 2015), in various information environmentsphysical (Björneborn, 2008) and digital (McCay-Peet & Toms, 2017), learning (Giordano, 2010), different user groups such as historians (Buchanan & Erdelez, 2019), journalists (Bird-Meyer, Erdelez, & Bossaller, 2019), shoppers (Ocepek, 2017), and various other contexts of information behavior (Agarwal, 2018), but were not focused on how people experience IE in an organizational context. Ocepek (2018) argues that everyday includes work.…”

Does serendipity matter in knowledge management? Organizational sharing and use of encountered information

“…IE can help organizations be more creative and innovative (Cunha et al, 2010). Past studies on IE have looked at serendipity conceptually (Erdelez, 2005;Agarwal, 2015), in both physical (Bj€ orneborn, 2008) and digital (McCay-Peet and Toms, 2017), information environments, learning (Giordano, 2010), user groups such as historians (Buchanan and Erdelez, 2019), journalists (Bird-Meyer et al, 2019), shoppers (Ocepek, 2017) and other contexts of information behavior (Agarwal, 2018), but not often on how people experience IE in an organizational context. The studies on IE in the organizational context have included Olshannikova et al (2020) who carried out a qualitative online survey to investigate knowledge workers' experiences of serendipitous social encounters and related factors.…”

“…, 2010). Past studies on IE have looked at serendipity conceptually (Erdelez, 2005; Agarwal, 2015), in both physical (Björneborn, 2008) and digital (McCay-Peet and Toms, 2017), information environments, learning (Giordano, 2010), user groups such as historians (Buchanan and Erdelez, 2019), journalists (Bird-Meyer et al. , 2019), shoppers (Ocepek, 2017) and other contexts of information behavior (Agarwal, 2018), but not often on how people experience IE in an organizational context.…”

Revisitando los metajuegos y el metajuego: consideraciones teóricas y metodológicas

“…Even if archaeology is often portrayed as an exemplar of a branch of scholarship that puts a lot of weight on systematic and rigorous documentation and preservation of information, empirical studies of Informatio 28(1), 2023(1), , pp. 296-342 ISSN: 2301(1), -1378 archaeological information management demonstrate both its complexity and reliance on tacit and informal rather than formal and systematic knowledge exchange (e.g Buchanan and Erdelez 2019;. Huvila 2018b;Dallas 2015;Davidović 2009;Sellers 1973) Börjesson and Huvila (2018).…”