News (updated February 13, 2012)
Recently, along with research assistants Karen Pollock and Rebecca Noone, I have been enjoying a visual research project on the nature of information. Preliminary results were reported at the 2012 iConference as a panel, on-site exhibit, and online exhibit entitled A Visual Approach to the Perennial Question "What is Information?" On the teaching front, this winter semester I am offering my first course on serious leisure INF1005/6: Information Workshop (The Liberal Arts Hobby); check out the incredible student maps of The Serious Leisure Perspective. I am also teaching a new course on Information Behaviour. This past October at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana I ran the panel Metatheoretical Snowman, II. Michael Olsson was the winner and Jonathan Furner was the first runner-up. I also convened the panel The Future of Information History [PDF]. Lately I have become an active contributor to the SIG-USE (information behaviour) mailing list and am cross-posting the entries in an Information Behavio(u)r Blog. In September at the Second International Visual Research Methods Conference in Milton Keynes (UK), I presented the paper Understanding Information Technology in the Home via Photographs: A Detailed Analysis of Swan and Taylor. The paper, co-authored with former advisee Leslie Thomson, "Visual Methods and Photography for the Study of Immediate Information Space" [abstract] [PDF] was just published in JASIS&T. I am still managing, with sociologist Robert A. Stebbins, The Serious Leisure Perspective website, a theoretical framework of leisure. Finally, advisee Danielle Cooper defended a terrific thesis this August, 2011 (congratulations, Danielle!) and has moved on to doctoral studies at York University in Toronto.
