Information in Crisis workshop. Information Seeking in Context Conference (ISIC) 2024

Description

References to information crises are on the increase in the information science literature with the term information crisis being used for a variety of purposes and scenarios. The term has been used to describe information in or about crisis both in the context of a personal crisis e.g. a health or relationship matter or an event on a large scale such as a natural disaster. The topic has become the subject of work by several scholars in information science in recent years e.g. Lloyd and Hicks (2020, 2021) and has been linked to concepts such as information resilience (e.g., Radford et al., 2022; Nicol et al., 2022) and other information coping behaviours (e.g., Bossaller et al., 2022; Koltay, 2022). Some scholars have written about information crisis in relation to the work of information intermediaries e.g. Buchanan et al (2019), meanwhile work by work by Hicks and Noone (2023) has highlighted limitations in current scholarship on the topic due to the inconsistent and ambiguous definitions of crisis in use.

The aim of this workshop is to explore crisis from an information behaviour perspective, in doing so, we ask:

What is an information crisis?
How is the term used in current scholarship and how has the term been used historically?
How should information crises be conceptualised and studied within the field of Information behaviour?
What distinctions should be made between information crisis and information in times of crisis?
What types of information crises exist and how can they be conceptualised in information behaviour?
What is the role of information and information activities, in information crises?
What role does time, affect and place play in shaping information practices in the context of crises?
The workshop will provide a platform for the exploration of Information Behaviour in times of crisis and will be the first step in creating a research network of scholars with an interest in the topic.

This workshop will provide a platform to first parse out distinctions between information crisis and information in times of crisis, and will explore information behaviour in this context. The workshop will be the first step in creating a research network of scholars with an interest in the topic.

References

Bossaller, J., Kohlburn, J., Cho, H., Moulaison‐Sandy, H. and Adkins, D., 2022. Health Information Needs of Public Library Leaders during COVID‐19. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 59(1), pp.410-414.

Buchanan, S., Jardine, C., & Ruthven, I. (2019). Information behaviors in disadvantaged and dependent circumstances and the role of information intermediaries. Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 70(2), 117–129. https://doi-org.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/10.1002/asi.24110

Lloyd, A., & Hicks, A. (2020). Risk and resilience in radically redefined information environments; information practices during the COVID-19 pandemic. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 57(1), e336. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.336

Lloyd, A., & Hicks, A. (2021). Contextualising risk: The unfolding information work and practices of people during the COVID- 19 pandemic. Journal of Documentation, 77(5), 1052-1072. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-11-2020-0203

Hicks, A. and Noone, R. (2023), Information in Crisis Mode? A Conceptual Analysis of the Information Crisis Discourse. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 60: 603-607. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.824

Nicol, E., Willson, R., Ruthven, I., Elsweiler, D., & Buchanan, G. (2022). Information intermediaries and information resilience: working to support marginalised groups. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 59(1), 469-473.

Radford, M. L., Connaway, L. S., Rorissa, A., Ekmekcioglu, C., & Caidi, N. (2022). Researching in Times of Crisis: Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 59(1), 595-597.

Period	29 Aug 2024
Event type	Workshop
Location	Aalborg, DenmarkShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International