Information experience : approaches to theory and practice

The Queensland University of Technology Research Team has recently edited a book on the idea of information experience. Authors from many parts of the world and focussed on many contexts have contributed chapters. The book represents the first attempt to profile and discuss information experience as a research domain and a research object, together with emphasis on different theories and methods being used in workplace, educational and community contexts. In this session members of the editorial team will introduce the book. We anticipate it will be of interest to any information professionals, students or researchers interested in understanding peoples' information experience.

The ethics, aesthetics and practical politics of ownership in co-creative media

What is ‘best practice’ when it comes to managing intellectual property rights in participatory media content? As commercial media and entertainment business models have increasingly come to rely upon the networked productivity of end-users (Banks and Humphreys 2008) this question has been framed as a problem of creative labour made all the more precarious by changing employment patterns and work cultures of knowledge-intensive societies and globalising economies (Banks, Gill and Taylor 2014). This paper considers how the problems of ownership are addressed in non-commercial, community-based arts and media contexts. Problems of labour are also manifest in these contexts (for example, reliance on volunteer labour and uncertain economic reward for creative excellence). Nonetheless, managing intellectual property rights in collaborative creative works that are created in community media and arts contexts is no less challenging or complex than in commercial contexts. This paper takes as its focus a particular participatory media practice known as ‘digital storytelling’. The digital storytelling method, formalised by the Centre for Digital Storytelling (CDS) from the mid-1990s, has been internationally adopted and adapted for use in an open-ended variety of community arts, education, health and allied services settings (Hartley and McWilliam 2009; Lambert 2013; Lundby 2008; Thumin 2012). It provides a useful point of departure for thinking about a range of collaborative media production practices that seek to address participation ‘gaps’ (Jenkins 2006). However the outputs of these activities, including digital stories, cannot be fully understood or accurately described as user-generated content. For this reason, digital storytelling is taken here to belong to a category of participatory media activity that has been described as ‘co-creative’ media (Spurgeon 2013) in order to improve understanding of the conditions of mediated and mediatized participation (Couldry 2008). This paper reports on a survey of the actual copyrighting practices of cultural institutions and community-based media arts practitioners that work with digital storytelling and similar participatory content creation methods. This survey finds that although there is a preference for Creative Commons licensing a great variety of approaches are taken to managing intellectual property rights in co-creative media. These range from the use of Creative Commons licences (for example, Lambert 2013, p.193) to retention of full copyrights by storytellers, to retention of certain rights by facilitating organisations (for example, broadcast rights by community radio stations and public service broadcasters), and a range of other shared rights arrangements between professional creative practitioners, the individual storytellers and communities with which they collaborate, media outlets, exhibitors and funders. This paper also considers how aesthetic and ethical considerations shape responses to questions of intellectual property rights in community media arts contexts. For example, embedded in the CDS digital storytelling method is ‘a critique of power and the numerous ways that rank is unconsciously expressed in engagements between classes, races and gender’ (Lambert 117). The CDS method privileges the interests of the storyteller and, through a transformative workshop process, aims to generate original individual stories that, in turn, reflect self-awareness of ‘how much the way we live is scripted by history, by social and cultural norms, by our own unique journey through a contradictory, and at times hostile, world’ (Lambert 118). Such a critical approach is characteristic of co-creative media practices. It extends to a heightened awareness of the risks of ‘story theft’ and the challenges of ownership and informs ideas of ‘best practice’ amongst creative practitioners, teaching artists and community media producers, along with commitments to achieving equitable solutions for all participants in co-creative media practice (for example, Lyons-Reid and Kuddell nd.). Yet, there is surprisingly little written about the challenges of managing intellectual property produced in co-creative media activities. A dialogic sense of ownership in stories has been identified as an indicator of successful digital storytelling practice (Hayes and Matusov 2005) and is helpful to grounding the more abstract claims of empowerment for social participation that are associated with co-creative methods. Contrary to the ‘change from below’ philosophy that underpins much thinking about co-creative media, however, discussions of intellectual property usually focus on how methods such as digital storytelling contribute to the formation of copyright law-compliant subjects, particularly when used in educational settings (for example, Ohler nd.). This also exposes the reliance of co-creative methods on the creative assets storytellers (rather than on the copyrighted materials of the media cultures of storytellers) as a pragmatic response to the constraints that intellectual property right laws impose on the entire category of participatory media. At the level of practical politics, it also becomes apparent that co-creative media practitioners and storytellers located in copyright jurisdictions governed by ‘fair use’ principles have much greater creative flexibility than those located in jurisdictions governed by ‘fair dealing’ principles.

Managing risk in process-aware information systems

This research contributes a fully-operational approach for managing business process risk in near real-time. The approach consists of a language for defining risks on top of process models, a technique to detect such risks as they eventuate during the execution of business processes, a recommender system for making risk-informed decisions, and a technique to automatically mitigate the detected risks when they are no longer tolerable. Through the incorporation of risk management elements in all stages of the lifecycle of business processes, this work contributes to the effective integration of the fields of Business Process Management and Risk Management.

Multiscale features and information extraction of online strain for long-span bridges

The strain data acquired from structural health monitoring (SHM) systems play an important role in the state monitoring and damage identification of bridges. Due to the environmental complexity of civil structures, a better understanding of the actual strain data will help filling the gap between theoretical/laboratorial results and practical application. In the study, the multi-scale features of strain response are first revealed after abundant investigations on the actual data from two typical long-span bridges. Results show that, strain types at the three typical temporal scales of 10^5, 10^2 and 10^0 sec are caused by temperature change, trains and heavy trucks, and have their respective cut-off frequency in the order of 10^-2, 10^-1 and 10^0 Hz. Multi-resolution analysis and wavelet shrinkage are applied for separating and extracting these strain types. During the above process, two methods for determining thresholds are introduced. The excellent ability of wavelet transform on simultaneously time-frequency analysis leads to an effective information extraction. After extraction, the strain data will be compressed at an attractive ratio. This research may contribute to a further understanding of actual strain data of long-span bridges; also, the proposed extracting methodology is applicable on actual SHM systems.

Migrants, refugees and mobility : how useful are information communication technologies in the first phase of resettlement?

The rate at which people move and resettle around the world is unprecedented. Mobility and resettlement is now greatly assisted by the use of inexpensive internet communication technologies (ICTs) for a wide variety of functions: to communicate locally and across territories, for localised information seeking, geo – locational mapping and for forging new social connections in host countries and cities. This article is based on a qualitative study of newly arrived migrants and mobile people from non English speaking backgrounds (NESB) to the city of Brisbane, Australia and investigates how the internet is used to assist the initial period of settling into the city. As increasing amounts of essential information is placed online, the study asks how people from NESB communities manage to negotiate the types of information they require during the early stages of resettlement, given varying levels of access to ICTs, digital and language literacy. The study finds that the internet is widely used for specific location information seeking (such as accommodation and job-seeking), but this is often supplemented with other non-mediated sources of information. The study identified implications for social policy in regard to the resourcing and access of information. While findings are specific to the study location, it is feasible that the patterns of internet use for resettlement have relevance in a broader context.

Researching information experience : methodological approaches

This chapter highlights the varied scope of research in the emerging information experience domain. First, I share my perspective as educator-researcher on information experience and its association with informed learning. Then, in six methodological snapshots I present a selection of qualitative approaches which are suited to investigating information experience. The snapshots feature: action research, constructivist grounded theory, ethnomethodology, expanded critical incident approach, phenomenography and qualitative case study. By way of illustration, six researchers explain how and why they use one of these methods. Finally, I review the key characteristics of the six methods and their respective benefits for information experience research.

Improving information in project appraisal using hedonic pricing : a case study of marina berthing charges

Hedonic pricing techniques can be used to generate quantitative information useful to the project appraiser at various stages of the project cycle, most notably project formulation and investment appraisal. To illustrate, a hedonic pricing model is applied to marina berthing charges in England and Wales. The technique determines the relevant marina facilities that are reflected in marina rental price. The contribution of the key marina facilities is expressed in monetary terms as the contribution to cost per overall rental price per foot.

The expert searcher's experience of information

Expert searchers engage with information in a variety of professional settings, as information brokers, reference librarians, information architects and faculty who teach advanced searching. As my recent research shows, the expert searcher’s information experience is defined by profound discernment of critical concepts about information, and a fluid ability to apply this knowledge to their engagement with the information environment. The information experience of the expert searcher means active and intentional participation with the processes and players that created that information environment. Expert searchers become an integral and seamless part of their information environment and also play a role in facilitating the information experiences of others. In this chapter, after discussing my understanding of the concept of information experience, I outline how I used threshold concept theory to explore the information experience of expert searchers. Through the findings, I identify four threshold concepts in the acquisition of search expertise that provide new perspectives on the information experience of the expert searcher. These new perspectives have implications for search engine design and how advanced search skills are taught. Finally, I consider how the fresh insights about the expert searcher’s experiences contribute to wider understanding about information experience.

Health Information Exchange in the wake of ‘big data’ paradigm – the theme is from ‘quality of information to quality of life’

Health Information Exchange (HIE) is an interesting phenomenon. It is a patient centric health and/or medical information management scenario enhanced by integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). While health information systems are repositioning complex system directives, in the wake of the ‘big data’ paradigm, extracting quality information is challenging. It is anticipated that in this talk, ICT enabled healthcare scenarios with big data analytics will be shared. In addition, research and development regarding big data analytics, such as current trends of using these technologies for health care services and critical research challenges when extracting quality of information to improve quality of life will be discussed.

Information and communication technologies transform the practice of medicine

Information and Communication Technologies are dramatically transforming Allopathic medicine. Technological developments including Tele-medicine, Electronic health records, Standards to ensure computer systems inter-operate, Data mining, Simulation, Decision Support and easy access to medical information each contribute to empowering patients in new ways and change the practice of medicine. To date, informatics has had little impact on Ayurvedic medicine. This tutorial provides an introduction to key informatics initiatives in Allopothic medicine using real examples and suggests how applications can be applied to Ayurvedic medicine.

The security and privacy of usage policies and provenance logs in an Information Accountability Framework

The potential benefits of shared eHealth records systems are promising for the future of improved healthcare. However, the uptake of such systems is hindered by concerns over the security and privacy of patient information. The use of Information Accountability and so called Accountable-eHealth (AeH) systems has been proposed to balance the privacy concerns of patients with the information needs of healthcare professionals. However, a number of challenges remain before AeH systems can become a reality. Among these is the need to protect the information stored in the usage policies and provenance logs used by AeH systems to define appropriate use of information and hold users accountable for their actions. In this paper, we discuss the privacy and security issues surrounding these accountability mechanisms, define valid access to the information they contain, discuss solutions to protect them, and verify and model an implementation of the access requirements as part of an Information Accountability Framework.

Teaching dispute resolution ethics in the law curriculum

Dispute resolution processes such as mediation are now central to contemporary legal practice. For this reason it is critical that the law curriculum includes instruction on mediation ethics, so that law graduates enter the profession equipped to deal with ethical dilemmas arising in this context. However, our recent content analysis of the unit outlines for professional responsibility subjects in Australian law schools indicates that this important area of legal ethics is often excluded from the curriculum. In most Australian law schools, dispute resolution subjects (where mediation ethics might also be considered) continue to be offered as stand-alone electives in the law degree. This means that many law students are graduating without the ethical knowledge and judgment-making skills needed in dispute resolution environments. This is contrary to the intentions of the Threshold Learning Outcomes for Law. This paper argues that the current paucity of mediation ethics instruction in the Australian law curriculum is problematic, given mediation’s relevance to contemporary legal practice. The paper discusses the importance of including mediation ethics in the law curriculum, and the importance of dispute resolution more broadly as a mandatory component of the law degree in Australia. It offers an outline of a possible mediation ethics module that could be included in professional responsibility subjects.

Information literacy and the serious leisure participant : variation in the experience of using information to learn

This thesis examines, by way of phenomenographic methodology, the qualitatively different ways in which people engaged in Serious Leisure activities (within the area of 'heritage') experience information literacy. The study identified the presence of four distinct categories of information literacy experience, each with variation in regard to the serious leisure participant's experience of learning and information. In addition it also identified the existence of a further dimension of variation pertaining to the way in which individual identity is experienced during engagement with a serious leisure activity.

Towards a theory of individual-level discontinuance of information systems use

I develop a model of individuals’ intentions to discontinue information system use. Understanding these intentions is important because they give insights into users’ willingness to carry out system tasks, and provide a basis for maintenance decisions as well as possible replacement decisions. I offer a first conceptualization of factors determining users’ discontinuance intentions on basis of existing literature on technology use, status quo bias and dual factor concepts. The model is grounded in rational choice theory to distinguish determinants of a conscious decision between continuing or discontinuing IS use. I provide details on the empirical test of the model through a field study of IS users in a retail organization. The work will have implications for theory on information systems continuance and dual-factor logic in information system use. The empirical findings will provide suggestions for managers dealing with cessation of information systems and work routine changes in organizations.