Search results

Colloquium in Oxford. A wide‐ranging debate about the impact of the new technologies of connectivity on Higher Education, libraries, and the publishing industry took place in the ‘parliamentary’ debating chamber of the Oxford Union on Thursday 23rd April. The event was organized by the Oxford University Computing Services Humanities Computing Unit, and was entitled ‘Beyond the Hype’. The one‐day colloquium, which was attended by about one hundred and twenty people, was the fourth in a series of colloquia hosted by the Humanities Computing Unit. In 1995 the Unit kicked the series off with the first event, entitled ‘Beyond the Book’, which appeared, paradoxically enough, in printed form (eds. Chernaik, Deegan, and Gibson, Oxford: OHC, 7, 1996). They followed this up with a look at teaching in ‘Beyond the Classroom’ (a report of which can be found on the Web at http://info.ox.ac.uk/oucs/humanities/events/beyond/). In 1997 the Unit targeted the library sector with ‘Beyond the Library’ (again a report of which can be found on the Web at http://info.ox.ac.uk/oucs/humanities/events/beyond/).

This chapter will examine ideological debates currently taking place in academics. Anthropologists – and all academic workers – are at a crossroads. They must determine what it means to “green the academy” in an era of permanent war, “green capitalism,” and the neoliberal university (Sullivan, 2010). As Victor Wallis makes clear, “no serious observer now denies the severity of the environmental crisis, but it is still not widely recognized as a capitalist crisis, that is, as a crisis arising from and perpetuated by the rule of capital, and hence incapable of resolution within the capitalist framework.”

This chapter describes a case study of a social change project in medical education (primary care), in which the critical interpretive evaluation methodology I sought to use came up against the “positivist” approach preferred by senior figures in the medical school who commissioned the evaluation.

I describe the background to the study and justify the evaluation approach and methods employed in the case study – drawing on interviews, document analysis, survey research, participant observation, literature reviews, and critical incidents – one of which was the decision by the medical school hierarchy to restrict my contact with the lay community in my official evaluation duties. The use of critical ethnography also embraced wider questions about circuits of power and the social and political contexts within which the “social change” effort occurred.

Central to my analysis is John Gaventa’s theory of power as “the internalization of values that inhibit consciousness and participation while encouraging powerlessness and dependency.” Gaventa argued, essentially, that the evocation of power has as much to do with preventing decisions as with bringing them about. My chosen case illustrated all three dimensions of power that Gaventa originally uncovered in his portrait of self-interested Appalachian coal mine owners: (1) communities were largely excluded from decision making power; (2) issues were avoided or suppressed; and (3) the interests of the oppressed went largely unrecognized.

The account is auto-ethnographic, hence the study is limited by my abilities, biases, and subject positions. I reflect on these in the chapter.

The study not only illustrates the unique contribution of case study as a research methodology but also its low status in the positivist paradigm adhered to by many doctors. Indeed, the tension between the potential of case study to illuminate the complexities of community engagement through thick description and the rejection of this very method as inherently “flawed” suggests that medical education may be doomed to its neoliberal fate for some time to come.

1. The Coming of the Intranet. In the wake of the Internet has come the Intranet. Figures for intranet growth abound, and they are all impressive. This year is expected to register a doubling of intranet expansion: from $4 billion last year to $8 billion this year.

1. Beyond the All in One. Suppose you had a machine that enabled you to wash your clothes, watch television programmes, listen to the radio, play CDs, and cook the dinner: would you give it house‐room for long? There seems to be emerging a view among IT pundits that the era of the all‐in‐one Personal Computer is passing, to give way to a the use of a range of digital devices dedicated to specific functions. It is in this context that that hoary old concept, the electronic book, is allegedly finding its spot in the sun — after years of being impugned as not at all suitable for the beach.

Horns. Academic publishers (and academics who publish) — especially those engaged in journal production — still confront a major dilemma thrown up by the much‐trumpeted Great Transition from print‐on‐paper to online publication: PDF or SGML?

When the Institute of Information Scientists was founded in 1958 the Internet was still germinating in the Cold War bunkers of the ARPANET, the seventeen‐year old Pele was performing his magic in the World Cup in Sweden, and librarians were still recording bits of information on 5 by 3 index cards. The 40th Anniversary Conference of the Institute which took place at the University of Sheffield from 8–11 July 1998 took place with the Net ubiquitous (well, at least in the English‐speaking countries), with Ronaldo leading the line for Brazil, and with Information Scientists confronting opportunities to remake themselves as the cutting‐edge ‘knowledge managers’ of the corporate world.

The collocation ‘virtual community’ yokes together a hyper‐modern concept (the virtual, in the cyberspatial sense), and a more ancient one (community, in the sense of the quality of people holding something in common, and possessing a sense of common identity). In Keywords, British socialist intellectual Raymond Williams recounts that from the seventeenth century (in English) ‘there are signs of the distinction which became especially important from the nineteenth century, in which community was felt to be more immediate than society’. (Williams 1976 p.65) This sense of community as being somehow more organic, more human than externally imposed forms of social organization informs the discussion around the word in the context of the Internet, too. Williams concludes his essay on the word by remarking that

Stephen Pinfield, the Project Leader of the BUILDER (Birmingham University Integrated Library Development and Electronic Resource) Project spoke to Brian McKenna, the Journals Editor at Learned Information. BUILDER is one of the eLib projects that has impacted significantly on the Library and Information Studies scene in the UK over the last few years. A set of World Wide Web pages describing the eLib programme is available at http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk.

A CEC‐funded project to automate the production of the Irish Publishing Record at the National Library of Ireland is described. The project is based around record sharing and co‐operation with the libraries in Trinity College Dublin and in University College Dublin. One of the workpackages of the project is the preparation of software for UKMARC to UNIMARC conversion.