Search results
1 – 10 of 178This paper is the result of a reflection on my personal experience while researching the politics of culture and identity in intercultural collaborations in Mexico. It deals with…
Abstract
This paper is the result of a reflection on my personal experience while researching the politics of culture and identity in intercultural collaborations in Mexico. It deals with how autoethnography transformed my relationship with the way of doing research and particularly how a dream at the beginning of my ethnographic research changed my assumptions of my role as interpreter. Using the analysis of the dream as a guide for understanding the dynamics of intercultural organisations in Mexico, I conceptualised organisations as open systems whose meanings are organised and interlinked, forming hypertexts. I considered participants in those organisations, and myself, as quotidian ethnographers, able to create meanings and make sense of them for action. In that light, I listened to the stories from some organisations and ‘read’ their meanings by following the links between multiple representations, in different kinds of cultural narratives emerging from anywhere and manifested in any medium.
Details
Keywords
To argue that library web sites embedded in a new media environment initiate and demand new kinds of communication and new communication skills.
Abstract
Purpose
To argue that library web sites embedded in a new media environment initiate and demand new kinds of communication and new communication skills.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is a short version of findings related to the author's research of the internet as a medium in libraries, especially in the domain of imaginative literature. The paper is based theoretically on findings of new media research. The approach is a theoretical clarification of what is new about new media and why new media may move librarians to new kinds of publicity and communication. This is illustrated by a presentation of the Danish library web site litteratursiden.dk, produced by librarians to inspire readers of fiction among library patrons.
Findings
Theoretical and practical findings by new media research have indicated several new media features concerning the internet and the web. The web is a hypertextual media environment – all web sites are part of a global media environment, a global publicity. Local web communication is already a global communication. The web interface is also a multimedia interface, and it gives the possibility of interactive, dialogic communication. Further web sites are “remediations” of media types and genres from other media. These features must be considered when analysing library web sites, and they must be considered in the education of librarians in the future. The Danish library web site litteratursiden.dk is used to demonstrate how a literary library web site may use the web as a medium, and how new skills are needed and developed. The site gives access to the fiction of library catalogues, but at the same time it is a literary magazine with news, essays and recommendations. The librarians operate in two kinds of space – the library space and the literary public space. The addressee is both the library patron and the common reader. This duplicity may be seen as an expansion of the reader advisory service and may be compared with similar advisory services in reader development programmes.
Practical implications
The world wide web and new media may change the roles of the librarian in public libraries. The library web site is embedded in a general media environment, which may demand new skills of media communication.
Originality/value
The paper aims to focus on the public librarian as a new media producer and communication expert.
Details
Keywords
This article analyses the structure of hypertext and the world wide web through the contrasting metaphors of the network and the rhizome and applies that analysis to the epistemic…
Abstract
Purpose
This article analyses the structure of hypertext and the world wide web through the contrasting metaphors of the network and the rhizome and applies that analysis to the epistemic challenge presented by fake news.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is a critical and theoretical study of the development of concepts in information science. It outlines the limitations of the network metaphor and analyses the ways in which it has influenced both the development and critical understanding of the World Wide Web and its wider social and cultural consequences. The paper develops an alternative description of the ontological structure of the Web in terms of interrupted and dissipated energy flows.
Findings
The paper argues that the Web is better described as a dynamic reorganization of the socio-cultural system that has no determinate boundaries and which is constituted properly in the spaces between technologies and the spaces between persons.
Originality/value
The paper contributes to and extends research into the rhizomic nature of hypertext and the Word Wide Web and in understanding the role of metaphor in descriptions of hypertext and the web.
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this paper is to explore one broad question: what do information, information processes, information services, as well as information systems and technology have to…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore one broad question: what do information, information processes, information services, as well as information systems and technology have to do with the spiritual?
Design/methodology/approach
The task is accomplished by conducting a literature review of 31 refereed texts in information studies. The paper proceeds by inspecting the manifestation of spirituality in information sources, generic information processes, as well as specific information processes: conceptualizing, seeking, processing, using, storing, describing and providing information.
Findings
A total of 11 relationships between information phenomena and the spiritual are discovered. Based on these, a definition of spiritual information is put forth. There are also some descriptive statistics on the corpus as a whole.
Research limitations/implications
The results are susceptible to limitations imposed by the reviewed studies themselves. Errors of interpretation were a possibility. The article suggests many directions for further research in the context of the spiritual, and discusses how to view spirituality in information science.
Practical implications
Practical implications are only mentioned here and there, because research implications are of primary concern in the investigation.
Originality/value
This paper is the first to synthesize information research in the spiritual domain. Beyond the subject area, the article demonstrates how to classify information processes, and conduct a context‐centric literature review in the field of information studies.
Details
Keywords
Claudio Gnoli and Riccardo Ridi
The different senses of the term information in physical, biological and social interpretations, and the possibility of connections between them, are addressed. Special attention…
Abstract
Purpose
The different senses of the term information in physical, biological and social interpretations, and the possibility of connections between them, are addressed. Special attention is paid to Hofkirchner's Unified Theory of Information (UTI), proposing an integrated view in which the notion of information gets additional properties as one moves from the physical to the biological and the social realms. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
UTI is compared to other views of information, especially to two theories complementing several ideas of it: the theory of the hypertextual documental universe (“docuverse”) and the theory of integrative levels of reality. Two alternative applications of the complex of these three theories are discussed: a pragmatical, hermeneutic one, and a more ambitious realist, ontological one. The latter can be extended until considering information (“bit”) together with matter-energy (“it”) as a fundamental element in the world. Problems and opportunities with each view are discussed.
Findings
It is found that the common ground for all three theories is an evolutionary approach, paying attention to the phylogenetic connections between the different meanings of information.
Research limitations/implications
Other theories of information, like Leontiev's, are not discussed as not especially related to the focus of the approach.
Originality/value
The paper builds on previously unnoticed affinities between different families of information-related theories, showing how each of them can provide fruitful complements to the other ones in clarifying the nature of information.
Details
Keywords
Paul Capriotti, Ileana Zeler and Andrea Oliveira
This study aims to analyze whether companies from six Latin American countries are encouraging dialogic communication on Facebook.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to analyze whether companies from six Latin American countries are encouraging dialogic communication on Facebook.
Design/methodology/approach
To do so, the paper studied the level of predisposition for interaction and the type of interaction achieved by companies on Facebook to produce an effective dialogic communication exchange and to generate conversation through different types of communication exchange between organizations and users. This research includes a specific analysis of the active presence, interactive attitude, interactive resources, responsiveness and conversation of 29,078 posts on 135 corporate fanpages of companies from six Latin American countries.
Findings
The results show that companies have a low interest in managing communication from a dialogic perspective on the social network, not only because a greater predisposition to interaction is needed, but also because the interaction generated is very low. Therefore, the paper identifies the need to review the communication strategy on social networks and to define a strategy aligned to the dialogic nature of the social network.
Originality/value
This research contributes to broadening the conceptual reflection on the evaluation of the dialogue in the digital context and aims to generate new methodological contributions to the evaluation of dialogic communication in an integrated way.
Details
Keywords
Gabriela Coronado and Wayne Fallon
Within the context of a broader project that analysed CSR practices, this paper seeks to explain a methodological approach to web‐based research that the authors call “hypertext…
Abstract
Purpose
Within the context of a broader project that analysed CSR practices, this paper seeks to explain a methodological approach to web‐based research that the authors call “hypertext ethnography”. This approach aims to enable the paper to focus on the relations between three publicly listed corporations in Australia and the recipients of a selection of their CSR programs.
Design/methodology/approach
Informed by ethnographic principles, hypertext ethnography provided the research protocols and analytical frame that were used to deconstruct the meanings in web texts that represented the connections between the corporations and their CSR stakeholders.
Findings
The corporations and the stakeholders articulated their perspectives on CSR in affirmative ways, apparently to maintain their positive benefactor‐recipient relations. While these discourses held the potential to mask more complex tensions in their relationships, the web was found to provide a rich hypertextual story that had a vastly broader scope than the self‐contained corporate and stakeholder agendas.
Research limitations/implications
The research approach presented here provides a useful first approximation to the study of CSR, through self representations, and offers a rigorous critical understanding of the practice of CSR. The approach can achieve much with only limited resources, but it could be developed through on‐site ethnographic research.
Practical implications
Because image‐conscious corporations are often reluctant to participate in CSR research, the unobtrusive approach of hypertext ethnography can provide access to important data for the researcher. This is especially significant in the case of critical research, and when the characteristics of the CSR contributions or stakeholder relations are to be investigated.
Originality/value
This paper offers a new way for approaching the study of CSR, by taking advantage of rich sources of data that are publicly available. Treating the web texts as primary data and critically analysing them following rigorous research protocols, enable new opportunities for understanding the public representations of CSR.
Details
Keywords
Carmen Daniela Maier and Mona Agerholm Andersen
The purpose of this paper is to explore how corporate heritage identity (CHI) implementation strategies are communicated by Grundfos, a 70-year-old global company from Denmark, in…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how corporate heritage identity (CHI) implementation strategies are communicated by Grundfos, a 70-year-old global company from Denmark, in their internal history references.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on an interdisciplinary methodological framework related to heritage identity communication, hypertextuality, and multi-modality, it proposes a multi-leveled analysis model through which communicative strategies are explored at the level of four semiotic modes (written text, speech, still image, and moving image) and at the level of their hypermodal interplay.
Findings
This exploratory case study explains how CHI implementation strategies are communicated in accordance with the potential and constraints of semiotic modes and hyperlinking affordances. The analytical work suggests that the management employs complex CHI implementation strategies in order to strengthen organizational identity and to influence employees’ identification with the company across past, present, and future.
Research limitations/implications
By examining the semiotic modes’ interconnectivity and functional differentiation in a hypermodal context, this paper expands existing research by extending the multi-modal focus to a hypertextual one.
Originality/value
By exploring CHI implementation strategies from a hypermodal perspective and by providing a replicable model of hypermodal analysis, this paper fills a gap in the heritage identity research. Furthermore, it can also be of value to practitioners who intend to design company webpages that strategically communicate heritage identity implementation strategies in order to engage the employees in the company’s heritage.
Details
Keywords
Outlines the results of a research into new methods and tools to design and implement user‐oriented Web referral services for the Internet. Reports on a research project aimed to…
Abstract
Outlines the results of a research into new methods and tools to design and implement user‐oriented Web referral services for the Internet. Reports on a research project aimed to build a new indexing technique which integrates into a matrix model the experience in database searching and indexing capabilities with various new criteria derived from the use of the Internet. Emphasis is on the need of improving Web usability in specific domains. Proposes a descriptive methodology, named unified multiform context (CUM) to analyze different groups of Web sites. The CUM methodology led to different results. In the direction to improve the network secondary communication, qualified support comes from the legacy of information studies, which have developed the ability to extrapolate the information elements from heterogeneous information materials of different nature, to reorganise these elements in complex value added and dynamic systems and proactively to disseminate and communicate the results into a knowledge process. Internet referral is not a static thing but a life‐cycle process. It requires building a dynamic framework sensible to major variations and modifications: to this end it is vital to activate bilateral communication with the institutions whose Web site is considered an information resource for the library service.