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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the functionality of the particular epistemological schools with regard to the issues of users with visual impairment, to offer a theoretical answer to the question why these issues are not in the center of the interest of information science, and to try to find an epistemological approach that has ambitions to create the theoretical basis for the analysis of the relationship between information and visually impaired users.

The methodological basis of the paper is determined by the selection of the epistemological approach. In order to think about the concept of information and to put it in relation to issues associated with users with visual impairment, a conceptual analysis is applied.

Most of information science theories are based on empiricism and rationalism; this is the reason for their low interest in the questions of visually impaired users. Users with visual disabilities are out of the interest of rationalistic epistemology because it underestimates sensory perception; empiricism is not interested in them paradoxically because it overestimates sensory perception. Realism which fairly reflects such issues is an approach which allows the providing of information to persons with visual disabilities to be dealt with properly.

The paper has a speculative character. Its findings should be supported by empirical research in the future.

Theoretical questions solved in the paper come from the practice of providing information to visually impaired users. Because practice has an influence on theory and vice versa, the author hopes that the findings included in the paper can serve to improve practice in the field.

The paper provides theoretical anchoring of the issues which are related to the inclusion of people with disabilities into society and its findings have a potential to support such efforts.

This is first study linking questions of users with visual disabilities to highly abstract issues connected to the concept of information.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss whether artists create research outcomes in a revolving (or spiraling) process? This can be a catch-22 where their work is responding to and forecasting change, while the artist’s voice is often seen as too qualitative to provide research impact for university societies or to be compared with the quantitative data that scientists use.

Where will research methods, qualitative and quantitative overlap? The author knows that both methods are important for ongoing observations about creative arts practice. The qualitative is part of Holmes’ (2011/2012) query about how “knowledge involved in artistic thinking should […] include the issue of how mental images are given creative form, but this is a process that remains obscure in current art research” (p. 2).

For Holmes, “the knowledge product of art research cannot be considered separate from the researcher’s psychic processes; and the currently obscure relationship between artistic production and subjectivity might lead to one of the unique contributions to be made by art research” (Holmes, 2011/2012, p. 2). Holmes’ suggestion provides a strategic link to the way arts and sciences might overlap. “How do artists and scientists find a way to match issues, ideas and theories?” This may be especially so in relation to the integral use of image to empower a message.

This paper offers an original look at how artists empower with image.

The purpose of this paper is to report on video making in two different contexts within the Community Arts Zone research project, an international research project concerned with the connections between arts, literacy and the community.

At one project site, researchers and parents from the community filmed their children making dens with an artist. At another site, a professional film crew filmed young people engaged in arts practice in school settings.

In both cases, researchers, artists and community participants collaborated to do research and make video. This paper discusses the ways that this work was differently positioned at the two sites. These different positionings had implications for the meaning ascribed to video making from the point of view of the participants, researchers and artists involved.

By drawing on perspectives of researchers and artists, the paper explores implications for video making processes within ethnographic research. These include a need for awareness of the diversity and fragmentation of the fields of both visual research and visual arts practice. In addition, the relationship between research and the visual is unfolding in a context in which the digital is increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life. Therefore the authors argue for the need for researchers and artists to explore their epistemological assumptions with regards to video and film, and to consider the role of the digital in the lives of their participants. The coming together of these positions and experiences is what constructs the meaning of the digital and visual in the field.

The purpose of this paper is to advance document ontology and epistemology by proposing a framework for analysing documents from multiple perspectives of research and practice.

Understanding is positioned as an epistemic aim of documents, which can be approached through phenomenology.

A phenomenological framework for document analysis is articulated. Key concepts in this framework are include intrinsic information, extrinsic information, abtrinsic information, and adtrinsic information. Information and meaning are distinguished. Finally, documents are positioned as part of a structural framework, which includes individual documents, parts of documents (docemes and docs), and systems of documents.

Scholarship is extended with an eye toward holism; still, it is possible that important aspects of documents are overlooked. This framework serves as a stepping-stone along the continual refinement of methods for understanding documents.

Both scholars and practitioners can consider documents through this framework. This will lead to further co-understanding and collaboration, as well as better education and a deeper understanding of all manner of document experiences.

This paper fills a need for a common way to conceptualise documents that respects the numerous ways in which documents exist and are used and examined. Such coherence is vital for the advancement of document scholarship and is the promotion of document literacy in society, which is becoming increasingly important.

Sexual health promotion aimed at men who have sex with men (MSM) is not achieving its objective of reducing the incidence of new infections of sexually transmitted diseases, notably HIV/AIDS, in the MSM population. The paper aims to raise awareness of possible unintended consequences when using visual culture and advertising techniques in the field of sexual (and other) health promotion and public health messages.

Using critical textual analysis and drawing on visual culture methodology the approach is to critique current practice and suggest alternative ways to approach gay men's sexual health which are not predicated on a “model” gay man.

Men who have sex with men (MSM) are constructed through sexual health promotion (SHP) literature as young, hedonistic and irrational which may serve to distance the very audience it seeks to attract and address. What may at first appear to be a targeted and helpful initiative to raise awareness may inadvertently have the simultaneous and unanticipated effect of “selling” unsafe sex rather than promoting safe sex. This is because, first, the use of sexual imagery designed to attract attention works in unanticipated ways. Second, MSM are constructed through the images and language used in ways that may be at best unhelpful and potentially quite harmful.

There are many different approaches and interventions in this field and the criticisms here may not be applicable to many of the other sources of health promotion awareness campaigns. Future research could certainly be conducted in other fields of health promotion and public health issues such as obesity, drug and alcohol abuse and smoking cessation.

Health promotion practice should beware of depicting their audience in stereotypical ways. MSM could be constructed far more positively as role models to be followed instead of bad examples to be avoided.

The methodology is new to this field and the findings provide an original basis for criticism of advertising techniques which have until now formed the basis of this type of public awareness‐raising.

This paper aims to contribute to recent debates about financial knowledge by opening the black box of its algorithmization to understand how information systems can address the major challenges related to interactions between algorithmic trading and financial markets.

The paper analyses financial algorithms in three steps. First, the authors introduce the phenomenon of flash crash; second, the authors conduct an epistemological analysis of algorithmization and identify three epistemological regimes – epistemic, operational and authority – which differ in terms of how they deal with financial information. Third, the authors demonstrate that a flash crash emerges when there is a disconnection between these three regimes.

The authors open the black box of financial algorithms to understand why flash crashes occur and how information technology research can address the problem. A flash crash is a very rapid and deep fall in security prices in a very short time due to an algorithmic misunderstanding of the market. Thus, the authors investigate the problem and propose an interdisciplinary approach to clarify the scope of algorithmization of financial markets.

To manage the misalignment of information and potential disconnection between the three regimes, the authors suggest that information technology can embrace the complexity of the algorithmization of financial knowledge by diversifying its implementation through the development of a multi-sensorial platform. The authors propose sonification as a new mechanism for capturing and understanding financial information. This approach is then presented as a new research area that can contribute to the way financial innovations interact with information technology.

Mainstream counselling psychology with its Western epistemology implies several assumptions about the therapeutic conversation. One assumption is the ability of the therapist to hear and see accurately during the therapy session. Apart from language difficulties and multi-cultural awareness, training in psychological counselling does not adequately address aspects of hearing and seeing as cognitive processors that are observer dependent and circular in nature. The purpose of this paper is to address this missing link by providing a single document addressing errors in hearing and seeing, which can then be used for training new therapists.

Using a Western epistemology, an argument based on multidisciplinary research findings is used to challenge the ideas of objective hearing and seeing in the therapeutic conversation of the counselling activity.

Research findings show that the act of hearing and seeing are personal and subjective. This would be in keeping with a cybernetic epistemology; however, cybernetic psychology is not well known nor widely accepted in mainstream institutions. Teaching counsellors who have a Western epistemology poses challenges when attempting to negate the objective reality of the trainees. Training counsellors to incorporate a cybernetic ethic of participation has obstacles, especially when the training has time constraints. Using Western positivistic research findings as a basis for providing an argument for subjectivity in perception may be a quicker method to achieve at least partial observer dependent thinking for counsellors in a short-time space during training sessions.

This paper presents a concentration of multidisciplinary research that can be used as part of counsellor training for the purposes of providing a basis for the error and filtering that take place in human perception of sound and vision.

The modalities of hearing and seeing are not readily addressed in counselling psychology praxis. The errors in human sense perception are integral in framing the therapeutic conversation as one of subjective co-construction between observers, moving closer to an empathetic position. This paper provides a research-based argument in denying objectivity in human perception during the therapeutic conversation.

The aims of cybernetics and of system research are shown to embody a strong bias towards biological studies. Cybernetics subsumes the ideas of “experimental epistemology”, a study which attempts to explain mental processes over the whole range of viewpoints from the single‐cell recordings of the neurophysiologist to concept‐formation and representation of knowledge. Studies which are more restricted in scope have been of practical value; “experimental epistemology” is a long way from achieving its goal. It has, however, provided useful stimulation and has an interesting bearing on viable systems other than nervous systems.

The paper aims to offer an approach that allows an analysis and construction of a typology of virtual city brand co-creation practices.

The approach is illustrated by using data collected in regard to the branding of Stockholm; it is based on visual representations expressing the process in which brand co-creation unfolds in a network of different affective modalities.

Virtual representations emerge as expressive trans-locations that obtain communicative qualities in which practices are included and also in which practices are constituted. Practices represent how experiencing is carried out by different stakeholders’ relationships and emotional interactions. They are labeled as contributing, using, esteeming and opposing. These practices constitute analytical abstraction that represent different power plays between the visual and material content of the images, the technologies of production and the display and performance of the virtual.

The focus on practices suggests a way to perform a critical analysis that could be used to research the performative process of co-creating brands in a way that the practices offer signals that can be used to grasp the dynamism of the process. Further, it suggests that the analysis of the practices in the virtual realm has the potential to unfold the material, nonlinear dynamic of communication that resides beyond forms of meaning and cognition.

The offered approach posits an alternative view of co-creation in which the process is uncontrollable by any stakeholders involved; the process might therefore not have a start and end or it could start everywhere in the internet and can transform at any point in space-time.

It contributes to the research on performative place branding by problematizing the issue of agency. It does so by displaying the way in which the process of virtual city brand co-creation could be analyzed based on practices involving the co-construction of visualization and materialization. Analytically, by dealing with virtual representations where practices of brand co-creation unfold, such an approach also helps to unpack the consequences of those practices and can highlight the technologies that are used and the specific qualities of the visual objects enacted.