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1 – 10 of 54
Open Access
Article
Publication date: 27 May 2024

Bonnie J. Tulloch, Michelle Kaczmarek, Saguna Shankar and Lisa P. Nathan

This project set out to explore information scholars’ perceptions of the influence of their keyword selections and the implications of their linguistic choices on possibilities…

Abstract

Purpose

This project set out to explore information scholars’ perceptions of the influence of their keyword selections and the implications of their linguistic choices on possibilities for and perceptions of the field of Information Science. We trialed a narrative methodological approach to investigate the multiple stories told with specific keywords, how they relate to larger discourses within the field and the impact they have on the lives of information researchers.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper draws on Arthur Frank’s narrative analysis to consider keywords as stories, which shape one’s sense of professional identity and belonging. The analysis, which is informed by insights from multi-disciplinary scholars of keywords, employs data from a keywords-oriented workshop with Information School faculty and students, as well as an online questionnaire sent to heads of Information Schools.

Findings

We did not find a singular definitive story of information science scholars’ experiences with keywords. Rather we identify tensions surrounding common and contested understandings of discipline, canon and information, engaging the complexity of interdisciplinary, international, intellectual and moral claims of the field. This research offers insight into the experiential factors that shape scholars’ engagement with keywords and the tensions they can create.

Originality/value

A wealth of bibliometric analyses of keywords focuses on finding the “right” words to describe the scholarship you seek or the work you want others to discover. However, this study offers information researchers a novel approach, creating space to acknowledge the generative tensions of keywords, beyond the extractive logic of search and retrieval.

Details

Journal of Documentation, vol. 80 no. 7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0022-0418

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 23 September 2024

Inkyung Choi and Yi-Yun Cheng

The purpose of this study is to develop a conceptual model, ProvKOS, for tracking the provenance of change activities in a knowledge organization system (KOS). By extending…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to develop a conceptual model, ProvKOS, for tracking the provenance of change activities in a knowledge organization system (KOS). By extending current provenance practices, this model represents dynamic changes in a KOS more effectively.

Design/methodology/approach

We take a five-step approach to develop the conceptual model, including content analysis of KOS editorial data, environmental scan of existing provenance models, development of persona-specific provenance questions and a participatory design with stakeholders to ensure the model’s utility.

Findings

We introduce (1) a taxonomy of editorial activities for a KOS; (2) a conceptual model ProvKOS, which extends existing models PROV and Simple Knowledge Organization Systems (SKOS). We also provide detailed data dictionaries for the entities, activities and warrants classes proposed in the model. A use case on “gender dysphoria” in Dewey Decimal Classifications (DDCs) is provided to illustrate the implementation of ProvKOS. This shows ProvKOS’s ability to capture KOS changes effectively and to link external resources relating to the changes.

Research limitations/implications

Further validation may be needed to implement the ProvKOS model across various types of KOSs.

Practical implications

ProvKOS can help improve machine readability, querying and analysis of a KOS. Especially within the linked data environment, the enhanced provenance documentation through ProvKOS can enable a network of KOSs, which will then inform better linked data or knowledge graph designs.

Social implications

By facilitating better tracking of changes within a KOS and across KOSs, ProvKOS can enhance the accessibility and usability of knowledge bases across different cultural and social contexts, thus better supporting inclusive information practices.

Originality/value

The proposed model is novel in two ways: one, its ability to represent dynamic change activities in a KOS, which has not been discussed anywhere else; two, it supports the interconnectivity across KOSs by providing a “warrant” class to substantiate the context of changes.

Details

Journal of Documentation, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0022-0418

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 10 July 2024

Maria Teresa Guaglianone, Giovanna Aracri and Maria Taverniti

The objective of this paper is to describe the evolution of the available subject heading list, i.e. the CC Soggettario (Carabinieri Corps Soggettario), towards a thesaurus, that…

Abstract

Purpose

The objective of this paper is to describe the evolution of the available subject heading list, i.e. the CC Soggettario (Carabinieri Corps Soggettario), towards a thesaurus, that is CCThes (Carabinieri Corps Thesaurus), to support subject indexing and retrieval of the documentary heritage held by the Historical Office of the General Command of the Carabinieri Corps. This work follows the need to implement a controlled vocabulary compliant with the state-of-the-art standards.

Design/methodology/approach

The methodology implements the practice of reengineering available vocabularies, following standardised guidelines for thesaurus development. The conversion process includes the balance maintenance of what has been achieved in the CC Soggettario and the enrichment of the semantic structure in the thesaurus by using both deductive and inductive methods.

Findings

The main result of this study is a thesaurus compliant with ISO 29964-1:2011 recommendations, which improves information retrieval performances and interoperability with other vocabularies and applications. It generally has a mono-hierarchical structure with the possibility of admitting, as an exception, the poly-hierarchy for a few concepts. An introductive user guide has been created as a complementary tool to the CCThes.

Originality/value

This is an applied study which deals with Knowledge Organisation System (KOS) reengineering and outlines this process using a pragmatic approach. The paper strength lies in providing the description of performed activities and conveying a set of resources to approach KOS reengineering practice. The study is also relevant for the preservation and diffusion of a part of the social memory and identity of Italy.

Details

Journal of Documentation, vol. 80 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0022-0418

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 20 June 2024

Felix Estrella

This paper aims to identify the effectiveness, student perceptions and impacts of integrating comics into the English as a foreign language (EFL) writing curriculum for…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to identify the effectiveness, student perceptions and impacts of integrating comics into the English as a foreign language (EFL) writing curriculum for undergraduate Ecuadorian polytechnic students.

Design/methodology/approach

This research followed a mixed method design to obtain quantitative information through a researcher-made survey and paired T-test, which would be corroborated by the qualitative data obtained from semistructured interviews.

Findings

From the descriptive and T-test results and the interview answers, it is concluded that students have a favorable view of the effectiveness of using comics to improve their writing skills. They also expressed their engagement and motivation to work with comics.

Research limitations/implications

First, the research sample, comprised of 109 students, may restrict the generalizability of the findings beyond the specific context of this study. This constraint suggests caution in extrapolating these findings to broader student cohorts, emphasizing the need for larger-scale studies to validate the robustness and applicability of the outcomes. Second, the study’s focus solely on students from a polytechnic state university introduces a potential limitation concerning the diversity and representativeness of the participant pool. Consequently, the findings might be limited in their applicability and may not fully encompass students’ varied responses and attitudes from other educational backgrounds.

Practical implications

The scaffolding afforded by comics aligns with genre-based literacy perspectives, valuing instruction in textual genres and social purposes. From a practical pedagogical point of view, this paper’s results suggest the potential of comic narratives and storyboarding. Comics writing could be added to classroom activities to vibrantly aboard brainstorming, drafting and peer reviewing before dealing with higher-stakes assignments. Legitimizing alternative mediums like comics for academic writing tasks has social implications for promoting literacies in a multimedia world.

Social implications

Writing comics nurtures multiliteracies aligned with participatory digital cultures by expanding traditional linguistic-centric norms. This multimodal composing can potentially increase access and representation and amplify voices across identities and cultures.

Originality/value

Although the paper addresses a topic that is not entirely novel in research, its originality lies in its focus on data originating from Ecuador, where specific cultural nuances and educational contexts may influence the effectiveness of using comics to enhance EFL writing skills. Thus, it fills a gap in the existing literature on this subject.

Details

Quality Education for All, vol. 1 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2976-9310

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 9 August 2024

Wolfgang G. Stock

The article aims to give an overview of the history and the achieved status of information science in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) with an emphasis on the organisation of…

Abstract

Purpose

The article aims to give an overview of the history and the achieved status of information science in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) with an emphasis on the organisation of information science and practice in the GDR and on the theoretical foundations of information science.

Design/methodology/approach

Primarily, this article is based upon critical literature studies, especially German-language books and journal articles, but the empirical basis also includes some unpublished sources (e.g. letters from information scientists from the GDR).

Findings

There are interesting results concerning the roots of information science in cybernetics, philosophy and the practical area of documentation. The naming of this knowledge field as “informatics”, “informatics of science” or “information and documentation science” is partly very distinct from Western conceptions. We found different theoretical foundations for information science including the approaches of Bonitz, Engelbert, Koblitz and Groß and Fuchs-Kittowski. In the GDR, information science and information practice were centralised, but through the information system science and technology, they were consistently accessible at all levels of professional work. With German reunification, information practice and its institutions, as well as GDR’s information science efforts, disappeared.

Research limitations/implications

The article gives hints on the importance on and the survival of some GDR approaches in contemporary information science, but those developments should be analysed in much more detail.

Originality/value

This is the first overview article on the state and entire development of information science in the GDR.

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 5 April 2024

Miquel Centelles and Núria Ferran-Ferrer

Develop a comprehensive framework for assessing the knowledge organization systems (KOSs), including the taxonomy of Wikipedia and the ontologies of Wikidata, with a specific…

Abstract

Purpose

Develop a comprehensive framework for assessing the knowledge organization systems (KOSs), including the taxonomy of Wikipedia and the ontologies of Wikidata, with a specific focus on enhancing management and retrieval with a gender nonbinary perspective.

Design/methodology/approach

This study employs heuristic and inspection methods to assess Wikipedia’s KOS, ensuring compliance with international standards. It evaluates the efficiency of retrieving non-masculine gender-related articles using the Catalan Wikipedian category scheme, identifying limitations. Additionally, a novel assessment of Wikidata ontologies examines their structure and coverage of gender-related properties, comparing them to Wikipedia’s taxonomy for advantages and enhancements.

Findings

This study evaluates Wikipedia’s taxonomy and Wikidata’s ontologies, establishing evaluation criteria for gender-based categorization and exploring their structural effectiveness. The evaluation process suggests that Wikidata ontologies may offer a viable solution to address Wikipedia’s categorization challenges.

Originality/value

The assessment of Wikipedia categories (taxonomy) based on KOS standards leads to the conclusion that there is ample room for improvement, not only in matters concerning gender identity but also in the overall KOS to enhance search and retrieval for users. These findings bear relevance for the design of tools to support information retrieval on knowledge-rich websites, as they assist users in exploring topics and concepts.

Article
Publication date: 23 September 2024

Bernardo Cerqueira de Lima, Renata Maria Abrantes Baracho, Thomas Mandl and Patricia Baracho Porto

Social media platforms that disseminate scientific information to the public during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of the topic of scientific communication…

Abstract

Purpose

Social media platforms that disseminate scientific information to the public during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of the topic of scientific communication. Content creators in the field, as well as researchers who study the impact of scientific information online, are interested in how people react to these information resources and how they judge them. This study aims to devise a framework for extracting large social media datasets and find specific feedback to content delivery, enabling scientific content creators to gain insights into how the public perceives scientific information.

Design/methodology/approach

To collect public reactions to scientific information, the study focused on Twitter users who are doctors, researchers, science communicators or representatives of research institutes, and processed their replies for two years from the start of the pandemic. The study aimed in developing a solution powered by topic modeling enhanced by manual validation and other machine learning techniques, such as word embeddings, that is capable of filtering massive social media datasets in search of documents related to reactions to scientific communication. The architecture developed in this paper can be replicated for finding any documents related to niche topics in social media data. As a final step of our framework, we also fine-tuned a large language model to be able to perform the classification task with even more accuracy, forgoing the need of more human validation after the first step.

Findings

We provided a framework capable of receiving a large document dataset, and, with the help of with a small degree of human validation at different stages, is able to filter out documents within the corpus that are relevant to a very underrepresented niche theme inside the database, with much higher precision than traditional state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. Performance was improved even further by the fine-tuning of a large language model based on BERT, which would allow for the use of such model to classify even larger unseen datasets in search of reactions to scientific communication without the need for further manual validation or topic modeling.

Research limitations/implications

The challenges of scientific communication are even higher with the rampant increase of misinformation in social media, and the difficulty of competing in a saturated attention economy of the social media landscape. Our study aimed at creating a solution that could be used by scientific content creators to better locate and understand constructive feedback toward their content and how it is received, which can be hidden as a minor subject between hundreds of thousands of comments. By leveraging an ensemble of techniques ranging from heuristics to state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, we created a framework that is able to detect texts related to very niche subjects in very large datasets, with just a small amount of examples of texts related to the subject being given as input.

Practical implications

With this tool, scientific content creators can sift through their social media following and quickly understand how to adapt their content to their current user’s needs and standards of content consumption.

Originality/value

This study aimed to find reactions to scientific communication in social media. We applied three methods with human intervention and compared their performance. This study shows for the first time, the topics of interest which were discussed in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Details

Data Technologies and Applications, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2514-9288

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 23 July 2024

Herwinda Kusuma Rahayu, Yhona Paratmanitya, Herni Dwi Herawati, Fitri Tariani, Anafrin Yugistyowati and Erni Samutri

Complementary feeding practices was more difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic due to economic instability, especially for animal source foods (ASFs) consumption. According to…

Abstract

Purpose

Complementary feeding practices was more difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic due to economic instability, especially for animal source foods (ASFs) consumption. According to the problem, the purpose of this study was to determine the economic impact of COVID-19 pandemic on ASFs consumption and ASFs consumption related factors on complementary feeding in Indonesia.

Design/methodology/approach

This cross-sectional study was targeted at mothers of children aged 6–23 months during pandemic. A total of 574 respondents were obtained through online questionnaire.

Findings

This study found that flesh food, including fish/seafood, organ meat, meat, poultry and processed meat, were associated with all economic impact of COVID-19 pandemic; in contrast, those economic impacts did not affect the dairy product and egg consumption. Multivariate analysis showed children with older age (AOR: 1.13, 95%CI: 1.04–3.26), meet minimum dietary diversity (AOR: 2.17, 95%CI: 1.56–5.44) and are from high income level household (AOR: 1.14, 95%CI: 1.09–2.10) contributed to ASFs consumption.

Practical implications

Other strategies aimed at enhancing food security to increase ASFs consumption on complementary feeding. The government may consider short-term emergency purchasing subsidies and macro-control of the ASFs market. Nutrition education is also required to improve knowledge related to importance of ASFs consumption for children.

Originality/value

This study reveals the association between each food group of ASFs consumption on complementary feeding and the economic impact of COVID-19 pandemic.

Details

Nutrition & Food Science , vol. 54 no. 7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0034-6659

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 25 June 2024

Lana Sabelfeld, John Dumay and Barbara Czarniawska

This study explores the integration of corporate reporting by Mitsubishi, a large Japanese company, using a culturally sensitive narrative that combines and reconciles Japanese…

Abstract

Purpose

This study explores the integration of corporate reporting by Mitsubishi, a large Japanese company, using a culturally sensitive narrative that combines and reconciles Japanese and Western corporate values in one story.

Design/methodology/approach

We use an analytical framework drawing on insights borrowed from narratology and the notion of wrapping – the traditional art of packaging as communication.

Findings

We find that Mitsubishi is a survivor company that uses different corporate reporting frameworks during its reporting journey to construct a bespoke narrative of its value creation and cultural values. It emplots narratives to convey a story presenting the impression that Mitsubishi is a Japanese corporation but is compatible with Western neo-liberal ideology, making bad news palatable to its stakeholders and instilling confidence in the future.

Research limitations/implications

Wrapping is a culturally sensitive form of impression management used in the integration of corporate reporting. Therefore, rather than assuming that companies blatantly manipulate their image in corporate reports, we suggest that future research should focus on how narratives are constructed and made sense of, situating them in the context of local culture and traditions.

Practical implications

The findings should interest scholars, report preparers, policymakers, and the IFRS, considering the recent release of the IFRS Sustainability Disclosure Standards designed to reduce the so-called alphabet soup of corporate reporting. By following Mitsubishi’s journey, we learn how and why the notion of integrated reporting was adopted and integrated with other reporting frameworks to create narratives that together convey a story of a global corporation compliant with Western neoliberal ideology. It highlights how Mitsubishi used integrated reporting to tell its story rather than as a rigid reporting framework, and the same fate may apply to the new IFRS Sustainability Reporting Standards that now include integrated reporting.

Originality/value

The study offers a new perspective on corporate reporting, showing how the local societal discourses of cultural heritage and modernity can shape the journey of the integration of corporate reporting over time.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 37 no. 9
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 16 July 2024

Henriett Primecz

This paper aims to investigate the concept of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) in the field of cross-cultural management.

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to investigate the concept of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) in the field of cross-cultural management.

Design/methodology/approach

The related literature has been analysed from various paradigmatic lenses.

Findings

As the VUCA world concept originates from business circles, several key articles were published in non-academic journals. Two distinct groups of publications can be identified: consulting literature and academic literature on the VUCA world. While both consulting literature and academic literature about the VUCA world can be associated with functionalism, alternative research paradigms can easily accommodate new studies in connection with the VUCA world: interpretive, critical and postmodern works would fit the features of the VUCA world, along with multi-paradigm studies.

Research limitations/implications

It is advisable to investigate emergent contemporary issues, often labelled VUCA, according to multiple paradigms and to conduct multi-paradigmatic research.

Originality/value

While consulting literature on the VUCA world implicitly assumes functionalist paradigms, academic literature might provide alternative assumptions. Interpretative, critical and postmodern paradigms more accurately address the issues raised by VUCA.

Details

International Journal of Organizational Analysis, vol. 32 no. 11
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1934-8835

Keywords

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