Information science and its core concepts: Levels of disagreement Birger Hjørland
What are the most important metatheories and research traditions in the LIS?
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6 What are the most important metatheories and research traditions in the LIS?In LIS different theories, metatheories, “approaches,” “paradigms”, and research traditions exist. The situation is rather chaotic and it is difficult to get a clear overview of the theoretical landscape of the field as a whole. Even the definition and understanding of such common terms as “theory,” “metatheory” and “paradigm” is a difficult task (not just in relation to LIS, but in relation to all disciplines). Bates (2005) provided an initial useful survey of such concepts but more is needed. Fisher, Erdelez, and McKechnie’s (2005) compendious Theories of information behavior provides short presentations of 72 “theories” in our field. But are they all really about “theories”? Many of them seem rather to be about concepts, topics, or perspectives from other disciplines. And how are all these “theories” related to more fundamental “metatheories”? The book clearly reveals the extremely fragmented state of LIS. One comes away with the impression that one has heard a lot of different voices without any overall attempt to cooperate towards the generation of broader frameworks. In the early 1990s, two metatheories (or “paradigms”) seemed to dominate disciplinary discourses within information science: “the physical approach” (or “the systems centered approach”) on the one side and “the cognitive approach” (or the user-centered approach”) on the other (cf. Ellis 1992; Saracevic 1999). The physical approach is associated with tests of different kinds of indexing languages/ search mechanisms and measures the effectiveness of document retrieval systems by the well-known measures of ‘recall’ (percent of all relevant documents retrieved) and ‘precision’ (percent of relevant documents retrieved in relation to all retrieved documents), which were developed in the 1960s within the framework of the so-called Cranfield experiments. According to Ellis, it is called ”physical” because [t]he assumption that index languages consisted of amalgams of index language devices meant that index language performance (in terms of the measures recall and precision) could be directly explained by reference to the combination of use of the different index language devices, just as the performance of a mechanical system can be explained with reference to the contribution of the different elements of the system (Ellis 1992, 51). The cognitive approach, on the other hand, is based on the assumption that “the retrieval must, in some way or another, operate with a model of the cognitive state of the user“ (Ellis 1992, 53). Ellis also found, however, that the cognitive view never succeeded in establishing any prototype like the physical paradigm. It is important to realize, that such different paradigms have different disciplinary affiliations: The split is not only conceptual, looking very differently at the same process, but also organizational. The systems centered side is now mostly concentrated in the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), while the user-centered cluster congregates around the American Society for Information Science (ASIS). Each has its own communication outlets—journals, proceedings, and conferences. There is less and less overlap of authors and works between the two outlets. We have two camps, two islands, with, unfortunately, relatively little traffic in-between (Saracevic 1999, 1057). During the 1990s, more frameworks emerged, and by the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, Bates (2005) could identify no fewer than 13 different metatheories29 in LIS:
Bates’ overview of metatheories in information science is probably the best available today, but there is a need for much more research on this issue. Steve Fuller, for example, at the session on “metatheoretical snowmen” at the CoLIS 7 in London 2010, asked whether bibliometrics is an approach, or whether there are different approaches to bibliometrics. Hjørland (2010) found the dichotomy between “the system’s view” and “the user’s view” problematic and thus also called into question the whole idea of a dichotomy between “the physical approach” and “the cognitive approach”. It seems, therefore, that many current interpretations of different approaches in LIS strongly need further investigation. The general development in the field can perhaps be characterized by a movement from information theory (Shannon and Weaver 1949) towards semiotic theories (e.g., Wersig 2003; Brier 2008) – that is, towards theories of signs, languages, and meaning in a social perspective. In a series of papers (e.g., Hjørland, 2009, 2010, 2011a+b), it has been argued that rationalism, empiricism, historicism, and pragmatism/critical theory may be viewed as the basic approaches to LIS and that versions of pragmatism/critical theory are the most fruitful of these alternatives. This point of view may also be considered a version of social epistemology (Wong 2011): LIS is about providing knowledge resources for users, and the questions of what knowledge is, and what the best knowledge resources are, and how to identify them, are, in the end, questions of epistemology. There may be different views of which research findings and thus documents or “information” are relevant for a given question (cf. Hjørland, 2010). Such questions of relevance are clearly scholarly and epistemological (not technical and not psychological, as it has been assumed in the dominant paradigms). Directory: portal -> files files -> Is it possible to construct a canon of tv programmes? Immanent reading versus textual-historicism files -> Lawrence Peter Ampofo files -> Impact case study (ref3b) files -> Ethics and Factual Television: a short history files -> P. O. Box 27, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland tel. 358-9-191 58080 / 22216; fax 358-9-191 58096 / 23008 files -> The impact of a pledge campaign and the promise of publicity: a randomized controlled trial of charitable donations files -> Diversity and Voice: the Political Participation of Young People in the European Union Download 184.46 Kb. Share with your friends:
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