Kim Martin

Are e‐books replacing print books? tradition, serendipity, and opportunity in the adoption and use of e‐books for historical research and teaching

This article aims to understand the adoption of e‐books by academic historians for the purpose of teaching and research. This includes an investigation into their knowledge about and perceived characteristics of this evolving research tool. The study relied on Rogerss model of the innovation‐decision process to guide the development of an interview guide. Ten semistructured interviews were conducted with history faculty between October 2010 and December 2011. A grounded theory approach was employed to code and analyze the data. Findings about tradition, cost, teaching innovations, and the historical research process provide the background for designing learning opportunities for the professional development of historians and the academic librarians who work with them. While historians are open to experimenting with e‐books, they are also concerned about the loss of serendipity in digital environments, the lack of availability of key resources, and the need for technological transparency. The findings show that Rogerss knowledge and persuasion stages are cyclical in nature, with scholars moving back and forth between these two stages. Participants interviewed were already weighing the five characteristics of the persuasion stage without having much knowledge about e‐books. The study findings have implications for our understanding of the diffusion of innovations in academia: both print and digital collections are being used in parallel without one replacing the other.

Networks of digital humanities scholars: The informational and social uses and gratifications of Twitter

Big Data research is currently split on whether and to what extent Twitter can be characterized as an informational or social network. We contribute to this line of inquiry through an investigation of digital humanities (DH) scholars’ uses and gratifications of Twitter. We conducted a thematic analysis of 25 semi-structured interview transcripts to learn about these scholars’ professional use of Twitter. Our findings show that Twitter is considered a critical tool for informal communication within DH invisible colleges, functioning at varying levels as both an information network (learning to ‘Twitter’ and maintaining awareness) and a social network (imagining audiences and engaging other digital humanists). We find that Twitter follow relationships reflect common academic interests and are closely tied to scholars’ pre-existing social ties and conference or event co-attendance. The concept of the invisible college continues to be relevant but requires revisiting. The invisible college formed on Twitter is messy, consisting of overlapping social contexts (professional, personal and public), scholars with different habits of engagement, and both formal and informal ties. Our research illustrates the value of using multiple methods to explore the complex questions arising from Big Data studies and points toward future research that could implement Big Data techniques on a small scale, focusing on sub-topics or emerging fields, to expose the nature of scholars’ invisible colleges made visible on Twitter.

Interviews with digital seniors: ICT use in the context of everyday life

ABSTRACT The literature on the digital divide suggests that seniors continue to lag behind in access to the Internet, digital skills, and engagement in various online activities. Much of the research, however, gains insight from large-scale survey research and neglects to examine the challenges and opportunities that digital seniors, those who are connected, experience in their everyday use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). We employed the theoretical lens of ICT use in the context of everyday life to inform this study. Twenty-one digital seniors (60 +) took part in interviews about how ICTs influenced their routines and practices such as news consumption, library use, information seeking, and reading. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using grounded theory. Three key findings emerged. First, digital seniors are developing new practices and routines around their ICT use; these are novel and emerge out of ICTs’ affordances. Second, digital seniors are creating hybrid practices, where they seamlessly combine traditional habits with new ones emerging from ICT use. Finally, digital seniors are recreating existing practices with digital means, i.e. the digital enhances or sometimes even replaces traditional practices. We find that agency is central to our understanding of digital seniors’ adoption and use of ICTs, they critically consider various options, and make choices around their preferences, convenience of use, and affordability. For digital seniors, ICT use is not a binary because they want to have the flexibility to choose for themselves under what circumstances and for what purposes the use of ICTs is appropriate.

The role of agency in historians’ experiences of serendipity in physical and digital information environments

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the changing research practices of historians, and to contrast their experiences of serendipity in physical and digital information environments. Design/methodology/approach In total, 20 historians in Southwestern Ontario participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed employing grounded theory. The analytical approach included memoing, the constant comparative method, and three phases of coding. Findings Four main themes were identified: agency, the importance of the physical library experience, digital information environments, and novel heuristic forms of serendipity. The authors found that scholars frequently used active verbs to describe their experience with serendipity. This suggests that agency is more involved in the experience than previous conceptualizations of serendipity have suggested, and led us to coin the term “incidental serendipity.” Other key findings include the need for digital tools to incorporate the context surrounding primary sources, and also to provide an organizational context much like what is encountered by patrons in library stacks. Originality/value The increased emphasis on digital materials should not come at the expense of the physical information environment, where historians often encounter serendipitous finds. A fine balance and a greater integration between digital and physical resources is needed in order to support scholars’ continued ability to make connections between materials. By showing the active role that historians take in their serendipitous encounters, this paper suggests that historical training is critical for eliciting incidental serendipitous encounters. The authors propose a novel approach, one that examines verbs in serendipity accounts.

Digital humanities: the continuing role of serendipity in historical research

Ebooks are being integrated into academic library catalogs---either in addition to existing resources or as a substitute to print copies. This study examines the perceptions and opinions of historians about how Ebooks, and the digitization of cultural artifacts in general, impact the research process of historians. Findings indicate that historians are concerned that the digital environment reduces the chances of a serendipitous encounter with a text. Access to resources is a central dimension in their research endeavor. While historians do not reject Ebooks as a research tool, they make use of this digital tool only in specific settings during their research and in their teaching. Additionally, our study found that historians attempt to recreate in the digital environment an atmosphere that encourages serendipity within their field, and would readily welcome new methods and designs that would make this possible.

Digital curation and the networked audience of urban events: Expanding La Fiesta de Santo Tomás from the physical to the virtual environment

The proliferation of portable, networked and location-aware devices has drastically changed how the city is represented and interpreted in general and during specific events in particular by enabling new practices of digital curation and networked audience activities. These extend the urban realm from the physical into the virtual, which provides a space for global and dispersed, often naive audience activities. This article uses the case study of the Fiesta de Santo Tomás, which is an annual festival that takes place during the week leading up to Christmas in Chichicastenango, Guatemala, to illustrate how digital curation, (re)presentation and (re)interpretation of festive events occur in a hybrid urban space. By documenting the ways that the modern day version of this festival has made its way into the larger digitally mediated sphere of urbanism, the study looks at three groups of curators and how their ways of encoding the event provide a multiplicity of representations to be decoded by the members of the ephemeral networked audience.

Illusions of a “Bond”: tagging cultural products across online platforms

Purpose Most studies pertaining to social tagging focus on one platform or platform type, thus limiting the scope of their findings. The purpose of this paper is to explore social tagging practices across four platforms in relation to cultural products associated with the book Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming. Design/methodology/approach A layered and nested case study approach was used to analyse data from four online platforms: Goodreads, Last.fm, WordPress, and public library social discovery platforms. The top-level case study focuses on the book Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming and its derivative products. The analysis of tagging practices in each of the four online platforms is nested within the top-level case study. Casino Royale was conceptualized as a cultural product (the book), its derived products (e.g. movies, theme songs), as well as a keyword in blogs. A qualitative, inductive, and context-specific approach was chosen to identify commonalities in tagging practices across platforms whilst taking into account the uniqueness of each platform. Findings The four platforms comprise different communities of users, each platform with its own cultural norms and tagging practices. Traditional access points in the library catalogues focused on the subject, location, and fictitious characters of the book. User-generated content across the four platforms emphasized historical events and periods related to the book, and highlighted more subjective access points, such as recommendations, tone, mood, reaction, and reading experience. Revealing shifts occur in the tags between the original book and its cultural derivatives: Goodreads and library catalogues focus almost exclusively on the book, while Last.fm and WordPress make in addition cross-references to a wider range of different cultural products, including books, movies, and music. The analyses also yield apparent similarities in certain platforms, such as recurring terms, phrasing and composite or multifaceted tags, as well as a strong presence of genre-related terms for the book and music. Originality/value The layered and nested case study approach presents a more comprehensive theoretical viewpoint and methodological framework by which to explore the study of user-generated metadata pertaining to a range of related cultural products across a variety of online platforms.

Interviews with Lifelong Readers: Preliminary Findings from the EDITS (Effects of Digital Information Technology on Seniors) Project

This poster outlines the preliminarily findings of the EDITS study: an inquiry into the digital information habits of senior citizens. The research presented here will focus on the adoption of ereading technology by seniors in order to determine the habits and attitudes, motivations, and barriers experienced by this demographic. Employing semi-structured interviews and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), this study aims to investigate one element of the digital divide that sometimes goes unnoticed: age. Despite ingrained habits based on print, findings show motivations, such as convenience, contribute to the adoption of ereading by seniors.