Melanie Feinberg

Two kinds of evidence: how information systems form rhetorical arguments

Purpose – This paper aims to examine how systems for organizing information construct rhetorical arguments for a particular interpretation of their subject matter.Design/methodology/approach – The paper synthesizes a conceptual framework from the field of rhetoric and uses that framework to analyze how existing organizational schemes present evidence in support of arguments regarding the material being organized.Findings – Organizational schemes can present logical arguments as posed in rhetoric, using two forms of evidence for their claims: relationship evidence from the category structure and resource evidence from the ways that items are assigned to categories.Research limitations/implications – This study does not attempt to identify all types of evidence that organizational schemes might use in argumentation. Further research may describe additional forms of evidence and argumentative structures.Practical implications – When creating organizational schemes, designers might develop a strategy to facil...

How information systems communicate as documents: the concept of authorial voice

Purpose – This study aims to examine how systems for organizing information may present an authorial voice and shows how the mechanism of voice may work to persuasively communicate a point of view on the materials being collected and described by the information system.Design/methodology/approach – The paper synthesizes a conceptual framework from the field of rhetoric and composition and uses that framework to analyze how existing organizational schemes reveal authorial voice.Findings – Through textual analysis, the mechanism of authorial voice is described in three example information systems. In two of the examples, authorial voice is shown to function as a persuasive element by enabling identification, the rhetorical construct defined by the literary critic Kenneth Burke. In one example, voice appears inconsistently and does not work to facilitate persuasion.Research limitations/implications – This study illustrates the concept of authorial voice in the context of information systems, but it does not ...

Conducting systematic evidence reviews: core concepts and lessons learned.

A systematic review (SR) is an essential component of evidence-based practice, because it synthesizes information on a particular topic that is necessary to inform health-related decision making. The purpose of this article is to document the process of producing a high-quality SR within the field of rehabilitation in contrast to other fields (eg, pharmaceutic research). We describe the notable methodologic challenges to producing high-quality SRs for rehabilitation researchers. Broadly, we outline how the quality of SRs is evaluated and suggest mechanisms for researchers to address potential pitfalls. Because meaningful SRs can and should be conducted in this field, we provide practical guidance regarding how to conduct such an SR. We outline a series of 8 important steps in the production of an SR: forming a committee, creating a development plan, conducting a literature review, selecting articles for inclusion, extracting data, preparing tables of evidence, facilitating external review and publication, and forming conclusions and recommendations. For each step of the SR process, we provide detailed description about the methodologic decisions involved and recommended strategies that researchers can implement to produce a high-quality SR. Using these preestablished steps and procedures as a guideline will not only help to increase the efficiency of the SR process, but also to improve the quality. The availability of high-quality SRs with plain language summaries promotes access to the best quality information for all involved in decision making.

Always somewhere, never there: using critical design to understand database interactions

Structured databases achieve effective searching and sorting by enacting sharply delineated category boundaries around their contents. While this enables precise retrieval, it also distorts identities that exist between category lines. A choice between Single and Married, for example, blurs distinctions within the Single group: single, perhaps, merely because same-sex marriage is not legal in ones locality. Sociologists Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker describe such residual states as inevitable byproducts of information systems. To minimize residuality, traditional practice for descriptive metadata seeks to demarcate clear and objective classes. In this study, we use critical design to question this position by creating information collections that foreground the residual, instead of diminishing it. We then interrogate our design experiments with solicited critical responses from invited experts and student designers. Inspired by the anthropologist Tim Ingold, we argue that our experiments illuminate a form of interacting with databases characterized by notions of wayfaring, or inhabiting a space, as opposed to notions of transport, or reaching a known destination. We suggest that the form of coherence that shapes a wayfaring database is enacted through its flow, or fluid integration between structure and content.

Personal expressive bibliography in the public space of cultural heritage institutions

Through their composition, arrangement and description, collections of objects and information resources, including those held by libraries, archives, and museums, tell a form of story; principles of selection, organization, and description produce an interpretive frame that shapes the meaning of each collection. Within cultural heritage institutions, however, such effects may run counter to longstanding goals and values. While interoperable information management systems, for example, facilitate universal access, the goal of interoperability constrains the generation of distinctively expressive descriptive systems. User-supplied collections of citations, however, are free to exploit a wider communicative potential of collecting and describing than those from the institutional perspective, and can provide an intriguing counterpoint to it. This article examines three means by which such personal, expressive bibliographies may communicate differently from institutional collections: through eclectic goals for collecting and describing, through a unique authorial voice, and through engagement with emotional experience. Expressive bibliographies that display such characteristics exhibit the combination of control and ambiguity that Umberto Eco (2009) calls the poetry of lists.

Beyond digital and physical objects: the intellectual work as a concept of interest for HCI

To understand activities of personal collecting and preservation, HCI researchers have investigated why people become attached to particular objects. These studies have examined ways that people relate to physical and digital objects, observing, for example, that people tend to cherish physical objects more than digital ones. This paper proposes that the value of digital objects may inhere less in an objects identity as a particular item and more in the objects ability to provide access to an intellectual work. The work, a familiar concept in information studies and textual studies, designates a general product of intellectual creation that may be instantiated in many versions. (For example, Shakespeares Hamlet exists in many editions and forms, which may differ in both content and carrier and yet still are all Hamlet.) The paper demonstrates how the concept of the work can extend research on the perceived value of digital objects. It also shows how a flexible definition of the work can reveal new aspects of a design situation.

Pluri, multi-, trans-meta-and interdisciplinary nature of LIS. Does it really matter?

The field of LIS is beset by recurrent debates as to its disciplinary status. For decades, the interdisciplinary nature of information science has been upheld without much proof from the ground. But if LIS is not an interdiscipline, is it then a meta-, a trans- a pluri-, a multi- or simply a discipline? The different proposals for qualifying the nature of LIS or for delineating its frontiers suggest that its fundamental nature remains unclear for its community. But is LIS alone in this dilemma and does it really matter? Does it stop the field from progressing?

Synthetic Ethos: The Believability of Collections at the Intersection of Classification and Curation

This article explores the rhetorical notion of ethos, or a believable character, in the context both of classification schemes, or means of organizing documents, and of the resource collections that make use of those schemes. Ethos, the article contends, explains how a particular audience is more or less likely to accept the interpretive frame that classification or collection inscribes on its contents. Two case studies, one of a classification and one of a resource collection that incorporates a classification, show how these communicative artifacts can generate ethos despite their lack of typical textual mechanisms, such as linear narrative. The article concludes by suggesting that properties of collections—their synthesis of multiple, often independent parts, their continuous versioning—stretch the basic idea of ethos itself, and the notion of synthetic ethos is proposed to better encompass these properties.

Information system design for communication: The use of genre as a design element

An information system is not merely a container for documents; through the ways that resources are selected, organized, and made available to users, information systems themselves work as expressive media, enabling the communication of a specific point of view on the collected materials. By analyzing information systems themselves as documents, we can better understand how information systems communicate these perspectives more and less persuasively, and we can use this understanding to facilitate the design of information systems for communicative purposes. This study examines one communicative mechanism available to information systems: the selective adaptation of genre conventions. Using theories of genre developed in rhetoric, composition, and applied linguistics, I show how two systems for organizing information, the Prelinger Library and the Warburg Institute classification, exhibit deviations from typical genre conventions for libraries, and I show how these deviations work as rhetorical tools to facilitate effective communication. I then demonstrate, using the creation of a prototype, how this understanding of genre as a communicative mechanism for information systems might be translated into the design context. By creating designs that incorporate an enhanced conceptual grasp of genre and other rhetorical properties of information systems, we can facilitate the construction of information systems that systematically and purposefully communicate original, creative points of view regarding their assembled collections, and so enable learning, discovery, and critical engagement for users.

Genres without Writers: Information Systems and Distributed Authorship

Abstract Purpose This essay demonstrates how information systems — collections of documents, data, or other information-bearing objects — function internally as sites for creative manipulation of genre resources. In the information systems context, these textual activities are not clearly traced to the purposeful actions of specific writers. Findings Genre development for information systems can result from actions that may appear individually to be rote, repetitive, passive, and uninteresting. But as these actions are aggregated at increasing scales, genre components interact and shift, even if change is limited to one element of the larger assemblage. Although these changes may not be initiated by writers in accordance with targeted work activities and associated rhetorical goals, the composite texts thus produced are nonetheless powerful documents that come to partially constitute the broader activities they appear to merely support. Originality/value In demonstrating “writerless” phenomena of genre change in distributed, regulated systems, this essay complements and extends the strong body of existing work in genre studies that emphasizes the writer’s perspective and agency in its accounts of genre development. By showing how continually evolving compound documents such as digital libraries constitute such sites of unacknowledged genre change, this essay demonstrates how the social actions that these composite documents facilitate for their users also change.