I am back in office after a week in Berlin, attending the
iConference, the now annual meeting of the iCaucus, an international
”association” of Information Schools and Library and Information Science
Departments. The iCaucus started off about fifteen years ago as an informal
netwok between a number of US LIS schools in an attempt to find ways in which
to address contemporary information problems and development. During the last
few years the concept has spread internationally as well, and there are today
55 iSchools in the US, Europe and Asia. In Scandinavia, there are three member
departments; at University of Borås, University of Oslo and Akershus, and
University of Copenhagen.
My own department at Linnaeus University is not a member,
but this does not stop us from having a lot in common with these schools in
terms of interests and collaborations. The reason I attended the conference
this year was much out of curiosity, as it was the first time it was held in Europe.
I remember that the iSchool concept, when it first appeared, was hailed as
something completely new and now I wanted to see for myself what it had to
offer as an alternative to, for instance, the CoLIS or ASIS&T conferences.
Not much, it turned out. A slight emphasis on ”the digital”, yes. A slight
leaning towards the computational, yes. As a whole, though it proved to be a
rather ordinary LIS conference, with pretty much the same people circulating
the coffee tables as on CoLIS or ASIS&T, and by all means, that is not a
bad thing.
None the less, the quality of papers and presentations
varied significantly. At the welcome session, Michael Seadle of the hosting
Humbolt University, mentioned that more and more papers are being rejected in
the peer review process of the iConference. Normally that is a good thing, but
as the days went along, I started to think about those papers that didn´t make
it. Were they rejected purely on the basis of poor quality? If so, there is quite a lot of really bad research
out there right now. That might be, but here I do not think that is the case. I
don´t think I have ever been to a conference that has suffered so much from the
obvious need of, primarily American, demands of publication by numbers. There
where several papers that held a quality no higher than that which I expect
from my students at our LIS bachelor program at LNU. Typically, and sadly, most
of these proved to be American doctoral thesis projects. Presumably, these papers presented little
snippets of more substantial studies, because a number of them were, to be honest,
pure rubbish – limited exploratory, statistical or experimental designs with
little or no ambition beyond the obvious outcome of the measures used. It
really makes you wonder about the general state of US LIS research today.
Needless to say, the doctoral students themselves are not the ones to blame.
Instead one must consider the judgement of supervisors and departments. As it is
likely that several of the papers, notes and posters that where rejected were
both strong and relevant, the organizers really need to think over the review
process for upcoming iConferences. A conference is never better than the reserach
presented and in this respect iConference has quite a long way to go if they
want to be in the same league as for instance CoLIS and ASIS&T, and I see
no other ambition in the programme.
Of course there were highlights. The two keynote talks,
given in the wonderful Audiomax at Hegelplatz, where Albert Einstein once gave his
famous public lectures on the theory of general relativity, were very
interesting. Tony Hey of Microsoft Research Connections gave an interesting
account of the development of Big Science and Open Data as the new challenge
for companies and institutions of the magnitude of Microsoft and its likes.
Melissa Terras of University College London held an intriguing talk on the
possibilities of, and challenges for, digital humanities. Among the session
talks I heard, Ronald Day of University of Indiana, Bloomington, stood out as
the unique voice in LIS that he has been over the last fifteen years. He
presented his forthcoming book Indexing it all: the subject in the age of
documentation, information and data. I look forward to reading it. For my own
part, I chaired a nice session on ”Culture studies and digital challenges”,
discussing political bias in Wikipedia, the character of Edward Snowden, and
Florida school libraries.
Was the iConference worth attending? Yes indeed. I see no
reason not to consider it when planning my annual conference attendances.
Perhaps I’ll even sign up for next year’s event – in sunny southern California.
Pictures:
1. The Audiomax auditorium during Melissa Terras' talk.
2. The conference "dinner" at Naturkundemuseum.
3. Dinosaurs. Two real and two in the making: Fredrik Åström and Joacim Hansson.
4. Hegel. No less.
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