Call for Proposals: ISIC 2020

Posted January 8, 2020

CONFERENCE VENUE:

Future Africa – University of Pretoria conference venue; please check the website (http://www.futureafrica.science/) for details on the facilities, which are designed to support collaboration and to stimulate creativity.

Please plan to present your work in information behaviour at the ISIC 2020 conference in Pretoria, South Africa. Pretoria is also known as Tshwane and the Jacaranda city due to purple Jacaranda trees that might be in early bloom during the conference. The city is within 1½ hour’s drive of various private game reserves.

 

CONFERENCE SCOPE:

The ISIC conferences focus on people’s contextualised interactions with information. We welcome interdisciplinary information research, taking influence from fields such as information science, information studies, library studies, communication studies, computer science, education, information management, information systems, management science, psychology, social psychology, sociology, and other disciplines. A common thread is the focus on contextualised information activities, expressed as ‘information behaviour’, ‘information practice’, ‘information seeking’, ‘information experience’ and others. For the 2020 conference, authors are invited to particularly consider issues of misinformation, and application of information behaviour research to practice. However, all theoretical and empirical work that falls within the broad scope of the conference is welcome. The conference includes full and short papers, panels, workshops, posters, and a doctoral workshop. Since 2004, full papers from the proceedings of this biennial conference have been published in Information Research (http://www.informationr.net/ir/). Authors, however, maintain the right to also publish their work elsewhere after the conference.

 

THEMES OF THIS CONFERENCE INCLUDE, BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO, THE FOLLOWING: 

1. Theoretical conceptualisations of the cultural, social, cognitive, affective, and situational aspects of information needs, seeking, searching, use and sharing.
2.  Research approaches and methodologies employing and developing qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches.
3. Specific contexts: e.g. in different sectors and organisations (health care, education, cultural heritage, libraries, business, industry, public services and government, emergency services and others); in everyday life, and in social networks, including social media, gaming or virtual worlds.
4. Collaborative information practices: communities, boundary spanning and innovation practices.
5. Information use and value: meanings of information and how information is used to help solve problems, aid or support decision-making.
6. The role of information in building and enhancing the adaptive capacity of organisations: strategy and information absorption, transformation and integration.
7. Cross-disciplinary contributions: integrating studies on information seeking and interactive retrieval; integrating information science and management science.
8. Critical investigations of information activities in contemporary society and of ethical challenges.
9. Research and actions related to the distribution of false and misleading information threatening social, community and economic development.
10. Application of information behaviour research to practiced based settings to enhance decision making and problem-solving.