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iSquare at #asist2015 

11/22/2015

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PictureGateway Arch, Nov 2015 photo by Bridgette Kelly
The iSquare team has been very busy! In early November, Dr. Jenna Hartel and the iSquare team represented the University of Toronto at the ASIS&T (Association for Information Science and Technology) 78th Annual Meeting: Information Science with Impact: Research in and for the Community, which took place in St. Louis, Missouri. Our Visualizing Information Worldwide panel session gave us a chance to report emergent findings from our study of visual conceptions of information across 12 countries.

Over the summer of 2014, the iSchool and collaborators from Australia, Brazil, Croatia, England, Finland, France, Ghana, Iran, Malaysia, Russia, and Taiwan, explored visual conceptions of information. They asked the question, “How is the concept of information visualized in my community and beyond?” To answer this question they used the draw-and-write technique. iSquares were collected from graduate students at 12 information studies programs worldwide. The data was meticulously organized and accessioned by Data Coordinator and MI program graduate, Stephanie Power. In seven cases the exercise was conducted in English, and at five sites it was presented in another first language, namely Farsi, Spanish, French, Russian, or Croatian. In total, 541 iSquares from around the world were created.

Back in Toronto, the iSquares were analyzed through a content analysis, spearheaded by MI student and the team’s research manager, Dr. Pavel Danzanov. The process identified common visual motifs related to humanity and sociality, information behaviours, information representation and organization, information and communication technologies, and print artifacts.

During the conference, there was a beautiful on-site exhibition of the 541 international iSquares, designed by PhD student/artist-in-residence Rebecca Noone and funded by ASIS&T’s Special Interest Group for International Information Issues. MI student Bridgette Kelly, the Social Media Manager for the study, live tweeted the panel and engaged with the broader research community in-person and by answering audience questions via social media.

The panel included presentations from the Toronto-based research team as well as a video that collated highlights from six pre-recorded 3-minute videos that document the work of iSquare contributors in Brazil, France, Finland, Iran, Malaysia, Russia, and Taiwan. The formal presentation concluded with the remarks of Dr. Toni Carbo who emphatically encouraged the team to scale-up the iSquare technical and analytical protocol and use it as a way to understand diverse communities’ relationships to information.

The results from the project will soon be reported in peer-reviewed journals of information studies in 2016. 

​We look forward to sharing our upcoming adventures with you!

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isquare Coding Party!

9/13/2015

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We had our first coding session (a "coding party") in Toronto!  We tested three key instruments:

  • a Code Framework (the variables and values of interest on the iSquares)
  • a Coding Manual (instructions on interpreting the variables and values)
  • a Code Matrix (an Excel spreadsheet that records results)

It took us almost an hour to code the first iSquare since there was a lot to discuss. But soon we were coding at a rate of 1 iSquare per minute and there was consensus on our decisions (high intercoder reliability -- a good thing). 

We are still refining all the documents and the process... 

We wish you could've been at the party too, but hopefully these photos are a good substitute! Have a look at the slideshow below and see what happened!
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The  iSquare  Protocol

8/26/2015

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The iSquare protocol is the data-gathering technique that we have developed and used to generate the existing corpus of iSquares. It is informed by the methodological literature on the draw-and-write technique and specifically an awareness of the ideal constraints to apply during data-gathering. With this protocol, researchers and educators can take advantage of a proven strategy for arts-informed, visual research into the concept of information. Importantly, the use of the protocol establishes social scientific reliability, that is, consistency across different implementations of the research design. Widespread use of the protocol will enable a more rapid accumulation of insights about the visual dimension of information and support collaboration.  The main elements of the protocol pertain to ethics;  setting and timing; instructional script; paper; iSquare size; front and back sides; drawing instrument; and (optional) incentives. The protocol concerns data collection only and leaves researchers free to analyze the iSquares as they wish.
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Information Stories

7/13/2015

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Perhaps information science can take inspiration from the humanities and employ stories as a means to understanding. The iSquares can help us to create a visual narrative of our central concept. Written conceptions of information do not lend themselves to storytelling in the same evocative and illustrative way. Innumerable narratives can be created from the corpus of iSquares on this website and one example is below, beginning at the top left and reading to the right:

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The  isquares Project

6/26/2015

 
iSquare is an ongoing, arts-informed, visual research project into the concept of information. It is geared for scholars, educators, and students in the field of information science but may be of interest to others, too. The study explores: 1) How do people visualize the concept of information?, 2) How do visual conceptions of information differ among various populations?, and 3) How do these images relate to conceptions of information made of words?

To answer these questions, our research team (led by Dr. Jenna Hartel) at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto employs an empirical, visual method known as the draw-and-write technique. Research subjects are given a 4.25" by 4.25" piece of paper and asked to express their understanding of information in the form of a drawing. On the back side of the same paper they are prompted to, "Say a few words about your drawing...". The process generates a compact piece of visual and textual data coined an "iSquare."

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