Information encountering in the humanities: Embeddedness, temporality, and altruism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Humanities research informs people's movements across time and reshapes cultural worldviews. While we know that humanists integrate information resources into their research program and that serendipitous discoveries enable truly transformative knowledge creation, our picture of discovery in the humanities is unclear. There is an important role for information professionals to better support humanistic discovery as routine practice. To fully comprehend the complex research activities of humanities scholars it is necessary to expand upon existing models of information encountering (IE) by analyzing discovery episodes and the temporal and topical factors in play. We take particular interest in studying how scholars in the art history and archeology disciplines conceptualize, pursue, and often complete research projects. Ultimately we present an amended IE model that reveals intricate connections between IE, rediscovery, and altruistic collaboration mutually evolving over distinct timespans.

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