Information World Mapping: A Participatory, Visual,Elicitation Activity for Information Practice Interviews

摘要

In an increasingly visually-oriented world, researcherswithin and beyond LIS can benefit from exploring,developing and applying creative methods for datacollection and research participant engagement.Participatory, arts-involved methods can complement moretraditional elicitation techniques, generating rich data thatallows researchers to explore participant experiences withsocially- and culturally-constructed information practices.This poster presents a novel drawing-based elicitationtechnique, Information World Mapping (IWM), which wasdeveloped to augment traditional qualitative interviewmethods. IWM combines elements of three established artsinvolvedmethods: information horizons (Sonnenwald,Wildemuth, & Harmon, 2001), relational mapping (Radford& Neke, 2000), and Photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997).Aiming to enable creative communication about theinformation world of the research participant as it relates toa social process of interest (e.g., making a health decisionor completing a work-related task), IWM guidesparticipants in generating drawings or maps of theirpersonal information worlds, including key interpersonaland institutional relationships. These drawings are thenused to facilitate elicitation of participants’ own storiesabout, and interpretations of, their information practices. Acase example of IWM in practice is provided, based on astudy of teenage parents’ health-related informationpractices.