Wayfinder: A tool for tagging to equalize opportunities for sense-making

Meghan Dougherty, PhD Candidate, Communication

(guest blog by Shaun Kane)

Wayfinder: A tool for tagging to equalize opportunities for sense-making in a collection of archived objects

This week Meghan presented her work on the Wayfinder project (http://www.wayfinder.webarchivist.org). This project is part of Meghan’s dissertation work, and is part of the larger Web Archivist project presented previously.

The Wayfinder project continues the exploration of representing digital scholarship digitally. By moving beyond traditional paper- based formats, we may explore alternate representations for scholarly information. Different media present different affordances, and may expose different social and epistemological issues. Wayfinder leverages the affordances of the web to enable new interactions with scholarly information. On the web, readers are able to act as content producers themselves, and can engage in a recursive dialogue with authors. The project also enables new modes of accessing and understanding scholarly information by allowing users to navigate and annotate data, and to create their own paths through a data set.

Designing for “Third Culture”?

Tabitha Hart and Bob Mason
Tabitha’s interest is in intercultural communication: how people from different cultures communicate. She starts by reporting on her fieldwork: interviewing baristas in Starbucks, Germany.

The discussion topic is about the notion: “Third Culture” (a notion reminiscent of “Third Place”).

Representing Digital Scholarship Digitally: Creating the Web Campaigning Digital Supplement

Kirsten discusses the affordances and trade-offs associated with her research group’s decision to share their research (on impact of the Web on elections) through the Web. (They use a modified Wiki that exposes both 60% of the book text and all the data archives, field notes, memos, and notes).

Information Ethics: Time for Another Look?

Bob Mason
There is a dissonance between Bob’s observations and the prevailing approaches to information ethics. There is a rapid pace of technological development with a lack of precedence and law always lags behind.