Program
Coming soon.
Keynote lecture: Paradata: documenting and understanding practices and processes
Describing, documenting and understanding how people and machines do things is notoriously difficult. At the same time it is often critically important to understand social and technical processes and practices, their outcomes, limitations, opportunities and biases. A parallel complication, apart from capturing such process information, termed paradata, is that it tends to be highly contextual and specific to particular tasks, individuals, communities and situations. The same applies to the amount and specificity of what needs to be known. This presentation showcases research and findings from the ERC-funded research project CAPTURE, which has developed in-depth understanding of how paradata is being created and used and what methods are used for identifying and capturing paradata. Challenges with paradata include how to enable and support the creation of paradata that is sufficient, relevant for its future users, and not too labour-intensive to produce and maintain. Considering the extent to which paradata is coincidental and exists because of the lack of cleaning and standardisation of information, a major challenge is also how to make and keep it technically manageable but at the same time rich enough for diverse user needs.
Bio
Isto Huvila is a Professor of Information Studies at the Department of ALM. His research interests include information and knowledge management, information work, knowledge organisation, documentation, and social and participatory information practices. His research contexts range from archaeology and cultural heritage, archives, libraries, and museums to health information and e-health, social media, virtual worlds, and corporate and public organisations.