Timothy Gorichanaz, an information studies doctoral student at the College of Computing & Informatics (CCI), is the recipient of the
ASIS&T SIG USE Innovation Award for 2016-2017.
The
award, to be presented during the SIG USE Research Symposium at the upcoming 2016 Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology in Copenhagen (Oct. 14-18, 2016), seeks to recognize innovative work in the field of information behavior, for example, how people construct, need, seek, give and use information in various contexts. The awards committee selects the award winner based on their ability to employ innovative methodologies and techniques, to ask novel and groundbreaking questions, to make theoretical breakthroughs and/or to use innovative presentation approaches.
Gorichanaz’s winning paper, titled “A Gardener’s Experience of Document Work at a Historic Landscape Site,” focuses on how the head gardener at Shofuso Japanese House and Garden, a historic landscape site in Philadelphia, experiences the document work in developing a comprehensive garden plan (see abstract below).
Gorichanaz will present the paper in the
Cultural Information Behavior paper session on Oct. 18.
The Innovation Award was established in 2011 and is administered by the SIG USE Awards Jury. It is sponsored by SIG USE.
Abstract:
“Research in document work has tended to take a sociocultural perspective. Recent interest in document experience invites the consideration of document work from the perspective of an individual’s lived experience. This paper reports on a holistic, single-case study of how the head gardener at Shofuso Japanese House and Garden, a historic landscape site in Philadelphia, experiences the document work involved in developing a comprehensive garden plan. A hermeneutic analysis of the data reveals how the underlying foundational values of authenticity, education and reducing ambiguity support the process of document work in this case, which involves summoning diverse knowledge, channeling the master and stepping back. This process is punctuated by organizational and historical challenges. These findings suggest that the theoretical framework of foundation–process–challenges may be used to study the lived experience of document work in other cases. Further ramifications are discussed for practice in gardening and historical document work.”