Associate Professor Jenna Hartel is joining Curtin University in Perth, Australia, for a month this spring as a Visiting Fellow, to conduct further research and apply techniques from her iSquare research.
Dr. Hartel will partner with Dr. Pauline Joseph, an archivist at Curtin’s Department of Information Studies in the School of Media, Culture, and Creative Arts. Dr. Curtin took an interest in the iSquare research at the Information Seeking in Context conference this past September, and invited Dr. Hartel to Curtin.
Their research together targets the field of Records and Archives Management (RAM), and marks the first application of an arts-informed, visual approach and the draw-and-write technique to understanding the central concept of “information” in RAM.
Prof. Hartel says that she will be “overseeing the implementation and exploring collaborations with information visualization and leisure studies scholars interested in various aspects of the project.”
The iSquare research program has been underway since 2011. It explores visual expressions of information and aims to answer three questions: 1.) How do people visualize the concept of information?; 2.) How do visual conceptions of information differ among various populations? and 3.) How these images relate to conceptions of information made of words?
An empirical, participatory, visual method known as the draw-and-write technique is used to answer the questions. Respondents are given a 4.25″ by 4.25″ piece of paper and asked to express their understanding of information in the form of a drawing. On the back side of the same paper they are prompted to “Say a few words about your drawing…” The process generates a compact piece of visual and textual data coined an “iSquare,” samples are shown below.
The project team consists of Dr. Hartel and Faculty of Information students Rebecca Noone, Christie Oh, Stephanie Power, Pavel Danzanov, and Bridgette Kelly. Dr. Hartel credits her “creative, dynamic, dedicated, and extremely fun team” for helping the project grow over the past four years.
During their month-long iSquare collaboration at Curtin, Drs. Hartel and Joseph will:
I. Collect 200+ drawings of information from RAM students and practitioners via an online data collection method;
II. Analyze the images through interdisciplinary lenses;
III. Curate an online presentation of the data for the research community at the Curtin HIVE;
IV. Co-host, with Professor Marian Tye, Director of the Centre for Sport and Recreation Research, a workshop on arts-informed visual methods; and
V. Generate peer-reviewed publications and launch collaborations with Curtin scholars that seed research projects and grants in the future.
While in Perth, Dr. Hartel will also give a public lecture on the study to celebration Australia’s 2015 Information Awareness Month.
iSchool Master of Information student, Bridgette Kelly, is the Social Media Coordinator for the project and will report on progress.
