Disciplinary preoccupations and community informatics
I have been thinking a lot about how disciplinary orientations shape the way we think about Community Informatics after having a conversation with a colleague about how the museum community has addressed many issues relating to community informatics and community engagement for many years.
Reading recently Kate Williams’s and Joan Durrance’s forthcoming Library and Information Science article on Community Informatics I was struck by what was missing. Kate and Joan see CI as growing out of library community outreach in the 1970s as well as social informatics. But I wonder about the genealogy… I see the community information movement of the 1970s’ American public library as part of a larger project of democratization of culture involving more activist archivists and the placement of museum exhibits and oral history projects and public memory workshops (with renewed community control) in communities in which they had never been before. So I wonder whether or not Kate and Joan’s article is privileging the role of libraries in the history of community informatics because of their (especially Joan’s) disciplinary allegiance to librarianship. It seems to me like we are still stalled in our interdisciplinary conversation about community informatics and cultural heritage, and reaching the bigger conversation among librarians, museum professionals and archivists [or as they have been called collectively culture heritage professionals] requires reading each other’s literature to see the roots of community engagement in all fields, without privileging a particular genealogy based on our disciplinary allegiances.
–Noah Lenstra
October 21st, 2009 at 7:47 am
Point well taken, Noah. I would add that other literatures also are key to this continuing conversation: community organizing, community development, informal education, and community cultural development. Of course, it is hard to keep up with all these fields, thus the importance of collaboration and listening.