Reports of the demise of the "user" have been greatly exaggerated: Dervin's sense‐making and the methodological resuscitation of the user – looking backwards, looking forward
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In 2003, an ASIST panel (Rosenbaum, Davenport, Lieuvrouw, Day, 2003) pronounced the "death of the user" suggesting that new technologies undermine a concept that was already weak in ability to account for agency in information seeking and use. This panel challenges that pronouncement by addressing how methodological approaches have created users in different manifestations – emotional, cognitive, physical, and social – elusive and capricious, dead or almost so, overly demanding, disinterested, individualistic, materialistic, culture‐bound, active, passive…. Panelists zero in on how they have used and struggled with Dervin's Sense‐Making Methodology (Dervin & Foreman‐Wernet, 2003) in attempts to conduct parsimonious, heuristic, and useful user studies and to introduce a strong user‐orientation into LIS pedagogy and practice. Starting with the seminal Dervin & Nilan (1986) ARIST review of information seeking and use studies, Dervin's Sense‐Making has been pointed to as sparking the turn toward user‐oriented studies of information seeking and use (e.g., Savolainen, 1993). Sense‐Making has been much quoted and misquoted, praised and criticized, implemented and co‐opted. This panel will look backwards and forward using Sense‐Making as an exemplar and foil for considering the ways philosophies that drive methodologies and methods that implement them enlarge or diminish our conceptions of the user.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.096 | 0.111 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.062 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".