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
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it