Time is of the essence: Social theory of time and its implications for LIS research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: “Time,” like “information,” is a concept that has received a great deal of attention in some disciplines and is ignored or taken for granted in others. Traditional studies of information seeking have focussed on spatial issues – primarily, locating/ location of sources – to the neglect of temporal issues. This paper proposes that the social constructivist theoretical paradigm recently adopted by LIS researchers demands recognition of social time; that is, not absolute time, but another type of meaning constructed between people through their interactions. Attending to social concepts of time can have important implications for research into organizational and individual information behaviour. Information practices in organizations and work groups within organizations cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the multitude of times that exist within such groups. Studies of workplace information practices focus variously on organizations, project teams, task forces, crews, departments, etc. Each group has a different temporal existence based on its practices. For example, organizations, departments and communities imply longevity as well as duration. We describe a developing study of information practices in a limited-duration work group. Traditional studies of information seeking often consider individuals’ descriptions of their information seeking behaviour as transparent representations of underlying cognitive processes. A constructivist stance permits an analysis of the ways that accounts of information seeking can take discursive action: the ways that such accounts are structured and the ways they may be used to make claims about individuals’ general behaviour or competence, and to prescribe or proscribe certain sets of activities. The concept of “time” may then be used as a discursive resource by individuals in a social interaction. We report findings from a study of the ways that information seekers may use various representations of “time” in justifying certain kinds of information seeking behaviour.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".