Call for papers — Special issue: Archaeology and information research

Editors

Isto Huvila (Uppsala University), Marija Dalbello (Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey), Costis Dallas (University of Toronto), Ixchel M. Faniel (OCLC Research), and Michael Olsson (University of Technology Sydney) Deadline for submitting a full manuscript to the special issue is June 30, 2018.

Archaeology and information research

Archaeology is a domain that has intersections with information research both as an empirical domain of investigation and as a perspective to inquire into how people interact with information. The relevance of discussing the links between the disciplines of information and archaeology relates to the increasing societal significance of cultural heritage around the globe. In archaeology, improved understanding of archaeological information work, knowledge creation and management processes has been acknowledged as being critical in managing and exploiting the escalating amounts of archaeological data from archaeological excavations conducted prior to land-use around the world. From a theoretical and practical perspective, archaeology brings together methodological perspectives ranging from the humanities to the natural sciences, and serves as an interesting showcase of the problems, challenges and opportunities related to inter- and multi-disciplinary domains of information practices. Finally, similar to multiple areas of humanities and social science research, archaeology has provided inspiration and functioned as a powerful metaphor in critical research in the information field.

As Huvila et al. (2017) note, it is possible to categorise the earlier research in the nexus of archaeology and information science into three broad categories. First, there is management, organisation and retrieval oriented research, often with an aim of contributing to the development of theories, methods and practices of archaeological information work. Secondly, there is a corpus of research with a focus on information behaviour and practices of archaeologists including studies about archaeological documents, documentation and the socio-technical aspects of archaeological knowledge production. Thirdly, earlier information science research has used archaeology (including but not restricted to Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge (Foucault, 2002) as a method or approach for studying diverse information science topics.

Therefore, the aim of this special issue is to highlight the interdisciplinary nexus and invite papers that explore and investigate the intersections of archaeologies and the different areas of information research. The archaeologies include archaeology proper, media archaeology, the archaeology of knowledge and other archaeological approaches, whereas information research includes, library, museum and archival studies, as well as other relevant disciplines.

Submissions can address, but are not limited to the following topics:

The proposed manuscripts can be theoretical, conceptual or grounded in qualitative and/or quantitative methods (e.g. interviews, surveys, document studies, bibliometrics, etc.), or phenomenological inquiry.

If you have questions about your proposed topic or approach, please contact Isto Huvila at isto.huvila@abm.uu.se

Submissions

Submissions should be made in Word (.doc) format, using the template provided at http://informationr.net/ir/IRWordTemplate.doc and following the instructions at Information Research Style Manual http://informationr.net/ir/StyleManual.html and Author Instructions http://www.informationr.net/ir/author2.html

The final submission has to be done using editorial system at http://nile.lub.lu.se/ojs/index.php/infores/ NB! When typing the title of your manuscript in the system, add word [ARCHAEOLOGY] (in square brackets) to the end of the title to make sure that your submission will be processed by the editors of the special issue.

The HTML-conversion of accepted and finalised manuscripts will be sponsored by the Department of ALM, Uppsala University and done on behalf of the authors.

Timetable

Deadline for full manuscripts is June 30, 2018.

We expect that the reviews and revisions rounds will be completed by early 2019 and a projected date of publication for the special issue is in the first half of 2019.

Literature on the topic