Making Sense of the Past: the Information Practices of Field Archaeologists

Dr. Nicole A. Cooke is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Sciences, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Michael Olsson, PhD

Senior Lecturer, School of Communication, University of Technology in Sydney, Australia

Seminar Date: November 2, 2017 This content is archived.

This presentation describes the findings of a study of the information practices of archaeologists excavating at two sites: the Iron Age Broch of Gurness and Neolithic Ness of Brodgar excavations in Orkney, Scotland, through the course of two digging seasons. It focuses in particular on those practices by which participants made sense of the artefacts they uncovered, and through these, the site they were excavating.

Participants’ information practices were shown to be not merely cognitive but embodied with haptic elements playing an important role in archaeologists’ sense-making of potential artefacts, e.g., the feel of a stone tool in the hand, the texture of pottery shards against the cheek. The study raises questions about prevailing assumptions in information behavior research.

Michael Olsson, PhD, is a senior lecturer at the School of Communication at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. He is an active researcher in the field of information behavior/information practices research, with a particular interest in information/knowledge sharing through in academic, professional and artistic communities. His work is interdisciplinary and has appeared in leading international research journals and conferences in a range of different fields, including information studies, communication and knowledge management. He is strongly associated with the emergence of new discourse analytic and social constructivist approaches to information research, focusing particularly on the social construction of information and knowledge and the inter-relationship of meaning and authority (knowledge/power). Olsson has a strong interest in the relationship between theory, research and professional practice.