INLS 302
Research Issues and Questions
Project: What Do You Mean By "Culture"? A review of the use of the term in IS literature
What do information scientists mean when they talk about culture? I've compiled a list of roughly 2000 articles from the information science literature with the term "culture" or some variant (cultural, multicultural, etc.) in the title. I'm planning to do two things with this information:
1. Perform statistical analyses (textual concordance and collocations) on the article titles to see which words are most commonly associated with "culture". From these words, I'm hoping primary senses and literature trends will emerge. For example, it's becoming apparent that "diversity" and "heritage" are terms term that frequently appear with "culture."
2. Analyze a sample (roughly 10%) of the articles to see what "cultural" studies are about. I plan to create a typology by looking at several variables: the definition of culture used, population(s) studied, setting, methodology, analytical methods, etc.
This is a pilot project for what may be a larger and (I hope) publishable paper at some later point. In a larger study, I'd hope to analyze not just the occurrence of term collocations and their contexts, but changes over time and by journal.
Posted on March 22, 2002 at 01:29 PM
This sounds really cool. Did you really do this?
Says Jason
19 Oct 2002 at 10:12 PM
Yeah, I did, but it wasn't as cool or informative as I hoped it would be. Most articles didn't define culture or the term pair (e.g., cultural diversity) they were using. I was only looking at information and library science literature, as opposed to other fields that claim to directly study culture like anthropology. But basically "culture" seems to be more a buzzword than a theoretical, rigorously studied construct in ILS.
Says Xy
20 Oct 2002 at 11:52 AM
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