Ooo, interesting, no? // Matt ----- Forwarded message ----- From: "Michael Buckland" <buckland(a)berkeley.edu> To: <friday(a)ischool.berkeley.edu>du>, "I School Announcement" <i-announce(a)ischool.berkeley.edu> Subject: [friday@ischool] Friday Afternoon Seminar: Nov 1: Elisa Oreglia: ICT in rural China. Date: Wed, Oct 30, 2013 11:17 FRIDAY AFTERNOON SEMINAR ON INFORMATION ACCESS. South Hall 107, Fridays 3-5 pm. http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-ia/f13/schedule.html Open to the public. Everyone interested is welcome! Friday, Nov 1: Elisa OREGLIA: Dissertation Talk: From Farm to Farmville: Circulation, Adoption, and Use of ICT between Urban and Rural China. In the mid-2000s, China began a set of policies to "informatize" the countryside, i.e. to bring Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to rural residents in order to improve their economic conditions. These policies posit the countryside as a world of "less", compared to urban areas, and portray people who are at the margins of China's modernization (migrant workers, rural residents, older people, and farmers) as in need of ICT to access more and better information, and, as a consequence, more and better opportunities. In contrast to this widespread view of marginalized users as passive recipients of technologies, I look at the diffusion and appropriation of ICT such as mobile phones and computers among rural residents and migrant workers in their own terms: not as foils for elite views of why they would/should go online, but rather as people who discover the opportunities offered by ICT that are of interest to them, and try to use these opportunities as best as they can. By retracing the paths through which ICT travel in urban and rural China and the social relations that are maintained, renewed, and reinvented along the way, I show how people at the margins "invent" themselves as users, find a connection between their lives and technology, and participate from afar to China's rapid modernization. A presentation of this work was was named the best graduate student paper on China and inner Asia at the 2013 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies by the AAS' China and Inner Asia Council. Elisa Oreglia is completing her PhD in the School of Information. More at http://ercolino.eu/eo/. FORTHCOMING Friday, Nov 8: Niels W. LUND, Univ. of Tromso, Norway: Which discipline does Document Theory belong to? Wrapping up 25 years of work in progress. In the design of information services (libraries, archives, data sets, websites, etc.), you deal with documents in relation to their material nature (paper, software, hardware etc. etc.), their social status (legal issues with access etc., impact), and their mental/cognitive aspects (How are they been understood?). But in the world of higher education, you still have a relatively sharp division between humanities, social sciences, and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), so what can you do when you feel you belong to all three academic worlds? Niels Windfeld Lund will soon retire as Professor, University of Tromso, Norway, where he was the founding director of the program in Documentation Studies. He has twice been a visiting scholar here. More at Bio card. Friday, Nov 15: Nick MERRILL: Alternative Visions of Internet Connectivity. Clifford LYNCH: The Failure of Stewardship Organizations. (Continued). Friday, Nov 22: Michael BUCKLAND: Support for scholarly editing. Friday, Nov 29: Thanksgiving: No seminar meeting. Friday, Dec 6: Nick MERRILL: Alternative Visions of Internet Connectivity. Karen SMITH-YOSHIMURA: Registering Researchers in Authority Files. -- Michael Buckland, School of Information, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-4600 (510) 642 3159 buckland(a)ischool.berkeley.edu http://www.berkeley.edu/~buckland Co-Director, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative