Trace2008

Trace2008
BibType	ARTICLE
Key	Trace2008
Author(s)	Ciaran B. Trace
Title	Resistance and the underlife: informal written literacies and their relationship to human information behavior
Editor(s)
Tag(s)	EMCA, information behavior, written literacy, informal documents
Publisher
Year	2008
Language
City
Month
Journal	Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Volume	59
Number	10
Pages	1540–1554
URL	Link
DOI	10.1002/asi.20871
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

This article presents findings from a research study (Trace, 2004) that looked at a particular aspect of human information behavior: children's information creation in a classroom setting. In the portion of the study described here, naturalism and ethnomethodology are used as theoretical frameworks to investigate informal documents as an information genre. Although previous studies have considered the role of informal documents within the classroom, little sustained attention has been paid to pre-adolescents, particularly in terms of how they create unofficial or vernacular literacies both to navigate their growing awareness of the formal (albeit sometimes “hidden”) curriculum and, on occasion, to subvert it, positing an alternative economy that itself can be “hidden” via surreptitious use of informal documents. Making explicit the ties that exist between these objects and the worlds in which they are embedded demonstrates that informal documents hold a particular relevance for children within this social context (Garfinkel & Bittner, 1999). Furthermore, this article demonstrates that an ethnomethodologically informed viewpoint of information creation brings a level of dignity and determination to an individual's human information behavior, allowing us to appreciate the human ability to recontextualize or reenvisage sanctioned or official information genres to meet our own needs and purposes.

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