Information Seeking as Socially Situated Activity

Situated action in the development of activity

After briefly attempting to describe situated action and distributed cognition, we examine their contributions from the point of view of activity theories and more specifically based on the relations between the functioning and development of activity. We argue that situated action identifies a limit in cognitive psychology in seeking to bring the subject back into the situation and in reintegr...

Situated Awareness for Information Seeking

In this paper, we present an overview of our current research activity, which provides enabling technology to promote loosely coupled information-seeking activities. The lightweight mechanisms constructed facilitate situated awareness of the presence of other users at digital information resources. The mechanisms seek to augment existing infrastructures and facilities to allow users to co-ordin...

Whistleblowing in the Wind Towards a Socially Situated Research Agenda: A Response to Recent Commentaries

Multilingual Information Access

This article describes the process by which systems can be designed to help users find content in a language that may be different from the language of their query. The discussion of the relatively narrowly construed technical issues that are often referred to as Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) is situated in the context of important related issues such as information seeking behavi...

The Reality of Arabic Fiction Translation into English: A Sociological Approach

English translations of texts associated with Arabic fiction remain largely unexplored from a sociological perspective. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, this paper aims to examine the genesis of Arabic fiction translation into English as a socially situated activity. Works of Arabic fiction emerged in English translation in the early twentieth century. Since then, this intellectual field...