• Hello. I'm a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Health, Arts, and Design at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. My supervisors are Professor Lisa Given and Dr. Kim Thompson. I also work as a librarian at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

       

      This page contains highlights. For more complete information, please see my CV.

       

      I study people's experiences with information in everyday life. I'm intrigued by how our bodies play a part in our information experiences. In my thesis research, I work with people to create video and other forms of data capturing everyday food activities and the information practices within them.

       

      At the upcoming Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology in Vancouver, I'll be:

      • Presenting my thesis work in the Student Award-Winning Papers session 
      • Discussing my video data collection setup in a visual presentation, "Going GoPro: integrating a wearable camera into qualitative information research"
      • Speaking with Melissa Ocepek, Jenna Hartel, Julia Bullard, Ludi Price, and Eric Forcier on our panel, "Fandom, Food, and Folksonomies: The Methodological Realities of Studying Fun Life-Contexts"

      I'd be happy to hear from you: spolkinghorne@swin.edu.au

    • Publications

       

        New (forthcoming) publications include:

        • "Treading Water: Results from the Longitudinal Study of Information Literacy Instruction in Canadian Academic Libraries, 1995-2017," in the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, 42 (1/2). With Heidi Julien.

        • "The 'user turn' in practice: Information behaviour researchers’ constructions of information users," in Information Research. With Heidi Julien, Lynne (E.F.) McKechnie, and Roger Chabot.

      • Presentations

         

          Recent presentations include:

          • Bodies of knowledge: what studying embodiment can teach us about teaching (2018, March). Keynote, Ashton Lecture Series, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
          • Connecting information behaviour with the senses. (2017, November). Guest lecture for the course Information Users and Uses at the University at Buffalo.
          • Interviews that attend to emplacement: The "walk-through"
            method.             (2017, May). Winner, Best Overall Paper, at the 45th Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science in Toronto. With Lisa M. Given and Lauren Carlson.

        • Practice

           

            The core of my work as a librarian is managing several aspects of monograph collections at the University of Alberta, including ebooks, approval plans, demand-driven acquisition, and assessment.

             

            Before becoming a collections librarian, I worked as a public services librarian for more than a decade. In this time, I helped people find and use information, manage research data, and work through processes such as making their publications openly available.

          • Service

             

              Recent service commitments include:

            • Awards

               

                Recent awards include:

                • New Leader Award, Association for Information Science and Technology (2018)
                • Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Award, Association for Information Science and Technology (2018)
                • Best Overall Paper, Canadian Association for Information Science (with Lisa Given and Lauren Carlson) (2017)

              • Curriculum Vitae

                Please feel free to view or download the complete chronicle.

              This work is licensed under a

              Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

               

               

              Banner image by Kelly Tindall.