The iSchool@UBC, the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, will hold its sixth annual Research Day on March 11, Friday 2016 in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, Golden Jubilee Room. Research Day showcases the contributions of the iSchool students and faculty working at the intersections of archival, information, library, and children’s literature studies.
This year, Research Day will focus broadly on perspectives on providing access to analogue and digital cultural heritage, records and information, considering the many various factors that work to enable and/or constrain access in different contexts, and the potential and challenge of new access environments.
Event Details
When: March 11, Friday 2016 | 11:00am-12:00pm
Where: Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, Golden Jubilee Room (level 4)
The event is free, but please RSVP here. We look forward to welcoming you for a day of engaging and inspiring short talks, conversations, and poster presentations.
Keynote Presentation by Dr. Mark Warren: “The Participedia Project: Using an Open Source Platform to Mobilize Knowledge about Democratic Innovations”
Abstract: The Participedia Project responds to a transformation of democratic governance, one possibly as revolutionary as the development of representative, party-based democracy that evolved out of the universal franchise. The transformation involves hundreds of thousands of new channels of citizen involvement in government, often outside of the more visible politics of electoral representation, and occurring in most countries in the world. Given this rapid and extensive development, we need to know what kinds of processes exist, and we need to know what kinds work best for specific problems and issues, for specific goals, under specific circumstances. We need to map this rapidly developing domain of political institutions. We need to explain why these processes are developing as they are. We need to assess their contributions to democracy and good governance. And we need to transfer this knowledge back into practice. But these needs exceed the capacities of traditionally-organized research teams. The Participedia Project meets this challenge by combining an extensive partnership with new information technologies to create the information base necessary for high quality research and evidence-based practice. At its heart is an open source research platform (www.participedia.net) that enables decentralized, collaborative creation and mobilization of knowledge from thousands of contributors.
Bio: Mark Warren holds the Harold and Dorrie Merilees Chair for the Study of Democracy in the Department of Political Science at UBC. He was the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at UBC, and the co-founder of the Center for Democracy and Civil Society at Georgetown University. A political theorist, Warren is especially interested in democratic innovations, civil society and democratic governance, and political corruption. He is author of Democracy and Association, editor of Democracy and Trust and co-editor of Designing Deliberative Democracy: The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly. He is currently directing the project funded by a SSHRC Partnership Grant entitled Participedia (www.participedia.net), which uses a web-based platform to collect data about democratic innovation and participatory governance around the world.
Questions about Research Day can be directed to: ischool.researchday@ubc.ca
