Well, here’s an empirical endeavor (studying the keyword choices of participants in a workshop at the 2018 iSchool conference and of iSchool directors) that I wouldn’t have thought of, using Raymond Williams’ cultural keyword analytics and applying Arthur Frank’s notion of “socio-narratology” to keywords as “stories.” Unsurprisingly, there was no consensus in the various participants’ choices regarding such loaded keywords as “information” (since LIS is a very big tent these days, with so many poles being staked at different points that the ‘polarization’ of the field is becoming more and more apparent), but my own experiences wirh what they term “the generative tensions of keywords” in the field (and, indeed, in other fields) certainly do agree with their findings:
“We did not find a singular definitive story of information science scholars’ experiences with keywords. Rather we identify tensions surrounding common and contested understandings of discipline, canon and information, engaging the complexity of interdisciplinary, international, intellectual and moral claims of the field. This research offers insight into the experiential factors that shape scholars’ engagement with keywords and the tensions they can create.
A wealth of bibliometric analyses of keywords focuses on finding the “right” words to describe the scholarship you seek or the work you want others to discover. However, this study offers information researchers a novel approach, creating space to acknowledge the generative tensions of keywords, beyond the extractive logic of search and retrieval.”
The paper can be found at:
Tulloch, B.J., Kaczmarek, M., Shankar, S. and Nathan, L.P. (2024), “When words are key: negotiating meaning in information research”, Journal of Documentation, Vol. 80 No. 7, pp. 187-205. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2023-0103
