Towards a vernacular aesthetics of liking for information studies
| Date | 02 March 2023 |
| Pages | 1220-1235 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2022-0175 |
| Published date | 02 March 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Cheryl Klimaszewski |
Towards a vernacular aesthetics
of liking for information studies
Cheryl Klimaszewski
School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University,
New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA
Abstract
Purpose–Personal museums provide the conceptual catalyst for liking as a research approach and inclusivity
around “idiosyncratic”knowledges within information research. An adapted research paper format echoes the
approach of personal museums: as a commentary on the limits of institutional shaping for the field.
Design/methodology/approach –Personalmuseums are conceptualized as spacesof knowing in-formation,
ontologicalopeningsthat are literallyand figurativelyentered into, that makea difference to humanand material
ways of knowing. Karen Barad’s agential r ealism and Sianne Ngai’s vernacular aesthetic categories provide the
theoretical le nses through which t he researcher’s 2018 visit to onepersonal museum is revisited.
Findings –An ethnographic account of the author’s visit to the Communist Consumer Museum (CCM) in
Timis
¸oara, Romania shows how its improvisational, friendly and intimate atmosphere exposes it as a space of
entanglements in a quantum sense, emphasizing the inseparability of human and material realms and how
knowledges are always in-formation. Such entanglements create atmospheres generative of different ways of
thinking about information and knowledge.
Originality/value –Humanexpressionsof liking reveal materialagenciesas ways of knowing andinformation
beyond therealm of human experienceand meaning. A vernacularaesthetics of likingis presented as a way to
resist the marginalizing tendencies of knowledges classified as unconventional, idiosyncratic or eccentric. This
approachis one way ofresisting the assumptionsof channelthinking thatoften shape howinformation isstudied.
Keywords Museums, Personal museums, Agential realism, Vernacular aesthetic categories, Atmospheres for
knowing, Entanglements, Emergence, Inclusivity, Ontological openings, Metaphor theory
Paper type Conceptual paper
What I like is self-evident to me. As the saying goes, I know it when I see it. Yet, I may not
always feel comfortable expressing my likes, especially when they differ from that which
I feel I should like, encouraged (if not demanded) by my various sociocultural milieus. As a
student in the visual arts, for instance, it was never enough to simply say that I liked an
artwork. Formalized critique required me to justify this statement, a process mediated by
the codified, elite Western artworld aesthetics that structured my studio art program in the
early 1990s. More recently, I have been researching people who make their own museums
(Klimaszewski, 2016,2018). Situating these informal, non-institutional museums within
information studies, I similarly learned to justify my academic existence, rooting through
theories and methods grounded in the positivism and reductionism of science. These were
places I loved because of how they exposed unique perspectives through their sensory
richness, creating unexpected experiences for me and others (Candlin, 2016;Mihalache,
2009;Moncunill-Pi~
nas, 2015,2017;Taimre, 2013). Yet, I’ve been troubled by the tensions
I encountered theorizing personal museums through institutional thinking that
anthropologist Mary Douglas describes as: “...Telling one another what right thinking
isandpassingblameonwrongthinking.Thisisindeedhowwebuildtheinstitutions,
squeezing each other’s ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer
JD
79,5
1220
The author wishes to thank James M. Nyce for our discussions around the limitations of the channel
metaphor. She also thanks the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. Research was
supported in part through Dissertation Support and Travel Grants from the Rutgers School of
Communication and Information.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 8 August 2022
Revised 2 February 2023
Accepted 5 February 2023
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 79 No. 5, 2023
pp. 1220-1235
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-08-2022-0175
numbers of independent assent”(1986, p. 91). Accepting the common shapes of the
academy often meant that the ideas I liked the most felt squeezed out, at best sidelined as
“limitations of the current study.”
Ethnologist Irina Nicolau (https://www.irinanicolau.online) expresses this problem in a
slightly different way, where our research studies:
[are] carried out without curiosity and wonder. Prudishness and academic rigour keep us from
expressing our feelings. I am supposed to think about the museum, write about the museum, or even
do my museum work, without letting anyone know how much I love it. (1994/2018, p. 73)
Academic prudishness required a contortion of my love of these nonconventional museums
into, for instance, formalized discussions of their “epistemic implications”. Perhaps even
worse, I’ve pointed out how such vernacular museums foreground their maker’s
“idiosyncratic”knowledge worlds. Like Nicolau, I have done all this while muting how
love of subject and my own idiosyncrasies are inevitably entwined with my research
processes. Further, relegating any knowledge to the realm of idiosyncrasy seems problematic
in a time when institutional motion is supposedly towards diversity, equity and inclusion.
Here, personal museums provide the conceptual catalyst for liking as a research approach
and inclusivity of “idiosyncratic”knowledges in information research. The paper’sformat sits
betweenconceptual andresearch, echoingthe approach of personalmuseums: as a commentary
on established institutionalforms. I begin by considering theeffects of channelthinking tendsto
conceptualize information as linear and pragmatic, a means of figuring things out. I offer a
vernacular aesthetics of liking, grounded in agential realism (Barad, 1998,2003,2007)and
vernacular aesthetic categories (Ngai, 2010,2015), as a way to resist the shaping effects of the
channel.My approach conceptualizes personal museumsas an ontological openings, spaceswe
can literally and figuratively enter into, that reveal the inseparability of material and human
ways of knowing. I engage thisapproach in an ethnographic essay recounting my visit to the
CommunistConsumer Museum(CCM) in Timis
¸oara, Romania and my conversation with one of
its creators. This account exposes the personal museum as a space of entanglements in a
quantum sense. By this I meanto emphasize the inseparability of human and materialrealms
where liking expresses how knowledges are always in-formation. My story of one personal
museumexposes differentways of thinking aboutwhat informationand knowledge are, as well
as where, why and how they happen. In conclusion, I consider how this liking-based research
approach might offer a way toresist the marginalizing tendencies of knowledgesclassified as
unconventional, idiosyncratic or eccentric in information studies.
The force of channel thinking
In the 1950s, information science supplanted documentation (Buckland and Liu, 1995)asthe
preferredterm for the disciplinestudying evidentiaryforms, primarily booksand other printed
materials.This was in part a resultof and response to the information explosion usheredin by
concurrent technological developments. This turn towards science is embedded in the field’s
traditional metaphors and models (visual metaphors). Shannon and Weaver’s (1949)
mathematical theory of communication, for instance, is foundational to the field. Widely
adoptedinourunderstandingofthewayinformation“moves,”the Shannon-Weaver model
pictures information as a square (implying something discrete, uniform and containable)
traveling from sender to a receiver along a channel, represented by a straight line. Successful
information outcomes of Shannon and Weaver’s (1949) channel, as they state, are measurable
and binary: “But with any reasonably broad definition of conduct, it is clear that communication
either affects conduct or is without any discernible or probable effect at all”(p. 4).
RonaldDay (2000) has noted the effects of channel thinking. Day (2000) employs the conduit
metaphor to describe how this simplified understanding of communication often suggests an
Vernacular
aesthetics of
liking
1221
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