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Rating: 
Summary: Towards a methodology of information seeking and use
Review: The book is a textbook designed for college students. It contains many exercises and there are many text examples in the book, which are fine given its purpose. This review is written from the perspective of library and information science (LIS), which is about the utilization of information sources. In the new electronic environment the traditional role of LIS is weakened, and many find that one way of survival for libraries is to teach information seeking and use. That is one reason I find this book important also for the LIS profession: It is basically about how writers should seek and use information. -----The book has important new ways of looking at the problem of information seeking. Firstly, it recognizes that different disciplines or domains are not identical but put different demands to users. It is in a sense non-reductionistic. This does not imply that it cannot teach student something general about how to write, to read and to use information sources. It implies, however, that the different nature of different kinds of writing in different disciplines is taken into account. Secondly, it recognizes the social character of writing and seeking information. Thirdly, it emphasizes the reciprocal nature of writing and reading (and using information). When you read, you have to seek information, and you are confronted with different views, which forces you to consider your own position. In this process, the reader is converted to a writer, whether or not he writes or publishes his own ideas. I like this view about the active role of the reader, and I like the remark on p. 23: "The cure for real boredom is to find a more advanced book on the subject; the only cure for pseudo-boredom is to become fully and personally involved in the book already in front of you". -----The book is informed by an advanced theoretical knowledge of scholarly research, documents and their composition. Because it is a textbook for college students such knowledge is only communicated indirectly. For example, chapter 6 is about "Recognizing the many voices in a text". The practical advises given are of course based on textual theory (Bakhtin and Kristeva), but this is not explicated. -----Chapter 8 is titled "Evaluating the book as a whole: The book review", and the first heading is "books as tools". Although I like this approach very much it is not clearly pointed out that knowledge is always formed by some epistemological assumptions, and that this is important when evaluating it and when one is going to find one's own opinion on an issue. Bazerman has written about this (e.g., 1988). The reason that this is not addressed in the present book must be that it is too difficult for the target group of the book to handle (although chapter 12 "Creating Knowledge" contains some important comments on such issues). -----In chapter 14 ("Reading and Writing About Events as They Happen: Observation in Social and Natural Sciences" there is (p. 444-445) a remark on the language of the behavioral sciences: ". . . you will not be able to maintain entirely value- and judgment free language . . . Some would even argue that the use of behavioral and operational language implies a mechanistic view of humans as both subjects and researchers and that a more human-centered view requires a different kind of language . . . Objectivity can remain an ideal goal". In my view the objectivity of the behaviorist language is NOT something that should be recommended as an ideal. It is not just a mechanical view of humans, it is pseudo-objective, in the way that it hides the researchers subjective interpretation behind a seemingly objective language. This has been criticized strongly. Chomsky (1959) demonstrated the pseudo-nature of the behaviorist language. More recently Danziger (1997) has developed critics of the language of psychology. Of course I can see the dilemma Bazerman is facing when writing textbooks about writing for college students. One has to teach them how the literature is actually written, and at the same time try to criticize the way main-stream publications are designed. -----In chapter 9 the first heading is "Knowledge is Messy". I agree, but maybe a little more specification of why knowledge is often messy should be included, even it would imply a critical analyses of the "publish or perish" academic culture. In this chapter is also a section about "Framing a Subject", where one important advice is to find a subject in which there is enough, but not too much source material. I feel that a more specific description of kinds of problems in framing subjects for different kinds and levels of education, based on the experience of highly qualified teachers, would be extremely useful in the books like this. -----I find the book very recommendable. Teaching writing is an important subject. I also found the book useful in my search for new kinds of inspiration for the LIS community. There are many problems regarding searching and using literature that are not addressed in this book. What kind of advises can teachers and librarians give students in framing subjects, seeking and using subject literature? This book takes some steps in providing answer to this question. For example, there are implicit principles of historical source criticism built into the book. But many other questions are not dealt with. To what degree are information sources individual, so that only specific (idiographical) knowledge can be applied? In all kinds of research, the use of literature is extremely important. However, in most methodologies the laboratory is the described as the central source of information. Is it possible to develop a (social) epistemology in which the library is treated as a core source of information? Bazerman, C. (1988). Shaping written knowledge. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Chomsky, N. (1959). Review of B. F. Skinner: Verbal behavior (1957). Language, 35(1), 25-58. Danziger, K. (1997). Naming the Mind. How Psychology Found its Language. London: SAGE Publications.
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