Rhiannon Bettivia presentation

Rhiannon Bettivia, assistant professor of library and information science at Simmons University, will present "More Provenance, More Problems: Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Stories of Things."

Abstract: Provenance is the story of things: how they have come to be, what they could have been, what they will be. Provenance is a fairly ubiquitous term in the information professions. The variety of fields and sub-disciplines that engage in provenance work contribute to the varied (and at variance) definitions for the term: some see it as looking backward on origins and ownership, while others look forward to workflows, recipes, and replicability. One theme that bridges these differences is that provenance work is often labor-intensive and simultaneously unsatisfying. This talk explores the temporal complexity of provenance and the need for provenance stories that are adequately persuasive in context, examining both facets from transdisciplinary perspectives.

Bettivia’s research blends information science with media, heritage, and cultural studies. She examines how political and governance concerns are built into technological infrastructures with a focus on provenance metadata, digital cultural heritage, video games, semantic web platforms, and e-learning. Her grant work includes projects on video game preservation and digital forensics education. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Digital Curation, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Journal of Qualitative Inquiry, Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, and Journal of Documentation. Bettivia is the co-author of Documenting the Future: Navigating Provenance Metadata Standards (Springer).

Contact Christine Hopper for online participation information.