Bennett and Peterson - Review

[nniiicc]

Bennett and Peterson Paper

Relevance to workshop (1-5): Potential for JASIST submission (1-5): Decision (Accept, Reject, Lightning talk):

Feedback to authors:

[kfenlon]

The paper considers the history of an organization dedicated to conceptual modeling: the DCMI. While such histories may be essential to understanding and critiquing conceptual models, this paper focuses mainly on the organization as its research object, rather than the organization's impact on the conceptual model, which reduces its fit in the workshop/JASIST special issue. The paper is interesting and worth discussing. There are some methodological concerns that need addressing before the paper will be ready for a JASIS&T submission (the authors acknowledge the methodological novelty and the need for "careful consideration" in deploying the method). The paper needs to do more to define, contextualize, and clarify the proposed methodological contribution: how exactly the authors are applying value-sensitive design, as a forward-looking method for designing technologies, toward the retrospective, historical analysis of an organization. In addition, the authors should clarify how this approach differs from or relates to other historical and analytic methods. Specific methodological questions include: What do the authors mean when they say they "conducted VSD methods"—does this simply mean that they conducted a content analysis of documents, but limited codes to the themes representing the values they identified? Where did the values come from, and how were they selected from among other potential values? How do values differ from themes as a way of structuring document analysis? In addition, the authors seem to be deploying a mix of qualitative and quantitative analysis, and it would helpful to have this explained in the methods section. Overall, this is a thought-provoking approach and subject, and I would be especially interested to hear more about how the authors think the organizational history has affected the development of the conceptual model.

[akthom]

Decision (Accept, Reject, Lightning talk): accept

Feedback to authors: I think this is a highly relevant topic - I'm intrigued by the use of VSD as a method to study the development of a metadata standard, and it seems a potentially fruitful method in other contexts -- so for that reason alone, I'd like to hear more about this work (and it would be worth talking through whether that might be a unique contribution the paper could make). My only hesitance thinking this might be a JASIST paper is because I'm not sure that JASIST often publishes that kind of study, but I'm happy to push them to do so. Given the centrality of Dublin Core to so many LIS infrastructures, an analysis of the values embedded in that model is certainly warranted!