Initially, the purpose of this study had been only to explore information behavior of freshly retired scholars from a wide range of Polish university faculties. However, as the research progressed, it appeared that information practices, along with their affective background, described by former faculty members followed an astonishingly salient pattern resembling mourning. Following this path, I adjusted the research goals to provide the answers to the following questions: a) in scholar’s everyday life, is retirement a triggering event likely to provoke an information mourning? and, b) if so, what are the behavioral manifestations and consequences of such an information mourning process? This study pursues four goals: 1) to identify and describe retired scholars’ information behaviors that mightconstitute information mourning; 2) to assess the harmfulness/neutrality of these behaviors for ex faculty members’ wellbeing and, in cases of observed negative impact, reflect on possible remedies; 3) to identify and describe constant and individually variable coping strategies applied by scholars in order to mitigate information losses(see Williamson, 2005; Israeli, 2020); and 4) to interpret the findings in the light of information ecology.
The study consisted of a series of 12 individual in-depth interviews conducted with researchers in the humanities and sciences who had retired from Polish universities within the last 2 years. , . The interviews were treated and processed en bloc as a set of narratives and submitted to discourse analysis using the method of cognitive metaphor mapping. Based on this textual material only, I extracted simple and ramified metaphors and interpreted them following a nomothetic approach without any preconceived assumptions (Massey & Ehrensberger-Dow, 2017; Csatár, 2014). Interviewed scholars tended to consider their retirement from university as a colossal personal loss, often described in terms such as banishment, amputation, and orphancy. The majority of the interviewees felt outcast from their familiar identity-shaping information ecosystem. The scale of experienced loss seems to set off a regular process of mourning with its typical stages of rebellion, anger, resignment, and so forth. Based on key assumptions of information ecology, as theorized inter alia by Fidel, Nardi and O’Day (Fidel, 2012; Nardi & O’Day, 2000) and research findings on information behavior of seniors (Williamson, 2005; Kim et al. 2016), combined with the conceptual framework of information horizons by Diane H. Sonnenwald (2005), information mourning could be defined as morbidly prolonged, harmful disturbance of individual information space caused by a loss of physical and immaterial connections with a larger community. Caught in the spiral of grief, the individual does not have enough agency left to recover without aid. It appears, however, that the affective heaviness of being cut off from the university information ecosystem might by relieved, and coping mechanism enhanced, by putting in place some simple practical remedies. The aim of these remedies should be to restore the sense of belonging and rebuild broken attachments with the academic community and, hence, accelerate readaptation. I will describe these remedies in the paper.
References
- Csatár, P. (2014). Data structure in cognitive metaphor research. Peter Lang Edition.
- Fidel, R. (2012). Human information interaction: An ecological approach to information behavior. Mit Press.
- Israeli, T. (2020). Losing information is like losing an arm: employee reactions to data loss. Behaviour & Information Technology, 39(12), 1297–1307.
- Kim, M. J., et al. (2016). Seniors’ loyalty to social network sites: Effects of social capital and attachment. International Journal of Information Management, 36(6), 1020–1032.
- Massey, G., & Ehrensberger-Dow, M. (2017). Translating conceptual metaphor: The processes of managing interlingual asymmetry. Research in Language, 15(2), 173–189.
- Nardi, B. A., & O’Day, V. (2000). Information ecologies: Using technology with heart. Mit Press.
- Sonnenwald, H. (2005). Information Horizons. In K. Fisher, S. Erdelez, L. McKechnie (Eds.), Theories of Information Behavior (pp.191–197). Information Today.
- Williamson, C. (2005). Ecological theory of human information behavior. In L. McKechnie (Ed.), Theories of information behavior: A researcher’s guide. (pp. 128–132). Information Today.
Paloma Korycińska
Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland
English 
French