ACM CHIIR 2025 tutorial

Transdisciplinarity for human information interaction and retrieval: Strategies for collaborating across research disciplines to foster societal impact

This tutorial is part of the program for the 2025 ACM SIGIR Conference being held at RMIT University, 24-27 March, 2025.

This half-day tutorial will be an interactive session exploring what it takes to conduct transdisciplinary research. The session will provide guidance for participants intending to conduct research exploring human-focused technology innovations, with a focus on the challenges and benefits of partnering with academics across paradigms, alongside and industry, community, and government stakeholders. The session will explore the pitfalls and caveats that many researchers (e.g., ecologists, climate scientists, industrial designers) encounter when they are interested in research problems addressing the need for human behaviour change but have not received formal training in social research methodologies. The session will discuss approaches used in social sciences and humanities research (e.g., qualitative inquiry) and provide guidance on designing information interaction and retrieval projects that sit across both computing-focused and humanities/social sciences paradigms. It will provide hands-on experience working with a published, transdisciplinary framework that can be adopted by research teams to guide mixed paradigm research planning and implementation, for studies intended to lead to societal impact outcomes. 

Context

Researchers are increasingly encouraged to undertake collaborative research that stretches beyond their home discipline, and engages community, industry, and government stakeholders.  This transdisciplinary research approach explores complex societal challenges, requiring researchers to navigate knowledge and organizational boundaries, including how best to integrate qualitative, quantitative, experimental, and textual methodologies. Transdisciplinary researchers must also engage effectively with external stakeholders, who bring a wealth of professional expertise to study designs and implementation, but typically lack formal research training and are unfamiliar with many research processes. This tutorial will explore how researchers in human information interaction and retrieval can work effectively across transdisciplinary boundaries.

A key challenge in transdisciplinary work is that researchers often start by designing projects within their own, individual paradigms, without the training or expertise needed to effectively integrate across other paradigmatic approaches. This imposes limitations on the design from the beginning, when research problems and methodologies are first being selected, if interdisciplinary colleagues and/or external partners are not involved at the outset. Practical considerations in working with external partners must also be managed within these complex designs, across all phases of the research lifecycle, so researchers have a clear understanding of all partners’ needs. This tutorial introduces human information interaction and retrieval researchers to the powerful insights that can be gained by working effectively across research paradigms, including involving qualitative social scientists and humanities scholars in human-focused research design. The session also examines how to navigate these research designs with external partners, particularly those with limited research experience. 

Tutorial Overview

This tutorial will address common challenges outlined in the literature to provide participants with guidance on developing effective transdisciplinary teams. The tutorial draws on Professor Given’s extensive experience engaging in and publishing about transdisciplinary research practices, as well as her expertise in human-focused technology design and adoption, working across multiple disciplines and industry sectors. The tutorial will be tailored to the needs of human information interaction and retrieval scholars, focusing on strategies for building partnerships with qualitative researchers in social sciences and humanities disciplines. The session will explore the powerful insights qualitative inquiry offers human-focused investigations, whether these engage individual end-users of systems, or communities and organisations adopting new technologies, to foster large-scale societal impact. Participants will have opportunities to discuss the practicalities involved in transdisciplinary research (e.g., managing ethics review, handling participants’ data, translating research outcomes to inform policy change) depending on their interests and past experiences. 

The session will provide guidance for researchers designing research involving mixed paradigm approaches through hands-on application of a peer-reviewed framework for transdisciplinary research [6]. The framework addresses many of the pitfalls and caveats that researchers encounter when embarking on research designs involving human research participants. The session will explore the benefits of mixing paradigms for fostering productive collaborations across methodological and disciplinary boundaries, such as information retrieval and human information behaviour. The tutorial will provide research teams with structured guidance on how to approach some of society’s most challenging problems from new perspectives, incorporating the views and knowledge of a broad range of community members.

The expected learning outcomes from the tutorial are to:

• Understand transdisciplinary research design, including working across paradigms and with diverse teams

• Understand how paradigms shape research designs and influence research outcomes

• Identify benefits of mixed paradigm approaches, particularly for studies investigating human information behaviour (e.g., adoption of new technology tools)

• Address challenges of transdisciplinary research by applying a mixed paradigm planning framework

• Acquire knowledge and tools to support development of transdisciplinary teams and to work across paradigms.

About the presenters

Professor Lisa M. Given, FASSA, RMIT University lisa.given2@rmit.edu.au https://lisagiven.com  

Professor Lisa M. Given, PhD, FASSA, is Director, Social Change Enabling Impact Platform, Director of the Centre for Human-AI Information Environments, and Professor of Information Sciences at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia). A former President of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Prof Given is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Her interdisciplinary research in human information behaviour brings a critical, social research lens to studies of technology use and user-focused design, including people’s experiences of artificial intelligence. Her studies embed social change, focusing on diverse settings and populations, including in healthcare, workplaces, schools, and everyday life. She holds numerous grants from the Australian Research Council, Canadian Institutes for Health Research, and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, working with university and community partners across disciplines. She is lead author of Looking for Information: Examining Research on How People Engage with Information (2023), author of 100 Questions (and Answers) about Qualitative Research (2016), and editor of The Sage Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods (2008). Follow her on Twitter/X @lisagiven and at https://lisagiven.com/  

Joann Cattlin, MLIS, RMIT University joann.cattlin2@rmit.edu.au  , https://www.joannkcattlin.com/   

Joann Cattlin is Associate Research Fellow within the Social Change Enabling Impact Platform and a PhD Candidate at RMIT University. Her PhD research explores the experiences and information behaviours of academic and professional staff undertaking impact work to better understand how universities can support this work. She also researches academic culture, interdisciplinary teams investigating cultural data collections, and trans disciplinarity practices. Her research is informed by her experiences working in universities for 20 years as a librarian and in blended professional/academic roles managing research projects and partnerships.