(I’m still sorting through my notes for the conference, next post will be some highlights, this one is more of a reflection.)

The theme of this conference drew out a lot of ideas that otherwise might not have been shared, and it certainly helped me recognize emerging areas of research that is inevitably going to intersect with information science. It helped tremendously to engage, if only for a few days, in the ethnomusicological discourse. There were many ways of thinking and talking that I haven’t done in a while, and some of it came back to me quickly, while others felt a little rusty. I began the conference as a stranger, as an outsider. By the end of it, I felt that I was surrounded by friendly faces, having established what Wenger might call ‘legitimate peripheral participation’.

Just as I found Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle helpful in conceptualizing my life trajectories as I was graduating high school (the more precise the location of an atom is measure, the less precise the momentum and direction can be measured, and vise versa), it has been replaced by Wenger’s theories about community and individual identity vis-à-vis participation. While it is clear that I am capable of engaging and participating in many established communities (information science, ethnomusicology, design thinking, etc.), it has also become clear that I have to be careful in defining my own trajectories, instead of being drawn into a pre-established and well trodden path (for at least a day I considered seriously what it would take for me to study in Oxford). They are very important in what I ultimate want to do, but they are the means, not the end, and therefore a dependent variable. Now, how to define ‘the end’.