Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
When Tony began teaching in1994 computer scientists had not yet appropriated the term, and Tony’s title was derived from Donna Haraway’s definition:
‘Informatics encompasses the technologies of information and communication as well as the biological, social, linguistic and cultural changes that initiate, accompany and complicate their development.’
In the early 1990s the world wide web was in its infancy, online browsing was done using something called Mosaic, and a small start-up company called Amazon began selling books online. Later in the decade Steve Jobs returned to Apple, and Google appeared, eventually ousting precursors such as Yahoo, Altavista and Lycos.
In his lecture Tony will reflect on some of these technologies and changes, offering some insights gleaned from 30 years of thinking informatically.
Professor Bryant has written extensively on qualitative research methods, being Senior Editor of The SAGE Handbook of Grounded Theory (2007) and The SAGE Handbook of Current Developments in Grounded Theory (2019); both co-edited with Kathy Charmaz. Also Grounded Theory and Grounded Theorizing (Oxford, 2017), The Varieties of Grounded Theory (SAGE, 2019), and ‘Continual Permutations of Misunderstanding: The Curious Incidents of the Grounded Theory Method’, Qualitative Inquiry, May, 2020.
In 2020 he was one of the founding members of The Coalition for Grounded Theory, a small group of grounded theory experts who organized World Grounded Theory Day – 12-MARCH-2021 – an international webinar incorporating presentations covering the key varieties of grounded theory. A conference on 'Grounded Theory Future' is now planned for September 2024. Other recent writings include Digital and Other Virtualities: Renegotiating the Image, co-edited with Griselda Pollock (IB Tauris, 2010); Liquid uncertainty, chaos and complexity: The gig economy and the open source movement, Thesis Eleven, FEB2020; A Conversation between Frank Land and Antony Bryant, Journal of Information Technology, June, 2020 Parts 1 & 2; 'What the Web has Wrought', Informatics 2020, 7(2), 15. As Editor-in-Chief of Informatics, he is leading a Special Topic concerned with AI chatbots.
