Information practices of cartoonists

Malvados Daily Project

Abstract

This article presents the Malvados Daily project, an Instagram page produced as a data-gathering instrument for descriptive research on the information practices of cartoonists. The stages of page development are depicted, whose functionality was: a) to organize and disseminate the researcher's collection of drawings, as well as to promote his/her entrance into the research field; b) to understand the information practices of the cartoonist community; c) to implement interdisciplinarity between Librarian Science and the cartoonist's domain, through the application of conventional and digital documentary organization methods. As result, this work describes a) the technical processes: use of the Dewey Decimal Classification and the Cutter-Sanborn Table – which are documentary languages originally oriented to the printed format in the digital environment; and b) study of user and uses: mapping information practices of virtual community engaged in the page. Finally, this study concludes that Malvados Daily page represents not only an environment for specialized content, since: a) at a theoretical level, it calls information professionals' attention to new information practices, which are quite different from those described by classical information theory; b) at a methodological level, it enables a holistic and contextualized analysis of the informational phenomena; c) at a practical level, it illustrates the necessary interdisciplinarity between Librarian Science and the information social practice of cartoonists, through the constitution of its pre-determined search methods, which, even if they work at a rudimentary level (prototype), instigate future research about this topic.