Many of the discussions at this year's edition of the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology CAA 2016 conference held earlier this week in Oslo were directly or somewhat less directly related to anxieties (and occasional optimism) about the impact of various types of technologies (and social arrangements related to technologies) on archaeological (information) work and practices.

Last week, one of the big issues in the Finnish social media landscape was Jenny Lehtinen's piece on the gender inequalities of metawork (fi. metatyö). It tends to be women, in families the mom, who tends to be the one who does most of the coordination, checking of schedules and finding out details for everything that needs to be done. From the perspective of an information researcher, an interesting aspect of metawork is that much of the so called metawork is actually information work.

I recently received an invitation to participate in a survey on attitudes on the societal relevance and utility of research conducted by a somewhat well-known Swedish consultancy Demoskop. It is obvious that research without relevance whatsoever is total waste of time but the survey is an excellent example of the difficulty and shear impossibility of asking "general" questions about this topic. The survey will undoubtedly will produce useful results for those who have paid for it.

People hate complex information systems for a good reason. Why on earth anyone should use a really annoying and difficult to grasp library catalogues when you have learned to appreciate the simplicity of the Google interface.

Uppsala University is an international research university focused on the development of science and education. Our most important assets are all the individuals who with their curiosity and their dedication makes Uppsala University one of Sweden’s most exciting work places. Uppsala University has 41.000 students, 6,500 employees and a turnover of SEK 5,900 million.

I have been planning for some time to participate  in the Organisational learning, knowledge and capabilities (OLKC) conference and finally managed to do it in the 2015 edition of the event organised at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy.

The Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conference was held this year  in Siena. Conference had gathered approximately 500 delegates and a very impressive number of papers, posters and roundtables. The book of abstracts was massive and reminded of proceedings volumes of the same conference from ten years ago.

The new edited volume "Perspectives to Archaeological Information in the Digital Society" of the ARKDIS research project that explores the challenges of archaeological information work and research in the contemporary digital society is out both in print and as an open access edition online.

I am right now heading home from the International Conference on Knowledge Management (ICKM) 2014 conference held this year in Antalya, Turkey. The conference offered an interesting mix of a bit more practical insights and academic work on IKM. This year's even was spiced with a little extra talk about research data as the event was colocated with Information Management in the Changing World (IMCW) conference.