Information Organization Lab will give students the opportunity to explore concepts related to information organization and retrieval in a hands-on fashion and develop competency with technical tools they can use in other projects at the School of Information.

These tools will include: Javascript, JQuery, Greasemonkey, Python, XML, and version control using Subversion.

Students will complete five projects during the course of the semester: at least one on their own and at least one in a group. Projects will cover topics including: controlled vocabularies, social classification, microformats, and information retrieval.


Date Topics Complete By Class
September 1, 2009 Course Introduction -
September 8, 2009 Javascript, Greasemonkey, and jQuery Walk-through of stand-alone Trailmaker
September 15, 2009 Greasemonkey & AJAX; Rapid prototyping with jQuery; Project 1 Your first Greasemonkey script
September 22, 2009 Demos of Project 1; Controlled vocabularies Project 1: Delicious Trailmaker
September 29, 2009 Version control using Subversion; RDF and other controlled vocabularies Ideas and teams for Project 2
October 6, 2009 Demos of Project 2; Introduction to Microformats/Semantic Web and Google App Engine Project 2: Controlled vocabularies
October 13, 2009 More Google App Engine and the Semantic Web Readings from Programming the Semantic Web
October 20, 2009 Processing & Processing.js -
October 27, 2009 Demos of Project 3; Social classifications; Visualization libraries Project 3: Microformats
November 3, 2009 Comparing visualizations; Flickr API -
November 10, 2009 Demos of Project 4; Introduction to information retrieval: corpora Project 4: Social classification tools
November 17, 2009 More information retrieval; Functional programming techniques -
November 24, 2009 Interfaces for information retrieval -
December 1, 2009 Update on Project 5 Progress and questions on Project 5
December 10, 2009 Tentative date for presentations to the iSchool community Project 5: Information retrieval