School of
Information
Previously School of Library & Information Studies
Friday Afternoon Seminar: Summaries.
296a-1 Seminar: Information Access, Fall 2014.
Fridays 3-5. 107 South Hall.
Schedule. Weekly mailing list.
Summaries will be added as they become available.
Aug 29: No seminar meeting.
Sep 5: Clifford LYNCH: Introductions to the Seminar and of participants.
Reconsidering the Challenges of Software Preservation
and Sustainability.
Reconsidering the Challenges of Software Preservation
and Sustainability.
Software preservation has long been recognized as a very
hard problem. However, there has been much less focus than one might like
on the purposes and audiences for software preservation; further, there
has been a certain fascination with particularly difficult or even
pathological cases that has dominated considerations of preservation at scale.
While the connections between software and digital documents of various
types (and the prospective role of standards in making these connections less
crucial) has long been recognized, in recent years the growing focus on the
stewardship and reuse of research data has forced the recognition of potential
critical interdependencies between data and the software to work with it;
here standards do not seem to be as helpful, and other approaches may be key.
Finally, we have a deeper understanding of software lifecycles and the challenges
of software sustainability (which is emerging as an enormous problem) and the
problems that these pose to research communities that depend on specific software;
yet the connections between sustainability and preservation are not well
articulated.
In my talk and the subsequent discussion, my hope is to take
a fresh look at the overall formulation of the challenges involved in both
preservation and sustanability of software, and the connections between
these twin objectives.
Sep 12: Aaron MARCUS, Aaron Marcus and Associates: Mobile Persuasion Design: Combining Information Design with Persuasion Design to Change Behavior.
The mobile Machine projects of Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. (AM+A) will be described. Each combines information design and persuasion design to change people’s behavior. The mobile products employ smart phones, tablets, and/or Web portals. The Green Machine concerns energy conservation and sustainability in order to save energy use. The Health Machine concerns nutrition and exercise to avoid obesity and Type 2 Diabetes. The Money Machine concerns saving/spending money so baby boomers can retire safely. The Story Machine concerns story-sharing among generations of geographically dispersed, asynchronous families. Time permitting, other Machine projects will be described, including the Travel Machine, which seeks, to change business and leisure tourists into culture travelers and the Learning Machine, which seeks to enable students to take advantage of virtual universities and MOOCs on tablets.
Aaron Marcus is President and Principal Designer/Analyst of Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. (AM+A) in Berkeley. He has extensive experience in graphic design and interface design. Three of the projects to be described won design awards from the International Institute of Information Design in Vienna. Reports on this work have been presented at CHI 2012, APCHI 2012, User Friendly 2012, and DUXU 11, 13, and 14. Mr. Marcus is currently at work on a book, Mobile Persuasion Design, about all of these projects. More at http://www.amanda.com/
Sep 19: George OATES, Good, Form & Spectacle:
If You Could Design A Museum From Scratch, What Would It Be Like?
George Oates is a designer in the information gathering
phase of a project to do just that, to make a working model of a museum.
Come and enjoy a speculative design session on what a museum of the
21st Century could be.
George Oates has worked on the web since 1996.
She was the lead designer at Flickr www.flickr.com/ from its inception
until 2008, where
she invented the Flickr Commons flickr.com/commons.
She redesigned the Open Library system openlibrary.org/
at the Internet Archive archive.org/ from scratch, and then
went on to do art direction at Stamen Design stamen.com/. About three months ago,
she left Stamen to start her own thing, a design firm called
Good, Form & Spectacle goodformandspectacle.com/.
The firm's mission is design in service to cultural heritage.
Sep 26: Michael BUCKLAND, Clifford LYNCH & Ryan SHAW: Digital Tools and
Humanities Scholars.
A wide variety of impressive projects demonstrate the
possibilities of applying digital techniques in the humanities, softer
social sciences, and cultural heritage when substantial funding and
technical expertise are available. In parallel, a variety of more of less
complex standards have emerged (e.g. Linked Open Data). But the typical
individual historian, editor, archivist, or curator does not have the
financial or technical resources (technical knowledge or experience, time,
resistance to opaque ‘black box’ options, IT support, and/or money) to
take advantage of the techniques and tools that have been developed,
usually at considerable expense. Even simple tools made available for
free are unlikely to be adopted if they are not smoothly incorporated into
existing work practices and standard office software suites and/or web
browsers. Widespread adoption of new tools is likely only if they are
well-understood, the marginal cost and effort of adoption is very low,
the practical benefits are high enough to motivate use, and stability of
Sep 26: Michael BUCKLAND, Clifford LYNCH & Ryan SHAW: Digital Tools and
Humanities Scholars.
support is assured. Join us for a discussion of these issues. For
background take a look at the editorsnotes.org website and the “Light
and shadows” website metadata.berkeley.edu/emma/.
Ryan B. Shaw, PhD '10, who will join us by skype, is
Assistant Professor, School of Information and Library Science,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is Chief Scientist in the
"Editorial Practices and the Web" project. More at aeshin.org/.
Oct 3: Chan LI & Jacqueline WILSON: California Digital Library: Calculating
Scholarly Journal Value.
The number of scholarly e-journals has grown considerably in
the last ten years, however many academic library budgets have not kept pace.
To cope with this imbalance libraries have been looking for an effective way
to analyze journal quality and use this information to make informed collection
decisions. The California Digital Library (CDL) developed a value-based strategy
to assess journals which is now used as a major part of the University of
California's systemwide e-journal collection planning process. The value-based
process is objective and quantifiable and is based on measures of utility,
quality, and cost effectiveness, with a goal of alignment to UC's user
communities and programmatic needs.
The strategy involves using objective metrics to calculate the
value of scholarly journals and identify titles that make a greater or lesser
contribution to the University's mission of teaching, research, and public
service. A key aspect of this strategy is the use of the CDL Weighted Journal
Value Algorithm to assess multiple vectors of value for each journal title
under review. This methodology compares each UC e-journal title licensed for
systemwide use against other UC-licensed titles within the same subject
category according to a variety of objective value indicators, in order to
arrive at a comparative value for each journal within the UC shared licensing
portfolio. The current analysis covers over 7,600 journals. Individual journal
value metrics can be compiled in order to assess the value of journal publisher
packages and to compare the value of a journal publisher package to other
journal publisher packages.
CDL recently completed an extensive evaluation of the algorithm.
We gathered feedback and recommendations from a broad community including
bibliometric scientists, library school faculty, librarians, economists, and
statisticians in order to validate the algorithm's accuracy and reliability.
For more information see http://www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2012/02/13/calculating-scholarly-journal-value-through-objective-metrics/.
Chan Li received her MLIS in 2006 from University of
California Los Angeles. She is senior data analyst at the California Digital
Library (CDL), where she manages all aspects of electronic resource analysis
activities. In the recent years, Chan has been a key player in the development
of CDL's weighted value algorithm to assess the significance of UC systemwide
electronic journals across disciplines. Chan currently serves on NISO
SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) Standing Committee.
Jacqueline Wilson supports management of high-profile
University of California negotiations with large academic publishers and
parallel coordination with campus libraries, facilitates various collaborative
collection decision making processes, provides support for systemwide policy
and planning efforts for the UC Libraries and scholarly information activities,
and provides project management and leadership for various systemwide library
pilots and trials. She is Senior Associate for Collection Development and
Management at the California Digital Library. She has an MLIS from Berkeley,
American Management Association Certificates in Project Management and Executive
Leadership, an ARL Certificate in Measuring Library Service Quality, and
completed the Senge Group Systems Thinking Institute, Interaction Management
Program.
Oct 10: Zachary PARDOS: Scaling Cognitive Modeling in Digital Education.
Cognitive models of skill acquisition have been a successful
measurement device in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) to determine when a
student has reached mastery. I will overview model extensions that have
incorporated individual learner differences as well as effects of individual
resource and resource ordering on skill acquisition. Incorporation of student
affect detectors into the model will also be touched on. Current and future
work discussed will include application of cognitive models to Massive Open
Online Courses (MOOCs) and expanding the impact of learning analytics through
a reproducible research platform for education (http://cahl.berkeley.edu:15100).
Zachary Pardos is an Assistant Professor in both the School
of Information and the Graduate School of Education. His interests include
educational data mining, learning analytics, and Formative assessment. More at
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/zacharypardos.
Also: Özgür KÜLCÜ, Visiting Scholar, will briefly
report on Online Access to Turkish Cultural Heritage Resources.
Özgür Külcü is Associate Professor, Department of
Information Management, Hacettepe University, Ankaha, Turkey.
Oct 17: Clifford LYNCH: Reader Privacy and the Flow of Information about Who is
Reading What.
1. Report and Observations from the Conference on Digital
Experimentation held at MIT October 10-11. See http://codecon.net/ for information on this
event.
2. Reader Privacy and the flow of information about who is
reading what. I will return to this topic, which I introduced in the seminar
last spring, from a broader perspective, exploring what kinds of data are
being collected, who they are being shared with and what this might mean to
privacy, authoring, and publishing. This topic has been very much in the news
over the last two weeks with the discovery that the most recent edition of
Adobe Digital Edition captures and distributes (in the clear, no less) vast
amounts of reader data, though the details are still not totally clear.
Also Ruchita RATHI & Dheera TALLAPRAGADA: Brief Progress
Report.
Oct 24: Dagobert SOERGEL, University at Buffalo: Ontology mapping:
A concept hub for storing
mapping data and linguistic methods for producing mappings.
Mapping between Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS), generally
called Ontology Mapping for short (ontologies being a type of KOS) is central
to achieving interoperability between systems, such as Electronic Health Record
systems, and to reaching the full promise of the Semantic Web by finding any
answer that can be derived by combining data posted by many agents.
The problem of ontology mapping and its application can be divided into (1)
designing systems that hold mapping data for use and (2) methods for creating
mapping data. I will approach both issues from a deep conceptual perspective.
On (1), mapping data are often stored "bilaterally" for individual pairs of KOS.
I propose an alternative, dubbed concept hub, which takes the approach used
in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) one step further. In a concept
hub for a group of KOS, concepts from each KOS are stored as description
logic formulas, using a base vocabulary of elemental concepts and of concept
relationships. The relationship between any pair of concepts in the hub can
then be computed by a reasoner. On (2) I will present an approach for mapping
from complex terms for the material of an art object, such as acrylic paint
on canvass mounted on wood, as found in records in the ARTstor database,
through elemental concepts from the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus
(AAT). In the example, the description logic formula is:
surface canvas; subsurface wood; coating
acrylic paint.
The mapping process can be partially automated by discerning linguistic
patterns that correspond to description logic patterns, with the role of
each element in the description logic pattern can be seen from the place of
a term in the linguistic pattern.
Dagobert SOERGEL is professor in the Dept of Library
and Information Studies, University at Buffalo and Professor Emeritus at
the College of
Information Studies, University of Maryland. He specializes in thesauri
and classification (taxonomy and ontologies). More at www.dsoergel.com/.
Oct 31: Halloween: No seminar meeting.
Nov 7: South Hall 202. Michael BUCKLAND & Tapan PARIKH. Special program
welcoming California Library Association attendees.
Michael BUCKLAND: How California Librarians Influenced
Library Services in Japan: Some US Influecnes during the SCAP Occupation
After World War II.
Japanese librarianship was transformed during the allied
occupation after the Second World War and California librarians had a strong
influence. Robert Gitler, ’31, founded the first college-level library
education program in Japan in 1951. Another alumnus, Philip Keeney, '27,
got fired for fighting censorship in Montana then ruined by being
denounced as a Soviet spy during the Red Scare. But in between he was
"Library Officer" on the allied occupation staff and deserves
recognition he has never received. He channeled the California County
Library system developed by California State Librarian James Gillis,
his charismatic county library organizer, Harriet Eddy, and others,
into a unified plan for library services in Japan. It is a complex
tale involving the School's founding director, Sydney Mitchell,
Berkeley city librarian Carleton Joeckel, and more.
Tapan PARIKH:
Local Ground: Empowering Teenage Engagement in Community Issues.
Avaaj Otalo, a phone-based voice message board
allows small farmers in rural India to ask, answer and browse
agricultural questions and answers. It receives hundreds of calls
every week and impacts farmers’ decisions and has reduced use of
less effective and potentially harmful pesticides. While Avaaj
Otalo illustrates the importance of designing appropriate user
interfaces for representing knowledge from underrepresented
groups, knowledge must still be translated to structured,
quantitative forms for aggregation and policy decision-making.
Local Ground is a data collection, mapping and information
visualization tool that helps youth develop data skills by
making connections between different representations of
empirical phenomena. Students collect open-ended qualitative
data, in the form of free-hand drawings, pictures and audio
interviews, then design structured data collection instruments for
more systematic inquiry and analysis. These various forms of
data are combined into narratives that can articulate youth
perspectives to a variety of stakeholders. Local Ground has
been used to involve youth the planning of a public park,
ground-truth civic data about food access, and document air
quality issues across the BART transportation system.
Tapan Parikh, Associate Professor in the
School of Information, explores several themes in his work,
including the design of more accessible interaction techniques
allowing new populations to author content, the importance of
bottom-up data for planning and evaluating development projects,
and how we can employ participatory computing technologies to
improve learning and human agency. More at
people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~parikh/
Nov 14: Ruchita RATHI & Dheera TALLAPRAGADA: Moovit!
Also Lisa BÖRJESSON: Lost Contexts.
Ruchita RATHI & Dheera TALLAPRAGADA: Moovit!:
Joint Interactions between a Smartwatch, Sensors, and Smartphones.
The research topic seeks to explore design paradigms for
joint interactions between a smartwatch, sensors, and smartphones.
The final application prototype will be geared towards kids
(4-6 year olds) and parents. We also seek to explore the impact
of designing using applied behavioral economics principle
specifically the principal of soft paternalism and its impact
on interaction design for wearables.
Lisa BÖRJESSON, Visiting Student Researcher; Uppsala
University, Sweden: Lost Contexts: Limited Genre
Understandings Hindering Access to Professional Archaeology
Documentation.
Knowledge production in archaeology is heavily dependent
on field work documentation, and on efficient dissemination and retrieval
of that documentation. As most archaeological surveys and excavations are
performed outside university research as contract archaeology, a majority
of the documentation is produced and managed in professional settings.
The genres of professional documentation, also known as ‘grey literature’,
have an ambiguous status in archaeology. On the one hand they represent
most of the archaeological undertakings; on the other hand they are accused
of being inaccessible and of having low quality content. Academic
archaeologists neglecting the grey literature are in turn blamed for being
disrespectful of professional archaeologists’ work. The discussion of the
‘grey literature problem’ in archaeology is multifold, but often returns
to a tension between academia and the professional sphere. In my dissertation
research I argue the focus on the tension between academia and professional
archaeology limits understandings and usages of professional archaeology
documentation. I propose a perspective on professional archaeology
documentation as shaped by a larger context, including policy, public
administrative and market logics as well as those of academia and professional
work. The seminar presentation will give a line of historical examples
supporting the study of archaeology documentation as shaped by a larger
context, explain my dissertation research design, and briefly touch upon
findings this far.
Lisa Börjesson, M.A., is a second year doctoral
student from Uppsala University in Sweden. During Fall 2014 and Spring 2015
she is a Visiting Student Researcher here in the at School of Information.
Her research is a part of the research project Archaeological Information
in the Digital Society (ARKDIS) http://arkdis-project.blogspot.se/.
Nov 21: Short Reports and Clifford LYNCH.
Short reports: The Association for Information
Science and Technology (ASIST) Annual Meeting;
etc.
Clifford LYNCH: Preserving News and
Stewardship Changes.
News is an integral and important part of the broad
cultural record and key evidence to support a very wide range of
scholarly inquiry. In this conversation I will partially recapitulate
and partially re-assess comments that I offered in a keynote talk very
recently at a conference on preserving the news, with particular but not
exclusive focus on "born-digital" news. I will also connect challenges
involved in news to a much broader framework I am trying to develop and
that we have discussed several times in the seminar which looks at
stewardship transitions as key control points and events in the survival
and management of important segments of the cultural record.
Nov 28: Thanksgiving: No Seminar meeting.
Dec 5: Last Meeting of the Semester:
Ashwin CHANDAK: Camp Kinnect: A Sports-Based Youth
Development Program.
An addressable problem: Studies have demonstrated
that 62% of middle-school
students will fail to be ready for college and career success by
the time they graduate from high school, and 36% of those already
falling behind are at risk of dropping out in their first year of
high school. A proposed Solution: Camp Kinnect is an after-school
program that provides middle-school students with meaningful
opportunities for deep learning and personal growth through
innovative curricula, highly trained staff, and intentional
mentorship. The program is designed to harness the interests
and passions of youth to produce an integrated development of
character, life skills, and career aspirations. We strive to
equip each child to create and achieve his or her own path to
success in a challenging and supportive environment.
Ruchita RATHI & Dheera TALLAPRAGADA: Moovit!:
Joint Interactions between a Smartwatch, Sensors, and Smartphones:
Update.
The research topic seeks to explore design
paradigms for joint interactions between a smartwatch, sensors,
and smartphones. The final application prototype will be geared
towards kids (4-6 year olds) and parents. We also seek to explore
the impact of designing using applied behavioral economics principle
specifically the principal of soft paternalism and its impact on
interaction design for wearables.
December 12: No Seminar meeting.
December 19: Additional Seminar meeting co-sponsored by the Institute
for South Asia Studies:
Joyojeet Pal, School of Information, University of Michigan:
Social Media and the Political Right in India: An analysis of Narendra
Modi's Tweeting.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has over 8.2
million followers on Twitter and over 25 million "likes" on Facebook,
making him among the most followed politicians on social media.
With a mix of ‘feel good’ messages, shout-outs to other celebrities,
well-timed ritualized responses, as well as a careful strategy of
‘followbacks’ for a small selection of his most active followers,
Modi has been able to grow his following dramatically since 2013.
Twitter helps Modi circumvent the mainstream media and directly
reach a significant constituency of listeners. At the same time,
social media is also central to his broader campaign of public
image shaping as a technology-savvy leader who represents pan-Indian
aspirations of modernity, away from Modi's own past image in the
popular media as a central political figure in some of the worst
communal riots in India.
Joyojeet Pal, MIMS '04, is Assistant Professor
in the School of Information, University of Michigan.
His research is on technology and development in the Global South.
His recent work has focused on the use accessible technology by
people with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries, and
on the role of social media in political brand building in India.
More at www.si.umich.edu/people/joyojeet-pal.
The Seminar will resume in the Spring semester on January 23, 2015.
Fall 2014 schedule Spring
2014 schedule
and summaries.