School of
Information
Previously School of Library & Information Studies
Friday Afternoon Seminar: Summaries.
296a-1 Seminar: Information Access, Spring 2010.
Fridays 3-5. 107 South Hall.
Schedule.
Friday Jan 22: Clifford LYNCH: Introductions and Varied Topics.
1. Introduction to the seminar and preview of the semester.
2. Brief topics (contributions from all participants welcome):
Reflections on HICSS, the fall CNI meeting, the NSF workshop on assessing the
impact of scholarly communication.
3. Some initial thoughts on personal archiving and the role
of cultural memory organizations in the digital age (preparation for a
February workshop talk).
Friday Jan 29: Jöran BEEL and Béla GIPP, Magdeburg, Germany:
Mindmaps and Citation Proximity Analysis. See below.
Also Cecilia PRESTON: Professional Societies and their members:
What is effective communication today?
A brief discussion: The Professional Societies and the journal
have a long history - 1660's or so. In the 21st C. is this the only way? I
am the co-chair of a committee of the American Society for Information Science
and Technology (ASIS&T) which has been charged with exploring the communication
methods of the Society, including traditional publication. We are to recommend
strategies to move the Society forward in light of the many rapidly changes
in modes of communication. We all have heard over and over about the crisis
in scholarly communications - these problems also occur within the professional
societies (which in this case encompasses a highly ranked scholarly journal JASIS).
What works and/or doesn't work for you and the professional/scholarly societies
to which you belong? Let's talk.
Béla GIPP, Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany:
Citation Proximity Analysis
The search for related work is a time-consuming procedure that even if
performed by experts often leads to unsatisfying results. To alleviate the
problem, digital libraries, search engines and recommender systems such as
Google Books and Google Scholar offer to display "related" documents. The
most powerful approaches to determine related documents usually apply
citation analysis. As part of my PhD project I developed a new approach to
identify related documents, called Citation Proximity Analysis (CPA). It is
based on co-citation analysis, but additionally evaluates the citations'
position within the full text. The same concept can also be applied on mind
maps and quotations (Quotation Proximity Analysis; QPA) and therefore could
be used to determine related documents. The talk presents latest research
results of the CPA and QPA as well as a new approach to determine plagiarism
based on citation order analysis even if the plagiarized document was
translated to another language.
Béla GIPP is a PhD student in Computer Science at
the Very Large Business Applications Lab in the Faculty of Computer Science
at the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany,
and a Visiting Scholar in the I-School this year.
His fields of research are information retrieval and recommender
systems.
Jöran BEEL, Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany:
Enhancing Search Applications with Data Retrieved from Mind Maps.
Mind maps are used for many purposes, among others for brainstorming,
project management and outlining documents. In my presentation I will
demonstrate how to manage scientific literature and drafting research papers
with the mind mapping software "SciPlore MindMapping". In addition, concepts
and first research results will be presented how data retrieved from mind
maps can enhance search applications such as expert search systems; web and
academic search engines; research paper recommender systems; and search
query recommender.
Jöran BEEL is also a PhD student at the Very Large Business Applications
Lab in the Faculty of Computer Science at the Otto-von-Guericke University
in Magdeburg, Germany and
a Visiting Scholar in the I-School this year. His fields of research are
academic search engines and mind maps.
For further reading on both presentations:
www.sciplore.org/publications_en.php
and for SciPlore MindMapping:
sciplore.org/software/sciplore_mindmapping.
Friday Feb 5: ** Double program: 1:30 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. **
Dominic POWLESLAND, Landscape Research Centre, U.K.:
My mind Boggles as I Goggle at my Google Earth:
Challenging the Serendipity and Emptiness of Past Landscapes through the
dissemination of 30 years of archaeological research in the Vale of Pickering,
Yorkshire, England
Thirty years ago the Vale of Pickering in Yorkshire, England,
was an archaeological distributional "blank", a landscape dominated by
apparent "emptiness" - like most of the maps produced by archaeologists and
others in the humanities whose knowledge had mostly been gained through
serendipitous discovery or chance survival.
Over the last 3 decades the Landscape Research Centre (LRC) with
the support of English Heritage has run multiple projects, both large excavations
and pioneering remote sensing programmes. When combined the results expose what
appears to be the most densely utilised fragment of human landscape in Britain
covering c. 100 sq km, showing an area of intense human activity for over the last
10,000 years. The results of this work challenge our perceptions and interpretations
of the past at almost every level and for almost every chronological period;
however they also challenge our theoretical frameworks and our methods of
knowledge dissemination.
The lecture will reflect on past research and how false theories
and impressions have created an un-functioning view of the past. Whilst
complex archaeological datasets are difficult to articulate and disseminate,
we innovatively achieve this at present using a vast plot measuring 1 x 5 meters
at a scale of 1:2000 termed the "wallpaper". The lecture will review work we
are doing to try and deliver the results of our research through the Google
Earth platform. The addition of a clock in Google Earth was a dream come true
for anyone wishing to articulate cultural sequence in space -- the holy grail
4th dimension for archaeological computing. However we have had to look at
more novel approaches to face up to the challenge of presenting more than
27,000 distinct and interlinked features from the Mesolithic to Medieval
periods.
Dominic Powlesland is Visiting Professor,
Institute of Medieval Studies, University of Leeds, England, and Director of
The Landscape Research Centre
www.landscaperesearchcentre.org.
- 3:00 p.m.: W. David BAMMAN and Gregory CRANE, Project Perseus, Tufts Univ:
New Questions for Old Data: Information Technology as Catalyst for New Possibilities
and Combinations of Teaching and Research with Historical Languages.
The rise of massive collections, increasingly sophisticated services
and global, heterogeneous intellectual communities has changed the role of intellectual
inquiry: not only can we work with far more textual data and with more languages than was
ever before feasible, but there are new opportunities for undergraduates
and non-specialists to
contribute as well. We will talk about some of the opportunities as well as challenges
before us.
David Bamman is a senior researcher in computational linguistics for
the Perseus Project at Tufts University.
Gregory Crane is Editor-in-Chief of the
Perseus Project and Professor of Classics at Tufts University. More at:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/about/who/davidBamman and
www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/about/who/gregoryCrane.
Friday Feb 12: Bob BELL: E-Ris (E-Resources for Industry Studies)
The project I intend to develop for the Information Access
Seminar is a continuation of the database project I started in INFO 257:
e-RIS (e-Resources for Industry Studies). In the database course, I
developed the database structure and a simple PHP-enabled website for
accessing and viewing tables as well as executing queries and filtering
results. The second phase of the project will be two-part: (1) Improving
usability for research team's ability to add and edit records to database;
(2) Migrating database to public website with search functionality and user
feedback enabled.
Also Clifford LYNCH:
Evolving Roles of Subject and Institutional Repositories.
In this discussion, I'll reflect on the evolving roles and
relationships between subject, or disciplinary, repositories on one hand and
institutional repositories on the other. This is based in part on a talk I
gave in late January at the conference on Subject Repositories in Economics
hosted at the British Library.
Friday Feb 19: Nick DOTY, Ryan GREENBERG, Julián LIMÓN
NÚÑEZ, Hyunwoo PARK, Ljuba MILJKOVIC, and Abe COFFMAN:
IO Lab Showcase Redux.
Information Organization Lab was a new course taught in the Fall
at the School of Information for students to experiment with fundamental concepts
of information organization and retrieval. Students from the class will demo some
of the over 30 group and individual projects that were built as part of rapid two-
to three-week assignments using tools like JavaScript, jQuery, Python, Google App
Engine and APIs from Delicious, Flickr, Yahoo! and Freebase. Come see Vannevar
Bush's Memex implemented using Delicious, a location-based news retrieval interface,
a Flickr tag browser and more. The instructors will also be on hand to answer
questions about how the course ran and to get your feedback on whether and how to
continue the class in the future.
Friday Feb 26: Ray LARSON: Bringing Lives to Light: Biography in
Context -- A Retrospective.
Cultural heritage, history, and the social sciences are fundamentally
about human activity. Everyone is interested in what other people do
and have done.
Chronological, geographical and biographical data lend themselves
naturally to being connected: an event is associated with a place, a
time and potentially with particular people; places are associated
with different events and people; and individual people are also
associated (in a variety of ways) with different places and
events.
Life-events in sequence constitute a narrative that can engage
interest and spark inquiry. History, geography, and most other
subjects can come alive in the travelogues, journeys of discovery, and
the life-stories of those involved. Science can be explained through
the work of scientists. Engineering is routinely explained through the
heroic struggles of inventors.
But mere narrative is not enough. Understanding the context of these
life events differentiates education from memorizing. It is
understanding the circumstances of people's actions that illuminates
their lives, but there is a significant gap in the infrastructure
developed by libraries, museums, and publishers in this area.
Our objective in this project was to design,
demonstrate, and evaluate techniques that would bring lives to light
by revealing them in their contexts.
Project website
ecai.org/imls2006.
Final report:
http://metadata.berkeley.edu/Biography_Final_Report.pdf.
Friday Mar 5: Ben SHNEIDERMAN, Univ of Maryland: A National Initiative for
Technology-Mediated Social Participation.
Technology-mediated social participation is generated when social
networking tools (such as Facebook), blogs and microblogs (Twitter), user-generated
content sites (YouTube), discussion groups, problem reporting, recommendation systems,
and other social media are applied to national priorities such as health, energy,
education, disaster response, environmental protection, business innovation, cultural
heritage, or community safety.
Fire, earthquake, storm, fraud, or crime reporting sites provide
information to civic authorities, AmberAlert has more than 7 million users who help with
information on child abductions, Peer-to-Patent provides valuable information for
patent examiners, and the SERVE.GOV enables citizens to volunteer for national parks,
museums and other institutions. These early attempts hint at the vast potential for
technology-mediated social participation, but substantial research is needed to scale
up, raise motivation, control malicious attacks, limit misguided rumors, and protect
privacy
(iparticipate.wikispaces.com).
As national initiatives are launched in several countries to dramatically
increase research and education on social media, a coordinated approach will be helpful.
Clearly stated research challenges should have three key elements: (1) close linkage to
compelling national priorities; (2) scientific foundation based on established theories
and well-defined research questions (privacy, reciprocity, trust, motivation, recognition,
etc.); and (3) computer science research challenges (security, privacy protection,
scalability, visualization, end-user development, distributed data handling for massive
user-generated content, network analysis of community evolution, cross network
comparison, etc.).
Potential short-term interventions include:
- universities changing course content, adding courses, and offering new degree programs;
- industry helping researchers by providing access to data and platforms for testing; and
- government agencies applying these strategies in pilot studies related to national priorities.
Ben Shneiderman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science,
Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, and Member of
the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park
(www.cs.umd.edu/~ben). He is the author of
Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (MIT Press, 2002) and
Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction,
Fifth Edition, Addison-Wesley, 2009).
Friday Mar 12: Michael BUCKLAND: Information, Knowledge, and I-Studies.
Information Studies is widely regarded as a new and emerging field -- and
has been for several decades. The rise of "i-schools" and demands for the development
of a science of information makes the time
ripe for a clarification of the core concerns of i-studies. I will introduce and invite
discussion of ideas about how that might be achieved through a more careful view of
"information", of "knowledge", and of being "interdisciplinary" and
what kind of "science" this field could be.
Friday Mar 19: David S. H. ROSENTHAL, Stanford University Libraries:
Stepping Twice Into the Same River.
The talk Dr. Rosenthal gave here in November 2008 on the problems
of digital preservation evolved into a plenary talk "How Are We Ensuring the
Longevity of Digital Documents?" at CNI
(www.cni.org/tfms/2009a.spring/).
It concluded that the transition from pre-Web electronic documents for
manipulation to post-Web documents for publication had profound effects on
digital preservation. In this talk he will broaden the focus to look at the effects
on the publishing ecosystem of the looming transition from static content to
dynamic services, and how access for future readers could be maintained.
Friday Mar 26: Spring break. No seminar meeting.
Friday Apr 2: Short Reports:
Bob BELL: E-Ris (E-Resources for Industry Studies): Progress report.
I will provide a short update on my work on the E-RIS project which aims
to create a public e-service that improves both access of industry researchers to
e-resources and their ability to make use of e-resources in generating their output.
In the update, I will discuss (1) creating a new set of meta-data for the initial
e-resources; and (2) providing supplemental data on each e-resource; and (3) revising
the database structure.
Ray LARSON: New NEH Project on Archival Name Extraction and Disambiguation.
Noah KERSEY & Michael BUCKLAND: New Context Finder.
Michael BUCKLAND: New Mellon Project on Editors' and Curators' Notes
To be rescheduled:
Avi RAPPOPORT, Search Tools Consulting:
The Average Lifespan of a Web Page.
I'll talk about an interesting statistic that came out of the
research I did about the "average lifespan of a web page".
It seems existential: What is a lifespan? What is a web page? What is average?
What about greater web sites? How is this related to URL turnover? What about
institutional vs. personal vs.social networking communities? Who decides and when?
I will also report briefly on The UK Web Archive.
The British Library got tired of waiting for the copyright law to be interpreted,
so they're going ahead and indexing everything on the .uk top-level domain. IBM is
providing services for handling this "Big Data" (new-ish jargon term), including
Apache Hadoop, Pig Latin, Nutch, Open Calais, InfoSphere and ManyEyes. They're
playing with metadata extraction and interface ideas. The one they're currently
touting is a spreadsheet interface (thus the name BigSheets).
My articles on this are at: http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/British-Library-and-IBM-Team-Up-on-Web-Archiving-Project-65787.asp and http://searchtools.livejournal.com/91002.html.
Avi Rappoport is a metadata and search engine consultant with
Search Tools Consulting
www.searchtools.com.
Friday Apr 9: Alan INOUYE, Director, Office for Information Technology Policy,
American Library Association: Information Policy and Politics in the Obama
Administration.
This session will include discussion of the broadband grant programs
under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the big stimulus package from 2009)
and the recently-released National Broadband Plan. How do these initiatives affect
the library and related communities? What is the back story of how such initiatives
are crafted? In addition, there will be some discussion of other activities within
ALA's Office for Information Technology Policy such as the Google Book Search lawsuit,
readers' rights in the digital age, the future of libraries and the public's access to
information, and other topics as attendee interest dictates.
Alan Inouye received his Ph.D. from South Hall in 1997.
In 2007, he was appointed director of the American Library Association's Office
for Information Technology Policy, based in Washington. Previously, he served
as coordinator of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC)
and study director at the National Academy of Science's Computer Science and
Telecommunications Board (CSTB).
Friday Apr 16: Ingeborg & Arne SØLVBERG, Trondheim, Norway, and
Thomas TUNSCH, Berlin.
Short report: Thomas TUNSCH, Berlin: The Wikimedia@MW2010 Workshop.
A report on the Museums and the Web 2010 conference's
Wikimedia@MW2010 Workshop on how
the museum and wikipedia communities can work together more effectively. www.archimuse.com/mw2010/abstracts/prg_335002379.html.
Ingeborg & Arne SØLVBERG, Trondheim, Norway:
Knowledge Management in Times of IT Revolutions.
The distribution channels for knowledge have become much less
expensive over the last 5-10 years, and may be regarded as a free commodity
relative to other costs, e.g., for producing knowledge and for consuming.
Established organizations for knowledge management have become under pressure,
e.g., newspapers, libraries, publishers, booksellers, and TV. The representation
of knowledge is also changing, from the representation of knowledge in printed
documents to the representation of knowledge in the semantic web of the future.
The presentation is composed of two parts:
Ingeborg Torvik Sølvberg: The reengineering of Norwegian
research libraries during the previous IT-revolution, what we can learn by the
experiences of bringing IT into an existing library organization.
Arne Sølvberg: Model management versus document management,
when will the two meet?
The role of models in the representation of knowledge; how knowledge,
information and data relate; approaches to information service provision;
cross-disciplinary knowledge management; the semantic web.
Discussion theme: The skills basis of the knowledge manager of the future.
Background:
One of the most striking features of the IT revolution is that the distribution
of knowledge has become gratis, relatively speaking. Those who previously
controlled the expensive distribution channels had a nearly monopoly in deciding
which content was "worthy" of distribution, e.g., the newspaper editors determined
what the newspaper would print; the publishers determined which books to print.
Only a few would be granted the privilege of delivering content, and only after a
serious quality control process. Both the distribution monopoly and the quality
control are currently under severe pressure.
Libraries were originally established for making knowledge represented
as printed material available to the citizens for an affordable cost. Quality of
content could be taken as granted because it was controlled by the owners of the
distribution channels. Libraries served as distribution channels from the few
content providers to the many content consumers.
The current situation is that content is increasingly provided by the many and
consumed by the many, and the distribution is close to free. There are no longer
distinct geographical locations where knowledge is stored. Knowledge is stored in
the computer "cloud". Much knowledge is stored as text. But there is also a trend
towards "model management", that the ideas that the texts are about increasingly
are presented in explicit forms, as is evidenced by the proposals for a "semantic web".
The digital library has taken over tasks and offers more services
than the traditional library. The role of the "new" digital library is unclear,
which knowledge to manage, which services to produce, which needs to satisfy.
Ingeborg Torvik Sølvberg is in the Information Management Group
and Arne Sølvberg is in the Information Systems Group
of the Department of Computer and Information Science,
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway.
They are Visiting Scholars here this year. See
http://www.idi.ntnu.no/people/ingeborg
and
http://www.idi.ntnu.no/people/asolvber
Friday, Apr 23: Clifford LYNCH: Citizen Science and Citizen Humanities in the Age of
Cyberinfrastructure.
First, briefly: Some comments on recent meetings, notably the CNI spring meeting
and the National Academies E-Journal meeting.
Some thoughts on citizen science and citizen humanities in the age of
cyberinfrastructure.
"Amateur" or "citizen" science has a rich history. Indeed, once all scientists were
arguably amateurs. We are seeing a resurgence of this in a range of scientific areas.
I'll survey a few of these, and try to draw some generalizations about where amateur
engagement seems most feasible, as well as trying to raise some questions about possible
distinctions between amateur and citizen science today. I'll then examine the recent rise of
amateur or citizen humanistic work, which has been enormous and has been fueled both by
social changes and changes in the educational system, and look at some of the implications
of these developments for scholarship broadly.
Friday, Apr 30: Bob BELL: Final Progress Report, and Eric KANSA: Scientific Data.
Bob Bell: Breathing Life into E-RIS: Creating an online platform for
e-resources.
I will discuss the progress on the project, including (a) database
changes, including meta-data/descriptors for e-resources, populating the
database, and structural changes to the database; and (b) database-driven
website development, including the interactive user's forum for e-resources.
Eric KANSA: Carrots, Sticks, and Web Publishing of Scientific Data:
Open Context in Context.
The journal Nature recently published a series of editorials
and features highlighting the lack of data sharing in many scientific domains.
Reluctance to share primary data comes from a number of factors. In some cases,
researchers see risks of appropriation and misuse more than they see rewards for
sharing data. In other cases, "cyberinfrastructure" supporting dissemination channels
and services remains poorly developed.
I will discuss a case study from archaeology to help illustrate how
data sharing practices are evolving. Often, the impact and research benefits of sharing
data remain theoretical rather than demonstrated. Fortunately, this is beginning to
change , at least in certain specialized subject areas within archaeology. As data
sharing assumes greater prominence in publication and funding, two distinct approaches
for data sharing are emerging within archaeology. On the one hand, there are models
for "data-sharing through archiving," and on the other hand, there are models that
try to cast "data sharing as publication." In the background, professional ethics,
funding mandates, and supporting "cyberinfrastructure" are all aligning to place
data sharing as a more regular part of professional practice.
Eric KANSA is Adjunct Professor and Executive Director of the
School's Information and Service Design Program. He is also Co-Founder and former
Executive Director of the Alexandria Archive Institute http://www.alexandriaarchive.org/people_eck.php.
Friday, May 7: No Seminar meeting.
The Seminar will resume in the Fall semester on August 27.
Spring 2010 schedule.
Fall 2009
schedule
and summaries.