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.

Jan 23: Clifford LYNCH: Introductions to the Seminar and Introduction of Participants.
    Stewardship Transitions
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    Over the past few years I have been examining the key role of stewardship transitions in the preservation of cultural memory, both as points of risk and as points of opportunity. The risks are increasingly acute because of the changing nature of cultural memory in the digital age (and the legal and economic complexities of managing it) and because of a range of disruptions and economic stresses that threaten or render unsustainable various organizations that included stewardship roles. The opportunities arise because these transfers, if we can put the right policies, best practices, and transition support in place, give us opportunities to better address a great deal of both modern and historic cultural heritage.
    Over the past two years we have examined various aspects of this issue in the seminar. In this talk, I will attempt a systematic framing and synthesis of our earlier discussions and map out open research issues.

Jan 30: Michael BUCKLAND: Improved Access to Humanities Scholars' Work and to Selected Primary Sources.
    A platform has been provided for shared access to the working notes of historians preparing scholarly editions of historically important documents. Thise experience provides a basis for exploring how the work of individual Humanities scholars might have more impact and how primarily sources could be made more accessible. A closer relationship between personal work environments and library infrastructures could facilitate earlier publication, preservation, and better work practices. My talk draws on experience with the "Editorial Practices and the Web" project ecai.org/mellon2010/ and the editorsnotes.org/ website.

Feb 6: Maio Lung SHIH and Jaap-Henk HOEPMAN,
    Maio Lung SHIH and others: The Hsing Yun Wen Ji Application Project: Spreading Humanistic Buddhism to the Younger Generation.

    Short report: In the age of technology, teaching and spreading religion should be updated to the mobile age. The younger generation is noticeably more involved with accessing information through apps on mobile devices, and so keeping up the times is of the upmost importance to appeal to these individuals. The 星雲文集 (Hsing Yun Wen Ji) project was founded in 2013 with the aim of spreading the teachings of the Venerable Master Hsing Yun, representative of Humanistic Buddhism, to the younger generation.
    The Venerable Dr. Miao Lung Shih works at the Digital Buddhist Office of the San Francisco San Bao Temple of the International Buddhist Progress Society (Fo Guang Shan).
    Jaap-Henk HOEPMAN, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands: Privacy and Data Protection by Design
    The European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) recently published a report on Privacy and Data Protection by Design. It contributes to bridging the gap between the legal framework and the available technological implementation measures by providing an inventory of existing approaches, privacy design strategies, and technical building blocks of various degrees of maturity from research and development. As one of the co-authros of the report I will give an overview of its contents and engage in a discussion with the audience on the general topic of designing privacy by design.
    Jaap-Henk Hoefman is associate professor of privacy enhancing protocols and privacy by design in the Digital Security group at the Institute for Computing and Information Sciences of the Radboud University Nijmegen. I am also scientific director of the Privacy & Identity Lab. My main research interest are privacy by design and privacy friendly protocols for identity management and the Internet of Things. More at http://www.cs.ru.nl/~jhh/.

Feb 13: Seán Ó NUALLÁIN: Intellectual Property and Other Information Policies in a Small Country.
    Even in the depths of the recent recession, smaller and economically challenged countries kept scientific research programs that attempt to replicate the NSF and NIH running. The current bloat in scientific journals allowed the system to be gamed to make this appear a reasonable step. The first part of this talk focuses on three burgeoning areas of research; cancer, computational semantics and immunology to show how this game is implemented. The conclusion is that, with the possible exception of the USA, these national programs are a waste of taxpayers' money.
    The second part of the talk attempts to find gaps in knowledge that small, economically distressed countries could exploit, It is argued that limits to big data and other brute force statistics approaches have been found. This part of the talk looks at how the elision of syntax and semantics have caused an asymptote in performance both in genomics and natural language processing; controversies in mainstream biology with its .central dogma. and why neuroscientists urgently need to master physics techniques like the harmonic oscillator.
    Thirdly, we look at conventional issues of "orphan" IP like books and drugs. The talk then briefly segues into issues of personal privacy.
    In the last section, we look at the current state of universities. It is argued that their disciplinary structure mimics the departmental weights assigned by science funding research after WW2. This has led to anomalies whereby popular subjects like cognitive science are relegated to the interdisciplinary category; indeed, in this vein, computer science was not taught as a major at Caltech until the 1980's. This opens up opportunities for the creation of online universities that use the myriad excellent freshman and sophomore foundation courses freely available on the web to create low-price majors in subjects currently ignored in the science, arts and humanities. The talk concludes by envisaging a way to do world-class education and research at a fraction of their current cost both to the student and taxpayer."
    Seán Ó Nualláin is Lead IP Adviser for the Reboot Ireland political party in the Republic of Ireland. He holds an M.Sc. in Psychology from University College, Dublin, Ireland & a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. He ia the author and editor of 12 books. In recent years, he has published several papers on the foundations of biology and the monograph One Magisterium. www.cambridgescholars.com/one-magisterium,

Feb 20: Michael BUCKLAND: Alternative Strategic Futures for i-Schools.
    Being a "School of Information" has become popular and the i-Schools' organization http://ischools.org/ already has 59 institutional members. In addition to re-branding and opportunism, what are the strategic options for such schools for academic planning and self-characterization? Four radically different alternatives will be identified, compared, and discussed. This talk is based on a discussion at the UCLA Department of Information on January 15, 2015, and draws in part on a paper at the 2nd Conceptions of Library and Information Science conference entitled "The 'liberal arts' of Library and Information Science and the research university environment" http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/libarts.html.

Feb 27: Room 202: Sarah KENDERDINE, University of New South Wales, & Jeffrey SHAW, City University of Hong Kong: Cultural Data in the Age of Experience.
    This presentation examines new paradigms for transforming digital cultural heritage archives into embodied experiences for cultural organizations. Using heterogeneous datasets representing intangible and tangible heritage, the research described integrates groundbreaking work in new museology through virtual environment design, interactivity, information visualization, visual analytics and data mining.
    The discussion comprises a series of seminal installations and permanent exhibits including:
  -   mARChive (2014) Museum Victoria’s data browser for 100,000 objects in 360-degree 3D, Melbourne.
  -   Look up Bombay (2014) as a gigapixel dome work for the Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai.
  -   Pirates Scroll 360 (2013) & Pirates Scroll Navigator (2013), two treatments of a scroll painting, Hong Kong Maritime Museum, Hong Kong.
  -   Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang (2012), Pure Land Augmented Reality Edition (2012) and Pure Land Unwired (2014) based on interactive facsimiles of the World Heritage Site, Dunhuang, China.
  -   PLACE-Hampi (2006) and the new museum at Karnataka, India Kaladham (2012) based on the World Heritage Site, Hampi, India.
  -   ECloud WW1 for Europeana (2012); a world touring exhibition representing 70,000 objects from the website in 3D.
    Sarah Kenderdine researches at the forefront of interactive and immersive experiences for museums and galleries. In the last 10 years Kenderdine had produced over 60 exhibitions and installations for museums worldwide. In these installation works, she has amalgamated cultural heritage with new media art practice, especially in the realms of interactive cinema, augmented reality and embodied narrative. She concurrently holds the position of Professor, National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA), University of New South Wales Art | Design (2013-) and Special Projects, Museum Victoria, Australia (2003-). She is Adjunct Prof. and Director of Research at the Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment (ALiVE), City University of Hong Kong and Adjunct Prof. at RMIT. More at research.unsw.edu.au/people/professor-sarah-kenderdine.
    Professor Jeffrey Shaw (Hon.D.CM) has been a leading figure in new media art since the 1960s. In a prolific oeuvre of widely exhibited and critically acclaimed works he has pioneered and set benchmarks for the creative use of digital media www.jeffrey-shaw.net). Since 2009 he is Chair Professor of Media Art and Dean of the School of Creative Media at City University Hong Kong (www.cityu.edu.hk/scm), as well as Director of the Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment (www.cityu.edu.hk/alive) and Centre for Applied Computing and Interactive Media (www.acim.cityu.edu.hk/). Shaw is also Visiting Professor at the Institute for Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London, and the Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) Beijing.

Mar 6: Catherine MARSHALL, Texas A&M University: Who owns your Facebook content?
    Who owns your Facebook content? On the face of it, the answer to this question seems self-evident. But it's easy to conjure up plausible situations that cast doubt on the ownership and control of what you've posted in Facebook and the information about yourself that you've shared via your profile. For example, can you store your friends' profiles on your computer? Can you reuse your social network (say, to move to a competing service)? Can you sell what you've revealed on Facebook about yourself to the highest bidder or trade it for a toaster oven on Amazon? We have gathered data about the attitudes (and related practices) of 244 Facebook users, and have used it to characterize how they feel about the ownership, control, and persistent value of Facebook content. (This talk describes work I've done in collaboration with Frank Shipman; it is part of a larger project about social media ownership, reuse, and archiving.)
    Cathy Marshall is currently an adjunct professor of computer science at Texas A&M University. Until last fall, she was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley.

Mar 13: Quinn DOMBROWSKI, Office of the CIO, UC Berkeley: Making the Most of a Pile of DiRT (Digital Research Tools).
    I will be speaking on the DiRT (Digital Research Tools) Directory, the latest incarnation of a community-generated resource for learning about digital tools, particularly those applicable to humanities research. Originally created as a wiki in 2008, DiRT has seen ebbs and flows in contributors over its lifespan. Adopted by Project Bamboo, a Mellon-funded cyberinfrastructure initiative, DiRT received its own development grant from Mellon after the conclusion of Bamboo. Quinn will demonstrate the work that has been done under that grant to enhance the directory and make the data from DiRT accessible in other environments. She will also discuss project sustainability — both social and technical — as it pertains to this long-running project that is widely recognized as valuable, but whose uptake requires consistent, tedious work. Lastly, Quinn will talk about future directions for DiRT, including potentially partnering with another tool directory to provide a way for digital humanities tools to be assigned a DOI to increase tool citeability in a variety of contexts.
    Quinn Dombrowski is Digital Humanities Coordinator from Research IT in the Office of the CIO at UC Berkeley,

Mar 20: Juliane STILLER, Maria GÄDE & Elke GREIFENEDER, Berlin School of Library and Information Science, Humboldt University, Berlin: There is a Thin Line Between Speaking 30 Languages and Gibberish - Semantic and Multilingual Access in Europeana.
    This talk discusses multilingual and semantic access in Europeana - the European digital library, archive and museum that offers access to over 30 million cultural heritage objects. We will present recent implementations in the portal for accessing multilingual content and adding a semantic layer such as the query translation feature and the automatic enrichments with multilingual vocabularies. For making Europeana truly multilingual, the user perspective also needs to be taken into account, adding several new challenges to the portal development. We will address the most important country and language levels presenting a log file study focusing on Europeana as a multilingual portal (with multilingual content) for multilingual users. The lack of best practices in cultural heritage digital libraries on such a scale and the particularities of the digital objects and queries in these systems make it necessary to constantly monitor the quality of the implemented features with quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Results of some of these evaluations will be a further focus of the talk.
    Juliane Stiller, was Visiting Student here from April 2011 to April 2012. She is a researcher at Berlin School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin where she works in the EU-funded project Europeana Version 3 on multilingual best practices. She also studies researchers' needs in virtual research environments in the project DARIAH-DE at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She obtained a doctoral degree in information science at Humboldt-Universität evaluating interactions in cultural heritage digital libraries. Prior to her research at the university, she worked several years at Google in Dublin, Ireland, as a search quality analyst.
    Maria Gäde is a lecturer at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research focuses on digital library evaluation, in particular on user behavior and requirements for multilingual access in digital libraries. She holds a doctoral degree in information science (Country and language level differences in multilingual digital libraries). Previously she was involved in the logCLEF multilingual log analysis evaluation initiative as well as in the Cultural Heritage in CLEF (CHiC) track dealing with the improvement of systematic and large-scale evaluation of cultural heritage digital libraries and information access systems. Currently she is co-organizing the interactive tasks in the Social Book Search Lab at CLEF.
    Prof. Dr. Elke Greifeneder is a Juniorprofessor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin where she leads the research group information behavior. Her interests are human information behavior in user's natural environments, including effects of ubiquitous computing, effects of distractions and remote user testing. Previously she hold a position as assistant professor at the Royal School of Library and Information Science at the University of Copenhagen. Among other community services, she was the Program Chair of iConference 2014 and is the editor of Library Hi Tech, Emerald Publishing Group.

Mar 27: Spring Break. No Seminar meeting.

Apr 3: Clifford LYNCH: Privacy in the world of Analytics, with emphasis on the Higher Education Environment.

    We all know that there are vast amounts of data being collected on individuals from a great range of perspectives: consumers, students, researchers, and readers will be of particular interest for this discussion. Various technology driven developments such as e-books (including e-textbooks) and online journals, learning management systems and newer, more sophisticated systems such as MOOCs or more general computer-based adaptive learning systems, and even "smart" buildings, classrooms and similar functions all contribute to this scope of this mass of data, and the policies surrounding data capture, aggregation, reuse and retention tend to be highly opaque, even in institutional contexts where there is little excuse for this. Marketing, advertising, intelligence (government and private), law enforcement and a few other sectors have long history of mining this data, unsually in secretive ways. What seems to be genuinely new in the past few years is the embrace of "analytics", tools to mine this data often as a basis for action by a range of new players such as authors, teachers, and educational systems. These uses vastly raise the stakes for individuals; the problems now go beyond abstract notions of privacy to actual "targeting" by analytic-driven interventions. In this discussion, I hope to make at least a preliminary survey of what's fundamentally changing in the enviornment and some of the risks associated with this.

Apr 10: Lisa BÖRJESSON: "...relevant, usable, and accessible to all...". On Documentation Ideals for Extra-Academic Research, the Case of Development-led Archaeology.
    In several disciplines, such as medicine and engineering, significant parts of the knowledge production take place outside academic research. Another such discipline is archaeology. Most archaeological surveys are conducted as development-led archaeology prior to land development. The documentation of such surveys is surrounded by legislation and guidelines. In this seminar we will take a closer look at the documentation ideals in those regulations. Additionally we will discuss how those ideals are interpreted by authorities in archaeology, notably academic archaeologists, museum professionals, and government professionals. From a distance, and with some humor, these ideals and interpretations may be likened to an administrative meltdown and they present an enigmatic challenge for the professionals who try to do the actual documentation. The seminar will focus on the case of archaeology, but the discussion will also be extended to the general circumstances for documentation and communication of extra-academic research today.
        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/.

Apr 17: Clifford LYNCH: Securing Networked Information Resources and Infrastructure: "Easy" Wins and Longer-Term.
    The Coalition for Networked Information held a small invitational workshop in early March 2015 to look at a near term agenda for improving security of networked information resources and infrastructure. This identified several areas where it should be relatively easy to make some quick gains; some midrange areas where work is needed but prospects are promising, and also noted a few longer term research areas where it's clear major problems exist but the way forward isn't clear. I will present some of the highlights from this workshop and invite comments and discussions.

Apr 24: Francisco Balthasar GARCIA MORAN, Visiting Scholar, European Commission: Towards a New Generation of Digital Public Services Based on Co-Production.
    Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is transforming social relations, work, and the economy into to a networked society without spatial-temporal constraints, which reinterprets social, economic and cultural relations and profoundly changes modes of producing, living and communicating. Citizens are now more aware of their rights, have better access to information on public services, and so expect better service. Both citizens and businesses expect better and more personalized public service, efficient and effective service delivery, less administrative burden, transparency, and participation.
    Public sector organizations see a golden opportunity for openness and to make open government transformative based on collaboration, transparency, and participation. The vision is for citizens and businesses to engage in the co-production of digital public services made more user-friendly, effective and innovative, and so with enhanced value. Co-production means delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between the public sector and citizens making better use of each others' assets and resources to achieve better outcomes and improve efficiency thus contributing to the creation of public value. By opening up public sector procedures and information resources through ICT-based platforms, governments may become more networked, work in enhanced cooperation within government, and with external stakeholders, paving the way for co-production.
    Research on the co-production of public services and preliminary public feedback show that social media and ubiquitous connectivity now allows for mass production and collaboration, especially for the .Generation-C. (C is for Connection, Creation, and Community), a demographic group where 65% is under 35, which is leading the way towards a "sharing society" with blurred boundaries between collaborative production and consumption that is likely to impact how public services are delivered. For more see research papers and books by J. Alford, T. Bovaird, P. Dunleavy, D. Linders, E. Loeffler.
    Francisco Baltasar Garcia Moran is currently Chief IT Advisor at the European Commission and former Director General of DIGIT, the Information Technology Directorate General that he helped to create. He is advising EU member states on eGovernment, Digital Policies and IT Management and has been working the last two years with the Greek government to define the eGovernment strategy and the related action plan. He also helps non-EU countries like Moldova to define and execute their eGovernment strategy and delivery program

May 1: Joan LIPPINCOTT, Coalition for Networked Information: Supporting Digital Scholarship.
    As part of my work at the Coalition for Networked Information, I have been exploring a number of topics related to the support of digital scholarship in a wide range of disciplines. I have examined a number of models, most based in academic libraries, in both research universities and liberal arts colleges. An increasing number of academic libraries are establishing digital scholarship centers or labs. In this talk, we.ll look at commonalities and differences among them and I will describe some of the key features. Interestingly, most programs have a connection to teaching and learning, often undergraduate education, as well as to research initiatives. One of the questions that emerges is what is meant by such terms as "support", "providing services", "building partnerships", and "community". How might we think about the relationship between what the primary researcher (faculty member) does and the information professionals that work with him or her? What are the characteristics and skill sets needed to work as part of a digital projects team? I will show examples of the kinds of facilities being developed in libraries and discuss such topics as scalability and sustainability. The CNI report and webpages at www.cni.org/events/cni-workshops/digital-scholarship-centers-cni-workshop/ will be useful background information for the talk.
    Dr. Joan Lippincott is Associate Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information, Washington, DC., where her interests include supporting digital scholarship, learning spaces, assessment, and teaching and learning. More at www.cni.org/about-cni/staff/joan-k-lippincott/.

The Seminar will resume in the Fall semester.
Spring 2015 schedule   Fall 2014 schedule and summaries. Fall 2015 schedule and summaries.