School of
Information
Previously School of Library & Information Studies
Friday Afternoon Seminar: Summaries.
296a-1 Seminar: Information Access, Spring 2019.
Fridays 3-5. 107 South Hall.
Schedule. Weekly
mailing list.
Details will be added as they become available.
Jan 25: Clifford LYNCH: Climate Change and Some Possible Surprises.
1. Introduction to Seminar and plans for the
Semester.
2. Introductions.
3. Brief Discussion: Stewardship and Climate Change.
Climate Change -- and particularly more intense storms and rising sea
levels -- raises a number of challenges to the enterprise of cultural
stewardship. I'll briefly enumerate some of these and solicit thoughts
about priorities, strategies, and aspects that I've overlooked. This is
very early thinking.
4. Some Possible Surprises in Scholarly Communication.
There's a tradition of welcoming the new year with lists of possible
surprises that may take place in various areas. Here I'll raise several
fairly near term (next few years) scenarios that may seem unlikely but
are worth some consideration. Additional suggestions for possible
surprises are welcome.
Feb 1: Catherine MARSHALL: The Times They Are A-Changin': The Influence of
Scandal and Experience on Users’ Attitudes to Social Media Data
Control.
Social media has become an entrenched function of
today's Internet. Has widespread news of abuse--e.g. the Cambridge
Analytica scandal--changed people’s perceptions of how corporations
and public institutions can use personal data? We compare two datasets,
one collected through an October 2013 study, and the other collected
via an augmented version of the same study performed in May 2018.
Overall, participants in 2018 are more willing to cede control of
their personal data to others (including public institutions) than
they were in 2013. Participants with greater awareness of the
Cambridge Analytica scandal’s details show an increased desire for
data mobility, more skepticism about targeted advertising and news,
and an increased willingness for social media sites to demand
corrections to inaccurate content. This work was done in
collaboration with Frank Shipman, Center for the Study of Digital
Libraries at Texas A&M University.
Cathy Marshall is an independent researcher
and writer and Adjunct Professor at the Center for the Study of
Digital Libraries (CSDL) at Texas A&M University. For many years
she was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon
Valley. Before joining Microsoft, Cathy was a hypertext researcher
at Xerox PARC at the dawn of the Internet era.
Feb 8: Michael BUCKLAND: Information Flows and Cultural Disruption.
Every society depends on a pattern of communication,
coordination, trust, and coercion. A change to its pattern is
culturally disruptive. Currently attention is on ‘fake news’ in social
media and the invasive use of data on activity. Disruption induces
cultural change and/or is mitigated by regulation. Innovation in
information services have social consequences. Authoritarian regimes
resist open information sources, a free press and freedom
of speech and travel. Efforts to change library services during the
Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952) provide a starting point for
asking what “American librarianship” (compared with, say, Soviet or Japanese
librarianship) could mean -- and why and how information access matters -–
and, more generally, relationships between technology choices,
resource allocation, and cultural differences. Join us for a discussion.
Feb 15: Mark GRAHAM, The Internet Archive: What's New with the
Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine?
Mark Graham will review various projects related to the missions
of "Universal Access to All Knowledge" and efforts to "Help Make the
Web More Useful and Reliable". He will share updates about work with
Wikipedia sites to fix broken links and provide direct access to
hundreds of thousands of books from Wikipedia articles. He will review
new features of the Wayback Machine, new related API and browser
extension functionality, and new projects to archive news and social
media. In addition he will want to hear from everyone, requests and
suggestions, about how they think the Wayback Machine can be made
more useful and ideas about new collaborations and projects.
Mark Graham, Director of the Wayback Machine at the
Internet Archive, has been inventing, building and
operating pioneering online services for more than 30 years. Most
recently as SVP with NBC News Digital. He co-founded the NGO Association
for Progressive Communications (APC.org), creating AOL’s interface to
the Internet
(Gopher and WAIS), leading technology and business development at The
WELL, and building a platform to crowd-source and distribute live-video
citizen reporting from mobile devices.
Feb 22: Rosalie LACK, UCLA: UCLA Library – International
Partnerships and Projects.
Libraries and archives play a critical role in
preserving and providing access to the collective memory of communities.
Unfortunately, the resources for enabling archive holders to preserve
cultural, social, political, and historical evidence are scarce and
urgently required. This talk will highlight UCLA Library’s
international initiatives aimed at addressing these challenges,
with a focus on the International Digital Ephemera Project (IDEP)
and Documenting Global Voices (DGV). The goal of these programs is to
preserve and provide broad, public access to at-risk materials.
The presentation will provide an overview of both programs including
the benefits and challenges of the different post-custodial models
employed for each.
Rosalie Lack is a Project Manager at the UCLA
Digital Library and is responsible for grant-funded initiatives,
including the Documenting Global Voices (DGV), International Digital
Ephemera Project (IDEP), the Syriac and Arabic Manuscript project, and
PRL (Pacific Rim Library). Rosalie experience also includes working
as Director of Digital Special Collections at the California Digital
Library and as Deputy Director for Electronic Information for
Libraries (EIFL). Rosalie holds a Masters in Information Management
and Systems from University of California, Berkeley. More at www.linkedin.com/in/rosalielack
Mar 1: Wayne de FREMERY: Computational Bibliography
and the Sociology of Data.
The speaker's current book project, "Computational
Bibliography and the Sociology of Data", reinvigorates analytical
bibliography by expanding the scope of what bibliography describes and
by diversifying the forms used in bibliographic description. As
etymologies of the word bibliography suggest, bibliographers have used
bibliographic forms -- books -- to document books. Analytical
bibliographers have typically investigated the materials and technologies
used to create and circulate texts. Computational Bibliography and the
Sociology of Data suggests expanding the scope of analytical bibliography
to include the computational systems currently creating and circulating
data. It suggests using computational methods to document computational
systems in order to illuminate the materials and technologies expressing
data, as well as to describe the socio-historical constraints within which
people have worked to make and share data. This talk will outline the
broad arguments presented by Computational Bibliography and the Sociology
of Data and then narrow its focus to reveal the deep relationship between
traditional forms of bibliographic description and newer forms of
artificial intelligence, especially those related to machine learning.
The talk proposes inductive approaches of bibliographers such as W.W.
Greg and those creating machine learning frameworks are homologous.
It also suggests that the critiques of bibliography as an inductive
science leveled by scholars such as D.F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann
are isomorphic with critiques of current machine learning methods.
Wayne de Fremery teaches Korean literature and
bibliography at Sogang University in Seoul, where he develops new technologies for
investigating Korean literature and documentary traditions, as well as
information systems as cultural systems.
Mar 8: Hany FARID: The Accuracy, Fairness, and Limits of Predicting
Recidivism.
Joint work with Julia Dressel. Algorithms for predicting
recidivism are commonly used to assess a criminal defendant’s likelihood
of committing a crime. These predictions are used in pretrial, parole,
and sentencing decisions. Proponents of these systems argue that big
data and advanced machine learning make these predictions more accurate
and less biased than humans. Opponents, however, argue that predictive
algorithms may lead to further racial bias in the criminal justice
system. I will discuss an in-depth analysis of one widely used
commercial predictive algorithm to determine its appropriateness for
use in our courts.
Hany Farid, a specialist in digital forensics,
image analysis, and human perception, will join the faculty next summer
in a joint appointment with EECS. He has degrees in computer science and
mathematics and has worked at MIT and Dartmouth College.
He is also the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Fourandsix
Technologies and a Senior Adviser to the Counter Extremism Project.
More at www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/.
Mar 15: Günter WAIBEL and John CHODACKI, California Digital Library:
Community-Owned Data Publishing: CDL’s new partnership with Dryad.
The California Digital Library (CDL) has invested
considerable effort researching and building exemplars in research
data management and data publishing. Like most institutions, we have
had varying levels of success, especially when it comes to adoption
and reach. In many instances, University of California researchers
have taken advantage of tools that are offered to a much broader
community, and are better integrated into their workflows. CDL’s
strategic vision acknowledges that in many instances, to best serve
the University of California,
we now need to think and act in a context that is broader than our
institutional home. To meet researchers where they are, CDL entered
into a formal partnership with Dryad. This partnership will make it
easier to integrate data publishing into researcher workflows, and
to be focused on building a sustainable product that is a credible
alternative to commercial offerings within the research data space.
With both CDL and Dryad’s expertise, we will be able to offer:
- Researchers: a higher level of service and integration into their
established workflows;
- Publishers: direct integrations and more comprehensive curation
services; and
- Institutions: a globally-accessible, community-led, low-cost
infrastructure and service that focuses on breaking down silos
between publishing, libraries and research.
For more info about the Dryad partnership, see: https://uc3.cdlib.org/2018/10/24/community-owned-data-publishing-infrastructure/.
For CDL’s strategic vision, see: www.cdlib.org/cdlinfo/2018/04/12/introducing-cdls-strategic-vision/.
Günter Waibel is Associate Vice Provost & Executive
Director of the California Digital Library. He has extensive
experience in the digital library and broader cultural heritage
communities and is well-known for his work in promoting cross-domain
collaboration. In his previous position he oversaw the strategic plan
for creating a digital Smithsonian out of the institution’s 19 museums
and 9 research centers. More at www.cdlib.org/contact/staff_directory/gwaibel.html
John Chodacki is UC Curation Center Director,
California Digital Library. He has a background in product management
within digital publishing and scholarly communication organizations.
More at www.cdlib.org/contact/staff_directory/jchodacki_profile.html.
Mar 22: Daniel KLUTTZ: AI, Professionals, and Professional Work: The
Practice of Law with Automated Decision Support Technologies.
A report on work being done jointly with Deirdre Mulligan.
Technical systems employing algorithms are shaping and
displacing human decision making in a variety of fields. As technology
reconfigures work practices, researchers have documented potential loss
of human agency and skill, confusion about responsibility, diminished
accountability, and both over- and under-reliance on decision-support
systems. The introduction of predictive algorithm systems into
professional decision making compounds both general concerns with
bureaucratic inscrutability and opaque technical systems as well as
specific concerns about encroachments on expert knowledge and
(mis-)alignment with professional liability frameworks and ethics.
To date, however, we have little empirical data regarding how automated
decision-support tools are being debated, deployed, used, and governed
in professional practice.
The objective of our ongoing empirical study is to analyze
the organizational structures, professional rules and norms, and
technical system properties that shape professionals’ understanding
and engagement with such systems in practice. As a case study, we
examine decision-support systems marketed to legal professionals,
focusing primarily on technologies marketed for “e-discovery” purposes.
Commonly referred to as “technology-assisted review” (TAR) or “predictive
coding,” these systems increasingly rely on machine-learning techniques
to classify and predict which of the voluminous electronic documents
subject to litigation should be withheld or produced to the opposing
side. We are accomplishing our objective through in-depth, semi-structured
interviews of experts in this space: the technology company
representatives who develop and sell such systems to law firms and the
legal professionals who decide whether and how to use them in practice.
We argue that governance approaches should be seeking to put lawyers
and decision-support systems in deeper conversation, not position them
as relatively passive recipients of system wisdom who must rely on
out-of-system legal mechanisms to understand or challenge them. This
requires attention to both the information demands of legal professionals
and the processes of interaction that elicit human expertise and allow
humans to obtain information about machine decision making.
Daniel N. Kluttz is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the
UC Berkeley School of Information. There, he helps organize and lead
the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group (AFOG), an
interdisciplinary group that brings together UC Berkeley faculty,
postdocs, and Bay Area technology professionals to develop research
and policy recommendations regarding fairness and transparency,
governance, professional ethics, and social impacts of emerging
technologies and practices, particularly as applied to
artificial-intelligence-based systems, algorithmic decision making, and
data science. Drawing from intellectual traditions in organizational
theory, law and society, economic sociology, social psychology, and
technology studies, Kluttz’s research is oriented around two broad
lines of inquiry: 1) the formal and informal governance of economic
and technological innovations, and 2) the organizational and legal
environments surrounding such innovations. His current projects include
studies of the psychological, organizational, and cultural underpinnings
of personal data exchange in the digital economy, the effects of automated
decision-support technologies on professional work practices and the
construction and implementation of data science ethics in the tech
industry and higher education. He has employed both qualitative and
quantitative methods in his work, including in-depth interviews,
longitudinal and multi-level modeling techniques, surveys, geospatial
analyses, and historical/archival methods. Kluttz’s research has
appeared in a variety of peer-reviewed publications, including the
Law & Society Review, Socio-Economic Review, and Handbook of
Contemporary Sociological Theory. He holds a PhD in sociology
from UC Berkeley, a JD from the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law, and
dual bachelors' degrees in sociology and psychology from UNC-Chapel
Hill. Prior to pursuing his PhD, he practiced law in Raleigh, NC.
More at www.danielkluttz.net.
Mar 29: Spring Break: No Seminar meeting.
April 5: Michael BUCKLAND & Clifford LYNCH: Basic Needs, Access, and
Marketplace Structures.
Michael BUCKLAND: Connecting Needs, Documentation, and
Evidence.
A hermeneutic approach suggests a possible conceptual bridge
between the most basic need for information and designs for the organization
of access to recorded evidence. A brief continuation of our discussion
on February 8.
Clifford LYNCH: New Marketplace Structures for Cultural
Products and Implications for Stewardship.
The structures of the public marketplace and exchange under the
doctrine of first sale worked very well for cultural memory
institutions such as libraries. Unfortunately, these are now being
rapidly eclipsed by complex and opaque new market structures that
incorporate (compulsory, large scale) license structures. The effects
of these changes for memory institutions are a potential disaster, and
are poorly understood. As time permits in this discussion, I'll begin
an exploration of how the marketplaces in music, books, and moving
image (video) materials are changing, and highlight some of the areas
that seem particularly opaque to me.
Apr 12: Double program: Augmented Reality and a Film Premiere.
3:10 pm: Nicole HADASSAH-VALDEZ: Augmented Reality and The Public.
We will explore how Augmented Reality affects image,
movement, and consciousness by analyzing the effects of Instagram
filters, Google Map’s live directions, and Pokémon Go’s gamification
on publics. First, I will take us through the popularity and functions
of Augmented Reality in these three case studies, and then, I will
undertake the explanation of AR’s implications on group experience.
These implications, will then, be tied back to the problem of
chronicling hybridized experience as an imposition of truths onto a
plastic web that structures simulated information. Lastly, I will
contrast the possibilities of AR’s strengths as enhancements on
“real life” by introducing real time editing as an empowering tool
that shapes the image of historical narratives that account for the
public.
Nicole Hadassah-Valdez is a senior studying
Interdisciplinary Studies and Rhetoric. Born and raised in the Bay
Area, she grew up appreciating multiple cultures and forms of thought,
which brought her to concerns regarding the authority of information
and the power of big data. As tools for argumentation, numerical
values quantify experiences that each carry a story to compel an
audience. She hopes to work for a quasi-public, or entirely public
organization to serve local communities and streamline access to (
financial and developmental) information.
4:10 pm: In DOCAM'S Footsteps. North American
premiere of a new
documentary film by Sabine Roux on the origins of the Document
Academy featuring scenes shot in South Hall. The Document Academy
is an informal international collaboration that has enlivened
Information Studies by exploring the physical, cognitive, and
social aspects dimensions of objects perceived as signifying.
It began in 2001 when Niels W. Lund, founding director of the
program in Documentation Studies at the University of Tromso,
Norway, came to this School as a Visiting Professor.
With narratives by Niels W. Lund, Roswitha Skare, and Michael Buckland.
For more on the Document Academy see www.documentacademy.org/?about.
Sabine Roux is a film-maker and high
school librarian living near Toulouse, France.
Apr 19: Jeffrey MACKIE-MASON: Moving towards open scholarship: UC,
Elsevier and all the rest.
The movement to make new scholarship freely available
to all readers began at least by 1994 with Stevan Harnad's "Subversive
proposal". In 2013 the UC Academic Senate adopted one of the first
mandatory OA policies in the US, requiring that a copy of all newly
authored research be deposited in an open archive regardless of where
it is published. In Winter 2018 the University Libraries published
an action roadmap, Pathways to OA.
Since then, the Libraries and
the Academic Senate have worked closely together to pursue some of
the actions discussed in "Pathways". Most visibly to date, the
University sought to negotiate a "transformative" contract with
Elsevier (the world's largest scholarly publisher) that would publish
all UC-authored articles as open access, retain full reading rights
to all Elsevier publications, and reduce the total cost of reading
plus publishing for the University. Negotiations failed, but rather
than sign a business-as-usual contract, the University canceled its
agreement with Elsevier on 28 Feb 2019. At the same time, the
University is negotiating for transformative agreements with several
other publishers, and leading a coalition seeking to help non-profit
scholarly society publishers to flip their journals to open access.
Jeff MacKie-Mason
is the University Librarian and Chief Digital Scholarship Officer at
UC Berkeley and has joint appointments as a professor in the School
of Information, and in the Department of Economics. He
has played
a leading role in building the UC-wide faculty-administration coalition,
and is co-chair of the Publisher Negotiations Team, which carried out
the negotiations with Elsevier. He will discuss the Univeresity's
goals, the process leading to the new strategies, the negotiations
with Elsevier, and other OA efforts currently underway.
Apr 26: AnnaLee SAXENIAN: The I School in 2019: Where we've been and
where we're going.
I'll look backward and review the changes in the school
since I became Dean in 2004, as well as forward, to discuss scenarios
for the future. Video
recording.
May 3: Michael BUCKLAND: The Concept of Context; and Yasunori SAITO.
Visiting scholar Yasunori SAITO will briefly
introduce his work on information seeking behavior, the role of
reference librarians, and the logic of knowledge and belief
(epistemic logic).
Prof. Saito is professor of Clinical Sociology in the School of Arts
and Letters, Meiji University, Tokyo, and formerly a Vice Director of
Meiji University Library.
Michael BUCKLAND: The Concept of Context.
Information is inevitably created in a context and,
whenever used, is necessarily used in some context.
Intermediaries, too, have their own contexts. The literature on
information-related
behavior mentioning context is vast and varied. Nevertheless the concept of
“context” itself seems underdeveloped in information studies beyond
the simple case of spatial and temporal metadata.
Formal models of systems
exist independently of contexts. Information system design
ordinarily recognizes inputs, outputs, and boundaries, but neglects
contexts. The large literature on “Information seeking in context”
is much more about seeking than about context. I will argue, however,
that components have long been available, in hermeneutics,
social
constructivism, bibliography, information science, and elsewhere,
which, if combined, can support theorizing both context and
contextualizing. Join us for a discussion.
May 10: Clifford LYNCH: Changing Production and Distribution
Systems for Mass-Market Cultural Materials and Implications
for Stewardship: The case of Video Materials.
The way in which video (including "film")
materials are produced and the pathways by which they are
distributed have changed radically from the days of VHS or even
DVD. This has broad implications for our cultural memory institutions
and also for efforts to attempt to even understand patterns
of availability of material for libraries, or the stewardship
status of materials. I'll present what I believe are a number
of open research questions. This seminar talk and discussion
will continue and complement an earlier seminar session
focusing on music.
May 17: Muhammad Raza KHAN: Machine Learning for the Developing
World using Mobile Communication Metadata.
A report on PhD dissertation research.
Researchers working on the problems associated with the developed
world generally have access to rich and diverse datasets like social
media activity, sensors data, etc. However, the same is not correct
about the developing world where access to comprehensive datasets
is one of the most significant issues in the research. Social networks
and digital sensors have not been that common in the developing world
with one big exception, i.e. mobile phones. More than 95% of the world
population today has mobile phone coverage, and even in some of the
most under-developed places of the earth, the penetration of mobile
phones is much higher as compared to other measures of human
development like literacy or access to the financial infrastructure.
As a result, researchers have been increasingly using the meta-data
collected by the mobile phone companies in these developing countries
as an alternative to the more conventional data sources. However,
the mobile phone data may not be very well suited for the machine
learning algorithms in its raw form. In other words, there is a need
for algorithms to convert the raw mobile communication meta-data into
features suited for the machine learning algorithms.
In this talk, I am going to describe my work on
extracting features from mobile communication logs using techniques
like Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA). I will also show how this
approach outperforms other methods for problems like product adoption.
I further show that by using DFA based features and spectral analysis
of the multi-view nature of mobile communication networks, advanced
neural network algorithms can be developed that beat the current
state of the art methods for the problems like poverty prediction
and gender prediction. In the last part of this talk, I will describe
the value of communication networks data for research questions
related to social networks analysis like what are the salient
differences between the behavioral patterns of men and women in
the developing world as exhibited in the communication networks data.
Muhammed Raza Khan recently completed his PhD
in the School of Information where, as a member of the Data Intensive
Development Lab, he worked on problems related to machine learning
for social good. The insights resulting from his work on feature
generation using mobile communication metadata has been used by the
International Finance Corporation (a subsidiary of the World Bank)
to improve financial inclusion in countries like Ghana and Zambia.
In Ghana, this approach resulted in better targeting of the customers
of mobile money products by a margin of 30% as compared to the existing
methods. Raza was also one of the grantees of the UN Big Data for
Gender Challenge - Data2X. Raza's work has been published in venues
like the ACM SIG Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining and the
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Prior to UC Berkeley, Raza completed his Masters in Computer Science
from Georgia Tech as a Fulbright Scholar. For more see www.linkedin.com/in/razarehman.
The Seminar will resume in the Fall Semester.
Fall 2018 schedule and summaries.