School of
Information
Previously School of Library & Information Studies
296a-1
Seminar: Information Access.
("The Friday Afternoon Seminar")
Summaries - Spring 2006.
Fridays 3-5. 107 South Hall.
Schedule.
Summaries will be added as they become available.
Friday, Jan 20: Ray LARSON: Time Period Directories; and HICSS.
We will be discussing a paper just submitted
to the Joint Conference
on Digital Libraries (JCDL) entitled "Time Period Directories: A
Metadata Infrastructure for Placing Events in Temporal and Geographic
Context." Metadata is ordinarily used to describe documents, but it
can also constitute a form of infrastructure for access to networked
resources and for traversal of those resources. One problematic area
for access to digital library resources has been the ability to
interpret user statements of periods or eras as ranges of dates and to
associate them with particular locations. For example, a user
interested in the "Vietnam war", "Clinton Administration" or the
"Elizabethan Period" must either know the corresponding dates, or
rely on simple keyword matching for those period names. This paper
describes the Time Period Directory, a metadata infrastructure for
named time periods linking them with their geographic location as well
as a canonical time period range. We describe the design and
development of Time Period Directories and discuss the a prototype
version derived from the Library of Congress Subject Headings.
Time periods and events are tightly associated, which
leads to us to consider how "events" should be described. Further,
people's lives can be viewed as a series of episodes or events,
which leads, in turn, to new possibilities for representing and
marking up biographical records.
In addition we will discuss the papers presented
in the Digital Media
Track of the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences
(HICSS).
Jan 27: Timo SAARI, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology:
Researching Mobile Media in Context.
The talk will address the study of mobile media and
its impacts, mostly from the psychological point of view. Brief examples
in psychology of mobile media (making and receiving media content) as
well as contextual and situational influences on mobile media creation
and reception will be presented. Also, methodological challenges and
opportunities for field-based mobile media research are addressed.
Study examples include mobile attention allocation processes, mobile
and collaborative spectator media for large-scale events and the
impact of use context on mobile gaming.
Timo Saari, D.Soc.Sc., is Senior Research Scientist
in the User Experience Research Group, and the Director of Research at
the Center for Knowledge and Innovation Research (CKIR) in Helsinki
School of Economics and Associate Director of M.I.N.D. Lab., USA & Finland.
Currently Dr. Saari is a Visiting Scholar in Stanford University. For
fall semester 2005 Dr. Saari was Visiting Professor at Michigan State
University in Mobile Media Psychology.
His research interests are i) psychology and adaptation
of mobile interaction and ii) media-rich collaboration technologies,
such as collaborative gaming applications for team-based knowledge
work, iii) design for emotion in entertainment gaming. His previous
research on mobile interaction includes experiments on how adaptation
of mobile interface form factors and design influence emotion, mood,
presence and learning with news and entertainment content. Recent
research investigates how mood influences behavior in mobile
interaction.
Research on media-rich collaboration technologies
and collaborative gaming addresses issues such as how social awareness
technologies and open content-based collaborative games and simulations
can be used to facilitate performance of knowledge worker teams in
select business processes, such as product development. Performance
is seen as task- related but also concepts of social performance
(group maintenance and cohesiveness) and emotional performance
(mood management, well-being) are used. Research on entertainment
gaming involves studying the emotional significance of various
gaming stimuli, such as middle level generic elements inside gaming
sequences (obstacles in driving games, for instance) across different
genres of games or the emotional impact of multiplayer gaming and
social interaction. Also, approaches to user regulated emotional
controls for games have been developed.
Dr. Saari was a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley
School of Information Management and Systems in spring 2004 focusing
on psychology of personalization systems.
Feb 3: Marc DAVIS, Founding Director, Yahoo! Research Berkeley:
Yahoo! Research Berkeley: Designing the Future of Social Media.
: The challenges of the internet cannot be solved by technology alone. New methods of research and product innovation are needed that enable the iterative design, development, and analysis of "sociotechnical" systems and applications. The possibility of creating large scale internet services that connect billions of humans, computational devices, and media assets into a functional network require us to rethink information science, social science, media studies, and design. This talk will discuss new ways of reconceptualizing the objects and methods of information technology research (especially in the area of multimedia information systems) as well innovation processes for corporate and academic research and development designed to address the challenges and opportunities of large scale internet media systems and applications. We will discuss these issues in the context of Yahoo! Research Berkeley-an innovative corporate-academic collaboration for research and development begun this past summer by Yahoo! Inc. and UC Berkeley.
Yahoo! Research Berkeley explores and invents social media and mobile media technology and applications at the intersection of media, technology, and people. Yahoo! Research Berkeley is focused on how we can gather and use media metadata to leverage context (especially from mobile devices) and the power of community (especially through tagging and sharing of media) to enable people to create, describe, find, share, and remix media content (especially photos, video, and audio) on the global internet.
Biography:
Marc Davis is the Founding Director of Yahoo! Research Berkeley. He is responsible for the technical and creative vision and leadership for the Lab. Yahoo! Research Berkeley is a new research partnership between Yahoo! Inc. and the University of California at Berkeley to explore and invent social media and mobile media technology and applications that will enable people to create, describe, find, share, and remix media on the web. Prof. Davis is on leave from the University of California at Berkeley School of Information where he directed Garage Cinema Research. Prof. Davis' work is focused on creating the technology and applications that will enable the billions of daily media consumers to become daily media producers. Prof. Davis earned his B.A. in the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, his M.A. in Literary Theory and Philosophy at the University of Konstanz in Germany, and his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory. From 1993 to 1998 at Interval Research Corporation, he led research and development teams in creating automatic media production technology. In 1997, he was an invited contributor to the 50th Anniversary Edition of the Communications of the ACM. From 1999 to 2002, he was Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Amova, Inc., a developer of media automation and personalization technology. Prof. Davis is also a Co-Founder and Executive Committee Member of the new interdisciplinary UC Berkeley Center for New Media (CNM).
Feb 10: Clifford LYNCH: Some Irresponsible Speculations on the
Implications of Large Scale Digitization and Digital Literatures.
There are a number of large scale digitization programs
underway to convert a great deal of the published literature --
scholarly and otherwise -- to digital form. At the same time, at
least for the scholarly literature, increasing amounts of material
are being published digitally. In my talk, I'll briefly some of
these developments, and conclude with a series of speculations
about the implications of having disciplinary literatures in digital
form.
Feb 17: Keith Johnson, Stanford Digital Repository:
Digital Preservation: "In theory, there's no difference between theory and
practice.
In the process of designing institutionally scoped digital
preservation services, I have been struck by a frequent disconnect between
digital preservation theory and the existing practical and economic environment.
My response, predictably, has been to attempt synthesis of more theory-practical,
that! Yet my goal was to put together something strategically informative for
institutional digital preservation service design, and as the theory has indeed
been informative, it is gradually proving itself practical.
I will present a current snapshot of this evolving work, how it
addresses what I perceive to be some impracticalities in common digital
preservation models, and its impact on the evolving design of the Stanford
Digital Repository.
Keith Johnson Product Manager at the Stanford Digital Repository.
Feb 24: Colin BURKE, Historian: Codebreaking and retrieval machines in the
1930s and 1940s; and the Historiography of Information Systems
Colin Burke will discuss his work on two subjects: the
related development of machines for codebreaking and machines for
information retrieval during the 1930s and 1940s; and, his current
work on the history of information science and information industry
with a focus on his forthcoming ARIST article surveying the state
of the art of the history of information.
Colin Burke is an historian who has researched several
different topics during this career, with the aid of grants from many
organizations including the Social Science Research Council, The Ford
Foundation, NSA, and the Chemical Heritage Foundation. He is currently
working on information history, a follow-up on a statistical history
of non-profit organizations, and the history of an American intelligence
agent and policy maker whose career spanned World War II, the critical
years of the cold war, and a politically-driven attempt to imprison
him during the Kennedy years.
Mar 3: Clifford LYNCH:The Varieties of Data Curation.
Data curation has recieved a great deal of emphasis
recently in the context of cyberinfrastructure and e-research, yet
it seems to mean very different things to different people and in
different settings. I will look at a range of practices and activities
that fall under the data curation umbrella, and will also offer some
discussion of key challenges that need to be addressed.
Mar 10: Libby SMITH, Yun Kyung JUNG, and Ray LARSON.
Libby SMITH: Mass Collection Digitization:
Keeping Resources Trusted.
Standards have been developed for trusted digital
repositories. How
do these attributes apply to mass digitization projects conducted by a
commercial third party such as Google? Examined are such issues as
quality, storage, and, most importantly, persistence of access. In
other words, in the case of repositories like UCB, how can Google be
trusted to provide an accurate and accessible collection forever?
Yun Kyung JUNG: Reasons for Voluntary Information Sharing
in Korean Cyberspace: The Uses and Gratification Approach.
I will study the various motivations and reasons for
voluntary user participation and information sharing among groups of
Koreans who share similar interests in cyberspace. As the primary method
to analyze this topic I have chosen the "Uses and Gratifications"
approach developed by communication researchers such as Katz and Blumler.
In the traditional study of media, the main object of study is the media.
The Uses and Gratifications approach, developed in the 1970s, starts with
people and explores how people use a certain media in order to achieve
their needs. This theory was not designed for Internet media and may
not apply well to the culture of Korean cyber society, and there might
be other factors that are not covered by this theory. I will also look
for reasons that have not yet been documented.
Ray R. LARSON:
Grid-based Digital Libraries and Cheshire3.
Recent research in designing and developing digital library services
has been focused on approaches to indexing and searching in a steadily
increasing range of genres and materials. An important aspect of this
research is concerned with providing effective and scalable IR
services for digital libraries as these diverse collections grow to
sizes measured in terabytes and petabytes. The Cheshire project has
had a central research focus on large-scale digital library collections
for more than a decade, with a current focus on supporting distributed
digital libraries in a Grid evironment. At the same time we have have
been prototyping systems for very long-term digital preservation, and
examining how grid-scale information retrieval systems can
interoperate with petabytes of diverse data stored over many years.
In order for Information Retrieval (IR) in the evolving "Grid"
parallel distributed computing environment to work
effectively, there must be a single flexible and extensible series of
"Grid Services" with identifiable objects and a known API to handle
the IR functions needed for Digital Libraries or other retrieval
tasks. The Cheshire3 system builds on the work of the Cheshire project
over the past decade to define and implement an easy to use set of IR
objects with precisely defined roles that can effectively provide a
Grid Service for IR. I will discuss how distributed storage technologies
like the SRB (Storage Resource Broker) are being used in Cheshire3, and
the issues of efficiency in such a computing environment.
(This talk is based on recent submissions to SIGIR and to INFOSCALE).
Mar 17: Kirsten NEILSEN, Project Manager, Tobacco Control Digital Library and
Heidi SCHMIDT, Director, Academic Information Systems, UCSF.
Remodeling a Digital Library: Planning for the Next Generation Legacy
Tobacco Documents Library.
UCSF Library hosts 2 large digital archives
of corporate documents from the
tobacco industry. The larger of the two collections, the Legacy Tobacco
Documents Library (LTDL), launched in 2002 with about 24 million pages. The
system was built using the University of Michigan's DLXS software.
Two radical changes to LTDL's content compel us to redesign the system.
First, the LTDL has almost doubled in size in 4 years; the Library now holds
41 million pages and more are added each month. Second, we have completed a
project to OCR all of the documents. When LTDL launched users could search
metadata only; now we are able to provide full-text searching, but the DLXS
system cannot support this function.
Meanwhile, in October 2003 we launched a second, smaller archive, the
British American Tobacco Documents Archive (BATDA) which currently holds 4
million pages of documents. The BADTA system, built in Java and based on the
Lucene search engine, does support full-text searching. In addition, the
system incorporates user suggestions and other knowledge, particularly about
usability, gleaned from experience with LTDL.
Our current plans are to build the new LTDL on the BADTA model using Java
and Lucene. However, we would welcome advice, suggestions, or just
validation of our plan from others in the community.
We plan to discuss the creation of the current systems as a means of
explaining what we have done and plan to do and, we hope, to explore what we
have not done or even thought to do.
Mar 24: Michael BUCKLAND: Book Talk: Emanuel Goldberg and His Knowledge
Machine.
In the received history of information science, Vannevar Bush designed
the first desktop
search engine, his mythic "Memex"; J. Edgar Hoover revealed that microdots used in
espionage were invented in Dresden by a Professor Zapp; and in the history of photography
the design of the famous Contax 35 mm camera is attributed to Heinz Kueppenbender,
head of Zeiss Ikon.
In fact all three -- and much more --
were primarily the work of Emanuel Goldberg (born Moscow 1881,
active in Germany 1900-1933,
died in Tel Aviv 1970). Goldberg, internationally famous in his prime, disappeared
into oblivion and
was forgotten.
My new book,
Emanuel Goldberg and his Knowledge Machine: Information,
Invention, and Political Forces, reconstructs Goldberg's life and work.
I will talk briefly about why and how the book was written, give highlights of
Goldberg's adventurous life, and
discuss Goldberg as a case study in historiography and
the mechanisms of historical amnesia.
More at
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~buckland/goldberg.html.
Mar 31: No Seminar - Spring Break.
Apr 7: Niels LUND: A Document Turn Ahead?
In connection with the development of ICT, many have envisioned
having all "content" in one huge database, the world-brain, getting rid of the
disturbing frames and borders in the analog world, a vision which is still kept
alive by Google and several others.
At the same time, the digital world becomes more and more diversified having an
infinite number of virtual communities with a lot of different databases using
many different media and media combinations.
Several current research projects focus on framing and capturing
content across all these distributed resources into something useful and relevant.
The huge amount of data available is not only an advantage, but is also a source
of very complex problems of dividing up and selecting from the huge amount of data.
In 1964 the French philospher Roland Barthes said: "meaning is
above all a cutting-out of shapes" and he might have predicted the major
challenge in a digital age.
He said: "looking into the distant and perhaps ideal future, we might say that
semiology and taxonomy, although they are not yet born, are perhaps meant to
be merged into a new science, arthrology, namely, the science of apportionment."
As I see it, this can be considered as a prediction of a document turn.
On April 7 I will explain why and how.
Apr 14: Coye CHESHIRE: Current Experimental Research in the Use of Information for
Trust-Building and Social Exchange Transitions.
A social exchange system is a fundamental form of human interaction
that consists of individuals who exchange social and material resources. In
any given social exchange system, individuals have access to various kinds
of information about their potential exchange partners (such as personal
exchange experience or third-party reputations). A long history of social
exchange experiments demonstrates that different forms of exchange yield
different outcomes for cooperation, trust, affect, and other factors. To a
large extent, this is a function of the differences that exist in levels of
risk and uncertainty inherent in various forms of exchange (i.e.,
reciprocal, binding, or non-binding exchange). In this talk, I will present
my current and forthcoming research on how available information within an
exchange network is related to 1) building trust, and 2) transitioning
between forms of exchange. Given the current interest in real-world systems
of B2B and Internet-based exchange (which often challenge many assumptions
about exchange processes, attributions, and outcomes), the opportunities for
theoretical development and real-world applications of the study of
trust-building and transitions in modes of exchange are substantial.
Trust and Trust-Building.
Research has consistently demonstrated that increased uncertainty in
social exchange leads to an increased need for relations based on
interpersonal trust. I will present current experimental research that shows
how uncertainty and risk affect trust-building over repeated interactions
and assessments of trustworthiness in one-shot interactions.
Exchange Transitions.
Prior work in social exchange generally begins with fixed networks
in which only one type of exchange can occur; in other words, the type of
exchange is fixed by the experimenter for purposes of comparison. There is
little or no research on the process of transitioning between different
modes of social exchange. I will present a set of theoretically driven
arguments for social exchange systems that transition (or shift) between
reciprocal exchange and binding or non-binding negotiated exchange (which is
only one of the possible types of transition in modes of exchange). These
shifts can be structurally determined (i.e. the form of exchange occurs
exogenously independent of the particular intentions or desires of the
participants), or as agent-based transitions (i.e. in which individuals
choose to move to a new mode of exchange based on their own experiences,
available information, and dispositions).
In collaboration with researchers at Stanford University, we make
several predictions about how agent-based transitions occur and about the
attributions and exchange outcomes that result from both structurally
determined and agent-based transitions in mode of exchange. I will present
our proposed set of social exchange experiments that will allow us to test
various hypotheses about these social exchange transitions.
Apr 21: Charis KASKIRIS: Behavioral Economic
Engineering: An Emprical Investigation of Time Preferences.
"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes
the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a
poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently
among the overabundance of information sources
that might consume it." (Herbert Simon, 1971)
Designing information services and systems that incorporate
desired individual and social outcomes requires understanding of the
information, instruction, and support structures, as well as the incentives,
motivations and psychological biases of users within the technological
possibilities available. Information design and encoding of such systems
incorporates models of human behavior whose empirical validity becomes
a critical component of the system's verification of the effectiveness.
We investigate different explorative and predictive models
of time discounting behavior using a unique data set from an online medical
claim negotiation service. We examine negotiators' discounting patterns,
time preference behavior and construct different predictive
models/technologies for improving negotiation outcomes. The data also
provide a unique opportunity to to study individual inter-temporal
preferences outside the experimental laboratory and provide some
empirical evidence towards the predictive accuracy of different
models of time discounting. This understanding is crucial in behavioral
modeling of users and in providing technologies which improve
negotiation outcomes.
*** Change of program ***
Visit of Dean AnnaLee Saxenian has been postponed.
Apr 28: Clifford LYNCH and Michael BUCKLAND: Reports and New Developments.
Clifford LYNCH: I'll report on highlights from a range of
recent conferences and meetings, including the CNI Spring Task Force Meeting,
the Internet2 meeting, the EDUCAUSE Policy meeting, the
CNI/Mellon/Microsoft/DLF/JISC invitational workshop on repository
interoperability and other developments as time permits.
Michael BUCKLAND: The Nature of Naming:
(1) Mapping Names of Objects to Names of Topics:
Preliminary report on a mapping of gazetteer
feature types (the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Geographic
Description Codes) to Library of Congress Subject headings;
(2) Subject Headings as Naming: Ideas for a paper on library subject
cataloging and classification for a linguistics anthology on "naming".
What "aboutness" is about. Tensions between the fluidity of language and
libraries' need for stability. Why subject categorization is inherently
obsolescent and unsatisfactory.
*** Last Friday of Semester ***
May 5: Students' Reports.
Yun Kyung JUNG: What Clicks? Why do Korean Cyber Users
Participate in Sharing Information?
An examination of uses of Google in the USA and Naver
in Korea found distinct differences. Naver users prefer to ask questions
of other users instead of doing keyword searching, as in Google. Users
are ranked by the quality of their answers. The more they offer, the
more likely information-receivers are to get relevant information and
the more information-givers likely get higher rank in "Naegong"
("inside-power of human being"). Ranks change in real time.
People care a lot about their "Naegong" rank. Similarly, the web site
called "wtv" allows anyone who has a webcam to share their files through
Internet broadcasting and get "stars" from people who receive the service.
People choose media based on their needs. Media have to
provide for use, an expectation of rewards that the media can provide.
"Naegong" and "star" click Korean cyber users' motivation for more
active participation in information sharing. Why do these intangible
rewards matter so much in Korean society and Internet culture? In Korea
Google is not as popular as Naver and is placed the fourth among.
Koreans seem to trust personal answers rather than web pages.
Elizabeth Ann SMITH: Mass Digitization:
Is Google a Trusted Repository?
Google is digitizing huge library collections.
If Google will essentially become the steward for these collections,
is it responsible for the collections and to the public to maintain
accessibility and quality of the content? Necessary attributes of
such trusted repositories have been developed and will be examined in
the context of the Google Library Project. Questions and other issues
will be explored to determine the feasibility of Google as a trusted
resource.
Vivien PETRAS: Translating Dialects in Search:
Mapping between Specialized Languages of Discourse and Documentary Languages.
The biggest problem in searching an information
system is to find the appropriate search terms that not only represent
the searcher's information need but also match the language used in the
information system. This is a translation problem between a specialized
dialect of discourse and the documentary language of the information
system. Discourse dialects evolve within specialized communities. They
differ from general language and other communities' dialects in terminology
(e.g. terms of art, jargon) and patterns grammar. A documentary language
is the language used for document representation in an information system.
The scope of a bibliographic database and its documentary language usually
extends across more than one domain of discourse.
This dissertation describes a mechanism that will provide
a translation aid between specialized languages and the documentary
language by suggesting appropriate search terms for a searcher's query
in relation to the searcher's domain of discourse. With this kind of
vocabulary support in the search process, the different specialized
vocabularies within the information system can be disambiguated.
Different perspectives on a topic can be represented to the searcher
(based on the different discourses' discussion of the topic in the
collection), which will help in navigating and exploring this information
space more effectively.
Aug 18: Julian WARNER, Queen's University, Belfast.
Forms of Mental Labor in the Feist Judgment.
The Feist judgment by the Supreme Court, which denied
copyright to telephone white pages, occurred in 1991 and is regarded
as one of the most significant copyright decisions concerning information
technology and inordinately Delphic even by Supreme Court standards.
This presentation attempts to clarify the judgment by
distinguishing different forms of mental labor, and their relation to
technology, which are implicit or covert in the judgment itself. The
presentation is deliberately exploratory and the presenter encourages
communal contributions.
Julian Warner is a faculty member in information
science at the Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland, where
he teaches courses in the human aspects of modern information and
communication technologies and in information policy. He has been
a visiting scholar here in South Hall and at the Universities of
Illinois and Edinburgh, and a visiting professor at Indiana University.
He has published a number of journal articles in information science
and three books, the first of which was translated into Japanese and
selected as a recommended reading by Microsoft Japan.
The seminar will continue in the Fall 2006 semester.
Spring 2006 schedule.
Fall 2005 schedule
and
summaries.