School of Information
 Previously School of Library & Information Studies

 Friday Afternoon Seminar: Summaries.
  296a-1 Seminar: Information Access, Fall 2013.

Fridays 3-5. 107 South Hall. Schedule. Weekly mailing list.
Summaries will be added as they become available.

Friday, Aug 30: No Seminar meeting.

Friday, Sep 6: Clifford LYNCH: Digital Libraries and Social Scale Systems.

    Introductions.     In late July 2013 I gave a keynote talk at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (www.jcdl2013.org) that looked at the changing nature of developing "digital library" systems and their evolution towards much larger-scale social systems. This included a look at the challenges of coherence and prioritization in an environment where multiple large-scale, high-cost initiatives are being advanced in parallel, and also some discussion of how the new environment may reshape research and education in digital libraries. To open the seminar for the 2013-2014 year, I will revisit and explore these themes and map our the issues at a more leisurely pace; we may return to some of these topics in greater depth later in the semester.

Friday, Sep 13: Warren SACK, UC Santa Cruz: Mutual Recursion: What Happens When Politics Becomes Code?
    Michael BUCKLAND: Brief trip report: Ars Electronica festival, Linz, Austria.
    Warren SACK, UC Santa Cruz: Mutual Recursion: What Happens When Politics Becomes Code?
    There is a growing appreciation for what Richard Rogers of the University of Amsterdam (2004) has called 'back-end politics," specifically how the detailed, internal workings of search engines, social networking sites, databases, electronic voting machines, and other computer and networking technologies have clear political implications. As more and more people go online to participate in the so-called "network society" (Manuel Castells, 1996), the need for the study of this kind of work in the domain of computers and networks is especially crucial and has been developing, in the last few years, under a few different labels including "digital methods," "digital humanities," "infrastructure studies," "platform studies," and, "software studies." I propose that studies of this sort need to be complemented by another kind of work that might be most simply termed as "software design." Specifically, now that the language of politics is inextricably woven into the code base of the Internet, a new form of political philosophy should be pursued by academics and researchers: specifically, the translation of democratic values from prose into programs. In short, my proposal is this: not only should we be studying the political implications of existing software, we should also be designing and writing prototype software that articulates the vagaries and values of democracy so that industry and government alike have multiple points of reference when they go about building large-scale platforms that increasingly mediate our personal, professional, social, and political institutions. A series of examples from my work will be presented.
    Warren Sack, former School of Information faculty member, is a software designer and media theorist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. He is Professor of Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz; and, Associate Director of the Data & Democracy Initiative at UC CITRIS. During the 2012-2013 academic year, he was an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Innovation Fellow; a visiting professor at the Department of Economic and Social Sciences at Télécom ParisTech; and a visiting professor at the médialab of Sciences Po. He earned a B.A. from Yale College and an S.M. and Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory. Warren's writings on new media and computer science have been published widely. He is currently working on a book for the MIT Press "Software Studies" series. His art work has been shown at the ZKM|Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the artport of the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Friday, Sept 20: Paul DUGUID & Clifford LYNCH.
    Nick MERRILL: Alternative Visions of Internet Connectivity.

    Brief introduction of research topic.
    Paul DUGUID: Dated Data: Presentism and California Trademarks.
    Data-driven research has an inherent and understandable tendency to lean towards contemporary data, which is always more likely to be "big." Where possible, however, it can be useful to balance the contemporary with historical data, as these can help overcome the inherent "survivorship bias" of contemporary data and the different sorts of teleological and presentist explanations that follow from this bias. This talk will offer an overview of early trademark registration data and suggest how these might modify our understanding of the development and theory of this branch of IP. It will try to look forward from the early registrations in the United States, rather than back with hindsight from the present. And it will draw on state registrations, rarely available in the big data sets of the U.S. Patent and Trademark office. In particular, it will look at California data. Generally overlooked, even by early historians of IP, California produced not only the first state trademark registration law, but anticipating federal law by seven years, the first law in the United States. As it also antedated British law by a dozen years, California's is in fact the first trademark registration law in common law jurisdictions and this year its 150th anniversary. The theory and general histories of trademarks, however, comforted by their own data, assume that the law and subsequent history developed in the industrial states.

Friday, Sept 27: Rafael PEDRAZA-JIMENEZ and Clifford LYNCH.
    Rafael PEDRAZA-JIMENEZ, Visiting Scholar from Pompeu Frabra University, Barcelona, Spain: Problematic issues with Semantic Web Technologies.
Brief introduction.
    Clifford LYNCH: The Failure of Stewardship Organizations and the Transfer or Conservation of Cultural Materials.
    In the past decade or so, we've seen many examples of stewardship organizations abandoning their management of collections, usually for economic reasons. In some cases, these situations raise very interesting governance, legal and public policy problems as well as financial and operational issues. In this discussion, I'll examine a number of representative case studies, and focus on how the ability to create very high quality digital representations of physical items or collections may change the situation. Time permitting, I'll also begin a discussion of how these situations may play out when the collections are themselves inherently digital.

Friday, Oct 4: Patrick RILEY, PhD Ark.com: Organizing the world's social information.     The web of pages has evolved into a web of people. The Internet has changed from being a place of information consumption to primarily a place of social interaction. The future of search engines, especially on mobile devices, is not ten blue links to pages, but one confident answer. In a response to this, Ark has been organizing the world's social information, by resolving social entities, profiles, and other social properties to provide products made for the future of search.
    Patrick Riley is the founder and CEO of Ark.com, a modern social search engine. Patrick built his first search engine while an undergraduate at Berkeley because he was tired of using Alta Vista to find academic articles. During his Ph.D., he created a search platform that captures and indexes everything said on broadcast television, in an effort to see how social media correlates to what is said on television. Patrick has published numerous computer science articles with the IEEE and ACM, as well as having ten years of industry experience.

Friday, Oct 11: Ron DAY, Indiana University: Indexing it All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data.
    In this talk, summarizing a recent book manuscript, I examine the mediation of subjects and objects by the techniques, technologies, and organizations of documentation, information, and data during the 20th and 21st centuries (what I call the modern "documentary tradition"). The talk asks: how have texts, being, and judgment been progressively subsumed by the documentary tradition? I look at five epistemic-historical moments: early 20th century European Documentation, citation indexing and analysis, social computing, android robotics, and big data and neoliberalism.
    Alumnus Ron Day, MLIS '93, is an associate professor at the Department of Information and Library Science, School of Informatics and Computing, at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of three books: The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001); co-editor and co-translator of the mid-twentieth century French documentalist, Suzanne Briet's book, What is Documentation? (Scarecrow, 2006); and co-editor with Claire McInerney, Rethinking Knowledge Management: From Knowledge Artifacts to Knowledge Processes (Springer, 2007). He is the author of numerous articles on the history, philosophy, and theory of documentation and information science. More at http://ils.indiana.edu/faculty/roday/index.html.

Friday, Oct 18: Merrilee PROFFITT and Max KLEIN, OCLC Research Library Partnership: What's Wikidata? A gentle introduction and some implications for libraries.
    Wikidata was introduced in 2012 as the latest project of the Wikimedia Foundation, providing structured data to Wikipedia. Since it was launched, it has grown rapidly and how has over 13 million items and 12 million properties that anyone can edit. But what is Wikidata? What role is library data is playing in Wikidata, and how might libraries benefit from the Wikidata effort? Join Max and Merrilee for a casual presentation and discussion.
    Merrilee Proffitt is a senior program officer at OCLC Research. Max Klein is OCLC's Wikipedian in Residence.

Friday, Oct 25: Two sessions: 2-3 pm and 3-5 pm.
2:00 - 3:00 p.m.: Centers of Excellence in Information Services: Discussion.

    How feasible would be the establishment of centers of excellence inside research libraries to address the libraries' research and development needs? A team of academic library administrators is conducting a survey of centers of excellence in diverse fields. Three members of that team will join us for an informal discussion of the project, which is funded by the Mellon Foundation, and of the issues involved: Susan Fliss (Associate Librarian for Research, Teaching, and Learning, Harvard College), Geneva Henry (University Librarian, George Washington U.), and Joy Kirchner (Associate University Librarian for Content and Collections, U. of Minnesota Libraries).

3:00 - 5:00 p.m.: Rajesh VEERARAHGAVANi and Tuukka RUOTSALO.
    Rajesh VEERARAGHAVAN: Controlling "last-mile" corruption: The Use and Subversion of ICT in an Indian Bureaucracy.

    To what extent can information technology be used to eliminate government corruption? In this talk, I examine an ambitious experiment by the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) within a bureaucracy to reduce corruption. In the initiative, senior bureaucrats built a digital network to remotely control the implementation of a public rural employment scheme. Focusing on the technology-based implementation, I show that centralization of implementation enabled by this technology did significantly reduce the endemic corruption that tends to happen in the local "last mile" of such schemes. But, local bureaucrats and politicians also discovered ways to subvert these efforts of control. My work suggests that the future of such government programs lies in recognizing that the move towards technological control in government is more of a political project than a technological one that needs wider participation from those it intends to benefit.
    Rajesh Veeraraghavan is a PhD student in the School of Information.
    Tuukka RUOTSALO, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland: Directing exploratory search: interactive user and intent modeling.
    A large part of everyday information seeking is informational as opposite to simple lookup, and the corresponding search behavior is fragmented to individual queries corresponding to evolving information needs. One of the main problems in exploratory search is that it can be hard, if not impossible, for users to formulate queries precisely, since information needs evolve throughout the search session as users gain more information. Current methods to support exploratory search are either based on suggesting query terms, or allowing faster access to the present search result set by faceted browsing or search result clustering. corruption? In this talk, I examine an ambitious experiment by the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) within a bureaucracy to reduce corruption. In the initiative, senior bureaucrats built a digital network to remotely control the implementation of a public rural employment scheme. Focusing on the technology-based implementation, I show that centralization of implementation enabled by this technology did significantly reduce the endemic corruption that tends to happen in the local "last mile" of such schemes. But, local bureaucrats and politicians also discovered ways to subvert these efforts of control. My work suggests that the future of such government programs lies in recognizing that the move towards technological control in government is more of a political project than a technological one that needs wider participation from those it intends to benefit.
    Rajesh Veeraraghavan is a PhD student in the School of Information.

Friday, Nov 1: Elisa OREGLIA: Dissertation Talk: From Farm to Farmville: Circulation, Adoption, and Use of ICT between Urban and Rural China.
    In the mid-2000s, China began a set of policies to "informatize" the countryside, i.e. to bring Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to rural residents in order to improve their economic conditions. These policies posit the countryside as a world of "less", compared to urban areas, and portray people who are at the margins of China's modernization (migrant workers, rural residents, older people, and farmers) as in need of ICT to access more and better information, and, as a consequence, more and better opportunities. In contrast to this widespread view of marginalized users as passive recipients of technologies, I look at the diffusion and appropriation of ICT such as mobile phones and computers among rural residents and migrant workers in their own terms: not as foils for elite views of why they would/should go online, but rather as people who discover the opportunities offered by ICT that are of interest to them, and try to use these opportunities as best as they can. By retracing the paths through which ICT travel in urban and rural China and the social relations that are maintained, renewed, and reinvented along the way, I show how people at the margins "invent" themselves as users, find a connection between their lives and technology, and participate from afar to China's rapid modernization.
    This work was
Friday, Nov 8: Niels W. LUND, Univ. of Tromso, Norway: A complementary document theory: or, Which discipline do you belong to?
    In the design of information services (libraries, archives, data sets, websites, etc.), you deal with documents in relation to their material nature (paper, software, hardware etc. etc.), their social status (legal issues with access etc., impact), and their mental/cognitive aspects (How are they been understood?). But in the world of higher education, you still have a relatively sharp division between humanities, social sciences, and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), so what can you do when you feel you belong to all three academic worlds?
    Niels Windfeld Lund is a soon-to-be-Emeritus Professor, University of Tromso, Norway, where he was the founding director of the program in Documentation Studies. He twice been a visiting scholar here. More at Bio card.

Friday, Nov 15: Nick MERRILL: Alternative Visions of Internet Connectivity.
    A short progress report will include discussion on the following projects:
  -   Namecoin, a widely distributed DNS that relies on a proof-of-work cryptosystem to align the database over many peers;
  -   tent.io - a novel approach to cloud-based application development in which users store their personal data locally; and
  -   commotion wireless, a cross-platform mesh network protcol with its eye on more than simple router replacement; and
  -   vole and its cousin idas blue with shoutout to blogracy --- attempts at peer-to-peer messaging that seem to slip below the great firewall of China.
    Clifford LYNCH: The Failure of Stewardship Organizations and the Transfer or Conservation of Cultural Materials.
    Continued from Sept 27: In the past decade or so, we've seen many examples of stewardship organizations abandoning their management of collections, usually for economic reasons. In some cases, these situations raise very interesting governance, legal and public policy problems as well as financial and operational issues. In this discussion, I'll examine a number of representative case studies, and focus on how the ability to create very high quality digital representations of physical items or collections may change the situation. Time permitting, I'll also begin a discussion of how these situations may play out when the collections are themselves inherently digital.

Friday, Nov 22 in South Hall 205: Marilyn TREMAINE: Investigating What Makes 3D Visualizations Difficult.
    Psychologists have known for approximately 50 years that individuals exhibit significant differences in spatial ability, differences that makes it extremely difficult for a large number of people to perform important spatial tasks. It has also been shown that there is a gender gap in spatial ability with males performing better on most spatial tasks. The advent of computers and the advances in science and medicine have created disciplines that low spatial individuals find difficult to enter. Even daily life has become harder for them because of complex information presentations that require spatial ability.
    More recent work has shown that individuals can improve their spatial skills with practice in their specific domain, and several software applications have been written to support such practice. However, there is currently no body of knowledge that suggests how to teach spatial skills. This research is looking at what properties of scientific visualizations make them difficult for individuals to understand with the intent of building training applications that start with practice on easier to comprehend properties followed by more difficult ones.
    We are currently looking at space-filling 3D visualizations, e.g., those used to show sediment layers in geology. This talk will present work that developed and then tested hypotheses about specific properties of the visualizations that were believed to make them more difficult to comprehend. Our work on projection visualizations has already shown that structured practice, ordering problem sets from easy to hard improved learning over random practice. Our intent is to use this current work to build an application supporting structured practice with space filling visualizations.
    Marilyn Tremaine is a Professor in Rutgers University's Professional Science Master's Program and in on the graduate faculties of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Communication and Information, and the Rutgers Business School. She currently is head of the Master in Business Science degree in User Experience Design and co-directs Master's degrees in Information Technology and Computers and Social Media. Prof. Tremaine's research focuses on understanding ser problems with 3D visualization and the impact of user experience practices on sustained competitive advantage. Past research includes work on global software development, the effect of temporal structures on organizational efficiency, the development technology and interfaces to support stroke rehabilitation and the creation of computer support meeting environments.
    She has also been active in the ACM Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI) serving as Vice-President of Communications, Chair of the Advisory Council, Vice-President of Finance and President of SIGCHI. She chaired the CHI'86 Conference on Human Factors in Computing, the CSCW'92 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, the ASSETS'2000 Conference on Assistive Technology and the CUU'2002 Conference on Universal Usability. She has served on six technical journal editorial boards and has been technical program chair for ACM conferences twice. She recently served as the Vice President of User Experience -New Jersey, editor of the Journal of Usability Studies and the Chair of CHI 2011's MatriarCHI event.

Friday, Nov 29: Thanksgiving: No Seminar meeting.

Friday, Dec 6: Two sessions: Nick MERRILL and Karen SMITH-YOSHIMURA.
  2:00 - 3:00 p.m. Nick MERRILL: Alternative visions of internet-like connectivity.
    Largely, state surveillance relies on placing political pressure on centralized information systems - servers where information is unusually well-indexed or through which major conduits of information flow. Recently, a community of open source developers have attempted to re-engineer fundamental internet technologies to remove these central points of weakness. Motivated by a growing awareness of global surveillance practices, their projects expand traditional client-server models by distributing information broadly among the application's users. Collectively, they have implemented blogs, video sites, social networks and even a domain name system using distributed, peer-to-peer datastores. The present research surveys a few of these projects, discusses their motivation and points forwards to potential directions for future development.
  Karen SMITH-YOSHIMURA, OCLC Research Library Partnership: Registerng Researchers in Authority Files.
    A number of approaches have emerged to address uniquely identifying all researchers, including those only partially represented in national name authority files because they primarily write journal articles or do not publish but contribute to data sets or other research activities. Authority databases, researcher identifier registries and researcher profile networks potentially overlap, and have created uncertainly in the library community regarding the challenges, benefits and trade-offs of each approach. The OCLC Research's Registering Researchers in Authority Files Task Group comprises specialists from the US, the UK, and the Netherlands who are engaged in uniquely identifying academic authors and researchers. Our goal is to identify: the benefits, needs and challenges for integrated author identification; approaches to effectively integrate multiple author identifier systems and to reconcile information from multiple sources; models and workflows for registering and maintaining integrated author and researcher information. More at www.oclc.org/research/activities/registering-researchers.html.
    Karen Smith-Yoshimura is a Program Officer in OCLC Research and is based in OCLC's San Mateo office. She has been working with research institutions affiliated with the trans-national OCLC Research Library Partnership for over twenty years. She focuses on issues related to the metadata needed to describe and provide access to the resources managed by libraries, archives, museums and other cultural heritage organizations. More at www.oclc.org/research/people/smith-yoshimura.html.

The Seminar will resume next semester.

Fall 2013 schedule.   Spring 2013 schedule and summaries.