School of
Information
Previously School of Library & Information Studies
Friday Afternoon Seminar: Summaries.
296a-1 Seminar: Information Access, Fall 2016.
Fridays 3-5. 107 South Hall.
Schedule. Weekly mailing list.
Friday, Aug 26: Clifford LYNCH: Factual Biography as Insfrastructure.
Clifford LYNCH and Michael BUCKLAND:
Introduction. Review of Seminar objectives and
plans for Fall 2016. Introductions by participants.
Clifford LYNCH: Factual Biography, Names, and
Identifiers as Infrastructure for the Digital Humanities and Beyond.
What I am calling "Factual biographies" in
machine-parsable structures can provide vital infrastructure for
historians, biographers, and many other kinds of research work,
and indeed for the scholarly record itself. I will begin with
definitions and examples, and discuss some of the drivers for
creating, sharing and reusing such biographies and some of the
data sources that can feed them; this will include a discussion
of the essential subordinate role of bibliography here. I'll
examine a second, lower level of key infrastructure --
names and identifiers -- and the state of developments in those
areas. Finally, the presentation will cover some considerations
about the availability and use of aggregated factual biographies
at scale, including privacy questions.
Sep 2: No Seminar: Labor Day Weekend.
Sep 9: Clifford LYNCH: Stewardship: I. Stewardship as a
Discipline and a Research Area.
This is the first of what are planned to be four lectures on
Stewardship which, starting from first principles, summarize and
synthesize the various discussions we have had over the past decade in
the Friday seminar.
This first talk will initially define stewardship
as a topic of research, including its relationship to other areas, including
information security and preservation, and to other disciplines. We
will explore some paradoxes of stewardship of the physical and the role
of digital surrogates of the physical, as well as born-digital
materials. Also to be considered are questions of access and visibility
of materials. If time allows we will begin a consideration of key
actors in the stewardship enterprise and their different traditions,
including the vital and often overlooked role of private collectors.
Sep 16: Marcia BATES: The Nature of the Information Professions.
What are the information professions? Do they
share enough in common to be considered as a group? Is there actually
any "there" there? How do they fit in with the rest of the academic
disciplines and professions in universities? Are they interdisciplinary?
(Hint: No.) Has the advent of digitization so commoditized information
service that any sense of professions will, necessarily, fade away?
Marcia J. Bates is Professor Emerita in the
University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of Information
Studies. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, she is a leading authority on information search,
human-centered design of information systems, and information practices.
She was Editor-in-Chief of the 7-volume Encyclopedia of Library
and Information Sciences, 3rd Ed., and is the recipient of many
awards for her research and leadership. In addition to her teaching
and scholarship, she has been a technical consultant to numerous
organizations in government, foundations, and businesses, including
technology startups. A graduate of Pomona College (B.A.) and the
University California at Berkeley (M.L.S., Ph.D.), Bates also served
in Thailand in the Peace Corps.
Sep 23: Michael BUCKLAND: From Scholars' Notes to New Forms of
Scholarly Communication.
First, a summary of six years experience with "open notebook
humanities" during our "Editorial Practices and the Web" project
working with historians preparing scholalrly editions of
historically important texts. Then, an examination
of how scholars working notes might lead to alternative
approaches to scholarly publication without the high costs,
long delays, and restricted access characteristic of legacy
publication practices.
David W. Lewis' new book "Reimagining the
academic library" (Rowan & Littlefield, 2016) assumes a
systematic transition to open access publication. How might
that be achieved?
Sep 30: Maximilian EIBL, Visiting Scholar from Chemnitz, Germany:
Digitizing Archives of Local TV Stations in Eastern Germany
Documenting the Transition of Political Systems after the
Reunification.
Surprisingly, the communist government of the German
Democratic Republic (GDR) sometimes quietly tolerated and even
supported the erection of community antennas all over East Germany
in the 1980s even though these antennas were used to receive West
German television. After reunification in 1990 many antennas and
their accompanying cable networks became the nucleus for local TV
stations whose programming reveal in a fascinating way
the transition of the socialist system to a market economy.
Surviving recordings on tape are deteriorating and at risk of loss.
The talk will present the software frameworks
AMOPA (Automated Moving Picture Annotator) and xTrieval (Extended
Information Retrieval Framework) developed at Chemnitz University
of Technology. The frameworks are used for different purposes in
teaching and research. I show how the xTrieval framework can be
used to enhance teaching Information Retrieval using real-world
experiments and game mechanics. Also I report on experience
using the frameworks to save the local TV archives.
Visiting Scholar Max Eible is professor
of Media Informatics at Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany.
He studied Information Science, History, and Philosophy at the
University of Regensburg (Germany) and Computer Science at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (U.S.A.) and at Sheffield
University (UK). From 1996 until 1999 he was a research assistant
at the Social Sciences Information Center in Bonn and did his PhD
in Computer Science at the University of Koblenz-Landau. His thesis
was on:“Visualization in Information Retrieval – Integrating concepts
of HCI and Graphic Design to Improve Interaction.” In 2000 he became
head of the Internet Group at the German Social Sciences
Infrastructure Services (now GESIS). Since 2006 he has been
professor of Computer Science at the Chemnitz University of Technology.
Oct 7: Clifford LYNCH: Stewardship II. The Cultural Record and Its
Evolution in the Digital Age.
This talk will focus on scoping and understanding
the nature of the
cultural record and how this is changing as more and more material is
produced and distributed in digital form. It will include consideration
of the relationship between the scholarly record and the broader
cultural record. several brief case studies of particular classes of
material that are part of the cultural record and how they are evolving
will be explored: books, music, news, the web, ephemera, and personal
and family information and records.
Oct 14: No Seminar meeting
Rob SANDERSON, Getty Center, will be rescheduled
early next semester.
Oct 21: Clifford LYNCH: Stewardship III: Legal and Policy Issues.
This talk will examine intellectual property law,
creator's rights, and privacy as they relate to stewardship. Private
ownership of cultural materials, movement of these materials,
and cultural and national
patrimony will also be considered. A key question here is how to
recognize and balance the public interest in effective stewardship
against many other competing priorities.
Oct 28: In South Hall 210: Alex AMIES: Experience with Open
Source Linguistic Data and Tools for Analysis of Chinese Text.
The speaker will discuss experience in access to
linguistic data from the development of a reader and corpus analysis
tools for Chinese Buddhist texts (ntireader.org). To begin with there
is much promise and hype in open source projects that have been used
or investigated in this project. Some of these sources are truly
useful, such as CBETA, which provides a digitization of several
versions of the Chinese Buddhist canon. The presentation will
describe challenges actually working with these sources, including
inferior quality, small volume, and critical missing pieces of the
open source data sources compared with copyrighted or otherwise
locked materials. The presentation will then describe approaches
to overcoming challenges, in particular tools, such as Jupyter
and Pandas, for efficient curation of linguistic data in a
semi-automated manner.
Alex Amies is working on a project to build
a Chinese text reader (ntireader.org)
for the Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō version of the Chinese Buddhist canon,
as part of a Master of Arts in Applied Buddhist Studies at Nan Tien
Institute, Australia. Alex works as a technical solution consultant
specializing in cloud computing as a full time job. He graduated with
a Masters of Science in Civil Engineering from Stanford and Bachelor
of Science in Computer Science from the University of New South Wales,
Australia.
Nov 4: Niels W. LUND, Univ of Tromsø, Norway: Information,
Documentation or ....? Do Paradigms (or Labels) Matter?"
Also: Maria Skou NICOLAISEN, Copenhagen: Short Report:
Digitally Informed Perspectives on Text.
How are notions of text reflected in and affected by
digital technology? A comparative study of the conceptual frameworks
guiding current digital literary projects.
Niels Windfeld LUND, Tromsø, Norway:
Information, Documentation or ....? Do Paradigms (or Labels) Matter?
In 1996, "Documentation Studies" was established in
Tromsø, Norway, and provided an alternative to the information
paradigm within the library and information science world and it
became more and more common to talk about documents and documentation,
not only in LIS, but also in social sciences and in society in general.
In 2001, Niels Lund, the founding professor of documentation studies,
presented in Berkeley a complementary theory of documentation.
Fifteen years later, he returns to discuss whether it is still
relevant today both in research and society in general or if we now
need a new label or paradigm ?
Niels Windfeld Lund was born in Copenhagen, Denmark.
An historian and ethnologist, he became associate professor at the
Royal School of Librarianship, Copenhagen, 1975-88; founding professor
of Documentation Studies at the University of Tromsø, Norway,
1996-2014 and, since 2014, professor emeritus. Niels Lund was
co-founder of The Document Academy, 2001, and visiting
professor at UC-Berkeley in 2001 and 2005-06.
Nov 11: University holiday: No Seminar.
Nov 18: Clifford LYNCH: Stewardship IV: Stewardship Failures
and Transitions.
Stewardship institutions can fail, or abdicate
parts of their historic mission; further, there are many
reasons why stewardship responsibility needs to be transferred
from one party to another. This is particularly critical and sensitive
for digital information, due to its fragile properties. This talk
will include a survey of a number of example drawn from libraries
and book collections, the world of art objects, archives, and data
collections. It will also include some further discussion of the
special role of private collectors in these transitions.
Nov 25: Thanksgiving: No Seminar.
Dec 2: Last Seminar meeting: David Lin WANG and Clifford LYNCH.
David Lin WANG: Max Boisot's Information Space and
Economic Systems.
The Information Space (I-space) model
was developed by Max Boisot to explain empirical evidence that the
planned economy of mainland China had not moved, as expected, to
an orthodox capitalist economy. The model will be described with
an explanation of how it could be made more complete from
the perspective of information science.
For Max Boisot see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Boisot.
"David" Lin Wang is Associate Professor in the
Department of Information Resource Management at Tianjin Normal
University, P.R. China. He obtained his PhD in Information Science
at Peking University of Beijing and is currently a Visiting Scholar here
in the School of Information.
Clifford LYNCH: Stewardship V: Stewardship
Transitions and Failures. Conclusions and Future Directions.
This hour brings to a close my series of talks on
Stewardship; originally planned for four lectures, it has expanded in length
slightly. In this talk we will complete our discussion of stewardship
failures and transitions, and then summarize the series with some
thoughts on key problems, central policy issues, and changes in
approach that are needed to address the challenges of pervasive digital
content.
The Seminar will resume on January 20th.
Fall
2016 schedule.
Spring
2016 schedule
and summaries.
Spring
2017 schedule
and summaries.