Bing He, Erjia Yan, and Chaoqun Ni - ASIS&T 2010
2010 has been an active year for students working towards the SLIS Ph.D. in Information Science degree.
Inna Kouper, Lai Ma, Bing He, Hesham Alsharan, Shannon Oltmann, Chaoqun Ni and Erjia Yan contributed to the 73rd Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) held October 22-27, 2010 in Pittsburgh, PA. Mark Millard presented at the Web Science Conference (WebSci10) held April 26-27, 2010 in Raleigh, NC. Elin Jacob, Director of the SLIS Doctoral Program, provided summaries of their presentations (see below.)
Inna Kouper, SLIS doctoral candidate, participated in the workshop "What in the World are We Talking About: The Differences That Definitions Make in Core Concepts", which was organized by SIG/USE and SIG/SI. In her presentation at the workshop, Inna discussed the concept of information seeking and how various models converge or diverge in their definitions of this concept. Lai Ma, also a SLIS doctoral candidate, presented her paper entitled "Information as Discursive Construct". In this paper, Lai argued that "By revisiting the notion of 'information-as-thing' (Buckland, 1991) and investigating the notion of 'regimes of information' (Ekbia & Evans, 2009), this paper shows that 'information' is constituted by community consensus and is influenced by economic and political structures of social systems. As such, 'information' should be understood as discursive construct. Understanding 'information' as discursive construct not only rids us of distorted views of communication and cognition implicated in influential conceptions of information, but also opens up questions concerning 'information' for critical social analyses, which in turn leads to epistemological and methodological discussions."
Bing He, SLIS doctoral student, presented her poster "A Comparative Analysis of User-generated and Author-generated Metadata for Web Resources." In collaboration with Assistant Professor Ying Ding, Bing investigated "the difference between metadata generated by users and authors. Delicious tags and HTML keyword META tags associated with the same set of web pages on topics related to semantic web are collected, forming two datasets (i.e., Delicious dataset and HTML dataset). Comparisons of the two datasets in micro and macro vocabulary overlap as well as classification of web pages are analyzed. The results show that (1) overlap between the two datasets exists; (2) non-overlapped tags in Delicious dataset reveal systematic deficiency of social tagging systems; non-overlapped tags in HTML dataset expose organization-oriented contents; and (3) Delicious dataset tends to cluster web pages according to their popularity and subject area while HTML dataset clusters the web pages according to different websites/authors."
Doctoral student Hesham Alsarhan presented in the session Information Use in Learning. "Learning Tacit Knowledge in Life Science Graduate Programs in Taiwan", written by Associate Professor Noriko Hara, Hesham Alsarhan, John Kilburn, Marcus Ynalvez, Ruby Ynalvez, Kuo-Hua Chen, described "preliminary results of a three-year project that examines the enculturation of doctoral students in life science programs in Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore. The purpose of the study is to examine how doctoral students in life science enrolled at universities in these three countries learn to become scientists and how information and communication technologies affect such processes. The project is in its first year, and we completed data collection in Taiwan during the summer of 2009. Data was collected using quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews, and time-diaries from advisors and doctoral students in life science programs in three Taiwanese universities. Preliminary results show that current students tend to have problems related to too great a reliance on computers, kits, and the Internet, and as a result, they fail to assimilate tacit knowledge that is invaluable in becoming the next generation of scientists."
SLIS doctoral candidate Shannon Oltmann presented a paper entitled "Katz out of the Bag: The Broader Privacy Ramifications of using Facebook." Shannon argued that, "As the social networking site Facebook has grown in popularity, scholars have worried about the seemingly nonchalant attitude toward privacy fostered by the website; others have argued for a more nuanced understanding of privacy. The implications of privacy attitudes, engendered at Facebook, stretch far beyond that website. To understand the possible ramifications of these changing attitudes toward privacy, we must examine legal conceptions of privacy, particularly the 1967 Katz v. United States case. With the Katz case, the Supreme Court created a formal definition of how much privacy a citizen could reasonably expect in the U.S. Privacy, according to the Supreme Court, is contingent upon the amount of privacy one expects to have. Thus, a site like Facebook, which frequently decreases the privacy of its users and creates lowered expectations for privacy, could have serious implications for the offline world. By reducing the level of privacy we expect from a business and within social relationships, Facebook may permanently lower the privacy available to us both online and offline."
Two SLIS doctoral students presented research on which they had collaborated with Assistant Professor Ying Ding. The paper presented by Chaoqun Ni explored "mapping journals in library and information science (LIS) through interlocking editorship information. Forty-eight LIS journals are clustered into four clusters. Possible reasons for some boundary-spanning journals and ten journals uninvolved in interlocking editorship are given. Results suggest that interlocking editorship information is useful for clustering journals in LIS, and additional suggestions regarding LIS journal re-categorization are proposed." In the paper "Measuring Scholarly Impact in Heterogeneous Networks" Erjia Yan described research leading to the proposal for "a new informetric indicator P-Rank for measuring the status of articles, authors, and journals in heterogeneous scholarly networks. P-Rank differentiates the weight of each citation based on its citing journals, citing authors, and time of publication. Articles from 16 library and information science (LIS) journals are selected as the dataset. We compare the top 10 lists for authors, journals, and articles based on different parameters of P-Rank."
Earlier this year, Mark Millard presented a paper entitled "Analysis of Interaction in an Asynchronous CMC Environment" at WebSci10 in Raleigh in April. In his paper, Mark argued that "Popular discourse is rife with promises of technologies that enhance collaboration, interaction, and learning. Current trends in social media, web 2.0, and convergent media computer-mediated communication (CMCMC) have stretched the bounds of traditional ICT use toward multifaceted information processing, social functions, communication, and learning support. The motivation for this study emerged from the dissonance between popular claims of learning technology advocates and the need to verify claims through empirical investigation. This research study was interested in investigating the characteristics of interaction, social presence and collaboration found within Voicethread.com. Results of the content analysis present an interesting view regarding user interactivity and social presence. The results found little support for interaction or collaborative activity, however the study provides several research-based design recommendations that may help promote social presence, community and user interaction in emerging CMCMC environments."
Posted November 08, 2010