Category: Research

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Hijacking conferences by any other name

In our field, the HICSS conference is rather well known, not least for its choice location (Hawaii) at a time of year (January) when most US folks want a break from the weather. I’m not a huge fan of the work there but some folks try to convince me it’s the real deal (usually the folks who go!). The acronym HICSS stands for Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. So successful is this conference that another has emerged, totally unrelated, also in Hawaii and also going by the acronym HICSS. Only this time, the SS stands for Social Sciences. Their call for papers is suitably all-embracing so that most disciplines could find a home here (and they organize island tours too!). It is not clear that any papers are reviewed which you think might put some providers of funding off the event but the conference certainly gets attendees.

The idea of two almost identically named conferences existing in the same location might be a coincidence but I don’t imagine so. The newer version makes little effort to disambiguate itself from the original and an email to the organizers just brought a curt reply that they were not in any way related to the original HICCS. They certainly don’t mention who the organizers or the reviewers might be either. Suspicious yet?

The emergence of bogus conferences has been documented in New Scientist and shows no signs of letting up. I heard colleagues mention it at the Council of Scientific Society Presidents’ meeting as a growing challenge in some fields. The most blatant efforts actually run shadow conferences at the same time or a week adjacent to the target conference, with a similar name, and lure people into believing it is a legitimate venue, charging them handsomely for attendance. Since many associations and hotels rely on the profit from conferences, you can see the challenge. You’d think scholars would not fall for it but then, how many folks opened that email call from the ‘other’ HICSS and thought a trip to Hawaii might be nice?

It’s not just conferences. I get an email every other day from some dubious publisher inviting my paper submissions. Follow the trail and you’ll find an editorial board of nobodies from far-flung universities that may or may not exist and then the real kicker, the page fees that you will be liable for when your paper is accepted (and it will be accepted). Open source publishing efforts have a real battle on their hands to demonstrate legitimacy and the frightening prospect of both the cowboy publishers and the traditional, conservative corporate publishers benefiting from this muddying of the waters is very real. Here’s another challenge for information science.

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CSSP: best content in a conference I’ve experienced

Despite the efforts of the winter weather and an over-complicated information system owned by American Airlines (which has little real information to offer), I managed to attend part of the Council of Scientific Societies Presidents meeting in DC this weekend. Session for session, there is more substance in this gathering than I’ve experienced at other conferences. Every speaker seems really top-notch and able to deliver deep content in a manner that truly spans disciplinary boundaries. Most enjoyable was Rob Dietz’s overview of the Center for the Study of Steady-State Economy’s work on assessing the real costs and values of our current use of the planet. He made a lot of sense, and made an even stronger impression when he revealed he believed so much in this approach to economic modeling that he had moved his whole family into a sustainable community housing arrangement in Oregon. Untitled 3-1 (dragged)

Among his many messages, I took away the argument that economic growth is a really inappropriate measure or goal for a nation to live by and that we need to rethink our collective sense of what is good for our societies, measure this appropriately, and then set policy. Of course, much of this also requires behavioral changes that perhaps economists are not best equipped to understand. More interdisciplinary challenges ahead.

Lots of other good stuff at CSSP, including a too-short but important committee discussion on the need (or not, as I argued) for longer moratorium periods for scholarly work in open access publication processes. I understand the realities of professional associations and their publication revenues, but we are entering an age where the ideas and requirements for access will so fundamentally shift scholarly practices that locking material down to protect the market for certain journals will no longer seem viable. It’s fair to say, I was in a minority on this one but the discussion was instructive.

While CSSP is really a closed shop, it is possible to represent your society there without being president. I suspect the small size and selectivity is not independent of the resulting high quality discourse, but what a shame more academic gatherings were no so stimulating.

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Learning a lot at CSSP

I attended the Council of Scientific Society Presidents meeting this past weekend in DC and it proved fascinating. A slate of top speakers covered advances and challenges across the spectrum of scientific enquiry, and both the stories and numbers are thought provoking.  How about unique and groundbreaking drug therapeutics research that cannot get published as reviewers don’t think it’s interesting enough? Or imagine looking for one data point in trillions to test a theory in physics? The information angles here alone are challenging.

Lori Garver of NASA delivered a myth busting talk about how they work and what they do. The organization, with 18000 employees and 40000 contractors has a $17bn annual budget,  is still committed to human space exploration, And spends half its budget on just this. She also confirmed that no dinosaurs were found on Mars!  Meanwhile, the man from Monsanto (aside from noting that a scarily high proportion of the US population believes its food is made in grocery stores!) referenced studies showing that the most noticeable shift in behavior that comes from increased prosperity is a shift in diet from grains to meat, which has major implications for our planet.

CSSP is a great group for ideas and its clear that many professional societies share the same problems with dwindling memberships and threatened publication shifts. It seems many members no longer value the publications that once one joined a society just to obtain. The bundling process, aggressive publisher pricing, and general worry over control runs across disciplines and there was a lively discussion in one of my groups about CSSP serving as a leader in new consortial efforts to retain control of scholarly publishing at the professional society level. More on this for sure.

All told, a great group and a stimulating event that rivaled (and beat) most academic conferences I’ve attended over the last decade. And this from a group of people who are mostly strangers to each other, personally and professionally. Proof indeed that ideas matter more than identity.

 

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George Miller dead at 92

 

Rather sorry today to learn of the death of George Miller, a legendary scientist in the field of psychology who most people know for his formulation of   the 7 +/- 2 chunks in short-term memory storage capability. He did far more than this, including excellent work on reading and writing, and the nature of information but it’s that ‘law’ for which he will always be known. I remember reading him as an undergraduate and later discovering all the other areas of work where he had made significant contributions (and I don’t mean he published a paper or two on eclectic topics, he really shaped whole areas of work). There’s a decent obit in today’s NYT that covers the life but he was a great scholar, a man of real impact, the kind we rarely see these days in the rat-race for citations. Coming so soon after the passing of Ulrich Neisser, it seems a generation of true greats is leaving us.

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And on we go into ’09

Yes, I’ve been quiet for a month, lots of other things happening. Most pertinent, I’ve had something of a cleaning of my personal editorial duties and resigned in the last few months from three editorial positions (Interacting with Computers, JASIST, and the Int. Journal of Digital Libraries) and mitigated that somewhat by joining the board at the Journal of Documentation. Been trying to lessen the reviewing load which was becoming increasingly heavy with one of the above and it’s disheartening to see one’s rejections ignored or being landed with a new paper to review within hours of submitting a completed review — talk about punishing those who promptly do the work. We need a system that auto removes those who complete reviews for a fixed period so as to reward them.

I’ve also made a resolution not to write for anyone but myself, meaning I am declining all requests for papers or chapters and taking total control over what I want to write — it might surprise you but many academics spend their lives writing on demand, so now, at 46, I’ve decided to stop saying ‘yes’ unless I really want to do it — ditto talks. Well, that’s the New Year resolution at least.

Naturally ALISE took up a large part of January and now we are set for the iSchools Conference, and you can appreciate how the annual schedule is getting increasingly overloaded. I recommend fewer conferences and stricter reviewing, but then how would the business end of academia cope? There’s a conference for everyone and at anyone time I suspect everyone’s at a conference. Ah knowledge….

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Google and copyright

So a deal has been reached….Google pays $$$ and everyone is happy….right? I was quizzed by a reporter yesterday who took some of what I said and ran with it here but the new agreement does contain within it an interesting note about allowing researchers from universities to query the resulting index (thanks to John Unsworth for bringing that to my attention). Naturally I remain somewhat suspicious of this whole project being under the control of a corporate entity whose aim is to organize the world’s information for us but I do have to acknowledge the sheer ambition of the project. No doubt there are more twists in this tale, especially since the news leaking out of Harvard is their library is sufficiently unhappy with the deal as to decline participation in the ‘in-copyright’ part of the book scanning project.

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The poverty of user-centered design

In the dim distant past, some of us used to distinguish our work from the masses by declaring proudly that we were ‘user-centered’. At one time this actually meant you did things differently and put a premium on the ability of real people to exploit a product or service. While the concern remains, and there are many examples of designs that really need to revisit their ideas about users, I find the term ‘user-centered’ to have little real meaning anymore. It is not just the case that everyone claims this label as representative, after all, who in their right mind would ever declare their work as not user-centered and still expect to have an audience? It is more a case that truly understanding the user seems beyond both established methods and established practices.

I will leave aside there any argument about the term ‘user’. Some people have made careers out of disimissing that term and proposing the apparently richer ‘person’ or ‘human’, but the end result is the same (though I prefer to talk of human-centered than user-centered myself). The real issue is methodological.

First, claiming adherence to user-centered methods and philosophies is too easy; anyone can do it. Ask people what they would like to see in a re-design and you have ‘established’ user-requirements. Stick a few people in front of your design at the end and you have ‘conducted’ a usability test. Hey presto, instant user-centered design process. If only!

Second, and more pernicious, the set of methods employed by most user-centered professionals fails to deliver truly user-centric insights. The so called ‘science’ of usability which underlies user-centeredness leaves much to be desired. It rests too much on anecdote, assumed truths about human behavior and an emphasis on performance metrics that serve the perspective of people other than the user. ISO-defined usability metrics refer to ‘efficiency’ and ‘effectiveness’ and ‘satisfaction’. These do not correlate so one needs to capture all three. But who gets to determine what constitutes effective and efficient anyhow? In many test scenarios this is a determination of the organization employing the user, or the thoughts of the design team on what people should do, not the user herself. Maybe this should be called organizational-centric or work-centric design. If I wanted to start a new trend I could probably push this idea into an article and someone might think I was serious.

What is often overlooked is that the quality of any method is determined far too much by the quality of the evaluator who employs it.. Evaluation methods are all flawed, that much is a given, but it is the unwillingness of many people to recognize these shortcomings that should give us all real concern. Here’s but one example. The early Nielsen work on heuristic evaluation has given rise to the ‘fact’ that evaluators find about 35% of usability problems following his method, and if you pool several reviewers you can get a better hit rate. What many people overlook in this is that the 35% figure is not calibrated with real user problems but is based on Nielsen’s own interpretation of the problems users will face. So the 35% claim is really a claim that following his method, you will probably find a third of the problems that Nielsen himself estimates are real problems for users. This is a very different thing. It is interesting that in my own tests with students, this 35% figure holds pretty firm, which is impressive, but you cannot lose sight of what that percentage relates to or you will misunderstand what is going on.

Now of course, there are great evaluators out there but even if all evaluators were great, that would not change the problem with user-centeredness as it currently exists. Too much evaluation occurs too late to matter. OK, this is an old story but what’s changed since this story was first heard? Not enough. If user-centered design really is limited to evaluating and designing for a narrowly construed definition of usability then there is little prospect of change. For a limited range of tasks where I want to be efficient (finding a number in my cell-phone, for example, then current practices are fine, as long as I can prototype quickly) but for the type of deeply interactive tasks that I might spend large parts of my day engaged in (reading, communicating, exploring data etc.) then talk of ‘effective’ and ‘efficient’ rings more hollow. But it is preciely this next generation of application opportunity that we need to explore if we are to augment human capabilities. The old usability approach is fine for applications where we are making digital that which used to be performed with physical resources (text editing, mailing, phoning, calculating) but it’s not a great source of help for imagining new uses.

If we could de-couple user-centered design and usability then there might be some benefit but I don’t think this is as important as it might first appear. More important is the very conception we have of users and uses for which we wish to derive technologies and information resources. Designing for augmentation is a very real problem and a great challenge for our field theoretically and practically.

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Aaron Marcus at the iSchool, ASIST 2007, it’s culture time

Just back from a fascinating presentation by Aaron Marcus on the importance of culture-centered design. He was a guest here of the ASIST Student Chapter at the iSchool and spoke for almost two hours with questions from the audience. His work leans heavily on Hofstede’s model of cultural dynamics, which he acknowledges has several weaknesses, but he presented an interesting mapping of the general characteristics of cultures (too often for my taste reduced to ‘nationality’) and sample web sites one finds in government, university and large company websites that represent said culture. Fascinating work, but more needs to be done.

The ASIST 2007 conference in Milwaukee this week was also a relatively lively affair. Keynoter Anthea Stratigos from Outsell presented a fast paced look at the world and I believe surprised many of us with the statement that China was fast becoming the leading English-speaking nation in the world. No reference provided but if it is even close to being true, what are the cultural implications? If nothing else, why do relatively recent listings of countries where English is spoken, even if not recognized as an official language, seem to make no mention of this? The best I can do to track this comment is back to the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who apparently predicted that Chinese speakers of English would outnumber all other English-language speakers in the world by 2025. Sound bite as science?

I also had a chance to talk with Tefko Saracevic and Don Kraft about changes they had seen in submissions to their respective journals (Information Processing and Management and JASIST). Tefko noted that he witnessed as many submissions in the last few years as he had received in the 15 preceding years, a fact he attributes to the emergence of information research in China and India. Could the day come when American and European scholars will compete to submit to Asian journals? If it happens it will seem inevitable and obvious with hindsight, but will it happen? One suspects there are many forces at work here, only some of which we recognize. In the meantime, this submission glut has pushed up the rejection rates for these journals to record highs.

I took part in a panel on Digital Genres that, despite its theme, drew a large and very lively audience at 8.30 am Tuesday morning. This really was a panel (not an attempt to sneak papers past reviewers) to which each presenter was limited to 3 minutes and then had to answer questions. Before we knew it, the audience got stuck in and took us on a tour of the problems with definition, the lack of appreciation in the field for earlier work, the absence of a well-informed archival perspective, the value of genre in searching and the emergence of genre in the digital realm. This was the hightlight of my conference sessions but of course, I am biased.

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CoLIS papers published

The special issue of Information Research with the Proceedings of the CoLIS 2007 conference in Sweden has now been published. There’s a lot of interesting reading here but let me point to a couple of papers I like. The Talja and Hartel piece examining the concept of user-centeredness in the information literature is a worthy contribution and should be required reading for those who wish to understand the emergence of this defining orientation within our field. Also, David Bawden’s paper, Information as self-organized complexity, provoked a lot of discussion at the conference itself and is now available to all.

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Student success

The IEEE Professional Communication Society has awarded Arijit Sengupta and myself the Rudolph J. Joenk, Jr. Award for Best Paper of 2006 in the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. The paper, “Query by Templates: Using the Shape of Information to Search Next-Generation Databases,” (see my pubs page for a copy) results originally from Dr. Sengupta’s doctoral dissertation which he completed at Indiana in Computer Science while we were both there. Jit is now an Assistant Professor at the Dept of Information Systems and Operations Management in the Raj Soin College of Business at Wright State University and deserves most of the credit for this – not only was it his research work but he persisted with the paper when others may have been put off by some of the reviewers’ comments which indicated they did not really understand the concept of information shape and when his fellow faculty members wondered just what is a CS guy doing working on this kind of stuff? Congrats Jit!

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