I learned today of the death of one of the legends of IR, Prof Karen Sparck Jones of University of Cambridge — there’s a nice note about her at:http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/dp/2007040403. The expression above about the need for more women to study CS is hers, and she was right. Her work crossed boundaries from automated language processing to privacy. Gender aside, we just need more thinkers like her in this field.
Libraries and the socio-technical system of tenure
The Modern Language Association (MLA) Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion released a new report in December that questions the role of monographs, and more directly, the responsibilities of publishers and university presses in facilitating tenure decisions for scholars in the humanities. The report is available at: http://www.mla.org/tenure_promotion and raises the spectre of faculty failing to take appropriate responsibility for tenure decisions by placing an undue emphasis on the successful production of published monographs by new professors. Since successful publication of a monograph requires the author to pass the review stage of the press, so the argument goes, then such reviewers have more influence on eventual tenure than the faculty making up the P&T committee at the candidate’s institution. The report contains some disturbing data, suggesting that PhD’s in the fields represented by MLA have only about a 35% chance of getting tenure when viewed as a complete pool, and that the the standards for receiving tenure are becoming ever more demanding. Not only are faculty making decision based on the outcomes of publishers’ reviews of proposals, the report argues that publishers themselves are more concerned with publishing essays, editions and textbooks that they can sell rather than monographs that impress tenure committees. Of course, taking a socio-technical systems perspective here one has to bring the libraries into the equation. Since libraries form a large (the largest?) market for scholarly books, the declining interest of libraries in purchasing monographs, particularly in the humanities, means that utlimately, tenurability of faculty can rest on the decision of a librarian to purchase a work (and how many librarians now graduate from programs that do not require an understanding of research?). This is no idle concern. The Association of Research Libraries reports that monograph purchases are falling as expenditures on serials rise prohibitively. Some where in all this, innovation and quality of research output are squashed, if not lost, when it comes to judging the work of scholars. Of course, everyone would agree that assessment of quality should never rely solely on the judgements of those whose primary motive is profit, but there is a real danger that this is where we are in certain disciplines. New digital scholarship must start finding clearer indices for quality.
Information behavior reveals fraud
If you’ve dabbled in online auctions or sales you will no doubt have wondered just how reliable are the various reputation ratings sellers report to convince you of their integrity. Interesting news this week from researchers at CMU who report that fraudsters in online auctions and selling sites can be reliably identified by the pattern of behaviour they reveal (http://tinyurl.com/yyr32m). The key seems to be identifying link patterns between group members, with fraudsters tending to display a clear pattern of communicating more with members in another group than the group of legitimate buyers and sellers on the site. This ‘bipartite core’ which can be clearly seen when the various transactions are plotted as a graph seems to be a strong indicator of the perpetrator working with accomplices to maintain a clean record on the original site while engaging in fraud with partners. The precise details are not yet revealed but most interesting is the emergence of this type of behavioral index from a massive data set using data mining techniques. What other indices of human behavior are out there to be uncovered is intruiging to consider. With Ebay reporting over 200 million registered users, the problem of small N for behavioral research might just start to appear quaintly old-fashioned.
ASIST 2006
The conference was a great event over 6 days, depending on when you started. For me the official kick off was the iSchool party at the Cedar Door where our tab had to be upped several times to handle the thirsty hordes. I had dinner later with our first keynote, Laszlo Barabasi, who is a delightfully engaging guest and speaker. His keynote address was fast paced and pointed to the insights to be gained in viewing human activities on the web as scale-free networks incorporating bursts of activity. He argued that 10% of most networks provide the key to holding the network together and that fitness attracts a disproportionately large number of links from other sites. Of course, the mystery of what makes a site or a linked node super-fit remains something to be discovered (and sold, I suppose). You can find out more about the man and his work here: http://www.nd.edu/~alb/
Attendance was up and most people seemed genuinely happy with the program and the location – Austin makes for a great conference venue though I needed to work on people to move them beyond the dubious delights of 6th St when seeking entertainment. Several sessions just would not end — a well attended set of presentations on blogs ran 30 minutes over (it was lunchtime) as people just would not stop asking questions of the various presenters. And it was not just new areas that caught the buzz. The panel on historiography was equally in demand even on the last day! I make a point in my program notes that ASIST is one conference where the old and the new mix easily, and it is this type of perspective-mix that keeps me at ASIST year after year. It was also good to see so many PhD students and younger members – ASIST seems to have lost many of the younger set in recent years to the equally-large IA Summits but when President Mike Leach asked at the outset how many people were attending ASIST for the first time, it was good to see so many hands go up.
Peparing a conference program is a long process and I am glad it’s over. I had superb assistance from Dick Hill at ASIST and three executive program committee members (France Bouthillier, Javed Mostafa and Carole Palmer) but it remained a long slog which I am glad to hand over to next year’s committee (see the call for papers: http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM07/am07cfp.html). While the society is good about awards events for various members, I think the program committee each year deserves a little more than a piece of paper commemorating their efforts and handed out in a rush at the poorly-attended business meeting. But this is a minor issue – the conference is its own reward, right? I’ll just not be rushing to serve on future program committees.
It was good to see so many faces there, and to talk to several readers of the blog – hello!! More later when I get a chance to think about it all.
No more information seeking models please
Am just back from a trip to GSLIS at McGill (great people, wonderful hospitality) where I spoke last week to faculty and students there on the future of information studies and the need for us to more aggressively position the field through better research and a focus on real world issues. I mentioned, rather bluntly, that I consider the world not to be in need of any more models of information seeking behavior, since I consider there to be far too many of these out there already. Worse, most of these are not really models at all but vague representations involving arrows, boxes and circles that contain little more than common sense. I doubt anyone will really listen to this since one sure way of making a career as an academic in LIS is to find a group that has never been studied explicitly and then describing their behaviors as if these were unique or important. I joke that there really ought to be a model generating algorithm out there rather like those “How to Speak Postmodern” or “Create your own Blues Singer” guides which contain three separate lists of terms that can be combined in any order to give you phrases such as ‘Hyper-modern multivocalities” or names like “Jumping Jake Humperdinck”. For information seeking models it could be as simple as listing age, gender and job characteristics (e.g., the info seeking behavior of middle-aged, male, clergy etc.). We could get more sophisticated and add task or media attributes once we have exhausted the possibilites of three attributes. Maybe we are there already.
Of course, I expect a ‘model’ to have some predictive value in helping us understand what people do, so this is probably a minority concern for now but it has me thinking about the need for a corrective in the LIS literature.
Most models of information seeking behavior look at more than behavior, they consider cognition which is quite natural for information activities, except that behavior and cognition are not the same. I can let this slide and go with Wilson ‘s (1999) slightly unwieldy definition of information behavior as ‘those activities a person may engage in when identifying his or her own needs for information, searching for such information in any way, and using or transferring that information”. Should this not be a reasonable concern of information researchers? It could certainly be if the fruits of that research shed real insight but it’s not clear that we have gained much from all this effort. Most models allude to environmental or contextual drivers, some responses by a human, and a state change resulting in feedback. They are presented often in a form of flowchart that seems to indicate a logical human process abstracted by careful examination.
Wilson’s (1999) article Models of Information Behaviour Research synthesizes many of the popular models into a nested framework that reveals many of the similarities among models but in so doing highlights for me the paucity of real content in any one of them. I was surprised nobody challenged my view but then again, the challenge requires an example of a model that really works. Maybe I am just expecting too much here, but for the sake of Information Studies, I hope not!
Computer science seeks sex appeal
There is much interest in attracting new students, especially female, to computer science and it has not gone unnoticed by some in that discipline that there is a real image problem. The Computer Research Association, a grouping of some 200 academic departments in computer science and engineering, is doing its best to put the sex appeal back in CS (you mean it was once there?) by inviting anthropologists to give keynotes at their conference (the wonderful Genevieve Bell of INTEL (http://www.intel.com/technology/techresearch/people/bios/bell_g.htm) who spoke here at the iSchool two years ago) and trying to sell the message that not only can CS give you a high paying job but it really does deal with exciting ideas. Check out the reports from this year’s CRA gathering at: http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/, particularly the accounts of Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research’s address where he argued that there was much excitement still awaiting the CS profession.
I don’t dispute any of this but I would note that the three projects listed as exemplars of wonder are:
–Using any surface as a computing interface
–Human scale storage, where all one’s actions and conversations can be recorded
–Terra scale applications such as mapping the sky and giving multiple attributes to each object
These have real potential for excitement but how much of that stems from the computational aspects that must be solved or from the human and social factors that such innovations might invoke. Unless CS incorporates the necessary methods and theories to handle those aspects then it’s hard for me to get terribly excited. And if CS did incorporate these, then would it still be computer science (and no jokes please about any discipline with ‘science’ in its name not being a real science)?
The serious point here (other than growing the recruitment of more and better balanced student cohorts) is what type of knowledge does it take to deliver successful outcomes for such projects? In my view there is no single discipline that could really tackle one of these three wonder projects successfully, only a multi-disciplinary approach could work. Since we tend to divide up universities into discrete disciplines and put buildings around them to keep outsiders from infiltrating their ranks, there seems to be a problem here. What would it take to create a truly new intellectual space to end the isolation at universities? I think the answer to that is far more important to think about than any specific wonder project and the information school movement might be the appropriate vehicle for trying out potential solutions.
Archiving my work
I have submitted copies of practically all my published journal and conference papers to the dList open archive — see: http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/. They may take some time to appear there as they are currently being added but I had such success with the Crying Wolf paper there that it seems a useful place for others to access relevant work. I also have copies of most of my writings on my own website but in the spirit of LOCKSS there is value in more than one access point. We will also be making a repository of our school’s publications available through dSpace in due course, I’ll post details in due course.
What’s in a name? Berkeley becomes an iSchool
The not-so-wonderfully named School of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley just announced that it has changed its name to the School of Information (http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/). The previous name lasted only 12 years, replacing the common School of Library and Information Science, which itself replaced School of Librarianship in 1976 (at this rate we might expect further updates on the name in 5 years). The new name mirrors the names of schools at Texas, Michigan, Washington and Florida (that last being a College of Information) and while one may view such a change as trivial, I would agrgue that this is an important signal of change in the academic study of information.
The language of information is shared across disciplines and qualifiers such as ‘science’ ‘studies’ or ‘systems’ evoke a rational but limiting interpretation of this field’s goals and values. If you do not believe that information is a more powerful force in our lives now then ever before then you will not care for any such name change. But if you understand that this is a moment in history where a vast range of issues related to information, from its control to its provision, from its access to its pricing, from its creation to its preservation, are being shaped by us and for us through forces and mechanisms that we need to understand, then the need for schools of information is obvious.
When we changed our name I received many comments – I trust others closer to Berkeley are making their views known. But 5 years ago, the idea of their being a school of information made many uncomfortable here. No doubt the same was said of schools of communication or of education in their day, but who now thinks these labels too general to have meaning? One day, I suspect the same will be true for iSchools. Congratulations Berkeley!
Top 10 Rules of IA
After 5 years of writing a column on information architecture for BASIST I summed up my take on the field in ten simple ‘rules’ (I use the term loosely).
1. No, we never did define it to everyone’s satisfaction.
2. Communities matter more.
3. There will be something else after blogs, wikis and memes.
4. Understanding people’s needs for information is a thorny problem.
5. A profession is not defined solely by financial concerns.
6. Findability is not a sufficient basis for architecture.
7. Usability is a design value, not a field.
8. Data is stored: Information is experienced
9. Most of the world is still not able to have this experience.
10. We’re still figuring this out, so don’t stop trying to shape it.
Obviously these need to be interepreted in the context of an emerging set of concerns but here they are for the record. I had a great time with that column but it was time for fresh perspectives and I hate to write on a fixed schedule. You can access the past columns on my own publications page: http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~adillon/publications.html
Gallup on Blogs
The Gallup group have just released a poll on blogging (http://poll.gallup.com/content/?ci=21397) and it is being interpreted by some as a swipe at the hype. In a survey of just over 1000 adult respondents they report that 60% of users never read a blog. This is a classic case of needing to read the full data to get at the story. A reporter from our local student paper rang me to ask if this showed that blogs were just a fad. Hum… 40% of the adults in this poll did read blogs, and we know that the biggest users are teenagers. Add to the mix the comparative recency of blogging and one might think these data make a pretty compelling case for its sustainability and long-term health.
Of course, the real story, as always with technology, is people, and homo sapiens really does like to talk and share ideas. Like everything involving our words and voices, not all of it is worth reading or hearing, but blogging gives you the chance to make that call for yourself. I suspect the bigger worry of journalists is the extent to which news and political blogs might gain credibility over established outlets. There is also very real concern these days about threats to academic peer review which should make us think of blogs less as a vehicle for spouting opinions than as one more example of communication tools by passing the established structures for sharing and informing. There is good and bad here.
The earliest web pages contained lots of pretty useless personal information and pictures of people’s pets. There are still sites like this but the medium was adapted and shaped by users into the current web that you can no longer imagine living without. Now there is still lots of garbage out there but there is also remarkable information to be had. It will be the same for blogging – the best uses are yet to be imagined.