Infomatters

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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!

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Wikipedia v Britannica

Wall St. Journal Online edition presented an interesting exchange this week between wikipedia founder Jummy Wales and Britannica’s editor in chief, Dale Hoiberg (http://tinyurl.com/jxe33). Since Nature published a study indicating that the accuracy of entries on Wikipedia was comparable to Britannica, traditionalists have been quick to find fault with the study or point to clear errors in Wikipedia, but this is no simple argument. The reported discussion certainly paints Wikipedia as the brave new entrant come to break the monopoly on ‘facts’ and some of Hoiberg’s comments are a little defensive but I think most of us agree we don’t want a mass of inaccurate and biased entries passed off as reliable (we get enough of that on TV). The Nature study asked experts to judge various entries without knowing from which source they came, and the results indicated an average of 4 errors per entry in Wikipedia to 3 errors per entry in Brittanica. The main point here is these rates are so comparable, though without looking at the type of errors found you might be forgiven for wondering why Britannica is so respected if each entry has that many errors. Nature released data showing the type of errors found and these include judgements of ‘overstatement’ or ‘too short’ as well as lack of clarity, failure to include certain works in a bibliography, and a mispelling of a place name (using an ‘e’ instead of an ‘a’). In fact, Nature concluded there were only 8 serious errors reported, and these were equally divided, four each in Wikipedia and Britannica.

A key argument made by Wales is that Wikipedia really builds on the openness principle: all can contribute through entries or corrections, and the result is likely to be more representative than the invitation-only contributions of Britannica. Since entrants to Wikipedia have to be motivated to contribute (have you?) there is certainly potential for mischief but Wales talks of moving to semi-protected and even editable ‘ nonvandalized’ versions to improve quality. And the proof is in the pudding, as they say. He likens publishing entries that are still being edited to Britannica’s revealing the in-draft versions of new entries which they won’t do of course (though there’s probably a collector somewhere who would pay for those).

In sum, arguments that authority must be maintained or chaos will ensue in the information world seem to be far less convincing than they once were. Maybe a little authority goes a long way. Stay tuned.

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Future of academic libraries symposium

I attended a closed-shop symposium at UT this week on the future of the academic library (http://www.utexas.edu/president/symposium/index.html). The two opening addresses, by James Duderstadt, former President of the University of Michigan) and Clifford Lynch (of CNI) were models of insightful, powerpoint-free talks that took us through a range of future scenarios (definitely plural!) suggesting major challenges ahead. Duderstadt pointed to the growing need for libraries as learning spaces, not as repositories, and made a case for a world of life-long learners who would engage with universities remotely and repeatedly. I was a little concerned about the presentation of dramatic scenarios for a new cyberinfrastructure of open access without clear examples of real human activities that we could consider, the talk certainly raised the collective sights of the attendees. Clifford Lynch noted specifically that the humanities have thoroughly embraced digital technologies, with new research enabled through text mining, remote access to collections and e-publishing, but he argued convincingly that easy predictions of what lies ahead for scholarship in the digital realm are inevitably wrong.

With only 60 attendees present it was easy to engage and lively discussions were common. I chaired a panel consisting of Dan Connolly (of W3C), Kevin Guthrie (Ithaka) and Alice Proschaka (Yale) on the future of access and preservation which got the crowd going when Dan stated there was no real preservation problem since 95% of clicks on links resulted in the desired result, and Kevin argued that access suffered greater impermanence than preservation in the digital realm. Much depends on how you interpret these points, and we spent much time trying to clarify just what Dan was measuring, but he argued strongly that this is not the same as claiming 95% of sites are permanent, and indeed on the web there is a good reason why we might want and expect some sights to be very transient. The facts need to be established more clearly here and there is certainly a study waiting to happen.

The final session after 1.5 days was an open discussion which led to some interesting summary statements. While it is clear that no university or publisher has the answers, there is real concern that the world is changing and we are not ready. Personally, I think the missing piece is a better understanding of human behavior since scholarship, learning, education etc. reside at the human not the artifact or collection level. The media will always change, but the human need to communicate, share and engage with data can be undertood better and designed for accordingly.

One interesting side-discussion involved the fate of LIS education for this new world of open access, networked and aggregated, personal digital spaces. Jim Neal (Columbia) suggested that the current masters programs in LIS were not really meeting the needs of academic libraries, and this was interpreted by one attendee from another program as deeming them irrelevant (a charge Jim denied). Oddly, nobody here mentioned ‘crisis’, or a failure to teach cataloging as the problem, but the feeling seemed to be that the futures facing academic libraries will not be shaped by graduates of many current LIS programs. No comment from me required!

Update — audio files (mixed quality) of the symposium are available at: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/symposium/

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New IA conf

First it was a one-off hot topic meeting organized by ASIST. Then is became a regular conference. Last year the first European IA Summit was launched with a second to follow this year. The IA world expands further with another new conference, OzIA 2006, to be held Sept 30th/Oct 1st in Sydney, Australia. Why Australia you ask? Well the conference organizers can answer that: “There has been ongoing demand for Information Architects in the Australian web industry, a demand which hasn’t ceased, while at the same time there is scant support for professional development and community development”. Learn more at: http://www.oz-ia.org/2006/index.shtml. Thanks to Eric Scheid for the news.

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The World Cup as Information Space

So now it’s over, and while for many in the US it was all a bit hard to understand, for the rest of the world this competition is the highlight of the sporting calendar. Forget the results however, there were several fascinating informational aspects to this year’s cup that should be noted. Leaving aside the quaint refusal of soccer authorities to employ video technology to help decision making for penalties and goalmouth clearances while allowing referees for the first time to sport earpieces to hear the off-field official provide another perspective, this was really the World Cup where the web shaped the tournament.

The BBC ran a number of blogs and discussion lists that had huge traffic. When England lost (again) to Portugal the conversation turned more than a little unpleasant as the more rabid fans blamed ‘Johnny Foreigner’ for all kinds of cheating that of course took away all the blame from the English team (but not their manager who as a Swede could be conveniently pilloried). Chief culprit was a talented Portugese named Christian Ronaldo. His crime was not that he scored the winning penalty (that would be too obvious) but that he supposedly led to England’s star turn, Wayne “Nice Boy” Rooney being sent off. Leaving logic aside (Rooney had landed his foot in the most sensitive area of another Portugese player’s anatomy resulting in a red card), Ronaldo soon became the “cause” of this dismissal (in the mind of some) because he complained about it to the referee. The ref claims this had nothing to do with his decision but before you knew it a hate campaign had been launched on the web. When FIFA put out a poll for votes on the Young Player of the Tournament, Ronaldo was a favorite given his performances. Soon the various football sites were full of messages telling people to vote against him with the result that within two days his lead was slashed and a lesser known Ecuadorian (whom most people could not name) was the top vote. FIFA, with cunning insight, spotted the problem and gave the award to another player entirely, but that’s another story. Result: Smart Mobs 1-0 Fair Play.

But of course, even as the threats to Ronaldo took on such a toxic tone that he even spoke of leaving his club in England to get away from the hostility (I kid you not), we have Zidane, also known now as “Zid Vicious”, claiming spoken insults about his family pushed him over the edge in the final. Again, the ref did not see the headbutt but TV cameras did and showed it repeatedly. Various channels then proceeded to bring in lip-reading experts to decipher what is was that Italian defender really said to him. Of course, just like consultants, put two in a room and you get three opinions, there was zero agreement between the various ‘experts’ and both players are not revealing exactly what was said but you get the idea — one moment of insanity in your life and thanks to technology it can all be captured, replayed and analyzed for years. Now wasn’t this one of the big exciting ideas that a new sexier CS was promising us? And the result?….oh, soccer lost.

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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.

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Informatics program at Buffalo disbanded

While iSchools are springing up all over the place, it is not all sweetness and light for this emerging discipline. News from SUNY Buffalo is that their program, formed from the merger of LIS and Communications seven years ago, is now being ‘realigned’. LIS will become part of Education while Communications will join the College of Arts and Sciences. Ostensibly this will enable greater collaboration. The official line is somewhat at odds with the reported comments of others as you can read here: http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20060620/1006816.asp?PFVer=Story.

There are many reasons why schools and mergers work and do not work so I suspect we will not know the full story here for awhile. The school’s website suggests that original affiliations of faculty lived on with each member still being seen as a professor in LIS or in Communications, and the divisions between these two seem fairly established in the curricular and degree offerings of this program. The provost estimates that the impact on students will be minimal and perhaps that’s the key — there may not really be an informatics program here, just an administrative umbrella under which two quite independent programs reside. Clearly something is not right in such a set up and it’s worth comparing this type of school with others, such as the greenfield program at Penn State which grew from the ground up and has avoided departmentalization.

Are there lessons here for other schools? I would not draw too many conclusions from this example but no doubt others will use this as an dire warning against changing existing disciplinary identities. Stay tuned.

You can read a blog offering the views of a faculty member involved at: http://alex.halavais.net/?p=1457

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IA spreading as a discipline

It may not be the first, but it’s the first time I’ve seen an academic position for Information Architecture in a British university. The University of the West of England announced this in Guardian recently: http://info.uwe.ac.uk/vacancies/job_details.asp?ref=L10690/RWS. The position is based in the Dept. of Computing, Engineering and Math Sciences, and asks for experience in librarianship and information science. Glad to see some other people treating intellectual boundaries between disciplines in the information realm as fluid.

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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.