CIRSS

Katrina Fenlon recently facilitated a discussion on applications of topic modeling to humanities research questions. Held November 3 at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Topic Modeling for Humanities Research workshop provided an "opportunity for cross-fertilization, information exchange, and collaboration between and among humanities scholars and researchers in natural language processing on the subject of topic modeling applications and methods".

Further information about the workshop, including a bibliography of relevant resources and archived video/audio, is available at http://mith.umd.edu/topicmodeling

The IMLS Digital Collections & Content (DCC) team has received a $50,000 sub-award from the Digital Public Library of America’s (DPLA) Secretariat to further refine the team’s DPLA Beta Sprint prototype. The Beta Sprint prototype was originally developed during Summer 2011 as part of the DPLA Beta Sprint. The prototype was selected as one of six finalist projects showcased during the DPLA’s Fall 2011 Plenary Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Bringing together resources from over 1000 cultural heritage collections across the U.S., the prototype builds on the DCC team’s knowledge and experiences aggregating metadata records from varied institutions ranging from libraries and archives to museums and historical societies. The new sub-award will allow the DCC team to make further refinements to the prototype’s information retrieval algorithms and implement additional layers of interactive functionality that allow users to interact more directly and dynamically with the prototype’s data.

CIRSS Associate Director Catherine Blake, along with Jeffery Stanton of Syracuse University, and Joshua Blumenstock of the University of Washington have organized a workshop on Sociotechnical Data Analytics to be delivered at iConference 2013.

Sociotechnical Data Analytics (SODA) emphasizes social (economic, ethical, policy, and political) and technical (databases, social networking, data mining, and text mining) aspects of data analytics that are required to fully realize the potential of the Fourth Paradigm of science.

The workshop will provide a forum for iSchool faculty who are developing programs in data analytics, eScience, eResearch, big data, and cyberinfrastructure to develop best practices with respect to preparing students to fill the workforce needed for managers and analysts to analyze big data and make decisions based on their findings.

The iConference is an annual gathering of scholars and researchers concerned with critical information issues in contemporary society. iConference participants advance the boundaries of information studies, explore core concepts and ideas, and create new technological and conceptual configurations—all situated in interdisciplinary discourses.

CIRSS Faculty, Affiliated Faculty, PhD Students, and Staff will be making yet another strong showing at ASIS&T's annual meeting. Taking place October 26-30, 2012 the ASIS&T Annual Meeting is a primary venue for disseminating research centered on advances in the information sciences and related applications of information technology.

Find below a list of CIRSS presentations, papers, posters, and workshops:

Unreliable and Uncertain Annotators: Evaluating Rater Quality and Rating Difficulty in Online Annotation Activities
Organisciak Peter, Efron Miles, Fenlon Katrina and Megan Senseney

http://www.asis.org/asist2012/abstracts/166.html

Identifying Content and Levels of Representation in Scientific Data
Karen Wickett, Simone Sacchi, David Dubin and Allen Renear

http://www.asis.org/asist2012/abstracts/199.html

Value and Context in Data Use: Domain Analysis Revisited
Nicholas Weber, Karen Baker, Andrea Thomer, Tiffany Chao and Carole Palmer

http://www.asis.org/asist2012/abstracts/168.html

Tooling the Aggregator's Workbench: Metadata Visualization Through Statistical Text Analysis
Katrina Fenlon, Miles Efron and Peter Organisciak

http://www.asis.org/asist2012/abstracts/161.html

Enhancing Cultural Heritage Collections by Supporting and Analyzing Participation in Flickr
Jacob Jett, Megan Senseney and Carole Palmer

http://www.asis.org/asist2012/abstracts/287.html

Combined Methods, Thick Descriptions: Languages of Collaboration on Github
Nicholas Weber

http://www.asis.org/asist2012/abstracts/347.html

The Data-at-Risk Initiative:  Analyzing the Current State of Endangered Scientific Data
Angela P. Murillo, Cheryl Thompson, Nico Carver, W. Davenport Robertson, Jane Greenberg and William Anderson
http://www.asis.org/asist2012/abstracts/346.html

Complications in climate data variable naming

Nic Weber, Andrea Thomer, and Gary Strand

GSLIS student and CIRSS Graduate Assistant, Thomas Padilla recently presented, "Preservationistas: Online Communities, Activist Preservation, and Born-Digital Archives" at the Archives and Activism Symposium in New York City. Held October 12, 2012 at The New School, the symposium brought together leaders in the archival activism space to discuss recent projects and future directions for archival activism.

This symposium was dedicated to the memory of archivist and historian Michael Nash (1946-2012).

As part of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics - Ethics Awareness Week, Virgil Varvel of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship will be participating as part of a panel being led by Nicholas Burbulas on When IRBs Do Not Agree: On Campus, Across Universities, Internationally.

When IRBs Do Not Agree: On Campus, Across Universities, Internationally
Time: 1:00 PM
Place: Illini Union 209
Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval is a requirement for virtually all research involving human subjects. But there are challenges confronting IRB review in three types of collaborative settings: interdisciplinary research within an institution, research that spans different institutions with multiple IRBs, and international research that involves other countries with different research traditions. How can researchers navigate these tricky waters?

Panelists
Nicholas Burbules is a Professor of Educational Policy Studies and is an affiliate of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretative Theory. He is a nationally preeminent scholar in the field of philosophy of education and is internationally recognized for his work focusing on the use of information technology in education. His current research includes project related to on ethical and policy issues concerning new technologies in education; virtual reality; collaboration; and dialogue and "third spaces."

Ms. Anita Balgopal is the Director of the Institutional Review Board at the University of Illinois. Anita has served as the IRB Director at the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration and Chapin Hall Center for Children. Prior to this, she was the IRB Manager at Northwestern University's Office for the Protection of Research Subjects.

Dr. Virgil Varvel is a Research Analyst for the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS). His research has been primarily on various aspects of distance education. His current work explores pedagogical assumptions of socially organized versus independent study instructional design in distance education.

John Caughlin is a Professor and Associate Head in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Research and teaching interests: family communication, privacy and secrets, disclosure of HIV/AIDS. Professor Caughlin recently received the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Family Communication from the National Communication Association.

http://ethics.grainger.illinois.edu/IRBpanel.asp

The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded $499,919 for the project, Site-Based Data Curation for Small Science, led by CIRSS Director Carole Palmer, with co-Principal Investigators Bruce Fouke, Professor in Geology, Microbiology, and the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Sayeed Choudhury, Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center and Associate Dean of Library Digital Programs at Johns Hopkins University; and Ann Rodman, Director of GIS Operations at Yellowstone National Park.

 Bringing together experts in data curation, data repositories, geobiology, and research site management, the Site-Based Data Curation (SBDC) project will investigate and test curation policies and procedures to advance the transfer of long-tail digital data collected at Yellowstone National Park (YNP) to the Data Conservancy for preservation and access, and to better coordinate the management of data resources produced at the many scientifically significant sites at YNP. The framework will result in a general model of professional curation processes readily extendible to other national parks and other important research sites, especially cradles of biodiversity such as coral reefs and deep crustal biosphere locations.

The new data curation approaches will be integrated into the curriculum of the Specialization in Data Curation at GSLIS and undergraduate and graduate geobiology courses taught at Illinois, with educational outreach extended to Yellowstone. The education activities will advance data curation workforce expertise in handling complex, cross-disciplinary data and prepare scientific communities to contribute to and take advantage of diverse collections of curated data.

The SBDC framework is an important step forward in evolving the professional best practices and institutional collaborations needed to build large-scale, interoperable data collections that include high-functioning long-tail data and are responsive to the pressing data needs of practicing research communities and resource management at sites of data production.

CIRSS Associate Director Catherine Blake recently  presented "Using Secondary Information to inform Public Policy" at the Oxford Internet Institute's "Internet, Politics, Policy 2012" conference. 

 Taking place September 20-21, the conference explored the new research frontiers opened up by Big Data as well as its limitations. The conference also aimed to serve as a forum to encourage discussion across disciplinary boundaries on how to exploit Big Data to inform policy debates and advance social science research.

 More information about Catherine Blake's presentation is available here:

http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/ipp2012/catherine-blake-using-secondary-information-inform-public-policy

Carole Palmer, CIRSS Director and Professor of Library and Information Science, will present “The Analytic Potential of Long-Tail Data: Sharable Data and Re-use Value” at Wolfram Data Summit 2012.  

Taking place September 6 – 7  in Washington, DC, Wolfram Data Summit 2012 is an invitation only event that offers leaders of the world's data repositories an opportunity to meet, to share insights into their work, and to discuss challenges and opportunities facing the data community. The third annual summit will place an emphasis on content, rather than infrastructure, in areas such as: data from social media, location-based data, freeing health care data, data narratives, news as data, natural language processing, government and election data, corporate data silos, culturomics, bibliometric data, data conservation, and semantic data.

More information is available here:

http://www.wolframdatasummit.org/2012/

Library Journal recently profiled Lynn Yarmey (MS ’11) for the “Librarians Abroad” series, which highlights professionals working outside traditional library and archives settings.

While at GSLIS Yarmey completed the Specialization in Data Curation and through the CIRSS DCEP Program had the opportunity to participate in an internship at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)  in Boulder, Colorado.

Yarmey is now the Senior Data Curator at NSIDC for the NSF-funded Advanced Cooperative Arctic Data and Information Service (ACADIS) project. 

Read below for details about Yarmey’s work and thoughts on her GSLIS education:

The Data Curation Specialization at the Univ. of Illinois Urbana Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) was a great fit for me. The program offered strong theoretical underpinnings and brought my practical experience into a much broader context. The LEEP distance option meant I could keep working in the labs while learning about the theory, a perfect balance for my data work.

I love that I get to do a little bit of everything! I am involved with two Agile development teams, user interface and design work, refining dataflows, scoping and implementing metadata profile updates, data management education, defining new projects and products in support of Arctic scientists, and tying all of these together in presentations, papers, and proposals . . . My role is almost as diverse as the data. Every day I am bridging between so many different groups of fantastic people to promote understanding across the project horizontals, and then vertically mapping the detailed daily operations with the project vision. I am a jack-of-all-trades type of person much more than a deep specialist; my work allows me to use and celebrate that quality.