Information Science Breakfast Series

Aug 31

Jeff Hancock
Phoebe Sengers
Kirsten Boehner

Cracking the CHI code:
Successful submissions to the ACM CHI conference: Tips and tricks

Sep 7

Paul Ginsparg

Next-Generation Implications of Open Access

True open access to scientific publications not only gives readers the possibility to read articles without paying subscription, but also makes the material available for automated ingestion and harvesting by 3rd parties. Once articles and associated data become universally treatable as computable objects, openly available to 3rd party aggregators and value-added services, what new services can we expect, and how will they change the way that researchers interact with their scholarly communications infrastructure? I will discuss straightforward applications of existing ideas and services, including citation analysis, collaborative filtering, external database linkages, interoperability, and other forms of automated markup, and speculate on the sociology of the next generation of users.

Sep 14

Phoebe Sengers

From the Margin to the Center: Exploring "Artsy" HCI

Recently, we have seen an upswell in interest in the arts, which offers new opportunities for conceiving of and designing for interaction, but simultaneously provides challenges for our traditional conceptualizations of what it means to do and to know in HCI. Given that intellectual issues in the contemporary arts are relatively unknown in our field, the status of arts-based work as research can be unclear to HCI researchers. When work in the field is labelled "artsy," this can often imply that it is pretty but not practical, creative but not generalizable, provocative but not a fundamental knowledge contribution, interesting but not valid until recast as science. The result is a missed opportunity, a marginalization of the insights the arts could offer us.

In this talk, I will explore what it might mean to take the arts seriously as a way of knowing and as an intellectual resource for HCI practitioners. I will describe a design experiment through which my group realized both the value of an aesthetic approach to affective computing and the deep-seated consequences of an aesthetic orientation for design and evaluation. I will argue that the arts provide a unique lens into design for the political, social, and personal dimensions of computing. Through analyses my group has conducted of the uptake of cultural probes and Situationism in HCI, I will explore the challenges and opportunities that the arts offer HCI.

Sep 21

Sep 28

Jeremy Birnholtz

What is the relationship between theory from the social sciences and the building/design of (communication/collaboration) technology? What should this relationship look like? This is a critical question as fields such as computer-supported cooperative work and social computing move forward, and as advice is sought from "real-world" organizations and funding agencies on how to reliably and robustly support geographically distributed groups. I don't pretend to have answers to these questions, but I think they're important things to think about in doing our work. The purpose of this session will be to provide some background on and invite those who are interested to participate in a larger conversation with people on both sides of the technology/social science divide. This will not be a formal research presentation (as I'll be giving an IS Colloquium in a couple weeks), so please come prepared to participate and share your thoughts and experiences in an informal discussion.

Some questions to consider:

When is a theory robust enough to be used as a basis for design/implementation decisions? Are any theories of group/organizational behavior really that robust?

Does it matter if design is based on theory?

Are technologists qualified to make theoretical contributions?

Does the codified nature of technology necessarily result in oversimplification and misapplication of subtle, nuanced theories?

Oct 5

Happy Fall Break

Oct 12

Geri Gay

Activity centered design in HCI

In the technologically textured world of evaluation in HCI, evaluators and designers need to evaluate systematically the mediating role of technologies in evaluation as well as the activities themselves. Evaluation activities are embedded in complex technosystems and cannot be isolated from the system under study. Looking at evaluation as part of the system has transformed how evaluations are designed and conducted. In this presentation, I will attempt to describe how we use computer technologies and their multimedia functionalities for the collection of (multimedia) data, for their organization and analysis, and for our composition and presentation of findings. These tools can disclose behaviors and social phenomena that have remained hidden and unexamined, even unimagined, because the technologies required to reveal them did not exist. Because new technologies enable new ways of knowing, new ways of evaluating, new ways of reflecting on the design process, and new ways of representing and reporting knowledge, they pose methodological, social, and ethical challenges upon which evaluators need to reflect and which they should proactively address.

Oct 19

IS Roundtable - DGS Thorsten Joachims + IS graduate students

Oct 26

Gilly Leshed

Sadat Shami

Gilly Leshed:

Feedback for Guiding Reflection on Teamwork Practices

Effective communication in project teams is important, but not often taught. We explore how feedback might improve teamwork in a controlled experiment where groups interact through chat rooms. Collaborators who receive high feedback ratings use different language than poor collaborators (e.g. more words, fewer assents, and less affect-laden language). Further, feedback affects language use. This suggests that a system could use linguistic analysis to automatically provide and visualize feedback to teach teamwork. To this end, we present GroupMeter, a system that applies principles discovered in the experiment to provide feed-back both from peers and from automated linguistic analysis.

Joint work with Jeff Hancock, Dan Cosley, Poppy McLeod, and Geri Gay.

Sadat Shami:

That's what friends are for: Facilitating 'who knows what' across group boundaries

We describe the design and evaluation of K-net, a social matching system to help people learn 'who knows what' in an organization by matching people with skills with those who need them. Transactive memory theory predicts that K-net will improve individuals' awareness of 'who knows what'. This should lead to improved performance through sharing knowledge across group boundaries. We evaluate K-net in terms of these predictions in an experiment with 41 students in seven groups working on software engineering projects. Accurate recommendations improved awareness of 'who knows what' versus 'random' recommendations, but did not improve performance. Our results highlight issues related to the evaluation of systems for sharing knowledge across group boundaries.

Joint work with Y. Connie Yuan, Dan Cosley, Ling Xia, and Geri Gay

Nov 2

Nov 9

Theresa Velden

Scholarly Communication Cultures

With the rise of the World Wide Web dramatic new opportunities have opened up to innovate and transform scholarly communication. Disciplines and fields differ in the extent to which they have taken up these opportunities to innovate, and implement new (more open) models of scholarly communication. The aim of my research is to develop a systematic understanding of field specific differences in scholarly communication cultures (practices, traditions and values) and how they influence the field or community specific evolution of scholarly communication systems. For my PhD thesis I plan to do a comparative empirical study on field specific differences, combining qualitative ethnographic methods with social network analysis (based on large scale, publication data).

At this IS breakfast talk I will report on a pilot field study I did this summer in two subfields of Chemistry, and the ongoing analysis of the data I gathered. Based on my experiences with this pilot study I will develop my PhD thesis proposal over the next few months. Hence I am looking forward to this talk as an opportunity to discuss with you my current thinking on the relevant research questions, and next steps in developing a focused and coherent research proposal. Also I would hope to trade experiences with doing ethnographic research in information science, and in particular the challenges of combining qualitative (local) and quantitative (global) research approaches.

Nov 16

Lucian Leahu

Subjective Objectivity: Negotiating Emotional Meaning

Affective computing systems face challenges in relating objective measures with subjective human experiences. Many systems have either focused on objective measures as a substitute for subjective experience (e.g. skin conductance as a direct representation of arousal) or have abandoned objective measures to focus purely on subjective experience. In this paper, we explore how to negotiate the relationship between objective signals and subjective experiences by highlighting the role of human interpretation. Our approach is informed by a reflective analysis drawing on the arts and the humanities and by a participatory study examining the emergence of emotional meaning. We demonstrate the potential of our approach for interactive affective systems through a series of conceptual designs that embody these understandings.

Joint work with Steve Schwenk and Phoebe Sengers. To be presented at DIS 2008.

Nov 23

Thanksgiving recess

Nov 30

Phil Davis