Past Research Seminars
Examining the Limits of Crowdsourcing for Relevance Assessment
Dr Paul Clough, Information School
Thursday 1st November at 4pm in the Information School lecture room (Regent Court, RC-204) with refreshments afterwards
Evaluation is instrumental in the development and management of effective information retrieval systems and ensuring high levels of user satisfaction. Using crowdsourcing as part of this process has been shown to be viable. What is less well understood are the limits of crowdsourcing for evaluation, particularly for domain specific search. I will present results comparing relevance assessments gathered using crowdsourcing with those gathered from a domain expert for evaluating different search engines in a large government archive. While crowdsourced judgments rank the tested search engines in the same order as expert judgments, crowdsourced workers appear unable to distinguish different levels of highly accurate search results in a way that expert assessors can. The nature of this limitation in crowd sourced workers for this experiment is examined and the viability of crowdsourcing for evaluating search in specialist settings is discussed.
Designing a decision model for an e-procurement decision support system (DSS) in public sector using multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA)
Mohamed Adil, Information School
Wednesday 14th November at 1pm in the Information School Lecture Room (Regent Court, RC-204)
Public sector procurement has a rigid structure enforced by law and regulations. This results in an organised step-by-step procedure for public sector procurement. However, this research focuses only on decision making based on evaluation of the performances of the suppliers against a preset list of criteria. This situation creates a context in which MCDA techniques can be applied to the evaluation. There are multiple MCDA methods. However, the applicability of these methods to the problem context is not known due to the multiple constrains and expectations of the public sector. This research will study the applicability of a set of published MCDA methods which involves linear weighting methods, single synthesising criterion or utility theory, outranking methods, fuzzy methods and mixed methods to the problem context and identify the best acceptable decision model. The presentation will highlight the research project and its progress to date.
The culturally competent public librarian
Mostafa Syed, Information School
Tuesday 20th November at 11am in the Information School Meetings Room (Regent Court, RC-231)
Public libraries in Britain serve a wide range of people in today’s multicultural Britain, including those from Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities. In order to be able to do so in an effective manner, many library staff participate in training that comes under terms such as ‘Diversity Training’ or ‘Cultural Awareness Courses.’Observational data coupled with findings in the literature show that such training is too short, rarely evaluated and is focused too strongly on anti-discrimination in the workplace as opposed to cultural understanding.What is needed is a training model that caters to the needs of library staff and helps them to be confident and culturally empathic in interacting with library users from a BME background. This is a skill set known as 'cultural competency' and this presentation will look into what this actually is, and the issues that surround it.
Twitpic-ing the riots: analysing images shared on Twitter during the 2011 UK riots
Dr Farida Vis, University of Sheffield, Information School | f.vis@sheffield.ac.uk
Thursday 29th November at 4pm in the Information School lecture room (Regent Court, RC-204) with refreshments afterwards
Crisis events, such as natural disasters and civil disobedience can be intensely visual in nature and this is often how we come to know and remember them. With the development of social media, such events have allowed for the production of vast amounts of user-generated content, including still images and videos circulated within a wider media ecology. Although earlier events such as the 2004 Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and the London bombings, both from 2005, have all received attention through the lens of ‘citizen journalism’ and have to some extent framed research on subsequent events, the role of images in these as a subject worthy of study in their own right remains under explored. Recent interest in the use of amateur images in the news as well as moves to rethink citizen journalism as ‘witnessing’ may signal important changes. This paper presents research from a collaborative interdisciplinary project and highlights that no model as yet exists to understand the specificities of the relationship between digital imaging technologies and Twitter, but at the same time it introduces theoretical frameworks and critically assesses methods and data collection strategies that might work towards establishing such a model. This will also need to take into account understandings of digitally native image practices such as the creation and circulation of ‘memes’. Advances in software for capturing and researching Twitter data open up important and exciting possibilities for future research to focus more centrally on image production and sharing practices on Twitter and beyond, which will help to enrich our understanding of the platform. The paper examines image production and sharing practices on Twitter during the four days of the 2011 UK riots. In particular, a set of images that powerfully signaled the start of the riots: the setting on fire of a Double Decker bus during the first night (August 6) of rioting in Tottenham.
Farida Vis is Research Fellow in the Social Sciences, at the Information School at The University of Sheffield. Key interests include crisis communication, the emerging field of data journalism and innovating methods for the study of social media. She is a co-author of The Data Journalism Handbook (2012) and the forthcoming Researching Social Media (Sage), with computer scientist Mike Thelwall. She blogs at www.reseachingsocialmedia.org and tweets as @flygirltwo.
Social practice, information and social informatics
Dr Andrew Cox, Information School
Thursday 13th December at 4pm in the Information School lecture room (Regent Court, RC-204) with refreshments afterwards
This talk explores the value and limits of taking a practice approach (Schatzki 2002) to the study of "information behaviour" and "social informatics" (socio-technical studies). The case is illustrated by examples from digital photography and food blogging.
The role of curiosity and serendipity in how people browse digital information systems.
Thursday June 7th; Professor Elaine Toms
Information Retrieval Research Group
Email: e.toms@sheffield.ac.uk
Libraries and librarians in the network world: defining our value proposition
Thursday May 31st; Professor Sheila Corrall
Libraries and Information Society Research Group
Email: s.m.corrall@sheffield.ac.uk
Elaborations of grounded theory and of arenas theory in information management research.
Thursday May 24th; Dr Ana Cristina Vasconcelos, Ms Barbara Sen, Ms Ana Guedes Pereira Rosa
Knowledge and Information Management Research Group
Email: a.c.vasconcelos@sheffield.ac.uk
Use of information to support health and wellbeing in older people.
Thursday May 17th; Dr Peter Bath, Health Informatics Research Group
Email: p.a.bath@sheffield.ac.uk
Drill-and-practice is not necessarily a behaviourist pejorative tool: an example of its successful application as a self-learning component of a constructivist phonetics blended learning environment.
Thursday May 10th; Dr Miguel Baptista Nunes, Information Systems Research Group
Email: j.m.nunes@sheffield.ac.uk
Exploring university students' experiences of inquiry and research, and implications for pedagogy.
Thursday March 29th
Professor Philippa Levy, Educational Informatics Research Group
Enriching gazetteers by detecting the informal vernacular place names from the web
Monday 26th March
Basheer Al-Farwan, PhD student, Information Retrieval Research Group
In our study we describe how to enrich the existing geographic gazetteers by gathering the geographical references that still have no representation or not stored yet in the gazetteers. Such references are called “Vernacular References”, which are references that refer to geographical places; they may refer to a common place or places that have no precise boundaries and coordinates or places that locally have different names.Vernacular place names may differ sometimes from the administrative definition or the official name of the same place name; this will make it difficult to capture such names or even to use them in the geographic services. Gathering vernacular references and storing them in the existing gazetteers is a big demand due to the limitations in the existing gazetteers, as they have a lack in storing and representing such references.
Our study is only concerned with the vernacular references that are still vague and unknown due to their informal or historical names. Finding these vernacular place names and assigning them to their official names will help to enrich the geographic databases and then lead to benefit several geographic services. One of these services, the Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) systems, as enriching gazetteers will lead to have more flexible GIR systems and a better performance. Our work will discuss the problems we could face when detecting the vernacular place names from web sources and our method to detect and define them and then assign each vernacular name to its official name.
Use of data fusion methods to find biologically active molecules in chemical databases
Thursday March 15th
Professor Peter Willett, Chemoinformatics Research Group
Email: p.willett@sheffield.ac.uk
Participatory Models in Networks, Crowds and Communities
Monday 12th December at 15:30, ICOSS Conference Room (see map).
Seminar from 15:30 until 16:30 with refreshments afterwards. No need to book.
Professor Caroline Haythornthwaite
University of British Columbia
Canada
Bio:
Professor Haythornthwaite is Director, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia. She joined UBC in 2010 after 14 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. In 2009-10, she was Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education, University of Londonpresenting and writing on learning networks; and in summer 2009 she was a visiting researcher lecturing on distributed knowledge, social networks, and e-learning at the Brazilian Institute for Information in Science and Technology (IBICT), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She has an international reputation in research on information and knowledge sharing through social networks, and the impact of computer media and the Internet on work, learning and social interaction.
Talk:
This research presents a Social Network perspective on online peer production, identifying "crowds" and "communities" as two ends of acontinuum of contributory behaviour. Peer production, it is argued,seems to operate on two distinct models – a crowdsourcing modelbased on micro-participation from many, unconnected individuals, and a virtual community model, based on strong connections among a set ofstrongly committed members. At one end of the scale, `lightweight´ collaboration is characterized by low interpersonal commitment, yetstrong investment in a common interest or purpose. At the `heavyweight´ end of the scale, strong interpersonal connectionsoperate with strong-ties with other community members and community purpose. Building on the literature and cases of crowds and virtualcommunities, the presentation defines a set of dimensions that distinguish these two forms of organizing, based on such factors ascontribution type and group size, power structures, and recognition/reward systems.
A cross-cultural study on individual, team, organisational and institutional factors affecting knowledge sharing willingness in the IT services industry
Thursday 8th December at 13:00, Information School lecture room (RC-204)
No need to book.
Alex Schauer
PhD student, Information School
Talk:
What factors affect knowledge sharing willingness? Prior studies explored individual, team, organisational and institutional factors. However, most research investigated only one or two levels. The presenter argues that none have examined all four levels in a single research setting, which this present study aims to address. Secondly, almost all enquiries focused on one country and a select few on two countries. This study aims to analyse an organisational setting that spans across five countries and across three continents. The presentation on 8 December will introduce knowledge sharing willingness and provide an insight into the research setting, pilot data collection and analysis. Initial results, namely the identification of 98 factors, are discussed. Details of the next phases and anticipated timetable conclude the presentation.
Evaluating the Intellectual assets of the Scholarship & Collections Directorate at the British Library
Wednesday 30th November at 13:00, Information School lecture room (RC-204)
No need to book.
Alice Schofield
PhD student, Information School
Email: lip10ams@sheffield.ac.uk
Talk:
This presentation will give an overview of the progress made thus far in the evaluation of the intellectual assets in the Scholarship and Collections directorate at the British Library. A summary of the background to the project will be made, including a definition of intellectual assets, key themes from the literature, and an introduction to the British Library. Next, the researcher will explain the methods being used for the data collection and analysis process, and how they were employed during the pilot study earlier in the year. The researcher will then discuss the data which have already been collected, and the conclusions drawn. Finally, the anticipated course of the project will be explained, including the eventual results that the researcher hopes to produce.