ICS & LIS Faculty & Researcher Works

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10125/36228

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Gazing the Diversity Stance in North America: Bringing Practitioner Inquiry into the LIS Classroom
(Association for Library and Information Science Education, 2016-04) Irvin, Vanessa
This article is an exploration of ways in which LIS educators can consider culture, heritage, and identity as a framework for becoming participatory agents of their teaching practices in the LIS classroom. To support this framework, this discussion introduces the research methodology, practitioner inquiry, as a meaningful approach to studying pedagogical practice and identity in the LIS classroom as a means to LIS educators becoming more self-reflective and aware of the impacts of their own identity construction in their teaching. In this article I am affirming the case for a diversity stance within the North American LIS curriculum. I am also posing additional questions and challenges about LIS identity construction and professional practice as we teach and learn in the classroom.
First-Mover Advantage in a Social Q&A Community
(2015) Gazan, Rich
Aggregate answer ratings serve as a metric of collective intelligence in social Q&A communities. The patterns by which participants in a social Q&A community rate and recommend answers are analyzed through the lens of first-mover advantage, to address the question of whether the first answer posted has a ratings advantage over those subsequently submitted. As part of a long-term participant observation, ratings for answers submitted to the Answerbag social Q&A site were compared by order of submission and normalized for page views and answer quality. The results suggest that the first-submitted answer consistently accumulates roughly 17% more rating points than the second answer submitted, and that the rating points of each subsequent answer tend to decline. Social factors influencing rating activity and implications for interpreting future social Q&A data are discussed.
The Hammer of Hawking: The Impact of Celebrity Scientists, the Intent of Extraterrestrials and the Public Perception of Astrobiology
(2013) Gazan, Rich
This paper assesses the impact of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking’s warning about the possibly malicious intent of extraterrestrial visitors on the public opinion of the search for life in the universe, which is the domain of the interdisciplinary science of astrobiology. Using Web content analysis and sentiment analysis methods, 13 distinct categories of opinion are proposed, suggesting the role of Web comments as both public forums and naturalistic data sources. The results suggest that a significant percentage of those studied agreed with Hawking purely on the merits of his reputation, but those who disagreed tended to claim that Hawking’s argument failed logically or scientifically. How cross–domain authority manifests on the Web, and the influence of celebrity scientists on the public perception of astrobiology, are discussed.
Identifying Crossover Documents in an Interdisciplinary Research Environment
(2013) Gazan, Rich
AIRFrame is a NASA project to analyze and integrate astrobiology documents from diverse disciplines to catalyze new knowledge. This paper outlines the technical infrastructure of the current system and reports on an ongoing iterative evaluation, to address the question of how scientists perceive and integrate crossover documents in their research. Some of the obstacles preventing AIRFrame from gaining traction with its target audience of astrobiology researchers include representing their research output accurately, effectively translating and relating diverse metadata, and understanding disciplinary norms and the broader knowledge production infrastructure. The skills required to address these needs suggest a role for both researchers and information professionals to work in tandem with technical tools to catalyze interdisciplinary knowledge. A graduate seminar in interdisciplinary knowledge production, targeted at both researchers and graduate students at the University of Hawaii, has been designed to elicit and impart needed information as input to ongoing AIRFrame development.
Rebroadcasting Astrobiology Information Through Social Media
(2012) Gazan, Rich
Social Q&A
(2011) Gazan, Rich
This article presents a review and analysis of the research literature in social Q&A (SQA), a term describing systems where people ask, answer, and rate content while interacting around it. The growth of SQA is contextualized within the broader trend of user-generated content from Usenet to Web 2.0, and alternative definitions of SQA are reviewed. SQA sites have been conceptualized in the literature as simultaneous examples of tools, collections, communities, and complex sociotechnical systems. Major threads of SQA research include user-generated and algorithmic question categorization, answer classification and quality assessment, studies of user satisfaction, reward structures, and motivation for participation, and how trust and expertise are both operationalized by and emerge from SQA sites. Directions for future research are discussed, including more refined conceptions of SQA site participants and their roles, unpacking the processes by which social capital is achieved, managed, and wielded in SQA sites, refining question categorization, conducting research within and across a wider range of SQA sites, the application of economic and game-theoretic models, and the problematization of SQA itself.
Redesign as an Act of Violence: Disrupted Interaction Patterns and the Fragmenting of a Social Q&A Community
(2011) Gazan, Rich
The worst-case scenario for the redesign of an established online community is a subsequent mass migration of its core members to other sites. Using data from transaction logs, content analysis and participant observation, this paper presents a descriptive analysis of the fragmentation of a social question answering (Q&A) community in the immediate aftermath of a fundamental redesign, where site- based communication mechanisms no longer functioned. The ways in which the community and its diaspora reacted, reconnected and resettled on other sites provides empirical data to support recent research on the life cycle of online communities. The results suggest that many of the same processes that help social Q&A sites generate content and motivate participation can work to dismantle an established community if communications between members are even temporarily disrupted. Modeling a redesign as an attack on a community can help future designers anticipate alternative paths of communication and information flows.
The Practical Mechanics of Interdisciplinary Science
(2010) Gazan, Rich; Miller, Lisa
In astrobiology and all interdisciplinary science, we want to do more than just hope for synergistic interactions of diverse types of knowledge. Knowledge created by researchers in distinct scientific communities must undergo active processes of translation in order to inform one another. This paper provides an overview and discussion of successful elements of translation and integration from past studies of interdisciplinary science practice.
Microcollaborations in a Social Q&A Community
(2010) Gazan, Rich
Most social Q&A sites are designed to support solo searchers who access the aggregated opinions of other users, and ask and answer questions of their own. The purpose of this paper is to show how users in one social Q&A community defy system constraints to engage in brief, informal episodes of collaborative information seeking called microcollaborations. A brief literature review is presented, suggesting a view of information seeking as a combination of problem-centered information seeking, technological affordances and constraints, and social and affective factors. The results of content and transaction log analyses of user interactions suggest that topics of collaboration share a common threshold of complexity and invite responses containing both fact and opinion. Analysis also revealed that key elements in predicting a collaborative instance involve social capital and affective factors unrelated to the topic of the collaboration. Suggestions for supporting future lightweight microcollaborations, and implications for future research, are discussed.
When Online Communities Become Self-Aware
(2009) Gazan, Rich
Evidence from a long-term participant observation suggests that a critical point in the evolution of an online community occurs when participants begin to focus less on topical content and more on one another. When content restrictions were removed from a question answering community and social technologies were introduced, the proportion of factual content on the site steadily diminished in favor of more social content: questions specifically about site users and appropriate behavior, suggesting an awareness of themselves as a community. Positive effects of self-aware behavior included increased site participation, social support and open normative debates. Negative effects included increased conflict, rogue behaviors and factionalism.
Social Annotations in Digital Library Collections
(2008) Gazan, Rich
In order to incorporate Web 2.0 functionality effectively, digital libraries must fundamentally recast users not just as content consumers, but as content creators. This article analyzes the integration of social annotations – uncontrolled user-generated content – into digital collection items. The literature review briefly summarizes the value of annotations and finds that there is conceptual room to include user-generated content in digital libraries, that they have been imagined as forums for social interaction since their inception, and that encouraging a collaborative approach to knowledge discovery and creation might make digital libraries serve as boundary objects that increase participation and engagement. The results of an ongoing case study of a Web 2.0 question and answer site that has made a similar transition from factual to social content are analyzed, and eight decision points for digital libraries to consider when integrating social annotations with digital collection items are proposed.
Seekers, Sloths and Social Reference: Homework Questions Submitted to a Question Answering Community
(2007) Gazan, Rich
An increasing number of students are seeking homework help outside library structures and systems, such as on social reference sites, where questions are answered by online community members who rate one another’s answers and provide collaborative filtering in place of traditional expertise. This paper reports the preliminary results of a participant observation and content analysis of homework questions submitted to Answerbag, a social reference site with over one million unique visitors per month. The results suggest that members of the online community are able to distinguish between questions submitted by Seekers, those who interact with the community and engage in conversation about their questions, and Sloths, those who post their homework questions apparently verbatim and interact no further. How the community reacts to these distinct types of questioners reflects values similar to those of professional reference providers, and the community structure also allows members to educate questioners about community standards and the ethics of information seeking.
Specialists and Synthesists in a Question Answering Community
(2006) Gazan, Rich
The most sustainable online communities are those that allow and encourage their users to have a voice in how the community evolves. The proliferation of online communities with collaborative filtering mechanisms, where user feedback is aggregated to shape future interactions, makes it necessary to understand why participants in online communities value the content they do. Building on the concepts of users as specialists and synthesists developed in previous research, this study examines Answerbag, an online question answering community where users rate one another’s answers to provide collaborative filtering. In this environment, specialists are operationalized as those who claim expertise in a given topic and answer questions without referencing other sources, and synthesists as those who include one or more references to external sources in their answers. The results of the study suggest that within the Answerbag community as a whole, the answers of synthesists tended to be rated more highly than those of specialists, though answers provided by specialists were rated more highly within certain categories. The consequences of differences in the perceived value of information provided by specialists and synthesists are examined, and avenues for future research are discussed.
Digital Library Evaluation: A Longer View
(2005) Gazan, Rich
Imposing Structures: Narrative Analysis and the Design of Information Systems
(2005) Gazan, Rich
Understanding how designers of information and communication technologies conceptualize and perform their work can contribute to the larger goals of more effective design environments, and more effective information systems. This article discusses the narrative analysis method in the context of a digital library design project related to environmental science, and suggests that useful insights can be gained when both the design product and the design process are framed in narrative terms. When designers embraced the narrative aspects of the system, indicators of communication, information sharing and integrative work increased. Narrative analysis supplemented social network analysis and demonstrated more explanatory power regarding the outcomes of the usability study, and was an effective research method insofar as it mirrored the participants’ evolving views of the design environment, suggesting that a reflexive approach to narrative data collection and analysis is warranted.
Metadata as a Realm of Translation: Merging Knowledge Domains in the Design of an Environmental Information System.
(2003) Gazan, Rich
Bringing together document collections in merged information resources is becoming more common, but presents the problem of integrating content and metadata that have been created in different knowledge domains, using different classification schemes. This paper describes how a multidisciplinary team attempted to integrate metadata structures from several different collections in the development of an environmental information system. The results of this qualitative study suggest that though designers and users from diverse backgrounds could conceptualize and articulate the potential new knowledge the merged system might reveal, the perceived informational value of different access points varied with disciplinary membership, and the compromises forced by this merged collection created barriers and missed opportunities for the creation of new knowledge. However, people with a variety of backgrounds were able to contribute to negotiations about metadata decisions, suggesting that this may be a key realm of translation between diverse individuals in future collaborative environments. Consequences for domain-specific knowledge organization, and for a translation and integration role for those in the field of information science, are discussed.
Library Management Education and Reality: A Clearer Connection
(2007) Gazan, Rich
The results of a study of a collaborative digital library development project suggested that activities positively associated with project success included various forms of connection work, such as integrating diverse people, organizations and collections of information. The digital library study results are juxtaposed with the results of a survey of the skills and interests of 106 library school students, which revealed that though few aspire to be library managers per se, students reported strong interest in the type of collaborative and synthetic work found to be success factors in the digital library project. The comparison suggests a disconnection between theoretical management concepts, student perceptions of library management and real-world practice in library management education. A hybrid library management course and practicum is proposed, one which de-emphasizes fictional case studies in favor of providing opportunities for students to evaluate management concepts by observing practice, and to challenge their perceptions of what management is.
Understanding the Rogue User
(2007) Gazan, Rich
Visions of a harmonious online community are usually crushed quite quickly once human beings start to participate. A totem of user-centered design is that people use technologies in ways never intended by their designers (see, for example, Nielsen 1993), sometimes emotionally, but distinguishing destructive and creative interactions with an information system is often difficult. This distinction is addressed in this chapter via the concept of a rogue user, an active participant in an online community who violates the community’s rules or spirit. Evidence of rogue behaviors in the Answerbag (www.answerbag.com) online question answering community was obtained through user postings and site logs, and an alyzed through the lens of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR 2000), to suggest ways in which rogue behaviors can be understood and mitigated in the design of future online communities.
Use Scenarios in the Development of the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT)
(2003) Gazan, Rich; Leazer, Gregory H.; Borgman, Christine L.; Gilliland-Swetland, Anne J.; Smart, Laura; Ancona, Dan; Nilsson, Rachel M.
A user-centered, iterative design philosophy requires a common language between users, designers and builders to translate user needs into buildable specifications. This paper details the rationale, evolution and implementation of use scenarios —structured narrative descriptions of envisioned system use—in the development of the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype. This paper discusses the strengths of the scenario approach, obstacles to their use, and lessons learned in the overall development process.
AIRFrame: Integrating Diverse Digital Collections in Astrobiology
(2010) Gazan, Rich
Astrobiology is an inherently interdisciplinary field concerned with questions of life in the universe. This paper describes the design and ongoing implementation of the Astrobiology Integrative Research Framework (AIRFrame), an open source, ontology-driven information system designed to ingest and analyze heterogeneous inputs of both published and unpublished data, and to identify and illustrate latent connections between research in astrobiology’s diverse constituent fields.

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