Work on research projects occurs year round, but during the spring and summer faculty and students are often away from the campus presenting papers and posters at conferences and giving workshops based on their research findings. The number of speaking commitments this year is notable: by the end of the summer over 45 presentations will have been given at conferences and meetings throughout Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The range of topics and venues is also noteworthy as the following paragraphs demonstrate. Moreover, the opportunities for students to speak about their research and gain experience are an important feature of the research projects and teams operating in the School.

Fiona Black

Fiona Black is continuing her research in digital humanities, particularly involving GIS. She discussed a forthcoming book chapter, “Canadian Book Trade Activities in the 1880s: Developing an HGIS Model” at the Historical GIS in Canada, Authors’ Workshop, at the University of Toronto on 23 April 2011. This chapter is co-authored with Jennifer Charney (MLIS student beginning September 2011), Robin Parker (2010 MLIS grad), and Bertrum MacDonald.

Fiona was a panel member in the session, “The Habits of Readers: Librarians Roles in the Study of Reading and a New Canadian Research Endeavour,” at the Canadian Library Association annual conference and trade show held in Halifax on 25-28 May 2011. This session was organized by Lou Duggan (2000 MLIS grad), and the panel included Anatoliy Gruzd, Bertrum MacDonald, and DeNel Rehberg Sedo (Mount Saint Vincent University), all members of the team leading the development of the Canadian Reading Experience Database.

Fiona presented two papers during the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences hosted at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton. At the annual conference of the Bibliographical Society of Canada on 10 May 2011 she spoke about “Transnationalism, Colonialism and Labour Migration in the Book Trades,” and on 1 June 2011 she gave the paper entitled, “Exploring Boundaries in Book Culture: Framing a Field of Enquiry” to the annual conference of the Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture.

Jennifer Charney, Fiona’s research assistant, is a Tuition scholarship winner for a five-day workshop “Geographic Information Systems for the Digital Humanities,” led by Dr. Ian Gregory of the University of Lancaster, which is part of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute offered at the University of Victoria, 6-10 June 2011.

Later this year, Fiona and Jennifer Charney will speak about “Feminizing a Geography of Print Culture,” in a paper they will present at the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) Conference—Space, Place, Play, Toronto, on 27-29 October 2011.

Anatoliy Gruzd

Anatoliy Gruzd’s research on social media has been receiving extensive media coverage based on work that he and his research students are completing in the Social Media Lab. He gave an invited talk, “Web 2.0 —Development, Demographics and Defining It,” to the Council of Nova Scotia Archives Annual Conference, Halifax, on 5-6 May 2011. On 12-14 May Anatoliy and members of his team participated in the Graphics, Animation and New Media (GRAND) Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, where Anatoliy and Dima Dimitrova (University of Toronto) presented “The NAVEL Study: GRAND Beginnings.” Peter Ye, a research student, spoke about “Studying Research Collaborations in GRAND via Co-authorship Networks,” and Melissa Goertzen (MLIS student) presented the poster “Publish or Perish…or Blog About It: Scholarly Communication and Information Dissemination Trends in the Age of Social Media.”

On 23-30 May 2011, at the 61st annual conference, “Communication @ the Center,” in Boston, a paper co-authored by Anatoliy, Dr. Barry Wellman (University of Toronto), and Dr. Yuri Takhteyev, “Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community,” was presented.

 

Anatoliy was a panel member in the session, “The Habits of Readers: Librarians Roles in the Study of Reading and a New Canadian Research Endeavour,” at the Canadian Library Association annual conference and trade show held in Halifax on 25-28 May 2011.

On 2-4 June 2011, Anatoliy was in Fredericton to present the paper “Scholarly Practices in the Age of Online Social Media,” co-authored with Kathleen Staves (2011 MLIS grad) and Amanda Wilk (MLIS student), at the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science.

 

Later in June, Anatoliy will travel to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, to give a poster and to serve as a faculty adviser-panel member in the Faculty Doctoral Consortium Panel Discussion of the NSF Social Computational Systems Doctoral Symposium, where Naureen Nizam (Dalhousie Computer Science student) will give a Work-in-Progress Thesis Presentation on “Social Tags in Website Navigation” on 9-11 June.

Also in June, Tom Robbins, a research student (MA – Social Anthropology) with Anatoliy, will attend the Summer Institute on Social Network Analysis offered by the Center for Computational Analysis of Social & Organizational Systems (CASOS), at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he will discuss “Social Network Analysis of Co-Authorship Scholarly Networks” on 13-19 June.

Vivian Howard

Vivian Howard and her team are actively disseminating findings and progress reports of their project on Contemporary Atlantic Canadian Books for Children and Teens. On 7 May 2011 Vivian gave a presentation to the Nova Scotia Children’s Literature Roundtable on this subject. On 18 May, Vivian, Dr. Keith Lawson, and Nicole Dixon (2011 MLIS grad) presented the paper, “Sea Stacks: Contemporary Atlantic Canadian Books for Children and Teens,” to the annual conference of the Atlantic Provinces Library Association in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. Nicole Dixon also presented a poster on the same topic at this conference, and Naomi Balla-Boudreau and Deirdre O’Reilly, two 2011 MLIS grads who studied with Vivian, presented a poster on the “National Survey of Early Literacy Programs.”

 

At the Canadian Library Association annual conference in Halifax on 25 May 2011, Vivian gave a keynote presentation in a pre-conference workshop on “What Young Teens Think of the Public Library, Libraries and Teens: Towards Building a Service Strategy.” At this conference, Vivian, Dr. Lawson, and Nicole Dixon spoke about “Sea Stacks: Contemporary Atlantic Canadian Books for Children and Teens,” and Nicole presented a poster on this subject. In addition, Naomi Balla-Boudreau and Deirdre O’Reilly presented the poster, “National Survey of Early Literacy Programs.”

Nicole Dixon represented the team with a poster at the Society for Digital Humanities conference held during the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Fredericton on 30 May 2011, and she also gave a poster on the Sea Stacks project at the Canadian Association for Information Science conference also held in Fredericton on 2-3 June 2011. Vivian also attended the Canadian Association for Information Science conference to present the poster on the “National Survey of Early Literacy Programs” prepared by Naomi Balla-Boudreau and Deirdre O’Reilly.

Two members of Vivian’s research team, Sue Fisher (University of New Brunswick) and Dr. Andrea Schwenke Wyile (Acadia University) along with research assistant, Kim Wallace (Acadia University), will report on various aspects of the Sea Stacks project at the 2011 Children’s Literature Association conference, Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia, on 23-25 June 2011. Their panel presentation is entitled “Rising Above the Waves: Introducing Sea Stacks Through Kevin Major’s Males, Budge Wilson’s Women, and Kate Inglis’s Dead Crew.”

Bertrum MacDonald

Bertrum MacDonald is pursuing research relating to historical and contemporary aspects of scientific information communication on two fronts. His research on contemporary topics is being conducted in the Environmental Information: Use and Influence (EIUI) research initiative which capitalizes on the interdisciplinary strengths of the Faculty of Management (see www.eiui.ca for details).

In the EIUI-related work, Suzuette Soomai (research assistant and 2010 Master of Marine Management grad), Peter Wells (School for Resource and Environmental Studies and Marine Affairs Program), and Bertrum presented “The 2009 State of Nova Scotia’s Coast Report: An Initial Study of its Use and Influence,” to the Nova Scotia Provincial Oceans network in Halifax on 19 May 2011. Suzuette presented the paper, “Using Environmental Information to Engage Public Participation in Decision Making in Coastal Policy Development,” co-authored with Bertrum MacDonald and Peter Wells to the Canadian Association for Information Science in Fredericton on 2-4 June 2011. On 15 June 2011, Peter Wells will present, “Marine Environmental Information and its Use and Influence: The State of the Gulf of Maine Case Study,” co-authored with Bertrum MacDonald, Suzuette Soomai, and Danielle Cossarini (2010 MLIS grad) to a meeting of the Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment in Bar Harbor, Maine.

On historical aspects of scientific information communication, Bertrum was a panel member in the session, “The Habits of Readers: Librarians Roles in the Study of Reading and a New Canadian Research Endeavour,” at the Canadian Library Association annual conference and trade show held in Halifax on 25-28 May 2011. Further details about the international Reading Experience Database projects are available at www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/

During 14-17 July 2011, Bertrum will be in Washington DC participating in the annual international conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing as as an executive member of the society and also presenting the paper, “The Reach of Scientific Networks: The Smithsonian Institution and Diffusion of Scientific Information in Nineteenth Century Canada.” At the same conference, Lou Duggan (2000 MLIS grad) will be a member of the panel, “RED: An International Digital Network for the History of Reading,” and will speak about “The Canadian Reading Experience Database: Organization and Strategies for Building a National Research Source.”

Louise Spiteri

In a continuation of her research on the use of social media and Web 2.0 applications to organize information, Louise Spiteri will present several papers this summer. At the Atlantic Provinces Library Association conference in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador on 17 May 2011, she gave the paper, “The Public Library Catalogue as a Social Space,” co-authored with Laurel Tarulli. On 4 June 2011, Louise and Laurel presented the paper, “The Public Library Catalogue as a Social Space: A Case Study of Social Discovery Systems in Two Canadian Public Libraries,” at the Canadian Association for Information Science Conference in Fredericton, New Brunswick. At the same conference, Louise spoke about “Social Discovery Tools: Cataloguing Meets User Convenience,” on 3 June 2011.

Louise will present the paper “Social Discovery Systems and User-Generated Metadata,” at the North American Society for Knowledge Organization conference in Toronto on 17 June 2011 and on 5 July 2011 Louise will be in London, England to present the paper “Faceted Navigation of Social Tagging Applications,” to the International Society for Knowledge Organization.

Sandra Toze

Sandra Toze was accepted to participate in the Doctoral Colloquium of the 2011 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems held in Philadelphia on 23-27 May 2011, where she discussed “Deconstructing Information Flow in Student Groups.” At the same conference, Sandra presented “Group Participation in the Search Process?” a paper co-authored with Lori McCay Peet (2008 MLIS grad), and Elaine Toms (Canada Research Chair in Management Informatics).

In addition to reporting on research work, Sandra and Louise Spiteri spoke about “Using Social Media to Leverage Corporate Intelligence and Tacit Knowledge,” at sessions organized by the Dalhousie University Centre for Advanced Management Education in Ottawa on 26 April 2011, Toronto on 29 April, and in Halifax on 3 May. While in Toronto on 27-28 April, Sandra spoke about “Transforming Information Management—The Role of Education” at the

International Conference on Information Management and Evaluation held at Ryerson University. On 2 June 2011, Sandra addressed the Maritime Access & Privacy Workshop in Halifax on the topic of “Governance and E-Discovery.”