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News from the Department of Information Science (formerly SIM)

Category: Alumni

James Boxall wins The Royal Canadian Geographic Society Literacy Award

The Royal Canadian Geographic Society has announced that it is presenting the 2012 Literacy Award to MLIS Alumus and SIM Lecturer, James Boxall. The award will be presented at the RCGS Fellows Dinner on November 7th in Ottawa. The award includes $5000, half of which is donated to a charity of James’ choice. James has expressed a desire to create a foundation to support k-12 teachers who wish to train in using GIS with their students. The Award is presented bcause of the work James has done over the last 25 years to support and enhance geographic and spatial education at all levels. From 1991 to 1993, James was the original proponent of developing the Canadian Council for Geographic Education and has been actively working with not only the Dalhousie community, in geography and GIS courses and through the development of the GISciences Centre, but also in the k-12 sector with teachers and schools who wish to develop skills in spatial learning.

Congratulations, James.

New Acting Head of the Killam Library: Joyline Makani

Please join us in congratulating Joyline Makani for her new role as acting head of the Killam Library.  Dr. Makani is a part-time instructor in the MLIS program, the liaison librarian for the Faculty of Management, and an alumna of SIM.  For further information about Dr. Makani’s new role, please read the following post.

Anatoliy Gruzd Quoted in an Article on Nature.com

big dataAnatoliy Gruzd, Director of the Social Media Lab at SIM, was interviewed for an article currently featured on Nature.com entitled  “Facebook ‘likes’ the scientific method”   .

The article included commentaries from Dr. Gruzd and other experts about Facebook’s proposed plan to grant limited access to its users’ data to outside researchers.  This story is part of the open data/big data debate that is currently raging among social scientists.

Also, on a related note, here is a companion blog post about this issue on the Social Media Lab’s website.

Social Media Lab Announces New Research Grants: Tracking Digital Politics across Web 2.0 & Tracking Scholarly Collaborations

Social Media Lab Logo 2012 “Social Media Campaigns: Tracking Digital Politics across Web 2.0”

The Social Media Lab is pleased to announce a new research initiative with the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University. Dr. Gruzd will be working in collaboration with Dr. Greg Elmer (Ryerson University) as PI and Ganaele Langlois (UOIT) as co-PI on a new five year $363,000 SSHRC funded initiatives: “Social Media Campaigns: Tracking Digital Politics across Web 2.0“. The project is designed to develop new theories, methods, and tools for the analysis of communication on and across social media.

The project team will also include some of the world’s most accomplished scholars of new media and social media: Philip Howard (U. of Washington), Jean Burgess (Queensland U. of Technology), Axel Bruns (Queensland U. of Technology), Mary Francoli (Carleton University), Dan Pare (U. of Ottawa), and Joanna Redden (Infoscape-Ryerson University). Stay tuned for more information.

25K Research Grant from GRAND to Study Scholarly Collaborations

The Social Media Lab is also pleased to announce that it received $25,000 in research funding for 2012-13 from GRAND. GRAND (a Network of Centres of Excellence – NCE) is a multidisciplinary research network exploring the application and advancement of graphics, animation and new media in Canada. This funding will be used to hire and train a few graduate students to work on three different research projects within GRAND: NAVEL, MEOW, DINS. These projects examine different aspect of scholarly collaborations and share a common goal of improving and enhancing the connections between researchers from across Canada.

Dr. Fiona Black promoted to Full Professor

The School of Information Management is very pleased to announce that Dr. Fiona Black has been promoted to the rank of Full Professor, effective July 1, 2012. Since her arrival at the School of Information Management in 2001, Dr. Black has worked tirelessly to move the School forward, both in her capacity as a “regular” faculty member, and as former School director. Dr. Black teaches in two of the programs offered within the School of Information Management (the Master of Library and Information Studies and the Master of Information Management).  The high quality of Dr. Black’s teaching is supported clearly by the glowing recommendations she has received from current and former students, as well by the consistently high SRI (student rating of instructor) scores that she has earned over the years. Dr. Black places a very high value on engaging students in the learning process, and is always innovative, flexible, and responsive to student needs.

Dr. Black’s scholarly activities are prodigious, timely, and innovative; more importantly, perhaps, is their positive impact on the discipline.  Of particular note is the continued high quality of Dr. Black’s research productivity even when she carried a significant administrative load.  Dr. Black typifies the Renaissance model of scholarly research in the true meaning of diversity and breadth of scope.

Dr. Black’s contributions to the School, the Faculty of Management, the University, and Information Management discipline and profession have been nothing short of exemplary. Dr. Black can always be counted on to work collaboratively and collegially in a large number of capacities, and to do so with good grace, humour, compassion, intelligence, and kindness.  We at the School are fortunate to work with such a gracious, giving, collaborative, and generous colleague.

 

Louise Spiteri

Director

School of Information Management

 

 

Social Media Lab Awarded Grant to Organize a Workshop on Measuring Influence on Social Media

Conference lecture

The Social Media Lab has recently been awarded a grant by MITACS to organize and host a two-day Symposium & Workshop on Measuring Influence on Social Media in Halifax. The funds will be used to organize the workshop and offset some of the travel cost for Canadian graduate students selected to attend the workshop.

The symposium will be held at the School of Information Management, Dalhousie University in the Fall of 2012. The workshop will provide internet and social media researchers an opportunity to present and debate their ideas on how to measure social influence, and provide graduate students with the opportunity to build academic and professional contacts, present their research, and learn about latest research in this area from a multidisciplinary perspective. The official call for proposals will be available later this month on the lab’s web site, so stay turned.

Stories You Might Have Missed: SIM’s Social Media Lab Research Featured in the Scholarly Kitchen & Foreign Affairs

NewsThe paper, “Investigating biomedical research literature in the blogosphere: a case study of diabetes and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c)” which first appeared in the January 2012 issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association, was featured in the Scholarly Kitchen in an article entitled “Birds of a Feather Blog Together” on 03/07/2012. In this study, Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd and Dr. Fiona Black, along with their now former students Thi Ngoc Yen Le and Kathleen Amos used a variety of methods such as web mining, social network analysis and content analysis to examine whether bloggers use peer reviewed medical literature in their blog posts and why.

Another paper, “Geography of Twitter Networks” which was originally published in the January 2012 issue of Social Networks, was recently featured in Foreign Affairs on 04/04/2012 in an article entitled, “How Twitter Makes the Internet More Local.” This study explored how connections on Twitter are influenced and bounded by geography. This study has also been featured on NPR, Slate.com and other media outlets.

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