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News from the Department of Information Science (formerly SIM)

Category: Research

DJIM’s new look

As a new school year begins, the Dalhousie Journal of Interdisciplinary Management is revealing our new look!

We worked hard over the summer to develop a new look that’s simple and modern. The new design will make it easier for changes to be made to the website in the future and for it to be maintained, year after year, by our Technical Co-Chairs. It was designed by DJIM’s current Co-Chair, Catherine McGoveran, in consultation with the DJIM Executive, and will continue to be enhanced throughout the academic year.

Check out the new look on our website, Facebook, and Twitter and follow us for updates about upcoming Executive positions, volunteer opportunities, and our fall launch!

Do you have questions about DJIM? Email us at djim@dal.ca

DJIM Logos

 

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.

SIM members awarded APLA Memorial Trust research grant

SIM alumna Alison Black and faculty member Fiona Black have been awarded this year’s research grant from the Atlantic Provinces Library Association (APLA) Memorial Trust. The title of their study is “Professional Staffing for 21st Century Public Libraries:  Atlantic Canadian Perspectives.”

Public libraries are crucial players in local and regional communities, supporting the cultural, educational, economic, and social life of each province, yet there is a significant gap in the literature concerning the important individuals who work in them. APLA is helping to remedy this for Atlantic Canada, through its support of Black and Black’s qualitative, comparative study of human resources using the primary lens of hiring and retention practices. As an increasing number of experienced librarians prepare for retirement, and job descriptions are altered in response to societal and organizational changes and fiscal restraint, the topic of human resource management is of particular importance.

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.

The Document Academy conference (DOCAM) – August 2012

SIM research would be a great fit for The Document Academy conference (DOCAM) to be held at The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, in August 2012.

Here’s why you might enjoy DOCAM:

1) You don’t have to submit a full paper, just do a 30-minute presentation.

2) Everything is a plenary session. People are friendly and interested and they offer helpful suggestions.

3) Many kinds of documents are represented. I’ve been to three DOCAMs and heard about digitized medieval manuscripts, Obama’s birth certificate, streaming opera performances, museum displays, plans for how to build a kayak, 4-H Club archives, scholars’ personal blogs, metadata, children’s literacy programs in India, books that go on tour, artist’s sketches, and proper techniques for destroying holy scripture, among many others.

4) The weather in London, Ontario in August is… well, it’s… hard to describe!

The call for proposals has been extended to May 25, 2012.

The official website is http://conferences.fims.uwo.ca/DOCAM12/cfp.aspx

Disclaimer: I’m not a conference organizer, just a DOCAM proponent. Email me if you’d like an unofficial view of the conference: eadphd@gmail.com

Elisabeth Davies

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.

Social Media Lab students presenting at the GRAND Conference in Montreal

NCE GRAND 2012 MLIS and Computer Science students from SIM’s Social Media Lab (SML) will be presenting posters at the GRAND 2012 Conference in Montréal next week. GRAND 2012 will showcase a multi-disciplinary program of research and innovation spanning the broad spectrum of digital media. The conference, held at Le Centre Sheraton, Montréal, will start on the evening of Wednesday, May 2, with an Opening Reception featuring Posters and Demos.

The SML posters are part of two different research projects within the GRAND network: DINS (Digital Infrastructures: Access and Use in the Network Society) and the NAVEL (Network Assessment and Validation for Effective Leadership):

  • Melissa Anez (MLIS Candidate, 2012) will be presenting on: “AcademiaMap Dashboard: Visualizing Scholarly Networks on Twitter”
  • Sreejata Chatterjee (M.Sc. in CS Candidate, 2013) will be presenting on: “Targeted Harnessing of Transient Micro-Blogging Date”
  • Amanda Wilk (MLIS Candidate, 2012) is the lead student organizer on the Grand Poster and Demos committee

 

* GRAND is a federally-funded Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE) research network and commercialization engine whose goal is to address complex issues in digital media and transform multidisciplinary research into user-centred solutions.

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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