SLIS News Feed

The Power of Maps - Exhibit at the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing

"This exhibit is really magic. Everybody who touches it benefits." [Katy Börner]
"Maps of abstract spaces, like ideas, aim to serve today's explorers who are navigating the world of science." [exhibit Learning Objective]
"Maps have enabled the discovery of new worlds..." [exhibit Learning Objective]

In collaboration with Chinese researchers at the Research Center for Grid and Service Computing (VEGA Center) at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing, and with support from a grant by the National Science Foundation - the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit will have an opening event on May 17, 2008 from 9:00 - 11:30 a.m. Weixia (Bonnie) Huang, senior system architect from the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at SLIS, will travel to the opening and will work with colleagues to introduce the maps. Katy Börner, SLIS faculty member and director of the Center, is proud of this accomplishment. She noted that this is the first major showing of the exhibit outside of the U.S., and that the maps have been translated into Chinese to aid in the sharing of information.

This will be the debut for the 4th iteration of this 10-year exhibit entitled "Science Maps for Economic Decision Makers".

English Web page:	http://scimaps.org/nslc/
Chinese Web page:	http://scimaps.org/china/

Starting July 2008, the exhibit will travel to other branch libraries of the Chinese Academy of Sciences including Lanzhou, Wuhan, and Chendu.

Excerpts from the Exhibit Website:
Are you interested in seeing science from above? Curious to see what impact one single person or invention can have? Keen to find pockets of innovation? Desperate for better tools to manage the information flood? Or are you simply fascinated by maps? Then visit the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit at on display at the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, May 17-June 30, 2008.

The exhibit aims to demonstrate the power of maps to navigate and make sense of physical places and abstract topic spaces. The display at The National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences features the first four of ten iterations of the Places & Spaces exhibit entitled 'The Power of Maps', 'The Power of Reference Systems', and 'The Power of Forecasts'. This will be the debut of the fourth iteration. Also shown are Illuminated Diagram displays by W. Bradford Paley, Kevin Boyack, John Burgoon, Peter Kennard, and Richard Klavans and Worldprocessor globes by Ingo GŠnther, and hands-on science maps for kids with paintings by Fileve Palmer.

Scientists will be stimulated, students and teachers encouraged, and the general public fascinated by this multi-layered accessible approach to the worlds of modern scientific thought.

Acknowledgements
The exhibit display in China is sponsored by National Science Foundation awards IIS-0238261, CHE-0524661, IIS-0737783 and IIS-0715303; Thomson Scientific; the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, University Information Technology Services, and the School of Library and Information Science, all three at Indiana University. Much of the data used to generate the science maps is from Thomson Scientific. We thank the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for all their support.

Other Venues
NSF, Washington D.C. There is a permanent display of the first two iterations on the 10th floor of the National Science Foundation, 4201 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA.

NRC, Ottawa, Canada. The first three iterations can be seen at National Research Council - Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, April 3 - June 27, 2008.

Foundations of Knowledge Management - Tallinn, Estonia

SLIS faculty member Ron Day will be teaching a course for the Eramus Project in Tallinn, Estonia - May 12-23, 2008. The course is titled: The Cultural, Social, and Theoretical Foundations of Knowledge Management. Excerpts from the syllabus are included here.

Introduction:
This course will introduce students to some of the cultural, social, and theoretical influences that gave shape to "Knowledge Management" ("KM") in the 1990s and continue until today. It will take the form of a 'critical informatics' approach, looking at the historical influences and discursive lines that led to Knowledge Management, lines that were often discarded as what would become "KM" was institutionalized within American business and information schools and institutions such as the World Bank. The purpose of this approach is to expose central concepts of Knowledge Management to historical and theoretical critique and thus reopen "Knowledge Management" as a theoretical and social project.

"Knowledge Management" appeared in the 1990s as a set of beliefs and discourses toward management and problems of production and selling in Western capitalist economies, which were under pressure from labor and cultural movements during the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese world-wide market expansion in the 1980s, and the computerization of both industrial and 'white-collar' work from the 1960s and onward. Some key terms in or allied with "Knowledge Management" were and are: "intellectual capital," "social capital," "implicit knowledge" or "tacit knowledge," "explicit knowledge," "knowledge sharing," "just-in-time production," "branding," "flat organizations," and "the attention economy." While it is sometimes assumed that the discourse of Knowledge Management arose wholly from United States business schools (particularly under the influence of Japanese management styles) during the 1990s, some of its terms and concepts can be traced to earlier Marxist discourses and social movements, and the discourse as a whole belongs to a host of discourses that can be classified as "information age" or "information society" discourses during the late 20th and early 21 centuries.

To be more completely understood, Knowledge Management discourse and its concepts must, therefore, be viewed culturally, socially, and theoretically. This course reads and comments upon texts that do this, attempting to expose, expand upon, and critique Knowledge Management discourse and its concepts from four general aspects and their traditions:

information management and documentation;
critical organization and management studies, discourses on post-Fordism, and the "New Economy";
social communities and information infrastructure theory;
epistemology and psychologies of learning.

Critical weight will be brought, foremost, upon four conceptual groups: the nature of knowledge, "social capital," "intellectual capital" and the tacit(implicit)/explicit knowledge distinction in KM.

Biography
Ronald E. Day is an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books are The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001); editor and co-translator of Suzanne Briet's What is Documentation? (Scarecrow Press, 2006); and co-editor with Claire McInerney of Rethinking Knowledge Management: From Knowledge Objects to Knowledge Processes (Springer-Verlag, 2007). He was a middle school and high school librarian and a community college librarian for four and a half years, as well.

Liana Zhou (MLS '90) Wins ALA 2008 Equality Award

SLIS alumna Liana Zhou (MLS '90), director of the Library and Archives at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, has been awarded the 2008 Equality Award by the American Library Association (ALA).

According to the ALA press release, Jury Chair Tim Grimes noted that Zhou "was selected for her accomplishments as director of the Library and Archives at the Kinsey Institute and in her leadership roles for several professional organizations, including the American Library Association, the Chinese American Librarians Association and the 2006 Joint Conference of Librarians of Color."

The release also includes comments from Sally Tseng, nominator and honorary executive director of the Chinese American Librarians Association: "Liana is committed to issues related to diversity, equality, mentorship, minority concerns, recruitment and retention. … Her energy and enthusiasm for equality and diversity are contagious and re-energizes those around her."

See related SLIS News Story:
SLIS Graduates - Librarians at the Kinsey Institute

Hara and Meho Promoted to Associate Professor Rank

SLIS faculty members Noriko Hara and Lokman Meho recently received tenure and have been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. Both have contributed to SLIS with their scholarship, their enthusiasm, and their dedication to the field. They bring to SLIS a global perspective. Noriko Hara is originally from Japan, and Lokman Meho from Lebanon.

"Both have published prolifically and in different areas: Lokman works in the area of citation analysis and bibliometrics, and Noriko investigates communities of practice and online social movements. They also have co-authored with many colleagues and are wonderful collaborators. Both are dedicated and reflective teachers who care about their students. Their excellence in the classroom was recognized when each received a 2007 Trustees Teaching Award." [comments from Howard Rosenbaum, SLIS Associate Dean]

See Related SLIS News Stories:

Rosenbaum Participates in Human-Centered Computing Review Panel

SLIS Associate Dean Howard Rosenbaum recently participated in a National Science Foundation (NSF) panel that evaluated research proposals submitted to the Human-Centered Computing (HCC) Cluster of the Intelligent and Information Systems Division.

"These were typically single institution "small" size projects requesting up to $450K of funding," Rosenbaum says. "The panel met on Monday and Tuesday, April 28-29, 2008, at NSF headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, reviewed the proposals, and sent a small number forward for consideration for funding."

In addition to serving as SLIS Associate Dean, Rosenbaum directs the Master of Information Science (MIS) degree program, which emphasizes human-centered information technology development.

Just Published: Managing Library Employees

Neal-Schuman Publishers has recently released a new book by Mary Stanley, associate dean of IUPUI University Library and SLIS adjunct faculty member, entitled Managing Library Employees. It is Number 161 of the "How-To-Do-It Manuals." A free preview of the book is available on the Neal-Schuman website. Stanley has taught SLIS S551 Library Management at SLIS Indianapolis.

Publisher's Description
Whether the HR function in your library is handled by an entire department, or a single individual, this nuts-and-bolts primer is a treasure trove of templates, forms, samples, and checklists that you can start using today. Organized in a Q&A format for quick reference, the author asks the everyday questions that few other guides bother to address. How do you write a job description? What kinds of questions should I ask in the interview? How should star employees be recognized? What are the most important elements in training staff? How do we handle a Reduction in Force? Every answer is specifically tailored to libraries' particular needs and circumstances. From the basics of hiring and firing, training, evaluation, legal requirements, recruitment and retention to hot topics like attracting minorities to librarianship, the "graying" of the library workforce, technologies useful for HR tasks, and more, this book gives you the full range of need-to-know information.

Particularly useful for students, new professionals, and occasional or "accidental" HR managers who need a reference to consult as issues arise, this book is the ideal go-to guide for quick, well informed advice, useful summaries of the most important research and professional resources, and proven HR tools for every kind of library.

ALA Publishes The Quality Library

A book co-written by SLIS adjunct faculty member Sara Laughlin (and colleague Ray Wilson), The Quality Library: A Guide to Self-Improvement, Better Efficiency, and Happier Customers has been published recently by the American Library Association.

Laughlin, a SLIS alumna (MLS 1985), has taught Public Library Management as well as Evaluation of Library Sources and Services for the SLIS Indianapolis program. She is currently the interim director of the Monroe County Public Library (Bloomington, Indiana), and the president of Sara Laughlin & Associates.

From the Publisher's Description
"In an environment of budget cuts and freezes, libraries must keep a tight rein on costs and inefficiencies. The efficiency of systems and processes goes hand-in-hand with excellent customer service. Managers, however, often find themselves far enough removed from the day-to-day activities in the library that they don't know where inefficiencies, mistakes, and poor customer service may occur.

Based on more than 50 years of author expertise in organizational improvement, The Quality Library offers a methodology to pinpoint trouble areas and improve processes. By developing a customer-focused system outlining library processes and networks, administrators and managers can quickly determine areas for improvement that directly apply to the library's goals and missions. Staff will also learn how to statistically document the new process's performance, giving the library a means to quantify its effects.

Sara Laughlin is president of Sara Laughlin & Associates, a consulting firm specializing in customer-focused, future-oriented planning, evaluation, and continuous improvement. In her 30-plus years as a librarian, she has worked as a reference librarian, branch manager, consortium director, library school faculty, and as a library trustee. Her consulting clients include public and academic libraries, school districts, State librarians and regional consortia, as well as foundations and other non-profits.

Ray Wilson is a process engineer with more than 25 years of experience. He is coauthor with Sara Laughlin and Denise Sisco Shockley of The Library's Continuous Improvement Fieldbook: 29 Ready-to-Use Tools (ALA Editions, 2003). Ray and Sara have worked together over the last four years in the Indiana Staff Development Council. He is also an active member of the Indy Quality, Productivity, and Improvement Council."

"Information Science and Technology" Conference - Los Alamos

SLIS faculty member Katy Börner has been invited to speak at the 28^th Annual Conference of the Center for Nonlinear Studies (CNLS) at Los Alamos National Laboratory, held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, May 12-16, 2008. This year's conference is entitled "Information Science and Technology (IS&T)."

Börner's talk, "Science Maps in Action," will feature work that she has conducted as director of the Information Visualization Lab and the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University. For related work of B�rner's in the area of science information visualization, see the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science website.

From the Invitation
"For the Annual Conference, CNLS has often focused on exciting, emerging, and interdisciplinary fields of science. This year's conference centers on the study of information science and technology, undoubtedly a cornerstone of scientific advances in the 21st century. These advances will produce quantitative measurements in systems that could previously only be studied qualitatively. Furthermore, the size of datasets in scientific, commercial, and government applications will continue to grow exponentially, in some cases reaching petabyte and exabyte scales. This shift from hypothesis-driven to data-driven science is creating opportunities to accelerate discoveries in science and technology and to apply these discoveries to problems of national and global importance. The 28th CNLS Annual Conference will bring together experts from a variety of disciplines which impact information science and technology. Specific areas will include information theory, machine learning, massive datasets, quantitative finance, bioinformatics, astroinformatics, statistics, neurocomputing, and image analysis."

2008 ESRI Business GIS Summit - Chicago

ESRI hosts a number of GIS conferences. Their company "began in 1969 with an almost limitless enthusiasm for the possibilities of geographic information systems (GIS). They understood even then that this new geographic information system technology could bring about a better future. Their confidence in GIS is built on the belief that geography matters. It fundamentally influences and connects our many cultures and societies." [ERSI website]

Their website continues by saying ways that Geographic Information Systems can help: "Our technology helps fight forest fires... find promising sites for new facilities, support optimal land-use planning, route emergency vehicles, monitor climate change, contain oil spills, and perform countless other vital tasks."

The 2008 ESRI Business GIS Summit was held April 27-30, 2008 at The Drake Hotel in Chicago, Illinois. SLIS faculty member Hamid Ekbia presented on Wednesday, April 30 (see abstract below from page 26 of the Summit Brochure).

A Grammar of Movement: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach to Location-Based Service - by Hamid Ekbia

"The ubiquity of location-based services calls for research on mobility and movement that could contribute to their formalization and computer implementation. This paper takes a step in this direction by developing a grammar of movement that is, of different types of movement relative to various targets, surfaces, and enclosures. Adopting an agent-based modeling approach, this grammar follows a bottom-up method in which complex movements are built from more primitive ones. The paper also introduces basic concepts such as indexical representations, cost surface, and local opportunity surface that would support the formalism. Application of this approach to a number of topics in location-based services are discussed."

Information Research at SLIS: Magazine Feature Part 2

(Note: Part 2 of this feature story has been reprinted from the Spring 2008 issue of SLIS Network, our semiannual alumni magazine. See Part 1 for an introduction to the story.)

Informetrics/Citation Analysis

Major Themes
What conclusions can we draw from studying citations—how often particular research is cited as well as the ways in which people find research to cite? How does the availability of research sources in particular media affect the amount of times they are cited?

Examples of Faculty Research

Thomas Nisonger: Digital Resource Availability

In an effort to check the pulse of digital library collection development, Thomas Nisonger is working to estimate the percentage of heavily cited research documents that are available, preferably in full-text, to on-campus patrons through the Indiana University Libraries website.

This type of availability study dates back to the 1930s, Nisonger says, but very few studies, even recent ones, focus on electronic collections. So far, Nisonger has found that he could access about 65 percent of his sample of 500 predetermined full-text items from 50 different subject areas. This result compares favorably to past availability studies of physical collections that Nisonger has reviewed, where average patrons found resources about 61 percent of the time.

"This is good news for students and citizens of Indiana who come to use the library," Nisonger says. Through further analysis, he hopes to find out more about how attributes such as the subject area or language of particular items may impact their electronic availability, as well as how readily available unfound resources from the sample are through public internet searches.

Debora Shaw and Pnina Shachaf: Do Reference Librarians in the Virtual Environment Use a Core Collection?

Faculty members Debora "Ralf" Shaw and Pnina Shachaf recently combined their research expertise in bibliometrics and virtual reference, respectively, to investigate the types of sources that reference librarians use when communicating with patrons online. They studied the logs of two groups of librarians in their research—Wells Library reference librarians at Indiana University, and reference librarians from Question Point, an electronic reference service run by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)—from 2006.

"Library web pages and the local catalogs were by far the most popular resources used by librarians to look up information when they were answering the questions of users," Shachaf says.

There were also some surprises on the top-20 lists of most-used sources. "What we found interesting is that some of the sources we wouldn't expect to be used as heavily were really very high on the list, and Wikipedia is a good example of that," Shachaf continues. "Even at Indiana University, Wikipedia was number 10."

Overall, Shaw and Shachaf found that librarians relied heavily on a few resources for most of their reference sessions, using two or three sources as much as 80 percent of the time. This may bode well for reference librarians who are new to virtual reference and may be overwhelmed by the amount of sources to choose from, Shaw says.

"Obviously there are lots of questions that can't be answered by the top 20, but the list gives you a way to focus, and I think it makes virtual reference much less scary because it is predicable. There is a core collection, and when you're first faced with being on the reference desk, you can feel confident and capable in your knowledge of that number of sources."

Kiduk Yang: Finding Web Opinions About Blog Passages

Yang, K., Yu, N., Valerio, A., Zhang, H., & Ke, W. (2008, in press). Fusion Approach to Finding Opinions in Blogosphere. Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.

(The following is excerpted from a research summary by Yang. –Ed.)

In this paper, Kiduk Yang and his student co-authors describe a fusion approach to finding opinion about a given target in blog postings. They tackled the opinion blog retrieval task by breaking it down to two sequential subtasks: on-topic retrieval followed by opinion classification. Their opinion retrieval approach was to first apply traditional information retrieval methods to retrieve on-topic blogs, and then boost the ranks of opinionated blogs using combined opinion scores generated by four opinion assessment methods.

The Web Information Discovery Integrated Tool (WIDIT) lab, where Yang and his students worked on the project, conducts collaborative research projects that study integrated approaches to information retrieval and knowledge discovery with an aim to combine the capabilities of the human and the machine as well as to integrate multiple methods and sources of evidence.

The WIDIT lab now houses a range of collaborative projects that apply an integrative approach (fusion) to classification, information retrieval, and knowledge discovery. As lab director, Yang has been instrumental in bringing together and coordinating the necessary skills mix to ensure the success of projects that involve both academic research and also practical system development. As a consequence, the WIDIT lab has become a fertile ground for multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional research and development projects.

Discourse Analysis

Major Themes
How can an analysis of written, spoken, or signed language inform our ideas about people's communication goals?

Examples of Faculty Research

Susan Herring: Talking Through TV

"Television-mediated conversation: Coherence in Italian iTV SMS chat." By Susan Herring and A. Zelenkauskaite (first author). [Proceedings of the 41st Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-41), 2008. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press. http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/hicss08.pdf (Nominated for HICSS Best Paper award.).].

On an Italian music video channel that broadcasts text-messaged comments from viewers, Susan Herring and her colleagues have found that a significant amount of viewers who submit text messages are attempting to communicate with other audience members—and some of them are actually succeeding. "Users often adapt technology to their needs, regardless of how the creators of the technology intended it to be used," Herring says.

Despite the "noise" from a deluge of unrelated text messages being posted, the possibility that a sent message might be filtered out by editors, and the chance that the intended recipient of a message might not be watching, Herring says that some texters seem to enjoy the challenge of using the medium to converse.

Evaluation and Outcomes Assessment

Major Themes
What types of evaluation methods will lead us to the creation of improved practices? How will we know that our practices are improving?

Examples of Faculty Research

Rachel Applegate: Planning Effective Library Spaces

Applegate, Rachel and David Lewis. "Renewing the Tech-Forward Library: Information Commons Development at the University Library of Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis." In Our New Public, a Changing Clientele: Bewildering Issues or New Challenges for Managing Libraries?, edited by James R. Kennedy, Lisa Vardaman and Gerard McCabe, 225-40. Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2008.

"[The chapter] shows how a multi-method evaluation of library users and their needs informed the design of a 'commons' area in an academic library," Rachel Applegate says.

Regarding the aspects of evaluation and outcomes assessment that spark her interest, Applegate remarks: "'Evaluation' can be considered the gathering and use of empirical data to support managerial decision-making. As a practitioner, both within my library and across my campus, we used data to identify trends, demonstrate accomplishments, and point the way to improvements or prioritizing effort. I am enthusiastic about encouraging librarians to join a 'culture of assessment' where we try to evaluate how we are doing and what we have accomplished, both internally and in the lives of our users."

Information Seeking Behavior

Major Themes
How do people look for the information they need? What motivates them to use one resource instead of another, and what techniques do they employ when they search for and use particular resources?

Examples of Faculty Research

Alice Robbin: Internet Information Behavior and Politics

Faculty member Alice Robbin and doctoral student Wayne Buente hope to publish a series of articles in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology based on extensive research into trends in information behavior on the Internet between 2000 and 2004.

"During these four years, the Internet was domesticated, moving from the work place to home to penetrate everyday life," Robbin says. "Among the many changes that took place were the decline in the use of traditional media and the substitution of new media for information content, technological advances in media convergence, and the globalization of information content and access. We wanted to understand these changes—specifically, how does the Internet 'embed' in our lives?"

Robbin and Buente used a multidisciplinary approach that included "large national surveys and multiple information use activities and behaviors" in order to learn more about the "relationship between traditional media and Internet use" for news and political information gathering, with a focus on the beginning of the Iraq War.

"The Internet offers an opportunity to communicate, inform, entertain, and shop, but there are socio-demographic differences between the people who rely on the Internet for these activities," Robbin says. "As expected, education makes a difference in how people use the Internet.

Digital literacy skills count a lot; the longer you have used the Internet, the more time you spend online and the more information activities you engage in. Everyone uses the Internet to communicate. People with less education and income use the Internet more for entertainment. Among people who use traditional media like television and newspapers for their political information and news, the Internet has increasingly been substituted for newspapers but not for television.

"In the case of the Iraq War, many people, especially dissenters, went to the Internet because they were not satisfied with the information they got from traditional media or the government," Robbin says.

"Dissenters were significantly different in how they used email and how they gathered information about the Iraq war. They also engaged in more political activities such as looking for information about a rally or sending an e-mail to an elected official."

Katherine Schilling: Information Needs for Younger Breast Cancer Survivors

Katherine Schilling is currently examining the information needs of breast cancer survivors under the age of 45 as part of a larger American Cancer Society study investigating quality of life and recurrence of the disease.

"This population has different issues and information needs than older breast cancer survivors," Schilling says. "We need to develop efficacious resources for these women—who will be dealing with the long-term effects of chemotherapy and other issues related to breast cancer and treatment for the rest of their lives—because there isn't much out there right now."

The study concerns a highly focused population, Schilling says, but it points to the significance of health information seeking throughout society. "Health information is such a huge issue, and health science librarians and public and school librarians need to work more closely to make sure that everyone is aware of the resources we have."

Bloomington Gaze Released - 3rd Book in a Series by Blaise Cronin

Bloomington Gaze: Yet More Town and Gown in Middle America is the third book in a series by SLIS Dean Blaise Cronin. The books, available through AuthorHouse, are well described below.

Praise for Bloomington Gaze [books back cover]

"Packed with the wit and humor of Bloomington Days and Bloomington Daze, Bloomington Gaze also flays some of the academy's most sacred cows."
-Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis, University Chancellor and Trustee Professor, Indiana University

"Blaise Cronin's witty, irreverent and amusing third book on the life of a university town in Middle America is not just another volume about town and gown in the USA. It is a book that guides the reader to the heart of the matter. Like the scalpel of a gifted surgeon, Cronin's eloquent prose cuts open the surface to reveal the incongruous contradictions of academic life. Eventually, the reader cannot help but smile and ponder at the same time in the face of the ironic observations of an elegant writer who possesses the rare ability of a great story teller: that of depicting details while painting an entire fresco. At the end, we realize that the tragic-comic aspects that comprise the intricate texture of the town and gown are not so different, after all, than life itself. Bloomington Gaze is that uncommon book that speaks to any intelligent reader, regardless of one's own cultural background: it invites rereading for both pure pleasure as well as for its intellectual rigor."
-Andrea Ciccarelli, Professor of Italian, Indiana University, and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel.

See Related SLIS News Stories:

Note on the book's cover:
The cover image for Bloomington Gaze is a portion of the Thomas Hart Benton Murals in Woodburn Hall 100. The Benton Murals (also in the IU Auditorium) celebrate 75 years at Indiana University this year. The Indiana Daily Student (IDS) had two stories about the murals on April 24, 2008.

Information Research at SLIS: Magazine Feature Part 1

(Note: This piece has been reprinted from the Spring 2008 issue of SLIS Network, our semiannual alumni magazine.)

Introduction by Debora Shaw
Interviews and Summaries by Julie Harpring

SLIS's high rankings in research productivity and impact reflect the contributions of many faculty members. In the fall issue of SLIS Network we considered the school's contributions to social informatics. Now we turn to information research that focuses on the general properties of information and collections.

Faculty leadership in library and information science research enriches classroom experiences because students are introduced to contemporary practice within a theoretical context that enhances understanding and provides support for the next stages of their professional careers. Faculty involvement in research also helps to connect the school with alumni; SLIS graduates' encounters with real-world challenges have prompted discussions and even investigations that suggest new research paths and extend our understanding. How does the research being conducted currently by SLIS faculty members affect the everyday work of practitioners and the greater public?

SLIS faculty contribute to information research in several areas: the philosophy of information, complex systems, scientometrics, informetrics, scholarly communication, citation analysis, serials and journal ranking, discourse analysis, quantitative methods, evaluation and outcomes assessment, teaching and learning, and information seeking behavior. The following vignettes illustrate our school's contributions to information research.

Philosophy of Information

Major Themes
How do we define "information" and related terms, and why do we need to define them? The way we conceive of "information" shapes the discourse of academic research as well as our social conversations about libraries, journalism, entertainment, business, and other realms of public and personal life.

Example of Faculty Research

Elin Jacob: Tracking the Use of "Information Architecture"

"Information Architecture." By Elin Jacob and Aaron Loehrlein. (to be published in the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 43).

Faculty member Elin Jacob and doctoral student Aaron Loehrlein conduct an extensive literature review and describe the various ways that practitioners and academics define "findability" and "information architecture" in a recent paper submitted to the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology.

In addition to this research, Jacob is particularly interested in issues of organization and representation and has recently worked in the areas of metadata and faceted classification structures.

Ron Day: The Importance of Defining "Information"

The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power. By Ron Day. (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001.)

(The following was written as an in-depth look at the philosophy of information by Ron Day for SLIS Network. -Ed.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein thought that one of the most important jobs for philosophy was to help clarify linguistic meaning. The question of "what is information?" seems to me to be an exemplary instance of a question in need of such clarification, for confusions about the word "information" have led to some of the most absurd, but intractable, problems in the theory and even the practices of Library and Information Science and have led, repeatedly since the Second World War, to claims that "information" is the cornerstone for all science and human life. In reality, the term "information" means many things. In the same way as we wouldn't want our heart surgeon in the operating room to interpret the drawn symbol of our heart for the poetic meaning of love, we also need to be vigilant about the tendency to collapse all the meanings and ways of speaking about information into one unifying concept or determining to be information one object or event which we then might suppose could be managed or represented in a single or common manner.

Using a useful distinction of the philosopher Rom Harré (after that of John Locke), we may recognize that information is not a "real essence," but rather that it is a "nominal essence." What does this mean? If we take iron, for example, this "essence" or being has the same properties and chemical relations whether we call it "iron" or we call it by the French word "fer" or we use some other term (say, the chemical symbol for iron, "Fe"). However, information isn't the same type of essence or being. Rather, it is a word whose meaning is understood only by the way and context in which it is used (it is a "nominal" essence—that is, its essence is determined by the act of naming). This means that what information is is whatever we, as speakers of a language, decide to call a thing to be "information." For example, documents may be taken as information, directions to the gas station may be taken to be information, and the early natural philosopher Francis Bacon even spoke of nature as informing us. Each of these ways of using the term "information" is, what Wittgenstein, termed "grammars"—or regularities—for the use of the term, and these are largely learned by learning a language (say, English, the language of librarianship or information professionalism, etc). Historically, there was a discipline called documentation that was well established before the discipline of information science began after the Second World War. Arguably, "documentation" provided a clearer, less metaphysical way of describing a large majority of the actual practices and materials in librarianship and allied professions than "information science."

It needs to be mentioned, as well, that there seems to be an historical tendency in the 20th and into the 21st centuries to think of information as if it were an empirical thing (one with intrinsic value, as well as the quality of being countable) and/or as if it were a referent somehow connoting factuality. However, earlier uses of the word in English used it as much to designate affects (e.g., Bacon, above) and possible knowledge, as well as to characterize statements of fact. In other words, there seems to be an increasing reification of the term "information" in English and Western European language use (and with this, an increasing confusion of the term as referring to a real essence). This is greatly harmful, not the least because it adds to the mystification and improper analysis of the social values and uses of information technologies and to the collapse of distinctions between various types of information. It also sometimes leads in Information Science to the mistaken application of empirical methods of research in studies of "information use."

In short, instead of beginning with the question, "what is information?" we might be better off starting with asking, "how is the word 'information' being used in a given situation?"

Complex Systems

Major Themes
How do we create models or simulations of the complex systems that occur in nature and society so we can study them more closely? How else can we represent or explain complex systems effectively? SLIS faculty members are researching ways to help the general public, scientists, and businesses gain a greater understanding of the inner workings of complex systems through new types of representation.

Examples of Faculty Research

Katy Börner: Visualizing Classification and Organization

"Taxonomy Visualization in Support of the Semi-Automatic Validation and Optimization of Organizational Schemas." By Katy Börner, Elisha Hardy, Bruce W. Herr, Todd Holloway, and W. Bradford Paley. [July 2007, Informetrics. 1(3), pp. 214-225.]. Available online at http://ivl.slis.indiana.edu/km/pub/2007-borner-taxo.pdf.

"Complex systems are inside and around us," Börner says. "We need tools to study these systems, to understand and utilize/sustain them. Visualizations help to communicate and make sense of complex structures and dynamics."

The taxonomy visualization explained in Börner's article, which displays the United States Patent and Trademark Office patent classification scheme, is used to illustrate how the taxonomy visualization and validation tool created by her and her colleagues works. The patent visualization is one of 34 maps that have been on display in Börner's "Places & Spaces: Mapping Science" exhibit, which has been housed at the New York Public Library and, most recently, the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Other maps in the exhibit display a wide variety of information visualizations on topics ranging from activity in Wikipedia to DNA development, providing powerful new ways to think about potentially overwhelming concepts.

More information about the exhibit can be found at http://scimaps.org, and summaries of more recent work of Börner and her team is available at http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~katy/gallery/07-openhouse/.

Scholarly Communication

Major Themes
How do the economics and copyright practices of scholarly publishing affect the dissemination of new and important research to the academic community and society at large?

Examples of Faculty Research

Dean Blaise Cronin and Lokman Meho: Reflecting on the Field

"Timelines of Creativity: A study of intellectual innovators in Information Science." By Blaise Cronin and Lokman Meho. [2007, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58(13), 1984-1959.]. (The following piece is Dean Blaise Cronin's Introduction to Volume 42 of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology –Ed.)

It is almost thirty years since Latour and Woolgar provocatively described the scientifically complex activities performed at the Salk Laboratory as "the organization of persuasion through literary inscription." Almost overnight, academic writing ceased to be a straightforward, after-the-fact activity; it had been, to use the vogue term, "problematized". To understand science and scientists, one needs to understand the material and discursive practices of those doing and reporting the science. And these days reporting is more often than not a collective activity. In almost every field of scientific endeavor, co-authorship is commonplace. "The author is dead, long live the contributor!" has become the fashionable cry. Sometimes the numbers involved are modest, sometimes massive. As a result, authorship, too, has been problematized. Who precisely is the author, and what exactly does authorship entail when literally hundreds of names appear on the byline? The issues (e.g., trust, oversight, ownership) are many and varied. One thing is clear: what holds for writing holds for authorship. As Biagioli observes: "scientific authorship, whatever shapes it might take in the future, will remain tied to specific disciplinary ecologies." There are at least as many kinds of writing and as many conceptions of authorship as there are disciplinary cultures and sub-cultures.

See related SLIS News Story
Artificial Dreams: The Quest for Non-Biological Intelligence

"The Harvard and Yale University Library Rowing Collections"

SLIS professor Thomas Nisonger and alumnus William Meehan (MLS'05 and Senior Fellow in Rare Books, Ekstrom Library, University of Louisville) have written a forthcoming article, entitled "The Harvard and Yale University Library Rowing Collections: A Checklist Evaluation and Semi-Availability Study," to be published in Library Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical Services.

The article is currently available through the ScienceDirect database, to which the IU Libraries subscribes.

Abstract
After reviewing the historical significance of competitive rowing at Harvard and Yale universities and the literature dealing with rowing as a competitive sport, this article describes and reports the results of a checklist evaluation and simulated semi-availability study of the rowing collections of the Harvard and Yale University library systems. The results indicate, contrary to what might be expected, that major academic libraries can have noteworthy holdings in a specialized sports area. Harvard has a stronger rowing collection with a higher overall availability rate than does Yale. Comparison with a previous evaluation of the Free Library of Philadelphia's (FLP) rowing collection, based on the identical checklist, indicated its holdings are a bit stronger than Harvard's and considerably better than Yale's, but not as strong as the combined holdings of both Harvard and Yale.

Alice Robbin and Man "Judy" Yang (Visiting Scholar from China)

"...their research endeavors to promote better information policies and to facilitate social equality."

Man "Judy" Yang is an associate professor at the Journalism and Communication School at Wuhan University in China. She teaches courses on communication theory and online journalism. Currently, she is a visiting scholar at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University-Bloomington working with SLIS faculty member Alice Robbin. Her research interests include information policy, computer-mediated communication, and information resource management. She has published articles and a monograph on information resource management and information policy.

Yang and Robbin responded to an email interview giving insights on their research interests and goals (see below).

Certainly, the Internet has become an integral part of everyday life. China has the second largest number of Web surfers after the United States, and the audience is expected to increase. However, the large amount of unorganized and unfiltered information in cyberspace makes effective use and communication of information difficult. Yang investigates how to organize and manage information online and how to promote information sharing and knowledge production in China. She is also interested in Internet behaviors, the study of online media, and the implications of information and communication technology (ICT) for information sharing. She has a keen interest in creating bridges between the fields of communication and information science.

At IU, Yang is focusing on digital inequality issues, which have been investigated from the perspectives of information science, economics, and sociology, but will situate these issues in a Chinese context. She attempts to answer the following question: how can China establish rational information policies to reduce digital inequality?

Alice Robbin's research interests focus on information policy, resource management, and organizational informatics, including communication and information behavior in complex organizations; and qualitative and quantitative research methods. Robbin is a political scientist by training with research projects linking the fields of library and information science (LIS) and political science and sociology. She is interested in the theoretical frameworks and methodologies that scholars use in their work. She is also curious about whether ICTs have altered the ways that people participate in political life.

Robbin and Yang's interests coincide in the research of information technology and society, information policy, and information resource management. Both aim to extend the interdisciplinary boundaries of LIS. They maintain that we can think more deeply about information and communication technology in society through multiple lenses of analysis. Applying alternative frameworks to information policy issues and ICT in society, their research endeavors to promote better information policies and to facilitate social equality.

All these interests led Robbin to poke around in the LIS literature on information seeking. She was quite surprised to find that scholars have not included political information use in their research projects, and with few exceptions most of them did not, understandably, employ potentially fruitful theoretical frameworks of mass political behavior and communication and new media use to study information behavior. Researchers seemed to ignore the Internet as the context for information practices: how it was related to other sources of information and part of a larger framework of daily life. Robbin and her doctoral student Wayne Buente have examined trends in Internet information activities and political information seeking behavior, with attention to the social environment as the context for these activities and integrating theories of everyday-life information practices, political communication, and mass political behavior. This project relies on a series of national surveys on Internet use conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life project between March 2000 and December 2004.

Robbin is currently analyzing the political controversy over revising federal statistical policy for classifying racial and ethnic group data; and how public and non-profit survey research organizations have implemented guidelines for protecting the confidentiality of personally identifiable information.

From 1994 to 1997, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) reviewed the racial and ethnic group classifications to be used in the 2000 decennial census. The review sparked a contentious and intense public debate that raised issues of racial prejudice and national identity. Alice Robbin studied the political controversy as a social movement through the lens of social informatics. They are also nearing the end of a second study of Internet information behavior, this one about political information seeking and communication behavior that took place at the beginning of the Iraq War.

Alice Robbin contends that the logic behind a classification scheme is an indication of how we organize our world; thus, the revision of a classification system has the potential to transform how we view ourselves and others.

When the OMB announced the review process, groups of people mobilized through social networking and the use of technology to try to influence the outcome. One extremely vocal group became active via ad hoc and well-established cultural and ethnic organizations to lobby for the addition of "European American" and "West European" categories. These new categories represented what Robbin described as a "form of official commemoration and grand historical narrative" — recognizing the contribution of this group to the building of the U.S. as a nation.

The classification debate highlighted several broad issues. For instance, a group of people without a category is in essence left without political and social representation. Categories also provide a sense of belonging and identity and can establish legitimacy and social power. Classification categories based on race and ethnicity can also produce prejudice, racism, and polarization, a view of "us" against "them."

The story of the reclassification of racial and ethnic data is a story about the politics of identity and social memory broadly conceived. The symbolic form of the federal classification system is the locus of collective and personal identity discourse. It has moral, social, political, and psychological consequences.

Both Robbin and Yang aim to extend the interdisciplinary boundaries of LIS. They maintain that we can think more deeply about information and communication technology in society through multiple lenses of analysis. Applying an alternative framework to information policy issues and ICT in society, their research endeavors to promote better information policies and to facilitate social equality.

Artificial Dreams: The Quest for Non-Biological Intelligence

"...the human mind is a special kind of complex system." [see below]

SLIS faculty member Hamid Ekbia's new book, Artificial Dreams: The Quest for Non-Biological Intelligence, is now available from Cambridge University Press.

"Highly readable and without pretense, Artificial Dreams offers a 'technical-critical' examination of taken for granted assumptions and prevailing practices in the field of Artificial Intellgience. Ekbia's central argument is that it is the discursive practices of AI that connect the performance of its artifacts to its scientific claims: this is at once a defining characteristic, and a source of perpetual slippage, internal contest and reinvention. While this book will no doubt infuriate some in the AI community, Ekbia's aim is to offer a generative critique by a concerned but appreciative practitioner, equipped with ideas drawn from the hybrid fields of science and technology studies and social informatics as well as from cognitive science itself. The result of Ekbia's efforts is a book that provides an informed and highly informative survey of the current state of the arts and sciences of AI, framed by reflections relevant to a broader understanding of what it could mean to build a humanlike machine." [Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University, UK - from the book's back cover]

Publisher's Description
"This book is a critique of Artificial Intelligence (AI) from the perspective of cognitive science — it seeks to examine what we have learned about human cognition from AI successes and failures. The book's goal is to separate those "AI dreams" that either have been or could be realized from those that are constructed through discourse and are unrealizable. AI research has advanced many areas that are intellectually compelling and holds great promise for advances in science, engineering, and practical systems. After the 1980s, however, the field has often struggled to deliver widely on these promises. This book breaks new ground by analyzing how some of the driving dreams of people practicing AI research become valued contributions, while others devolve into unrealized and unrealizable projects."

Special Description for SLIS Network by Hamid Ekbia
Hamid Ekbia wrote the following for the Spring 2008 SLIS Network alumni magazine in response to the questions: "What do you think SLIS alumni can take away from your new book? What is it about artificial intelligence that drives you to conduct research in this area?"

"The human mind is a complex phenomenon in many ways. It involves our brains (with almost a hundred billion neurons and a hundred trillion synaptic connections) and our bodies (with hundreds of joints, muscles, and functions), but it also incorporates perceptions, emotions, and memories, as well as numerous interactions with the environment. In short, it is a multifaceted and multilevel phenomenon that should be studied from different perspectives. In my book, I introduce the major ideas in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that researchers have adopted in the study of the human mind—for instance, connectionist, symbolic, robotic, case-based, analogical, and so on. One set of ideas draws on complex systems theory, where researchers try to apply a common language to describe the brain, the body, and the environment. This is a promising line of research with interesting findings. However, in my view, the human mind is a special kind of complex system that does not lend itself to quantitative methods—you can't use numbers in talking about human intelligence, experience, emotions, and skills. In my book, I discuss these specific features of the human mind, the limitations of some of the views and theories in AI, and what we have learned from more than fifty years of research in this area. There is a lot of hype in AI in the media, but there is also interesting research done in this area. I try to tease these apart and separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, in some of the knowledge claims made by the AI community about the human mind.

"I believe that we have learned a great deal from AI not only about computers and their capabilities, but also, and more importantly, about ourselves and our minds. For instance, we have learned that human cognition is much more concrete and contextual than we previously thought, that playing chess or solving mathematical problems are not necessarily the pinnacles of human intelligence, that there is no deep chasm separating the mind and the body, that human creativity is much more pervasive and mundane than we tend to believe, and so on. Many of these lessons were learned because of the unique methods that AI applies in building systems. We could have not arrived at these in the way that we have if it were not for AI research. This is what attracts me to AI, and what staunch AI critics fail to understand.

"We have also learned that humans have a strong tendency to anthropomorphize—that is, we attribute agency and intelligence to artifacts, in the same fashion that our ancestors attributed purpose to wind, flood, and thunder. This human tendency is, in my view, at the root of many unfounded claims in AI. In the book, I illustrate various manifestations of this phenomenon in research and writing in this area."

MLS Student Angela Dresselhaus Wins Conference Grant

First-year MLS student Angela (Slaughter) Dresselhaus, who works full-time in the serials cataloging unit at Wells Library in addition to her studies, was recently awarded a grant to attend the 2008 Ohio Valley Group of Technical Service Librarians (OVGTSL) 2008 conference in Dayton, Ohio, May 14–16, 2008.

Three scholarships were available for "any full or part-time student enrolled in either on-campus or distance learning courses at an ALA-accredited library and information science school in Indiana, Kentucky, or Ohio," according to the OVGTSL conference website.

Along with the other two grant winners, Dresselhaus will submit a review of the conference and her experience there for the OVGTSL post-conference newsletter.

This school year, Dresselhaus has won two additional awards: the 2007 Fritz Schwartz Serials Education Award and an ALCTS/SAGE Publications Support Staff Travel Grant for the 2008 American Library Association Annual Conference.

SLIS Alumna and Student Team Wins Video Award

As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a YouTube video co-created by SLIS MLS student Jessica Bozeman and MLS alumna Brooke Cox, now a DePauw Visual Resource Center librarian, won a 2008 InfoTubey Award at the annual Computers in Libraries conference held in Arlington, Virginia, April 7-9, 2008. SLIS alumna Caroline Gilson, assistant director of DePauw Libraries and coordinator of the Science Library, also participated in the overall video marketing project, Bozeman says.

"This video, a spinoff of the popular Mac vs. PC advertisement, pits Google Image Search against DePauw Libraries," says Andrea Foster of the Chronicle. "DePauw, of course, prevails in helping a student efficiently locate the image he needs for a paper." All winning videos can be seen on the InfoTubey Award website.

Bozeman, who is pursuing dual MLS/MA Art History degrees, helped create the winning video as part of her graduate internship in the DePauw University Visual Resource Center and even acted in another video from the campaign. "The video-making experience taught me a lot about how much you can accomplish with creative teamwork and collaboration," Bozeman says.

The entire collection of DePauw Libraries YouTube videos can be seen on the DePauw Branch Library YouTube page.

Walton (MLS '05) Gives iTour Presentation at IACRL

SLIS alumnus Sean Walton (MLS '05) recently gave a presentation titled "How We Stuffed Six Floors of Milner Library into the Palm of Your Hand" at the Spring 2008 Illinois Association of College and Research Libraries (IACRL) Conference in Normal, Illinois, March 27th-28th, 2008. Walton works as an instructional services librarian at Milner Library, Illinois State University.

"Milner Library is breaking new ground with iTour, a blend of video, audio and user-selected choices that is based in an Apple iPod," Walton says.

"When the student starts iTour, it will walk them through a full tour of Milner Library, letting them determine what to explore, and at their own pace. iTour is programmed to be very interactive, with the 'iLibrarian' asking questions that allow the student to determine the direction and depth of knowledge given on sources and services. iTour meets the diverse needs of students by accommodating their varied learning styles, offering 'at-the-point-of-need' teaching, and allowing students to initiate tours on their own schedules."

Walton will present about iTour again at the WILU 37 Conference in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, on May 15, 2008.

Dean's Note: Exploring Information Research at SLIS

By Blaise Cronin, Dean and Rudy Professor of Information Science

Note: This piece has been reprinted from the Spring 2008 issue of SLIS Network, our semiannual alumni magazine.

Sometimes it seems as if there are as many rankings as there are universities. In any case, the global dominance of US institutions is not in doubt. Remove both Oxford and Cambridge from consideration and the world's top-10 (top-20, I am tempted to say) universities are all American. That is a remarkable statistic; another is Harvard's endowment: roughly $34 billion — more than the annual higher education budget of many nations.

The U.S. tertiary education system is unlike any other in terms of scale, resources or academic values. In addition to the Ivy League, the country boasts dozens of public research universities on a par with the very best universities in other countries. And there's the key word: research. Our great public and private universities are special because of their zealous commitment to research and scholarship. It's not a question of teaching versus research; the two go hand in hand. The insights and discoveries arising from research keep us intellectually fresh, expose us to new theories and techniques, connect us more tightly to distributed networks of scholars and, ultimately, allow us to speak with earned authority in the classroom. Good scholarship demands critical thinking and analytic rigor, the very qualities we hope to find and nurture in our best students.

When it comes to rating the research productivity of schools of library and information science, SLIS, as I am sure you are well aware, continually ranks among the very best in not only the nation but also in the world (see our website for details). My colleagues are impressively productive and, more importantly, their work is widely and highly cited. Another indicator of quality is the inflow of research funds. In recent years we have secured millions of dollars from bodies such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities. That is no mean achievement.

One of the pleasures of working in the school is witnessing the remarkable diversity of research that is undertaken by one's colleagues, ranging from large-scale data mining and visualization through computer-mediated discourse analysis to folksonomies. Another is observing at first hand how faculty and students collaborate on projects and, increasingly, co-author papers arising from their joint research. In short, one learns so much simply by being part of a multi-disciplinary research culture, whether you're a dean or a first-year graduate student. I trust you'll understand why as you read through this issue of the magazine devoted to information research at SLIS.

... to enhance navigation of the digital realm

SLIS faculty member Hamid Ekbia chaired a panel called "Geographies of Information Society" on April 15, 2008, at the Association of American Geographers annual meeting in Boston, Massachusetts. He was also the co-organizer of the panel along with Nadine Schuurman, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia.

Ekbia's additional recent activities centering on the geography of information include co-editorship of a forthcoming special issue of The Information Society, "Geographies of the Information Society Revisited," as well as a talk for the IU Networks and Complex Systems Series, entitled "The Integration of Geographic Information Systems and Agent-Based Modeling."

Geographies of Information Society: Session Description
The information society can be usefully characterized as a universe at the intersection of three distinct but interdependent spaces: the geographical space, the social space, and the informational space. Although there are obvious differences among these spaces, there are also interesting similarities. In each of them, we discover asymmetries, inequalities, and hierarchies. We also identify similar features and activities — most notably, links, bridges, and associations being continuously assembled, disassembled, and reassembled; borders drawn, erased, and redrawn incessantly; and boundary objects shuttled along the links and across borders tirelessly. The information realm is - as a result - increasing complex and challenging to navigate. Making sense of this complex state of affairs is beyond the scope of any single discipline, the capacity of any one method, or the resources of any individual philosophy. Rather, it can emerge from the exchanges and interactions among multiple ideas, methods, models, and disciplines. This is a call for such a multidisciplinary endeavor to examine methods, perspectives and protocols that enhance navigation of the digital realm.

This panel brings perspectives from GIS, political geography, critical geography, critical GIS, and information science to the above topics.

Also, during this trip, Ekbia was able to interview Eric Sheppard, a prominent economic geographer. The interview will be included in the special issue of The Information Society that Ekbia is co-editing with Nadine Shuurman (Simon Fraser University, British Columbia) titled "Geographies of the Information Society Revisited."