As mentioned in the previous post, last week I was attending the Information Interaction in Context Symposium held in New Brunswick, USA.

At the poster session, I and my student Justin Wong (left in the photo) from the University of Toronto,  presented our ongoing work on the development and evaluation of a context-aware information retrieval system for blog authors called CONTEXT.

The main goal of this system is to inform the blogger in real time of other related discussions that are going on in the blogosphere or elsewhere and give her/him a chance to be part of the ‘global’ conversation and thus improve his/her entry by incorporating some of the suggested resources into a post. As a blogger writes a post using CONTEXT, the system automatically retrieves and displays links to web resources (web sites, news stories, video, etc) that are relevant to the bogger’s entry. CONTEXT continuously monitors the blog post for new search keywords to find and display the most relevant resources to the blogger. Our expectation is that CONTEXT will lead to more interactive and content-rich blog entries, in which bloggers are not just expressing their own opinions, but they are also addressing each other and building on each other’s arguments and ideas.

The next step in this work is to design and evaluate a version of this tool for scholars who are blogging about their research and might benefit from automated recommendations of published articles and unpublished resources  such as http://researchblogging.org.

You can find our poster at http://hdl.handle.net/10222/13010. The paper will be published shortly in the conference proceedings by ACM.  If you like to receive an advanced copy of our paper or try CONTEXT, sent your request via email at gruzd@dal.ca.  We would love to hear your feedback.

I am writing from the ‘Information Interaction in Context Symposium‘ in New Brunswick (the one in New Jersey, not the one in Canada), the home of Rutgers University. Usually I would wait until a conference is over and the dust is settled before blogging about an event, but in this case I’ll make an exception. Specifically, I would like to share some of the highlights from the keynote speaker while it’s still fresh in my mind.

This year the keynote speaker is Dr. Tefko Saracevic from the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. Dr. Saracevic is a well-known figure in the field of Information Behaviour. He was one of the first scholars in the field to recognize the importance and influence of context (e.g., social, cultural, cognitive, etc.) on user’s information seeking and searching behaviour (see Saracevic’s 1996/97 stratified model of Information Retrieval interaction).

Dr. Saracevic started with a great overview of the field from the theoretical perspective. He then outlined some of the shortcomings within current Human-Computer Interaction theories, specifically how HCI theories are not strong on ‘context’ and criticized that the majority of Information Retrieval (IR) tests rely too heavily on the ‘traditional’ recall/precision model (including TREC). As a solution, he proposed five axioms related to ‘context’ in information interaction. I especially like the first axiom “One cannot not have a context in information interaction” which was inspired by Paul Watzlawick ‘s axiom in the Communication field – “One Cannot Not Communicate”. You can find the other four axioms (which are also very insightful) on Saracevic’s website (in the abtract of the talk or presentation slides).

In sum, I agree with Dr. Saracevic that the understanding of ‘context’ is crucial; especially for designing effective IR systems. But understanding the importance of ‘context’ and actually capturing & being able to make use of the information is two different things. Nowadays it is very easy and cheap to capture different kinds of contextual information such as user’s geographic location (via GPS-enabled phones) or user’s social ‘location’ (via online social networking sites); the harder question is how to take full advantage of this information without actually overwhelming the user with a tsunami of data and/or compromising user’s privacy. Going forward, these are some of the concerns that the IR field will have to address.

[Note: Add the latter to my to-do list once I'm back to Halifax ]

Saracevic, T. (2010). The Notion of Context in "Information Interaction in Context." Inivited keynote at the conference Information Interaction in Context, New Brunswick, NJ.

Saracevic, T. (1997). The stratified model of information retrieval interaction: Extension and applications Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science, 34, 313-327

<Cross-posted at http://SocialMediaLab.ca>

Last week, over 800 researchers from sociology, anthropology, communication, information science, computer science, statistics and business school got together in a small Italian town Riva del Garda (north of Verona) to attend the annual conference on the International Network for Social Network Analysis. Although they all came from different fields, the attendees share their passion for social networks analysis. At the conference, I presented my latest research from three separate research areas: mining Twitter networks, analyzing co-authorship data and studying conversations in the blogosphere with collaborators from Canada, the USA and Korea.

Considering the social networking orientation of this conference, I expected to see many papers on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites. But interestingly this was not the case. All together there were only four papers on Facebook. Also in total there were only three sessions on Twitter, and prominent Twitter researchers such as danah boyd were noticeably missing from the program. And for those with a conspiratorial mind, one of the most frequently heard comments put forth by many of the attendees was about how small the room for the Twitter session was compared to the room given to the other sessions. Is this because Twitter and Facebook are “so” last year?

I doubt it, even as we speak, the populations of Twitter and Facebook are growing steadily. It is hard to believe that network scientists are purposely ignoring these popular and fast growing online social networks. More likely, the scant focus on Twitter and Facebook at this conference probably has a lot to do with the European location of the conference this year. While ubiquitous in the US and Canada, Twitter and Facebook have yet (if ever) to capture minds and hearts in Europe where online users tend to favour their own home grown social networking services like http://www.studivz.net in Germany or http://www.vkontakte.ru in Russia and Ukraine.

Also, as a result of the huge amount of buzz around these sites, it’s very easy to forget that studies on Twitter and Facebook and even online social networks in general are still very young and comprise only a small proportion of all studies on social networks. And it should be noted that research on social networks existed long before the recent appearance of online networking sites . Who knows, maybe in a few years when research in online social networks is more mature (and includes more work on incorporating existing and developing new social network theories, and not just relying on sample observations), then maybe Sunbelt will have just as many papers on Twitter as it does on citation and co-authorship networks. In short, although I didn’t get the normal dosage of Twitter; it was actually a very refreshing change since most recent North American i-type conferences have been very Twitter/Facebook-heavy (and system-centric in general).

In recent years, social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace have become the preferred medium of communication for many people, and have become an essential tool for building and maintaining online social relationships. Scholars and professionals are also beginning to take advantage of these media to share information and collaborate; consequently, there is a growing number of online communities and social networking sites that cater directly to these user groups.

We @ SocialMediaLab.ca are starting a series of weekly blog posts that will evaluate and review social media and networking tools for scholars like Academia.edu, ResearchGate.net, and SciSpace.net, to name a few. This project will address the ways in which scholars use these tools, the advantages of using them, and also the similarities and connections between different sites and media.

“Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd, Assistant Professor in the School of Information Management at Dalhousie University, and Dr. Barry Wellman, the S.D. Clark Professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto have been awarded a $161,000 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Standard Research grant titled “How Online Social Media and Online Social Networks are Changing the Ways Scholars Disseminate Knowledge and Information”.

As online social networks (OSNs), such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, are rapidly becoming mainstream, numerous studies have been conducted on how the general public is using OSN-based technologies; however, very little work has been undertaken to understand how scholars are using and adapting to these new social media in their own work. This study will specifically focus on how Canadian scholars are adapting to these new OSN-based technologies and will seek to fill this gap in our understanding of knowledge and information dissemination in the age of Social Media. This research initiative will:

- help us to better understand changing scholarly communication and publishing practices on the Internet;
- measure to what extent online postings initiated by scholars are being discovered and picked up by the mainstream media and the general public;
- help scholars to decide whether or not to incorporate these new social media in their work;
- and give University administrators a better tool to assess their faculty’s contributions in these new forms of communication and publishing.

This initiative is an extension of Dr. Gruzd’s work on automated discovery and understanding of online social networks and a continuation of Dr. Wellman’s work on the use of information and communication technologies by remote collaborators. This research will also result in the development of a cost effective automated web-tool for making sense of online textual conversations. Once developed, this tool can be used by other researchers in their own research initiatives, by companies to identify and analyze consumers’ perceptions of products or services from just their digital footprints alone; and political parties can use it to evaluate the effectiveness of political campaigns in online media.”