Information seeking in the Humanities: physicality and digitality

This paper presents a brief overview of a research project that is examining the information seeking practices of humanities scholars. The results of this project are being used to develop digital resources to better support these work activities. Initial findings from a recent set of interviews is offered, revealing the importance of physical artefacts in the humanities scholars’ research processes and the limitations of digital resources. Finally, further work that is soon to be undertaken is summarised, and it is hoped that after participation in this workshop these ideas will be refined

Dynamic elasticity by the theory of characteristics

Method of characteristics for analysis of elastic wave equations in Cartesian coordinate

Improving Placeholders in Digital Documents

Placeholders in physical documents provide critical support for the human reader in relocating material and their place in the text. However, the equivalent tools in digital documents have long been identified as suffering from unintuitive interactions and low rates of use. This paper evaluates the current bookmarking technologies found in digital document readers, and identifies a number of specific and significant shortcomings in their support for user activity. We introduce some simple interactions that close the gap between user requirements and the placeholder support in a simple document reader program. Through this, we demonstrate that improved interactions can be created that reduce the barriers that inhibit placeholder use in digital documents

Health and cancer prevention: knowledge and beliefs of children and young people

Objective: To collect information from children and young people about their knowledge of and attitudes towards cancer and their understanding of health and health related behaviours to inform future health promotion work. Design: Questionnaire survey of 15-16 year olds, and interviews with play materials with 9-10 year old children. Setting: Six inner city, suburban, and rural schools. Subjects: 226 children aged 15-16 years and 100 aged 9-10 years. Main outcome measures: Knowledge about different types of cancer; beliefs about health; sources of information; quality of research data obtainable from young children about cancer and health. Results: Both samples knew most about lung cancer, but there was also some knowledge of breast and skin cancer and leukaemia. Smoking, together with pollution and other environmental factors, were seen as the dominant causes of cancer. Environmental factors were mentioned more often by the inner city samples. Television and the media were the most important sources of information. Young people were more worried about unemployment than about ill health. More than half the young people did not describe their health as good, and most said they did not have a healthy lifestyle. Children were able to provide detailed information about their knowledge and understanding by using drawings as well as interviews. Conclusions: Children and young people possess considerable knowledge about cancer, especially about lung cancer and smoking, and show considerable awareness of predominant health education messages. Despite this knowledge, many lead less than healthy lifestyles. Health is not seen as the most important goal in life by many young people; the circumstances in which many children and young people live are not experienced as health promoting

The PRET A Rapporter framework: Evaluating digital libraries from the perspective of information work

The strongest tradition of IR systems evaluation has focused on system effectiveness; more recently, there has been a growing interest in evaluation of Interactive IR systems, balancing system and user-oriented evaluation criteria. In this paper we shift the focus to considering how IR systems, and particularly digital libraries, can be evaluated to assess (and improve) their fit with users’ broader work activities. Taking this focus, we answer a different set of evaluation questions that reveal more about the design of interfaces, user–system interactions and how systems may be deployed in the information working context. The planning and conduct of such evaluation studies share some features with the established methods for conducting IR evaluation studies, but come with a shift in emphasis; for example, a greater range of ethical considerations may be pertinent. We present the PRET A Rapporter framework for structuring user-centred evaluation studies and illustrate its application to three evaluation studies of digital library systems

Mathematical Analysis and Simulations of the Neural Circuit for Locomotion in Lamprey

We analyze the dynamics of the neural circuit of the lamprey central pattern generator (CPG). This analysis provides insights into how neural interactions form oscillators and enable spontaneous oscillations in a network of damped oscillators, which were not apparent in previous simulations or abstract phase oscillator models. We also show how the different behaviour regimes (characterized by phase and amplitude relationships between oscillators) of forward/backward swimming, and turning, can be controlled using the neural connection strengths and external inputs.Comment: 4 pages, accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter

Where My Books Go: Choice and Place in Digital Reading

Digital reading is a topic of rising interest in digital libraries, particularly in terms of optimizing the reading experience. However, there is relatively little data on the patterns of digital reading, including issues of where and what users read, and how they organize, plan and conduct their reading sessions. This paper reports the first data on mobile reading, combining insights from three different studies of users, including diary studies, interviews and ethnomethodological work. The data reveals that reading often depends on highly developed and rehearsed practices, especially when the reading is related to study or research. From this, we are able to identify a number of opportunities for further digital library research to better support the needs of users

Reflecting on Users’ Strategies for Resilient Interactions

One crucial contributor to the resilience and reliability of interactions with technical and sociotechnical systems is the resilience of users themselves. While the study of human factors has traditionally focused on the negative aspects or frailties of human performance, attention is increasingly turning to also consider the proactive and positive contributions human performance can make across a range of tasks and settings. In this position paper, we introduce the notion of Resilience Strategies, summarise some of our current work in this area and discuss examples of resilience strategies we have encountered during the course of this work. We also discuss how work into resilience strategies is situated in terms of broader work into the high-level resilience of sociotechnical systems, and interactions with technical systems

Learning Lessons from Controlled Studies to Investigate Users' Resilience Strategies

This work describes the development and implementation of a controlled study into the way users form and utilise resilience strategies to overcome threats to performance. Despite a carefully considered design, participants demonstrated creative and unanticipated strategies to overcome deliberately ‘designed-in’ challenges in our task, thus circumventing the errors and responses we had predicted. We discuss the variety of unanticipated resilience strategies we observed during the course of this study, as well as methodological lessons learned as a result. Furthermore, we describe a forthcoming study which seeks to build upon the initial investigation, utilising a revised task paradigm to address and overcome its limitations

Investigating collaborative annotation on slate PCs

Mobile reading is becoming evermore popular with the introduction of eInk devices such as the Kindle, as well as the many reading applications available on slate PCs and cellular handsets. The portable nature and large storage capacity of these modern mobile devices is making reading a more technology orientated activity. One aspect of mobile reading that has been given surprisingly little attention is collective reading - which is a common activity with paper documents. We investigate the support of group reading using slate PCs, focussing on collective annotation. In the past, desktop PCs have proved inferior in many ways for reading, when compared to paper. Notably, user evaluations of our new system, BuddyBooks, demonstrate that the slate PC form factor can, in contrast, provide advantages for group reading. While annotation practices change with the new format, coordinating within the group can be improved when touch-interaction is carefully exploited