Peer-to-peer information exchange platform for academic publishing experiences: A prototype

Across multiple domains and online platforms, consumers have an opportunity to review products, services, businesses and people and benefit from the information shared by others. However, within the scholarly communication domain, such opportunity is not available due to a lack of reviewing platforms. To close this gap, we propose a peer-to-peer online platform for informal reviews of scholarly publications. We develop and test a prototype of a website where scholars could share their publication experiences and rate different publication venues across a variety of dimensions

Co-designing data labs at the public library: Data literacy with, for, and by teens

Abstract. This poster presents research investigating youth data literacy at the public library. The Data Literacy with, for, and by Youth project is framed by principles of participatory design, and asks, how might an informal STEM learning environment such as the public library, support the development of the skills, knowledge, and dispositions that young people need for them to take charge of their data lives, from data creation to data use – to be, in short, data literate. The problem of how to approach something as complex as data literacy in the voluntary drop-in setting of informal, after-school sites of learning - the public library being one such place - guides this study. The aim of the project is to design, build, test, and evolve theory and practice around informal data literacy education alongside youth, with the goal of building a holistic, humanistic, and youth-oriented model of data literacy which incorporates social-awareness, critical approaches, and “goodness of fit” into STEM learning about data

On the Role of Engagement in Information Seeking Contexts: From Research to Implementation

This workshop will provide a forum for researchers, practitioners and developers interested in user engagement and emotion in the context of information systems design and use. Specifically, we seek to address questions such as “How do we ensure that the measurement of subjective user experiences is robust and scalable?”, “How do we design for engaging and emotionally compelling experiences?”, and “How do we prevent disengagement?” The ability to answer these questions relies upon: a solid conceptual understanding of subjective experiences; robust, scalable approaches to measuring engagement; and the ability to utilize this knowledge in information systems design. This three-part workshop will include: talks by the organizers to ground the workshop’s themes; position paper presentations and design exemplars from attendees, and an interactive session focused on design scenarios and prototyping. The intersection of emotion and engagement with measurement and design in information seeking contexts is a timely issue for the iSchool community.ye

The Texas Library Directory Database: A Multipurpose Database for the Library of Texas

The paper presents an overview of the Texas Library Directory Database development effort. The TLDD was designed and implemented by the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge at the University of North Texas team as part of a project for the Texas State Library and Archives Commission to support the Library of Texas Resource Discovery Service. The TLDD offers a unique centralized controlled environment to collect a wide range of information about Texas libraries, to manage these data, and to offer a common repository of current information about Texas libraries for use by various TSLAC divisions, members of the Texas library community and library users. The paper examines issues that shaped the development of the TLDD, such as an international standard for directories of libraries, archives, information and documentation centre, and their databases (ISO2146); selection of the open source technical platform for the database and interface applications development; availability and quality of the data sources available to populate the database, etc. Challenges encountered during the project and suggestions for future library directory database development efforts are described

Psycho-physiological Methods in Information Science: Fit or Fad?

This interactive session focuses on the use of psycho-physiological methods in information science research. Through presentations, demos, and interactive discussion we will discuss and observe pragmatic issues of implementing these methods in IS and analyzing the data they generate. We will also examine the “fit” of these methods of measuring IS concepts and phenomenon, their reliability and validity, and the need for greater knowledge exchange amongst IS researchers to guide the effective use of these methods.ye

E-books in academia: Expectations and challenges

This paper reports on the results of a pilot study conducted as part of a larger project aimed at understanding the evolving role of e-books in academia. The study used a survey, a scenario-based usability test, and interviews to collect data on e-book reading habits, specific user expectations, and issues related to the usability of an academic library interface for e-book access. Future work will investigate factors affecting user preferences and patterns of use in context, including routine use of academic e-books.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Engaging digital artworks through emotion: interface design case study

Artworks are often created to solicit emotional responses, yet the emotional elements are largely missing from artworks’ description and access options. In an effort to advance the design of emotion-based image retrieval systems, our study developed several research proposals for incorporating emotion into the description and access features of a digital artwork collection. Most of the proposed solutions for developing emotion metadata for artworks were informed by the current practices in information organization, including crowdsoursing and expert classifications. Being grounded in various emotion theories, the proposals offer a variety of ways to integrate emotion descriptors and navigation features into the interface design of a museum website. While the proposed solutions for integrating emotion features into online collections are not exhaustive, they highlight some of the design choices for developing emotion metadata, coding schemas and navigation features, and offer innovative ways to engage virtual visitors with museum digital collection.ye

Report on the future conversations workshop at CHIIR 2021

The Future Conversations workshop at CHIIR’21 looked to the future of search, recommen- dation, and information interaction to ask: where are the opportunities for conversational interactions? What do we need to do to get there? Furthermore, who stands to benefit?The workshop was hands-on and interactive. Rather than a series of technical talks, we solicited position statements on opportunities, problems, and solutions in conversational search in all modalities (written, spoken, or multimodal). This paper –co-authored by the organisers and participants of the workshop– summarises the submitted statements and the discussions we had during the two sessions of the workshop. Statements discussed during the workshop are available at https://bit.ly/FutureConversations2021Statements

An efficient image retrieval scheme for colour enhancement of embedded and distributed surveillance images

From the past few years, the size of the data grows exponentially with respect to volume, velocity, and dimensionality due to wide spread use of embedded and distributed surveillance cameras for security reasons. In this paper, we have proposed an integrated approach for biometric-based image retrieval and processing which addresses the two issues. The first issue is related to the poor visibility of the images produced by the embedded and distributed surveillance cameras, and the second issue is concerned with the effective image retrieval based on the user query. This paper addresses the first issue by proposing an integrated image enhancement approach based on contrast enhancement and colour balancing methods. The contrast enhancement method is used to improve the contrast, while the colour balancing method helps to achieve a balanced colour. Importantly, in the colour balancing method, a new process for colour cast adjustment is introduced which relies on statistical calculation. It adjusts the colour cast and maintains the luminance of the image. The integrated image enhancement approach is applied to the enhancement of low quality images produced by surveillance cameras. The paper addresses the second issue relating to image retrieval by proposing a content-based image retrieval approach. The approach is based on the three features extraction methods namely colour, texture and shape. Colour histogram is used to extract the colour features of an image. Gabor filter is used to extract the texture features and the moment invariant is used to extract the shape features of an image. The use of these three algorithms ensures that the proposed image retrieval approach produces results which are highly relevant to the content of an image query, by taking into account the three distinct features of the image and the similarity metrics based on Euclidean measure. In order to retrieve the most relevant images, the proposed approach also employs a set of fuzzy heuristics to improve the quality of the results further. The result

Extracting Relevance and Affect Information from Physiological Text Annotation

We present physiological text annotation, which refers to the practice of associating physiological responses to text content in order to infer characteristics of the user information needs and affective responses. Text annotation is a laborious task, and implicit feedback has been studied as a way to collect annotations without requiring any explicit action from the user. Previous work has explored behavioral signals, such as clicks or dwell time to automatically infer annotations, and physiological signals have mostly been explored for image or video content. We report on two experiments in which physiological text annotation is studied first to 1) indicate perceived relevance and then to 2) indicate affective responses of the users. The first experiment tackles the user’s perception of relevance of an information item, which is fundamental towards revealing the user’s information needs. The second experiment is then aimed at revealing the user’s affective responses towards a -relevant- text document. Results show that physiological user signals are associated with relevance and affect. In particular, electrodermal activity (EDA) was found to be different when users read relevant content than when they read irrelevant content and was found to be lower when reading texts with negative emotional content than when reading texts with neutral content. Together, the experiments show that physiological text annotation can provide valuable implicit inputs for personalized systems. We discuss how our findings help design personalized systems that can annotate digital content using human physiology without the need for any explicit user interaction