Ingwersen, Peter

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Copenhagen University Research Information System

u n i ve r s i t y  o f  co pe n h ag e n  Københavns UniversitetReflections on receiving the ASIS&T 2016 Award of MeritIngwersen, PeterPublished in:Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and TechnologyPublication date:2016Document versionPublisher's PDF, also known as Version of recordDocument license:UnspecifiedCitation for published version (APA):Ingwersen, P. (2016). Reflections on receiving the ASIS&T 2016 Award of Merit. Bulletin of the Association forInformation Science and Technology, 43(2), 13.Download date: 03. Feb. 2020D ear colleagues and friends; ladiesand gentlemen!It was a nice and highly appreciatedsurprise to me to have the honor to bepresented with the prestigious ASIS&TAward of Merit, given in recognition ofmy contributions to our field ofinformation science. And then here inCopenhagen, my home town, at thefirst ASIS&T Annual Meeting outsidethe United States. We are very proudand thankful to Diane Sonnenwaldand ASIS&T for this choice. Also, Iwish to thank the jury that selected meand the nominators Peiling Wang,University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Virginia Ortiz-Repiso Jiménez,president of the European Chapter, who created the two nominationpackages.I have now had the opportunity to look into the two nomination texts andthe many supporting letters from outstanding IS researchers worldwide. Iam very grateful for their acknowledgements of my contributions to the fieldover four decades of research. As with citations received to your work, youobtain a range of new perspectives on your research and activities. It seemsthat I have had much stronger roles as mentor as well as initiator of researchthan I perceived. I really appreciate the recognition of that achievement. Looking back, it is interesting to note two phenomena in association withmy lines of research: Peter Ingwersen, ASIS&T 2016 Award of Merit recipient, is professor emeritus fromthe Royal School of Library and Information Science (RSLIS), Copenhagen,Denmark. He can be reached at peter.ingwersen<at>hum.ku.dk.Reflections on Receiving the ASIS&T 2016 Award of Merit  by Peter Ingwersen2016 ASIS&T Awards CoverageEDITOR’S SUMMARYAt the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Copenhagen, Peter Ingwersen expressed surpriseand gratitude for being honored with the Association’s 2016 Award of Merit. Theprofessor emeritus from Denmark’s Royal School of Library and Information Sciencethanked peers for recognizing him as a mentor and research originator. Ingwersenobserved that his own areas of research in interactive information retrieval (IR) andscientometrics/webometrics have come together as converging lines of interest,though research and analysis are often restricted by system and feature limitations.Experimentation, Ingwersen stated, is too little focused on the effective workings ofIR models and contexts, repeatability and negative research results, and is insteadconstrained by practicalities and pragmatics. Ingwersen expressed pleasure at theacceptance of web redundancy, citing his theory of polyrepresentation and notingthe value of weighting term and search results underlying ranking of web searchresults. He credited the ASIS&T meetings and publications for developmentsstemming from original IR experimental studies.KEYWORDSAssociation for Information Science and Technologyhonorsresearch and developmentinformation retrievalwebometricsterm weightingredundancyreproducibilityrankingNEX T  PAGE  > N EX T  A RT I C L E >< PRE V I OUS  PAGECONTENTSBULLETIN OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY– DECEMBER/JANUARY 2017–VOLUME 43, NUMBER 2131) How scientometric and information retrieval (IR) research are technology driven and dependent on available features in IR and citation systems.2) How redundancy and the ranking principle have become mainstream in research and commercial retrieval environments.Speaking to the first point, my two lines of research, interactive IR andscientometrics/webometrics, have recently started to be seen inconjunction, including at this conference. In that endeavor I have followedin the steps of B.C. Brookes, Jean Tague-Sutcliffe and Don Swanson. Inparticular, in scientometric and webometric research it is interesting toobserve how much we are dependent of the system structures and featuresavailable (or rather NOT available) in the citation databases and searchengines on the web. With link-searching features having disappeared fromYahoo (originally in Altavista), webometric analyses have been seriouslyinhibited. We must rely on independent crawlers and repeatability becomesmore difficult to perform. As long as Web of Science and Scopus keep theironline analysis features available, research evaluation is doable andrepeatable online and independent from the Leiden system. It is also my opinion, that the IR experimentation, by and large, has beenand is a technical venture. Experiments and tests are very often donebecause they can be done, based on technical progress and constrained bythe availability of test collections of special kinds. There is less focus on whyand how IR models actually do (not) work or work better than other models,in particular in IR interaction – and in which topical and mediaenvironments they are most effective. Repeated experiments as well asnegative result papers are rarely submitted or published. But fortunately wesee an increasing amount of user-driven IR experiments.Turning to my second point, I want to comment on how quicklyredundancy became accepted by the information profession. Up to the startof the web, redundancy was to be avoided; it was unacceptable except infaceted classification. My theory of polyrepresentation from 1994 andonwards makes deliberate use of redundancy. Polyrepresentation is aconsequence of the cognitive perspective on IR, promoted by Nick Belkin,Pia Borlund, Birger Larsen and many others also present today in this room.Today redundancy is all around us, often in the form of chaos on the web.But without redundancy no weighting of terms, records and so forth caneffectively take place. And from that follows logically the ranking principlein IR. With respect to the ranking principle and other algorithmic solutionsprovided by IR research, we all remember how difficult it was to convinceand transfer that ranking principle in experimental IR to major onlinevendors and applied search environments 1976-1996. They did not believein it! With the commercial search engines (Altavista, Google, Yahoo)ranking first became a natural way of searching, and it caught on very fast tobecome the only available and accepted search mode on the web – andelsewhere. Remember that most of those features are grounded inexperimental IR and information-seeking studies done since the 60s, inparticular driven by research channels like TREC, ACM-SIGIR and, notleast, JASIST, ARIST and the ASIS&T meetings.Once again, allow me to thank you all for this distinguished honor.  I N G W E R S E N , c o n t i n u e d2016 ASIS&T Awards CoverageNEX T  PAGE  > 14NEX T  ART I C L E >< TOP  O F  A RT I C L E < PRE V I OUS  PAGECONTENTSBULLETIN OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY– DECEMBER/JANUARY 2017–VOLUME 43, NUMBER 2

Reflections on receiving the ASIS&T 2016 Award of Merit

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Reflections on receiving the ASIS&amp;T 2016 Award of Merit

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Reflections on receiving the ASIS&T 2016 Award of Merit