Library and Information Science Commons^™

Infrastructure, Standards, And Policies For Research Data Management, Jian Qin

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper discusses the needs and importance of research data management and introduces the concept of research data management as an infrastructure service. Although many resources have been made available for research data management, most of them are developed as “islands” and lack linking mechanisms. The lack of integrated and interconnected resources has contributed to high cost and duplicated efforts in data management operations. The vision of research data management as an infrastructure service is not only to improve the efficiency of research data management but also the productivity of the research enterprise. Each of the three dimensions—infrastructure, standards, and …

Color By Numbers: An Exploration Of The Use Of Color As Classification Notation, Rachel I. Clarke

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Notation is a fundamental component of a classification scheme, especially library and bibliographic classification. However, notation is often considered an afterthought or auxiliary to classification itself. With the advances in technology, classification systems, including their notation, must evolve. What, if any, possibilities lie beyond alphanumeric characters and symbols? The author explores the possible use of color as classificatory notation by looking at the traditional qualities of notation and the classificatory needs it must accommodate, various theories and standards of color, and their possible applications to classification notation. Theoretical and practical implications are considered and discussed, as well as larger implications …

Introduction To Data Science, Jeffrey M. Stanton

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

In this Introduction to Data Science eBook, a series of data problems of increasing complexity is used to illustrate the skills and capabilities needed by data scientists. The open source data analysis program known as "R" and its graphical user interface companion "R-Studio" are used to work with real data examples to illustrate both the challenges of data science and some of the techniques used to address those challenges. To the greatest extent possible, real datasets reflecting important contemporary issues are used as the basis of the discussions.

Steps Toward A Socio-Technical Categorization Scheme For Communication And Information Standards, Joann Brooks, Anne W. Rawls

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Socio-technical systems continue to grow larger and more complex, comprising increasingly significant portions of contemporary society. Yet systematic understanding of interrelationships between social and technological elements remains elusive, even as computers and information systems proliferate. In this paper, we draw on ethnomethodology to distinguish several different kinds of processes through which communication and information are constituted. We discuss the distinctive properties of each in an effort to develop systematic understanding of basic elements of socio-technical systems. In particular, we offer a basic categorization of communication and information standards, noting the constitutive importance of their accompanying social practices. Implications for theory …

Theorizing Embodied Communicative Organizing: Fleshing Out Genre With Goffman’S Situational View, Joann Brooks

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Collecting Legacy Corpora From Social Science Research For Text Mining Evaluation, Bei Yu, Min-Chun Ku

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

In this poster we describe a pilot study of searching social science literature for legacy corpora to evaluate text mining algorithms. The new emerging field of computational social science demands large amount of social science data to train and evaluate computational models. We argue that the legacy corpora that were annotated by social science researchers through traditional Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) are ideal data sets to evaluate text mining methods, such as text categorization and clustering. As a pilot study, we searched articles that involve content analysis and discourse analysis in leading communication journals, and then contacted the authors regarding …

A Longitudinal Study Of Language And Ideology In Congress, Bei Yu, Daniel Diermeier

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents an analysis of the legislative speech records from the 101st-108th U.S. Congresses using machine learning and natural language processing methods. We use word vectors to represent the speeches in both the Senate and the House, and then use text categorization methods to classify the speakers by their ideological positions. The classification accuracy indicates the level of distinction between the liberal and the conservative ideologies. Our experiment results demonstrate an increasing partisanship in the Congress between 1989 and 2006. Ideology classifiers trained on the House speeches can predict the Senators' ideological positions well (House-to-Senate prediction), however the Senate-to-House …

Questions To Be Asked & Answered On Nlp’S Role In Improving Semantic Annotation For Ir, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

What was early information retrieval like? (before it was called search!)

How was NLP first applied to the task?

Which levels of language analysis were utilized?

Which were successful? Which were not?

Why were other levels not incorporated ?

Do we now see that the higher levels can and need to be included?

If they are, how might they change how we do IR, as well as what tasks we use it for?

Supporting Inquiry By Identifying Gaps In Student Confidence: Development Of A Measure Of Perceived Competence, Marilyn P. Arnone, Ruth V. Small, Rebecca Reynolds

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Critical to inquiry-based learning is information literacy. Educators can enhance students’ experiences during the inquiry process if they are aware of the skill areas in which students either have or lack confidence. This article describes the development and psychometric properties of the Perceived Competence in Information Skills (PCIS) measure. Educators can use the measure to support student inquiry by identifying and addressing gaps in student confidence. The measure is freely available through Syracuse University’s Center for Digital Literacy.

The Effect Of Early Adolescents’ Psychological Needs Satisfaction Upon Their Perceived Competence In Information Skills And Intrinsic Motivation For Research, Marilyn P. Arnone, Rebecca Reynolds, Todd Marshall

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The American Association of School Librarians’ Standards for the 21st Century Learner make clear that information skills alone are not sufficient for student success; students must also value those skills, use them in a productive and responsible manner, and have the motivational “dispositions in action” to support successful research and independent lifelong learning. Self-determination theory highlights perceived competence and autonomy as two basic psychological needs that support intrinsically-motivated behavior. This study investigates the extent to which context factors inherent to the school library influence students’ perceived competence in the domain of information skills (PCIS), and their intrinsic motivation for research …

Writing Information Literacy Assessment Plans: A Guide To Best Practice, Megan Oakleaf

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Academic librarians throughout higher education add value to the teaching and learning missions of their institutions though information literacy instruction. To demonstrate the full impact of librarians on students in higher education, librarians need comprehensive information literacy assessment plans, composed of instructional program-level and outcome-level components, that summarize the purpose of information literacy assessment, emphasize the theoretical basis of their assessment efforts, articulate specific information literacy goals and outcomes, describe the major assessment methods and tools used to capture evidence of student learning, report assessment results, and highlight improvements made as a consequence of learning assessment.

Exploring The Characteristics Of Opinion Expressions For Political Opinion Classification, Bei Yu, Stefan Kaufmann, Daniel Diermeier

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Recently there has been increasing interest in constructing general-purpose political opinion classifiers for applications in e-Rulemaking. This problem is generally modeled as a sentiment classification task in a new domain. However, the classification accuracy is not as good as that in other domains such as customer reviews. In this paper, we report the results of a series of experiments designed to explore the characteristics of political opinion expression which might affect the sentiment classification performance. We found that the average sentiment level of Congressional debate is higher than that of neutral news articles, but lower than that of movie reviews. …

An Evaluation Of Text Classification Methods For Literary Study, Bei Yu

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This article presents an empirical evaluation of text classification methods in literary domain. This study compared the performance of two popular algorithms, naı¨ve Bayes and support vector machines (SVMs) in two literary text classification tasks: the eroticism classification of Dickinson’s poems and the sentimentalism classification of chapters in early American novels. The algorithms were also combined with three text pre-processing tools, namely stemming, stopword removal, and statistical feature selection, to study the impact of these tools on the classifiers’ performance in the literary setting. Existing studies outside the literary domain indicated that SVMs are generally better than naı¨ve Bayes classifiers. …

Obligations And Opportunities, R David Lankes

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

A discussion of how library service should match how people build knowledge. It also discusses the obligation and power of libraries participating in their communities and society as a whole.

Planning, Building, And Assessing An Online Information Literacy Tutorial: The Lobo Experience, Megan Oakleaf

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Each fall, first-year students arrive at colleges across the country with widely varying abilities to complete library research assignments. Some students enter higher education as veterans of the information seeking process, armed with strong school library media preparation and ready to conquer any research assignment. Far more first-year students are over-reliant on Internet resources, confused about distinctions between scholarly and popular sources, daunted by scores of article databases, and mystified by the LC classification system. Academic librarians face the challenge of establishing baseline information literacy skills in all students, often with limited time and resources. One way to confront this …

Using Rubrics To Collect Evidence For Decision‐Making: What Do Librarians Need To Learn?, Megan Oakleaf

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Objective ‐ Every day librarians make decisions that impact on the provision of library products and services. To formulate good decisions librarians must be equipped with reliable and valid data. Unfortunately, many library processes generate vast quantities of unwieldy information that is ill suited for the evidence based decision‐making (EBDM) practices librarians strive to employ. Librarians require tools to facilitate the translation of unmanageable facts and figures into data that can be used to support decision‐making. One such tool is a rubric. Rubrics provide benefits to librarians seeking to use EBDM strategies. This study examined librarians’ abilities to use rubrics …

Understanding Virtuality: Contributions From Goffman’S "Frame Analysis", Joann Brooks

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Virtual interactions are normally assumed to be separate and distinct from the “real world,” yet they are also situated within material reality. In this paper I propose that a situated approach to understanding virtuality can be developed through drawing from Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974/1986). I explain how Goffman’s terminology and concepts afford a way of integrating the study of virtual interaction with the study of social interaction more generally. His frame analysis approach offers constructs useful for distinguishing virtual worlds from each other and from real worlds in a way that is consonant with perspectives on human-computer interaction. His language …

Adaptive Modeling Of Workforce Domain Knowledge, Jian Qin, Peter Creticos, Wen-Yuan Hsiao

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Workforce development is a multidisciplinary domain in which policy, laws and regulations, social services, training and education, and information technology and systems are heavily involved. It is essential to have a semantic base accepted by the workforce development community for knowledge sharing and exchange. This paper describes how such a semantic base—the Workforce Open Knowledge Exchange (WOKE) Ontology—was built by using the adaptive modeling approach. The focus of this paper is to address questions such as how ontology designers should extract and model concepts obtained from different sources and what methodologies are useful along the steps of ontology development. The …

The Semantic And Syntactic Model Of Metadata, Jian Qin, Javier Calzada Prado

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

As more information becomes “born digital”, metadata creation is increasingly becoming part of the information creation process. Current metadata schemes inherit much of the library cataloging tradition, which has shown limitations on representing “born digital” type of resources. Through analysis of issues of metadata schemes and review of metadata research and projects, the authors propose an ontology-based approach to building a modular metadata model in which semantics and syntax may be integrated to suit the needs for representing “born digital” resources. The authors use an learning object ontology as an example to demonstrate how the semantics and syntax may be …

Building Interoperable Vocabulary And Structures For Learning Objects, Jian Qin, Naybell Hernández

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The structural, functional, and production views on learning objects influence metadata structure and vocabulary. We drew on these views and conducted a literature review and in-depth analysis of 14 learning objects and over 500 components in these learning objects to model the knowledge framework for a learning object ontology. The learning object ontology reported in this paper consists of 8 top-level classes, 28 classes at the second level, and 34 at the third level. Except class Learning object, all other classes have the three properties of preferred term, related term, and synonym. To validate the ontology, we conducted a query …

Certainty Identification In Texts: Categorization Model And Manual Tagging Results, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Victoria L. Rubin, Noriko Kando

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This chapter presents a theoretical framework and preliminary results for manual categorization of explicit certainty information in 32 English newspaper articles. Our contribution is in a proposed categorization model and analytical framework for certainty identification. Certainty is presented as a type of subjective information available in texts. Statements with explicit certainty markers were identified and categorized according to four hypothesized dimensions – level, perspective, focus, and time of certainty.

The preliminary results reveal an overall promising picture of the presence of certainty information in texts, and establish its susceptibility to manual identification within the proposed four-dimensional certainty categorization analytical framework. …

Leveraging One-Class Svm And Semantic Analysis To Detect Anomalous Content, Ozgur Yilmazel, Svetlana Symonenko, Niranjan Balasubramanian, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Experiments were conducted to test several hypotheses on methods for improving document classification for the malicious insider threat problem within the Intelligence Community. Bag-of-words (BOW) representations of documents were compared to Natural Language Processing (NLP) based representations in both the typical and one-class classification problems using the Support Vector Machine algorithm. Results show that the NLP features significantly improved classifier performance over the BOW approach both in terms of precision and recall, while using many fewer features. The one-class algorithm using NLP features demonstrated robustness when tested on new domains.

Improved Document Representation For Classification Tasks For The Intelligence Community, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Ozgur Yilmazel, Svetlana Symonenko, Niranjan Balasubramanian

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This research addresses the question of whether the AI technologies of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) can be used to improve security within the Intelligence Community (IC).

Hands-On Nlp For An Interdisciplinary Audience, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Nancy Mccracken

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The need for a single NLP offering for a diverse mix of graduate students (including computer scientists, information scientists, and linguists) has motivated us to develop a course that provides students with a breadth of understanding of the scope of real world applications, as well as depth of knowledge of the computational techniques on which to build in later experiences. We describe the three hands-on tasks for the course that have proven successful, namely: 1) in-class group simulations of computational processes; 2) team posters and public presentations on state-of-the-art commercial NLP applications, and; 3) team projects implementing various levels of …

Document Retrieval, Automatic, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Document Retrieval is the computerized process of producing a relevance ranked list of documents in response to an inquirer’s request by comparing their request to an automatically produced index of the documents in the system. Everyone uses such systems today in the form of web-based search engines. While evolving from a fairly small discipline in the 1940s, to a large, profitable industry today, the field has maintained a healthy research focus, supported by test collections and large-scale annual comparative tests of systems. A document retrieval system is comprised of three core modules: document processor, query analyzer, and matching function. There …

Effective Work Practices For Floss Development: A Model And Propositions, Kevin Crowston, Hala Annabi, James Howison, Chengetai Masango

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

We review the literature on Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development and on software development, distributed work and teams more generally to develop a theoretical model to explain the performance of FLOSS teams. The proposed model is based on Hackman’s [1] model of effectiveness of work teams, with coordination theory [2] and collective mind [3] to extend Hackman’s model by elaborating team practices relevant to effectiveness in software development. We propose a set of propositions to guide further research.

Coordination Of Free/Libre Open Source Software Development, Kevin Crowston, Kangning Wei, Qing Li, U Yeliz Eseryel, James Howison

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The apparent success of free/libre open source software (FLOSS) development projects such as Linux, Apache, and many others has raised the question, what lessons from FLOSS development can be transferred to mainstream software development? In this paper, we use coordination theory to analyze coordination mechanisms in FLOSS development and compare our analysis with existing literature on coordination in proprietary software development. We examined developer interaction data from three active and successful FLOSS projects and used content analysis to identify the coordination mechanisms used by the participants. We found that there were similarities between the FLOSS groups and the reported practices …

The Implications Of Property Rights In Virtual World Business Models, Ian Macinnes

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The financial success of online communities based on multiplayer game environments has been a bright spot among the many failures in electronic commerce initiatives. While this form of business has existed for less than a decade, it is growing rapidly and has become a mainstream form of entertainment in some areas of the world, such as Korea. Game environments are becoming more immersive and compelling and if this rate of improvement continues, such as through growing broadband penetration, they are likely to become as common as other forms of entertainment. This paper analyzes the issues facing developers of game communities …

Genres Of Digital Documents: Introduction To The Special Issue., Barbara H. Kwasnik, Kevin Crowston

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Purpose – To introduce the special issue on “Genres of digital documents.” While there are many definitions of genre, most include consideration of the intended communicative purpose, form and sometimes expected content of a document. Most also include the notion of social acceptance, that a document is of a particular genre to the extent that it is recognized as such within a given discourse community. Design/methodology/approach – The article reviews the notion of document genre and its applicability to studies of digital documents and introduces the four articles in the special issue. Findings – Genre can be studied based on …

Translation Of Classifications: Issues And Solutions As Exemplifies In The Korean Decimal Classification., Barbara H. Kwasnik, You-Lee Chun

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The aim of this study was to describe how the Korean Decimal Classification (KDC), which is based on the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), accommodated translation and adaptation issues in making the scheme culturally hospitable. We made a concept-by-concept comparison of terms in selected sections of the KDC with the analogous terms or sections in the DDC, noting the differences and similarities of terms and structure. Our analysis suggests that, overall, the KDC succeeded in this endeavor, and that the process of adaptation made good use of several adaptive strategies identified in previous work: adjustments to term specificity and term location …