Library and Information Science Commons^™

Convivial Making: Power In Public Library Creative Places, Shannon Crawford Barniskis

Theses and Dissertations

In 2011, public libraries began to provide access to collaborative creative places, frequently called “makerspaces.” The professional literature portrays these as beneficial for communities and individuals through their support of creativity, innovation, learning, and access to high-tech tools such as 3D printers. As in longstanding “library faith” narratives, which pin the library’s existence to widely held values, makerspace rhetoric describes access to tools and skills as instrumental for a stronger economy or democracy, social justice, and/or individual happiness. The rhetoric generally frames these places as empowering. Yet the concept of power has been neither well-theorized within the library makerspace literature …

The Flow Less Traveled: Documenting Independent Original Research On Fluid Flow Interactions In The Laurentian Great Lakes And Immediate Surroundings, Thomas F. Hansen

Theses and Dissertations

This work is a compilation of several research projects undertaken by the author. Each research effort identifies a problem that has been addressed traditionally using methods that are significantly costly, to such an extent that, in general, funding, convenience, and practicality are primary limiting factors to their effective implementation. In each case, the author has been able to either build upon existing, less expensive alternatives, or even invent novel approaches. The fundamental recurring research question is, can creative, even novel, computational approaches make more efficient use of resources to interpret or present data in such a way as to make …

The Ensemble Mesh-Term Query Expansion Models Using Multiple Lda Topic Models And Ann Classifiers In Health Information Retrieval, Sukjin You

Theses and Dissertations

Information retrieval in the health field has several challenges. Health information terminology is difficult for consumers (laypeople) to understand. Formulating a query with professional terms is not easy for consumers because health-related terms are more familiar to health professionals. If health terms related to a query are automatically added, it would help consumers to find relevant information. The proposed query expansion (QE) models show how to expand a query using MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms. The documents were represented by MeSH terms (i.e. Bag-of-MeSH), which were included in the full-text articles. And then the MeSH terms were used to generate …

Quantitative Phenotype Analysis To Identify, Validate And Compare Rat Disease Models, Yiqing Zhao

Theses and Dissertations

Introduction

The laboratory rat has been widely used as an animal model in biomedical research. There are many strains exhibiting a wide variety of phenotypes. Capturing these phenotypes in a centralized database provides researchers with an easy method for choosing the appropriate strains for their studies. Current resources such as NBRP and PhysGen provided some preliminary work in rat phenotype databases. However, there are drawbacks in both projects: (1) small number of animals (6 rats) used by NBRP; (2) NBRP project is a one-time effort for each strain; (3) PhysGen web interface only enables queries within a single study – …

Social Network Analysis On Wisconsin Archival Facebook Community, Jennifer Stevenson

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to understand how Wisconsin archives are using Facebook (Wisconson archives Facebook community, WAFC). Few archive studies use quantitative measurements to draw conclusions from social media application use. Quantitative data is needed in order to identify the various ways that social media is being used in an archive. Without the data behind the assumptions, it is impossible to improve service and outreach to the archive users. This study proposed a mixed methods approach to aid in the process, using social network analysis, inferential statistics and thematic analysis. This study measured the effects of implementation of …

Informational Power On Twitter: A Mixed-Methods Exploration Of User Knowledge And Technological Discourse About Information Flows, Nicholas John Proferes

Theses and Dissertations

Following a number of recent examples where social media users have been confronted by information flows that did not match their understandings of the platforms, there is a pressing need to examine public knowledge of information flows on these systems, to map how this knowledge lines up against the extant flows of these systems, and to explore the factors that contribute to the construction of knowledge about these systems. There is an immediacy to this issue because as social media sites become further entrenched as dominant vehicles for communication, knowledge about these technologies will play an ever increasing role in …

#Mplp: A Comparison Of Domain Novice And Expert User-Generated Tags In A Minimally Processed Digital Archive, Edward A. Benoit Iii

Theses and Dissertations

The high costs of creating and maintaining digital archives precluded many archives from providing users with digital content or increasing the amount of digitized materials. Studies have shown users increasingly demand immediate online access to archival materials with detailed descriptions (access points). The adoption of minimal processing to digital archives limits the access points at the folder or series level rather than the item-level description users' desire. User-generated content such as tags, could supplement the minimally processed metadata, though users are reluctant to trust or use unmediated tags. This dissertation project explores the potential for controlling/mediating the supplemental metadata from …

Google Books As Infrastructure Of In/Justice: Towards A Sociotechnical Account Of Rawlsian Justice, Information, And Technology, Anna Lauren Hoffmann

Theses and Dissertations

The Google Books project is germane for examining underappreciated dimensions of social justice and access to information from a Rawlsian perspective. To date, however, the standard account of Rawls as applied to information and technology has focused almost exclusively on rights to access and information as a primary good (Drahos 1996; van den Hoven and Rooksby 2008; Duff 2011). In this dissertation, the author develops an alternative to the standard account--the sociotechnical account--that draws on underappreciated resources available within discussions of Rawls' work. Specifically, the author focuses on the importance of Rawls' basic structure argument and the value of self-respect--two …