Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

Proyecto De Investigación: La Primera Agencia Espacial Mexicana: La Comisión Nacional Del Espacio Exterior (1962-1977), J. R. Joel Flores-Mariscal

J. R. Joel Flores-Mariscal

No abstract provided.

Proyecto De Investigación: Los Mexicanos En Las Operaciones De La Segunda Guerra Mundial, J. R. Joel Flores-Mariscal

J. R. Joel Flores-Mariscal

No abstract provided.

Communication And Collaboration In E-Science Projects, Peter Darch, Matteo Turilli, Marina Jirotka

Peter Darch

Collaborative projects, such as e-Science projects producing software and tools to support the work of scientists, involve the management and coordination of work of a wide range of personnel, and also involve these personnel working together on joint activities. Effective communication practices are essential for the success of e-Science projects, for a number of reasons and in a number of different senses. For instance, there will be many one-way transfers of information, such as project management informing new personnel of the project’s vision and goals, the communication of work plans (including individuals’ roles, the model of software development employed by …

Retaining Volunteers In Volunteer Computing Projects, Peter Darch, Annamaria Carusi

Peter Darch

Volunteer computing projects (VCPs) have been set up by groups of scientists to recruit members of the public who are asked to donate spare capacity on their personal computers to the processing of scientific data or computationally intensive models. VCPs serve two purposes: to acquire significant computing capacity and to educate the public about science. A particular challenge for these scientists is the retention of volunteers as there is a very high drop-out rate. This paper develops recommendations for scientists and software engineers setting up or running VCPs regarding which strategies to pursue in order to improve volunteer retention rates. …

Communication And Collaboration In E-Science Projects: A Report From The 'Embedding E-Science: Designing And Managing For Usability' Project, Peter Darch, Matteo Turilli, Sharon Lloyd, Marina Jirotka, Grace De La Flor

Peter Darch

No abstract provided.

Shared Understandings In E-Science Projects: A Report From The 'Embedding E-Science Applications: Designing And Managing For Usability' Project, Peter Darch, Annamaria Carusi, Sharon Lloyd, Marina Jirotka, Grace De La Flor, Ralph Schroeder, Eric Meyer

Peter Darch

No abstract provided.

The Data Conservancy: Science-Driven Information Science, Christine L. Borgman, Carole L. Palmer

Christine L. Borgman

The Data Conservancy –which is a National Science Foundation funded Datanet project with a diverse array of partners – embraces a shared vision: data curation is not an end, but rather a means to collect, organize, validate, and preserve data to address grand research challenges that face society. Key to the data conservancy approach is information science research on the data practices of the science domains. Three teams are conducting social studies of individual science domains. Prof. Carole Palmer of the University of Illinois will report on their comparative studies of multiple biosciences domains. Prof. Christine Borgman of the University …

The Digital Future Is Now: What The Humanities Can Learn From Escience, Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

As the digital humanities mature, their scholarship is taking on many characteristics of the sciences, becoming more data-intensive, information-intensive, distributed, multi-disciplinary, and collaborative. While few scholars in the humanities or arts would wish to be characterized as emulating scientists, they do envy the comparatively rich technical and resource infrastructure of the sciences. The interests of all scholars in the university align with respect to access to data, library resources, and computing infrastructure. However, the scholarly interests of the sciences and humanities diverge regarding research practices, sources of evidence, and degrees of control over those sources. This talk will explore the …

The Digital Archive: The Data Deluge Arrives In The Humanities, Christine L. Borgman

Christine L. Borgman

The data deluge has began to overwhelm the sciences, as instruments such as sensor networks and space telescopes are generating far more data than can possibly be inspected manually. Only digital tools can make sense of these vast volumes of data. As the humanities draw more heavily on digital archives, their scholarship is taking on many characteristics of the sciences, becoming more data-intensive, information-intensive, distributed, multi-disciplinary, and collaborative. However, the humanities typically lack the technical infrastructure available to the sciences. The scholarly interests of the sciences and humanities also diverge with respect to research practices, sources of evidence, and degrees …

Challenges And Opportunities Of Creating Library Services For The Singapore Campus, Lateka Grays

Library Faculty Publications

When the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, opened its Singapore campus, it was critical that library services be provided and integrated into the curriculum. The University Libraries team overcame many challenges to create a libraries services infrastructure to support the students. Work began with then-hospitality liaison librarian Cory Tucker and has been carried on by current hospitality liaison librarian Lateka Grays. Our greatest strengths were the expertise of the liaisons and the support of the university.

We faced challenges to our mission of establishing library services in three key areas: access, communication, and technology. We developed a list of questions …

Mobile Technologies: Participation And Surveillance, Katie Shilton

Ethics in Science and Engineering National Clearinghouse

Mobile phones could become the largest surveillance system on the planet. These ubiquitous devices can sense and record data such as images, sound and location. They can automatically upload this data via wireless connections into systems for aggregation and analysis. But unlike traditional surveillance devices, phone sensors can be controlled by billions of individuals around the world. Are emerging mobile technologies platforms for citizen participation in research and discovery? Or new tools for mass surveillance?

Location-based technologies and mobile phone applications like carbon footprint calculator Ecorio and Google’s Latitude are attracting attention and raising new questions for engineers, policy makers, …

Mobile Technologies: Participation And Surveillance Lesson Plans, Katie Shilton

Ethics in Science and Engineering National Clearinghouse

No abstract provided.

Insights Into The Commons On Flickr, Jason Vaughan

Library Faculty Publications

The Commons on Flickr, comprised of an international community of select libraries, museums, and archives, was a project initially launched in 2008 by the Library of Congress and Flickr. Primary goals of The Commons are to broaden exposure to rich cultural heritage photographs and to observe and participate in the communities of engagement and dialog enabled through The Commons. A survey was administered to all The Commons institutions during summer 2009, focusing on assessment of the overall satisfaction of current members and seeking additional details on participation goals, social interactions, staff time involvement, and general statistics. Members report a very …

A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, And The Digital Revolution, Priscilla Finley

Library Faculty Publications

Baron (Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) offers a breezy overview of the ways that technology is shaping reading and writing practices. This book will be valued in the future as a well-contextualized survey of issues that surface among writers in the current online landscape.

The Neoliberal University And Agricultural Biotechnology: Reports From The Field, Wilhelm Peekhaus

Wilhelm Peekhaus

Following in the footsteps of a variety of previous research that elaborates on the current state of affairs in academia, this article sets out the argument that neoliberalism and its corresponding iterations of science and technology and research funding policies in this country have implications for the types of knowledge that can be generated within and communicated without contemporary institutions of higher education. Using agricultural biotechnology as the lens through which to focus analysis, the article outlines a number of empirical examples that illustrate how the free flow of knowledge either critical of or not readily appropriated by capital is …

Ethics In Science And Engineering: Redefining Tools And Resources, Goncalves Michelle, Jane E. Fountain, Adamick Jessica, Billings Marilyn

Jane E. Fountain

The leaders of the ESENCe beta site project organized

a national workshop, “Ethics in Science and Engineering:

Redefining Tools and Resources,” that was held on

October 22-23, 2009 at UMass Amherst. The workshop

objectives, broadly speaking, were twofold: first, to

explore the potential for leveraging the university’s role

as a locus of education and mentoring for ethics and

RCR in science and engineering and, second, to explore

the potential and limitations of digital tools, including

social media, for supporting such growth. The workshop

initiated a dialogue between university faculty involved in

ethics research and education and library and information

scientists. …

Google Analytics: Analyzing The Latest Wave Of Legal Concerns For Google In The U.S. And The E.U., 7 Buff. Intell. Prop. L.J. 135 (2010), Raizel Liebler, Keidra Chaney

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

The next wave of concern regarding Google involves web analytics. Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. The concerns of web analytics use touches on issues of online user privacy, government use of personal information, and information on website user activity. While Google Analytics is not the sole web analytics product on the market, it is widely used by corporate, non-profit, and government organizations. The product has been reported to have a 59% market share among web analytics vendors in a 2008 study.

Web analytics technology …

Building Efficient Wireless Infrastructures For Pervasive Computing Environments, Bo Sheng

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Pervasive computing is an emerging concept that thoroughly brings computing devices and the consequent technology into people's daily life and activities. Most of these computing devices are very small, sometimes even "invisible", and often embedded into the objects surrounding people. In addition, these devices usually are not isolated, but networked with each other through wireless channels so that people can easily control and access them. In the architecture of pervasive computing systems, these small and networked computing devices form a wireless infrastructure layer to support various functionalities in the upper application layer.;In practical applications, the wireless infrastructure often plays a …

Regional Development And Interregional Collaboration In The Growth Of Nanotechnology Research In China, Li Tang, Philip Shapira

Li Tang

China is becoming a leading nation in terms of its share of the world’s publications in the emerging nanotechnology domain. This paper demonstrates that the international rise of China’s position in nanotechnology has been underwritten by the emergence of a series of regional hubs of nanotechnology R&D activity within the country. We develop a unique database of Chinese nanotechnology articles covering the period 1990 to mid-2006 to identify the regional distribution of nanotechnology research in China. To build this database, a new approach was developed to clean and standardize the geographical allocation of Chinese publication records. We then analyze the …

Bibliometric Fingerprints: Name Disambiguation Based On Approximate Structure Equivalence Of Cognitive Maps, Li Tang, John P. Walsh

Li Tang

Authorship identity has long been an Achilles’ heel in bibliometric analyses at the individual level. This problem appears in studies of scientists’ productivity, inventor mobility and scientific collaboration. Using the concepts of cognitive maps from psychology and approximate structural equivalence from network analysis, we develop a novel algorithm for name disambiguation based on knowledge homogeneity scores. We test it on two cases, and the results show that this approach outperforms other common authorship identification methods with the ASE method providing a relatively simple algorithm that yields higher levels of accuracy with reasonable time demands.