Starting in January I will be teaching LIS310 Computing the in the Humanities at GSLIS. I’ve posted a draft of my syllabus and would welcome any feedback or comments from more seasoned instructors in this area.

It’s been a while since I’ve taught an undergraduate course, and I’m quite excited to see the diversity of students who have already enrolled in the course. I’ll be updating the draft syllabus as we go along to fill in some of the details (like exactly which activity I’m using for a particular week).

Thanks to all of you who have posted your digital humanities syllabuses to the web, They’ve been a useful guide as I’ve been revising this one. Thanks also to John Unsworth for sharing his earlier syllabus for this course on which this one is heavily based.

CALL FOR PAPERS — LIBRARY TRENDS

The editors of Library Trends are pleased to announce plans for a special issue titled “Involving Users in the Co-Construction of Digital Knowledge in Libraries, Archives, and Museums.”

This special issue will be guest edited by Drs. Paul F. Marty and Michelle M. Kazmer, College of Communication and Information, Florida State University, with Dr. Corinne Jorgensen (Florida State University), Katherine Burton Jones (Harvard Divinity School), and Richard J. Urban (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

DESCRIPTION

Many libraries, archives, and museums provide their users with social computing environments that include the ability to tag collections, annotate objects, and otherwise contribute their thoughts to the knowledge base of the institution. Information professionals and users have responded to the transition to a web 2.0 world of user-created content by developing open source tools to coordinate these activities and researching the best ways to involve users in the co-creation of digital knowledge.

This rapid influx of new technologies and new methods of interacting with users has come at a time when libraries, archives, and museums still struggle to share data across their own institutions, let alone between different types of institutions. Information professionals in libraries, archives, and museums had barely begun to make progress developing crosswalks and data interoperability standards when, as social computing became the norm on the web, providing the ability for users to manipulate data changed from a cool toy to a basic expectation. Moving forward — and keeping pace with user expectations — requires the coordination of many different users (in all their variety) as they contribute, participate, shape, and create all types of data in all types of contexts.

We need to consider what social computing really means for the future of libraries, archives, and museums, and think carefully about the future trends and long-term implications of involving users in the co-construction of knowledge online. It is important to have broad-based discussions about what happens when users are involved in shaping and directing and guiding the development of online libraries, archives, and museums and their information resources.

For this issue of Library Trends, therefore, we seek authors who can step back and think broadly about those issues that are raised when we bring users into the mix in various ways and at various points in the data/information/knowledge life-cycle. We are interested in receiving high-level theory pieces, supported by research data of course, but with a focus on the long-term trends involved and their implications for libraries, archives, and museums. In particular, we are looking for papers that explore the future trends and long-term implications of the many different ways in which information professionals in libraries, archives, and museums have, can, and should involve their users in the co-construction of digital knowledge based on their online collections.

Sample questions include, but are certainly not limited to:

• How are libraries, archives, and museums implementing user-contributed data / descriptions of artifacts, objects, or collections on their websites? What are the long-term implications of involving users in the co-description, co-cataloguing of digital knowledge?
• How are libraries, archives, and museums encouraging users to create online collections of personal favorites or similar items on their websites? What are the long-term implications of involving users in the co-creation, co-curation of digital knowledge?
• How are libraries, archives, and museums encouraging users to create / structure their own online environments, designing personalized websites or portals specifically suited to individual needs? What are the implications of involving users in the design and structuring of online interfaces for the development and presentation of digital knowledge?
• How is the education of library, archives, and museum practitioners (and in particular the increase in online and hybrid learning technologies) influencing the ways practitioners subsequently incorporate technology into their user service environments in libraries, archives, and museums?

IMPORTANT DATES

• Optional Abstract: December 1, 2009 (see below)
• Submission Deadline: March 1, 2010
• Review Decisions: May 15, 2010 (all submissions will be peer-reviewed)
• Final Versions Due: July 15, 2010
• Publication: Early 2011

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

All submissions should be emailed directly to Paul Marty at marty@fsu.edu or Michelle Kazmer at mkazmer@fsu.edu.

For formatting instructions, please see the Library Trends Author Guidelines available here:

http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/library_trends/guidelines.html

If you wish, you may submit an optional abstract (by email to Paul Marty at marty [at] fsu.edu or Michelle Kazmer at mkazmer [at] fsu.edu) for feedback by December 1, 2009.

A PDF version of this CFP is available.

More information about Library Trends

Ooops….after the iSchools 2009 conference, I updated a page on my website that contained my poster “Modelling CDWA Lite as an OWL-DL Ontology” but never posted anything here at Inherent Vice.  You can also download the full poster from the IDEALS repository.

I’ve also just posted the beta version of the OWL file on my website as well. I do this with some trepidation, since this is probably the first full OWL model that I’ve created from top to bottom. As I note in the paper, the current structure of the CDWA Lite XML schema forces ontology developers to make some choices about how certain parts of the schema are modelled in an ontology.

This was a useful learning exercise, but I’m not sure if I will take this particular OWL model forward. I had intentionally avoided using the CIDOC-CRM and the improvements suggested by the MuseumDAT project. CDWA and CDWA Lite have enough of a toehold here in the United States and had impacted other influential standards such as the VRACore and Cataloging Cultural Objects. I felt that it deserved a fair shake to stand on its own. But some of the problems I encountered in trying to create an OWL model suggest that modeling CDWA using CRM would be a worthwhile next step.

If you’re working on a similar project I would be interested in hearing from you and would appreciate any comments or feedback on the ontology itself.

Following on my earlier post, here is the final version of my “work in progress” poster.   I thought the session tonght went quite well, with interest from a number of different directions.  As a “work in progress” I’d still welcome comments and feedback on what’s presented here.

At the moment the connection between grounded theory approaches and ontologies seems strongest when discussing coding proceedures.  What I’m less sure about at this point is whether making ontologies helps build better theories about your data.   The one thing that makes me think this still might be processing is actually the CIDOC-CRM.   The more familiar with it that I became, the more I gained new insights about cultural heritage documentation.   I am hopeful that refinements on these approaches might lead to additional new ideas.

I’m in  Denver this week attending the Association of Library and Information Science Educators iCreate Conference 2009.

Tuesday will be a busy day as I’m participating in the WISE workshop panel:

Stepping out of CMS: Student Communication Technologies Beyond the Course Management System
Panel Presentation and Discussion of effective practices for instructor/student, student/student, and student/instructor communication strategies outside the context of the online course management system, as well as with the wider community of LIS professionals, alumni and prospective students.

and I’ll be presenting a “work in progress” poster:

Blended Methods for Ontology Development

Ontologies represent an important backbone for knowledge representation on the emerging Semantic Web. As a formal specification of concepts within a domain, developing an ontology requires translating the knowledge of domain experts into the classes, properties and relationships used by machine-processable languages such as RDF and OWL. Current ontology development practices owe much to knowledge and software engingeering processes, however the methods for capturing the knowledge of domain experts reamins under-theorized. While “mixed” qualitative and quantitative methods have received extensive discussion in the literature, less attention has been paid to blending the kinds of formal methods used in ontology development and qualitative methods used elsewhere in LIS research. The resulting “knowledge acquisition bottleneck” has lead some ontology developers to turn towards mining large textual datasets for base concepts using natural language processing techniques. While these tools are improving, automated population of an ontology still requires intervention and evaluation by domain experts – particularly in areas where textual sources present conflicting or incomplete representations of a domain.

Lee (2000) has identified the lack of agreement on concepts of “collections” among LIS professionals and their users – exactly the kind of domain that challenges automated techniques. The research discussed here is working towards an ontology for cultural heritage “collections” as identifiable entities that are more than the sum of their parts. As part of the work in progress, this poster explores how qualitative approaches, such as Glaser & Strauss’ Grounded Theory, can be used to inform the development of such an ontology.

Of course this “work in progress” abstract was written a few months ago and after digging into this topic a little deeper the focus of my poster has shifted just a bit.   What you’ll see tomorrow (I’ll post the final version here) focuses more on the similarities between Strauss & Corbin’s open/axial coding process and ontology development.  As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve backed away from developing an ontology for its own sake and the revisions to the poster reflect my current thinking about how ontologies could inform traditional QDA approaches.  Along these lines, the poster also explores the possibility of  using the CIDOC-CRM (or any existing ontology) as start-list of qualitative coding concepts.

Stay tuned for Twitter updates!

I’ve never been much for New Year’s resolutions – I tend to leave my existential crisis for my birthday in February.   I also wasn’t enrolled in any classes in the Fall 2008 semester, so I don’t have an end-of-semester report on my courses to offer you.   What I had been hoping to tell you was that the dissertation proposal was behind me and that I was moving onto the dissertation itself.   I’d always had some reservations whether Fall 2008 was a realistic target, and circumstances have proved those hunches were correct. Expect to see something in the Spring 2009 term.

I’ve  decided to take a step back from the collection ontology development that I talked about earlier.  While I still feel that this would be a do-able project, I’m not so sure it would have a broad impact as a solo project (thanks to some helpful advice from colleagues).  Instead, I’m hoping that my research can inform conversations about collections within existing forums and standards groups.

The funny thing about blogging your way to a dissertation is that the path ahead is not always obvious.  So probably you’ll see less direct discussion here about the proposal – until it’s done. I’m particularly keen on looking more closely at the kind of scholarly communication taking place in LIS, museum studies and digital humanities blogs finding a place for Inherent Vice in those conversations – rather than being something of a monologue of what I’m up to (twitter seems to do a better job at that anyway).

Although I can’t say that 2008 was a terrible year, I’m glad its behind me and am looking forward to moving ahead in 2009.

In “My So-Called Second Life” I talked about my decision to NOT focus on Second Life for my dissertation. This of course left the question of just what I am doing for my dissertation unanswered.

The other thing that happened last fall was that I started working on a new component of the IMLS Digital Collections and Content Project. This gave me an opportunity to get back to some of the problems that had brought me to graduate school in the first place – looking at metadata for cultural heritage collections. The Collection/Item Metadata Relationships (CIMR) research group has been working to develop formal specifications of the kinds of relationships that hold between the description of a collection and the items that are members of that collection. (working on getting those various papers into our IR, happy open access day!). What we hope to accomplish by the end of the project is an expression of these relationships using some knowledge representation languages like OWL and RDFs – hopefully making these kinds of relationships available for computer processing.

It has been nice to get back to the familiar problems. They’re the kinds of problems that I’d started working on back in Colorado; that led me here and drew me towards the ontology classes I took through my Masters and PhD coursework. They also follows on some of the early pilot research I did for the IMLS DCC. So I’ve also decided to build my dissertation on this solid foundation of experience and learning, pleasantly surrounded by a supportive group of people working on related issues.

As we’ve worked on CIMR research it has been fairly surprising how little work has been done on characterizing just what “collections” are. It’s one of those terms that we use all the time that usually carries different meanings when used in different contexts. We’ve largely been avoiding it in our work as a problem that’s “too interesting” and beyond the scope of the project. We’ve been focusing our attention on the Dublin Core Collection Application Profile and it’s characterization of collections being something that items are simply “gathered into.”

However DC-CAP is largely based on the pre-existing item-level description format of Dublin Core (I’d say the same about how CDWALite and VRACore handle “collections” as well.) Archivists will point towards Encoded Archival Description, but of course this is premised on the archival community’s understanding of what shape collections take. Experiments here with EAD also demonstrate that it doesn’t decompose nicely when flattened. (I think the expression of whole-part relationships in EAD is weak when aggregating across EAD documents – makes perfect sense when you’re trying to wrangle the paper in at first, but whew headaches later). And there are lots of unstructured representations of museum collections on websites and in catalogues. These are a good start towards describing collections -as collections – but they also leave me unsatisfied that they’ve given us to the tools to fully describe collections in useful ways in online aggregated environments.

Perhaps aligning the ways that we describe collections wasn’t quite so important in the past. But since the digitization of Library, archive, museum (LAM) collections has supposedly broken down the barriers for re-integrating these resources it seems like a good time to revisit the issue. Most of the efforts so far have been around finding common ways of expressing and sharing item-level metadata irrespective of the characteristics of the collection as a whole. Perhaps we’ve lost something important by only providing the item out of its context. Maybe more robust ways of sharing that context can help make those items more useful and meaningful to end users (and as Hur-Li Lee suggests, maybe we need to incorporate some of their needs in the model). Maybe it can also tell us how we can better transform the metadata about those items when it is re-situated in a new context. Maybe providing this context means that a user might be able to navigate among items that already have important relationships with each other. The preservation of context is already a problem that is receiving increased attention in Semantic Web circles, perhaps a better understanding of our collections can help us take advantage of these new platforms.

I’ve decided that the best way to address some of these questions is by adopting some of the approaches we’re using in CIMR. I will be proposing to develop an collections ontology drawn from across the cultural heritage community. The rest of the fall will be a process of specifying exactly what this means in practical terms (well, practical in an academic sense) – the scope of the research, datasets, methodologies, etc.

Wish me luck as I’m off and running. (yeah, more running less crawling…)

Wow..it’s only been more than a month since the Field Exam experience ended. A few people pinged me through other channels and I now realized that I never gave an “all-clear” here on the blog. In case you hadn’t heard, I passed!

Thanks again to everyone for their support and encouragement through the whole process.

Many of you expressed great confidence in the outcome, but truth be told, it was a bumpy ride in the end. I may have cut the balance between inputs and outputs a little too close to the bone on this one. The pressures of getting it all down on paper in the space of two weeks again reminded me the weaknesses in my approach to writing (namely, wait for the Muses to show-up and then write like a madman). Let’s just say that those answers won’t be seeing the light of day anytime soon. Thankfully, I was able to pull my bacon out of the fire in the oral defense. I’ve come out of this feeling a little humbled and with lots of things to think about in terms of what I’m doing and where I go next.

I know he hears this all the time, but without Jorge Cham, I don’t know how many of us would keep our sanity doing this. Thanks to his important “research,” I know I’m not alone in suffering the “post-quals” slump.

So what happens next?

I’m now entering Phase III: The Dissertation (the final phase) of the program. By the end of next fall I hope to have completed the first part of that, the Dissertation Proposal/Preliminary Examination. Depending on how things go I may try to schedule a defense before the close of the fall semester, but I think a more realistic expectation will be to hold in the beginning of the Spring 2009 semester. That’s still a little ahead of the timeline expected by the department (and the slightly more aggressive timeline I set for myself).

So what’s your dissertation going to be on, Richard? Huh? Huh? Tell us, tell us!

At this point I’m still undecided. Fortunately it’s not for lack of ideas, but too many tempting options. While I’ve been here I’ve jumped around and explored a number of different approaches, topics and methodologies that I can bring to bear on the dissertation. In the exam, I tried hard to stretch the boundaries around some of my different interests. I think this made my job harder rather than easier – and left me feeling a little like a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. Lesson learned.

Everyone I’ve talked to so far has said the same thing – make the dissertation about something that you’re passionate about. It’s a long slog and your topic needs to be something that motivates you through the highs and the lows (see figure above). Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the questions that brought me here in the first place, the things that I’ve picked up since arriving, and where I’d like to be when I’m finished. Ultimately this means some things will have to be put on the back-burner or dropped altogether.

The plan at the moment is to brainstorm lots of questions without much commitment to any of them. Using these as a start, I’ll write up a few different proposal ideas that will be shared with colleagues for comment, criticism and improvement. I will settle on a topic by the end of the summer so I can form a proposal committee as soon as the fall semester starts. If all goes well, I’ll have a draft done by December and maybe a scheduled defense (although I’m leaving a little wiggle room – might not be until late January).

In the meantime, I’m feeling the need to do some more regular blogging here. I’ve decided to turn the work I did this spring in Ontology Development into a little blog series. Stay tuned for “Creating a CDWA Ontology.”

Last week I turned in the thirty pages of writing I did for my Field Exams. Next Wednesday I’ll be sat down in front of my committee for the oral defense. Several other colleagues who were also taking the exam have already passed, so there’s high hopes for me.

It’s also that time of year where everyone has to submit their annual progress reports. I’ve now fulfilled all my course requirements so I thought I’d post the long and winding list of courses that I’ve taken since I started at GSLIS in 2005.

Masters Classes

• LIS 390 LEB   Libraries, Information & Society
• LIS 452 LE   Foundations of Information Processing< br/> aka learn how to program in Python
• LIS 490 GCG   Game Culture & Technology
  This is where I first discovered Second Life.
• LIS 490 MI   Museum Informatics
  (This is where I built a Second Life Museum!)
• LIS 501 LEA   Information Organization and Access
• LIS 507   Cataloging and Classification I
  Ahhh! make the AACR2 torture stop!
• LIS 590 DHL   Digital Humanities
• LIS 590 EPL   Electronic Publishing
  XML, DTDs and XSLT, oh my!
• LIS 590 IIL  Interfaces for Information Systems
  Usability rocks!
• LIS 590 MD  Metadata in Theory & Practice
• LIS 591   Practicum: Collections Understanding and the IMLS Digital Collections Repository

Doctoral Studies

Courses counted towards doctoral credits:

• LIS 590 TKR   Topics in Knowledge Representation (4)
• LIS 409  Storytelling (2)
  Don’t laugh! Great place to practice public speaking skills – plus lots of fun.

Fall 2006

• LIS590HF   History & Foundations of Library & Information Science (4)
• LIS590II   Inquiry Based Learning (4)< br/> John Dewey!
• LIS590CQ   Computer Supported Collaborative Work (4)

Spring 2007

• LIS590DRM   Doctoral Research Methods (4)
• LIS590OH   Ontologies in the Humanities (4)
  CIDOC CRM & FRBR
• LIS590IU   Designing Information User Studies (4)

Summer 2007

• Independent Study:   Historic Ethnography of Museum Collections: A Pilot Study (4)

Fall 2007

• ANTH517   Anthropological Approaches to Memory (4)
• LIS590PPL   Public Pedagogies (4)
• LIS590QM   Qualitative Methods in Research (4)

Spring 2008

• LIS590OD   Ontology Development (4)

I’ve almost finished all my reading and am oiling up the old mental cogs for two weeks of intensive writing. Not the quantity is going to be very high – but the quality has to be stellar.

I’ve finally put a bug from my Twitter account here, since microblogging has been much more satisfying for me lately. (Look up). More regular and often inconsequential updates will be posted there.

On the list of post-exam to-dos is to take some time to seriously re-think what I want to accomplish with this blog. I’ve been continuing to collect examples of what I am now calling “academic” blogs and will also be looking for other discussions about how to improve your academic blogging. Consistency and regular posting is high on the desirable list, but I think I need more of a formal commitment about doing it. e.g. one post a week on Thursdays; and to have a longer-range plan for the discussion. Thoughtful suggestions are welcome.

Until then wish me luck. See you on the other side.