| Leading and Promoting the Information Field |
Welcome Message from the ChairsWelcome to 2017 iConference Doctoral Colloquium. We look forward to our time together to discuss your research and future prospects for research and scholarship. Based on your diverse research interests, we have assembled a distinguished team of faculty mentors to work with you throughout the conference. We will meet together on two days of the conference. On Wednesday, March 22, we will gather together at lunch. Each of you will introduce yourself and what you hope to accomplish at the conference. Over the next two days you will attend the conference, but we hope you will all look out for each other, in navigating, discussing and assisting each other through the conference. We will spend much of Saturday, March 25, together. In the morning, each of you will present a one-minute overview of your research. By way of introduction, we hope to understand the range of interests and methodological approaches represented within the iSchool community. We will then divide into discussion groups—groups of three or four students and one or two faculty mentors. Each student will engage in a 30-minute review and critiques of each other’s research. We will support these conversations with extended abstracts of your research. After breaking for lunch, we will continue as a colloquium with panel discussions on transitioning to faculty status, and your future academic and career success. Please be prepared with questions that concern you. Participant biographies and dissertation project abstracts are presented below; they are made available to all conference attendees to help highlight your talent and potential as scholars. We thank the iSchools and the iConference—as well as your home institutions—for making doctoral colloquium possible. We are glad that you are here and look forward to an engaging time together. —Kevin Crowston, Bella Jing Zhang, Pia Borlund and Jiangping Chen, Doctoral Colloquium Co-Chairs 2017 ParticipantsMichal Benyamin-Kahana
Research: My research interests lie in the fields of bibliometrics and altmetrics (alternative metrics). My dissertation investigates the impact and visibility of research by library information science department heads, in academic institutions which are members of iSchools, whose research is related to LIS. My research is based on traditional citation indexes and scholarly social networking sites (SNSs). The traditional bibliometric measures are extended by alternative measures (altmetrics) of academic publications. Citation counts were collected from Scopus, Google Scholar, and ResearchGate, while readership counts were collected from Mendeley and ResearchGate. My research questions relate to the bibliometric/altmetric data: Are there significant and meaningful correlations between citation counts in the different citation sources? Are there significant and meaningful correlations between citation and readership counts? The preliminary results of my research show two findings: first, the number of citations in Google Scholar is correlated strongly and significantly with citations from Scopus and ResearchGate alike; and second, for Mendeley the correlations between citations and readership counts were moderate positive. There is a statistically significant correlation between the traditional citation indexes and the altmetric indices of the readership on the SNSs sites. So it is possible to conclude that altmetrics can be used as a supplementary measure for assessing researchers and science. Yuanyuan Feng Biography: Yuanyuan Feng is a PhD candidate in Information Studies at Drexel University’s College of Computing and Informatics. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Library Science from Sun Yat-sen University and a master’s degree in Information Science from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Currently, she is a Doctoral Teaching Fellow at Drexel University and has independently taught a range of graduate-level courses in the field of library and information science.Yuanyuan Feng’s areas of expertise are information behavior, human-computer interaction, and health informatics, with a specific focus on mobile and wearable technologies. Advised by Professor Denise E. Agosto, her dissertation research examines activity tracker users’ personal health information management (PHIM) of the information generated by their devices. Research: Today’s commercial mobile and wearable devices are often equipped with sensors such as pedometers, accelerometers and altimeters, allowing users to automatically collect data about their physical activities. Devices with physical activity-tracking functions are referred as activity trackers (e.g. fitness bands, smartphones, smart watches). The data generated by activity trackers are usually presented to users via health or wellness applications, creating a new type of personal health information in need of research attention. Oliver L. Haimson
Research: When people face major life changes, they must then make complicated decisions about how to disclose information about that change to the people around them. While such disclosures have never been simple, the pervasive and often public nature of social media complicates managing information disclosure. Particularly during life events that involve potential disapproval or estrangement from others in one’s network, decisions about how, when, and to whom to disclose can be difficult. While disclosure can be a liberating experience, making oneself known as a person with a stigmatized identity can open one up to discrimination and harassment. In my research, I examine how people manage stigmatized disclosures, and how disclosure, mental health, and social support are associated, during gender transition on social media. I first use self-reported measures from a survey about gender transition on Facebook to understand people’s experiences with transgender identity disclosure. I am now starting the next phase of my dissertation research in which I analyze transition blogs on Tumblr. Results will give insight into difficulties as well as potentially relieving capabilities of self-disclosure on social media. Additionally, I will uncover ways that affordances of particular social media platforms enable or constrain sensitive self-disclosures. Xiaoshuang Jia
Research: We are living in an archiving society. Never before has so much been recorded, collected. Private archival resources are more and more important, especially for the memoralization of society and my Ph.D. dissertation is focused on The Archival U-turn: Research on the change of Archival Resource Structure. The research questions are about what and why the Archival Resource Structure has changed since the middle of 20th century, and how to respond to such a change. To answer such questions, conceptual framework and analytical framework are firstly to be set up which based on Structuralism Methodology. As for the “what” question, the analytical framework is based on the development through practice, and then the legal text and theory text which trying to identify the change of “archival resource structure”. And then for the “why” question, it puts archival field in the social background and analyze how changes of the collective developments-cultural, technological, social-have influence it. The last is for question of “how to respond to such change”, it proposes the re-definition of the national archival resources and comes up with some collection development strategy based on the analysis of the existing experience and lessons. Yoojung Kim Biography: Yoojung Kim is a Ph.D. student in the graduate school of convergence science and technology (GSCST) at Seoul National University (SNU), studying under Joongseek Lee. Her research interests lie in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and user experience (UX), particularly, personal informatics and behavior change. She is interested in what motivates people to track their personal data and how they perceive the data as a sensemaking process. Building on her experience as an HCI researcher, Yoojung’s recent works address how doctor-patient communication be mediated by patient-generated data from various types of devices. She organized many social events including an international workshop named “UW x SNU GSCST,” and HCI group day in SNU. She has also worked as a TA for several semesters at Seoul National University. She earned her B.A. from Seoul National University, and her M.S. from GSCST in SNU.
Research: By enabling people to track their lifestyles, including activity level, sleeping, and diet, technology helps clinicians to treat patients suffering from lifestyle diseases. Previous work identified that people are more motivated to change their habits by using self-logged data in the medical context. However, obstacles remain for both clinicians and patients side to further adopt such data in medical consultations. Thus, in this work, I aim to identify those obstacles on the perspective of both clinicians and patients and address the role of information design. There are three research questions: (1) How medical contexts engage patients in tracking their data from various devices with long-term? (2) How data-driven medical consultation data lead patients to change their behavior? (3) How can data-driven medical consultation be integrated with an existing workflow? Six clinicians and 50 patients involved in this research. Conducting in-depth interviews, observations and a participatory design workshop for two years, I discovered the motivation strategy to track various types of data, the newly appeared doctor-patient communication pattern, and the specific requirements for hospital information system. Those findings have implications for designing services and system for both patients and clinicians. Yang Li Biography: Yang Li is a Ph.D. candidate in information science at the School of Information Management, Wuhan University. He was born in 1989 in Tongcheng, Anhui Province, and received his Master Degree in information science from Anhui University in 2014. During his current Ph.D. program, he focuses on the study of information resource management and competitive intelligence. He was listed in the winners of many scholarships including the National Scholarship for Doctoral Students, the First Prize of Academic Innovation of Wuhan University. He was also awarded from the university the titles of “Pacemaker to Merit Student”, “the Outstanding Student Cadre”, “Excellent Graduates”, “Social Activity Activist”, and other honors. So far, he has successfully published more than thirty academic papers on a list of prestigious journals such as Journal of Library Science in China, Library and Information Science, Journal of Advances in Information Technology, and so on. He attended four national and international academic conferences, participated in writing monographs and research reports, and won many prizes. In addition, he is the PI of a key research project of doctoral students in Wuhan University, and the participant of a major project funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China and a project funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China as well as some other projects.
Research: Yang Li has made achievements in the fields of information resource management and competitive intelligence. In the perspective of intelligence engineering that treats information work in an engineering way, he mainly explores two aspects of two scenarios about smart emergency response and think tanks. First, by analyzing the information flow, he investigated the urban intelligence emergency mode and proposed a new framework that integrates intelligence engineering and intelligence parallelization. The former plays a leading role and the latter plays a supporting role. Second, based on the research paradigm of “data resources + methods and tools + expert wisdom”, he studied the information services in think tanks under the environment of big data. The main research results are about the construction of the information system for quick emergency response, the emergency decision-making support system for smart cities, intelligence functions of think tanks, evaluation of new types of think tanks with Chinese characteristics, information services for the diagnosis and treatment of urban diseases, etc. His studies on the theories and applications are mainly rooted in the local context of China with special attention paid to the frontier topics of social problems. Kustini Lim-Wavde
Her research primarily focuses on the interdisciplinary intersection of information, technology, sustainability and policy analytics. Her research uses a fusion of machine methods and explanatory empiricism for assessing the effects of environmental policies. This aims to support decision-makers in formulating policies in order to achieve a more sustainable future. Research: Governments have developed policies in the form of rules, regulations, taxation, pricing schemes, advisories, and other directives to address environmental issues (e.g., pollution, endangered animal species, and resource depletion.) This dissertation aims to create a more informed and data-supported policy-making approach in environmental management by employing data analytics, mathematical programming, optimization, econometrics, and spatiotemporal analysis. It consists of three essays. Essay 1 discusses household informedness, a construct that is defined as “the degree to which household have the necessary information to make utility-maximizing decisions in their daily activities, such as managing their household waste.” It also analyses the impact of informedness on the collection and recycling of household hazardous waste (HHW) using econometric methods. Essay 2 assesses how geospatial locations affect the HHW collection and whether those effects change over time, using spatial autocorrelation analysis and geographically weighted regression. Finally, Essay 3 examines the impacts of new carbon pollution standards on electricity generation and water use in Texas using mathematical programming. These essays demonstrate the use of a variety of data analytics and management science methods that represent promising advances in policy analytics that help design data-driven policies and promote environmental sustainability and resources for future generations. Debbie Maron Biography: Deborah (Debbie) Maron is currently a doctoral student at UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. Her research centers on metadata pedagogy, metadata knowledge and metadata in embodied use. Other areas of interest include Philosophy of Knowledge Organization and Information Organization, Logics in library science, digital/coding rhetoric, and Web presentations of racial ephemera. She holds a MSLIS from the I-school at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA, and a Masters from The Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, UK, where she wrote her thesis on digitization of racial ephemera at The Wiener Library. She is advised by Dr. Ryan Shaw.
Research: When we say that people perform metadata tasks, what does that really mean? It is generally agreed upon that metadata is more than what we construct in a dataverse; it is all around us in the actual world, existing across contexts, and has been as long as humans have had the ability and apparatuses to describe things. However the current definition of metadata practice is limited by the community and does not match the richness of “metadata-as-thing”. Metadata in all permutations is a problem of language and representation. With this in mind, I construe metadata broadly- including database design, IR/AI algorithm production, cataloguing and classification, interface design, and “typical” metadata work, and interview the people who perform it to surface their common underlying assumptions. I will use narrative inquiry (3 part interviews) to build a conceptual model showing the likenesses and differences among such practitioners of metadata, showcasing their educations, biases, philosophical commitments, quirks and approaches to critical thinking or other sorts of procedure. The hope is that such a model will assist those who teach metadata, and work in metadata, in their ability to recognize opportunities for collaboration among all of these superficially separate activities. Tamara Meredith Biography: Tamara Meredith lives in Laramie, WY, where she is employed an Instructional Technology Specialist for the University of Wyoming and has responsibilities in training, emerging tech, and instructional design for the department of Extension. She has presented at AERA and SITE, and published on augmented reality, libraries and teacher education, and game-based learning. She holds degrees from Indiana University’s Early Music Institute (MMus), the University of North Texas (MLIS), and Central Washington University (BMus). Ms. Meredith is nearing the completion of a Ph.D. in Learning Technologies from the University of North Texas and expects to receive the degree in May 2017.
Previously, Ms. Meredith spent over fifteen years in library roles, spanning K-6 library/technology, public library administration, and higher education positions. It was from these experiences that she developed a love of teaching teachers and supporting technology use that improves learning. Ms. Meredith is also an adjunct instructor in the University’s music department (medieval and renaissance history), and is principal flutist with orchestras in Texas and Colorado and violist with orchestras in Wyoming. When not working on her dissertation or practicing, she likes to read/watch sci-fi, play with her 3D printer, and generally geek out with her husband and daughter. Research: I have been fascinated by the challenges presented by academic music’s traditional master/apprentice educational practices in an era of emerging technologies and social networking. I believe that there are opportunities improve formal and informal learning in higher education music departments through the adoption and integration of these technologies; however, since social media is a recent phenomenon, the music faculty masters of this current generation are creating their own practices without a pedagogical tradition or previous apprenticeship to inform them—an unusual method for teachers in this field. My dissertation research addresses this topic through a qualitative study of music faculty beliefs, intent, and lived experiences with their Facebook studio pages/groups. The conceptual framework includes apprenticeship, enculturation, and anticipatory socialization theories applied to studio-based music instruction and social media use in higher education. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis is being used to develop themes that will support a thick narrative of lived experiences from semi-structured interviews and public Facebook data. From this documentation and analysis of contemporary practice, I hope to provide recommendations to current and future music faculty for improving informal learning through social media interactions with their students. Nathan Moles
Research: Governments throughout the world are releasing public-sector information as open data. Open Government Data (OGD) released in this way consist of structured datasets derived from information originally created or collected as part of the administration’s regular business functions, the management of services to the public, and to inform decision-making. These publicly-released datasets play a crucial role in open government initiatives, foster innovation, and generate insights through a range of activities that include data mining, remixing, mashups, visualizations, and combining OGD with other data. This diversity of use, and the viability of OGD for specific purposes, is directly influenced by the curation processes that shape these datasets and lead to their release. The realities of managing digital information necessitate curatorial processes of selection, preparation, representation, and quality assurance to ensure a usable information product. Actions and decisions within this process affect the ability of the data to contribute to openness in government and function as part of political, economic, technological, and innovational objectives. Through a case study of the open data operations at the City of Toronto, this doctoral research aims to explore OGD curation and how conceptualizations of data use influence these OGD curation processes. Yanqing Shi
Research: As the number of name authority records in databases increases, problems of homonym headings and name disambiguation become more common in Chinese name authority files. The purpose of this research is to explore assistance for promoting the accuracy of identification of increasing homonym names and development of rules for additional components of personal names. This research focuses on researching the usage and problems of the additional components for Chinese personal names and the influence on quality of name authority files. As research objects, the authors selected the first 100 personal names from the name duplication list in the three most influential databases in China, which are HKCAN, NLC and CALIS. Statistics of name duplication, types and use frequency of additional components are described and analyzed. We presented an elaborate statistics of usage about additional components in HKCAN, NLC and CALIS, studied discriminating power of the three kinds of additional information frequently used. And concluded that there are problems of additional components from aspects of the source of additional information, the natural attributes, the social attributes, dimensions of information, etc. Yosef Solomon Biography: Yosef Solomon is a doctoral student in the Department of Information Science at Bar-Ilan University, and a licensed lawyer (Israel) with rich professional experience in various legal positions in the public, private and civic sectors. Previously, he earned an LL.M (Laws) degree from Bar-Ilan University and both LL.B (Laws, Magna cum Laude) and B.A (Finance, Magna cum Laude) degrees from the College of Management. Solomon’s research interests focus on human information behavior, information in the legal profession, information discovery and serendipity. His doctoral research explores the information seeking behavior of Israeli lawyers, using a mixed methodology. In addition, Solomon lectures in a variety of topics, ranging from legal information to info-serendipity, and has published articles in several refereed journals on these topics. In his work, Solomon brings together a unique combination of thorough information research skills and broad legal comprehension and expertise. He is also a member of CILIP, ASIS&T (and serves as the European Chapter’s representative for Israel), and the Serendipity Society.
Research: To serve in a client’s best interest and to provide proficient legal service, lawyers must obtain, process and utilize extensive professional information on a continuously evolving and up-to-date basis. In Israel there is one lawyer for every 150 citizens, one of the highest ratios worldwide. Yet, the study of Israeli lawyers’ information-seeking behavior is actually rare, and the discourse being held in this matter is very limited and at a very early stage. Solomon’s doctoral research attempts to reduce this knowledge gap, by examining the following aspects among active members of the Israeli Bar: (a) Types of information Israeli lawyers need for each of their professional roles; (b) Information sources being used and those not used, for seeking legal information; (c) Analytical mapping of information sources zones; (d) Information seeking activities that Israeli lawyers undertake in the legal practice (five information seeking activities are explored: passive attention, passive search, active search, ongoing search, and delegation); and (e) Ways Israeli lawyers use and keep the information found. The study implements a mixed method approach, and is performed as a sequential explanatory research (QUAN-[a structured anonymous questionnaire] > qual-[semi-structured interviews]). The study is currently nearing completion of the quantitative data collection stage. Sikana Tanupabrungsun
Research summary: My research aims to reveal how ‘ordinary people’ utilize social media to practice micro-celebrity, a set of self-presentation techniques in which people construct their public persona as a commodity sign, or product, to be consumed by others, and regard their audiences as fans, rather than friends or family. Recently, it become common for micro-celebrity practitioners to utilize multiple social media platforms to amp-up the fame they have achieved elsewhere. Research suggests the core micro-celebrity practices are visibility, interaction and identity, and that they need to articulate a consistent and authentic public persona, even when using multiple platforms. My work uses media richness theory to develop a methodological framework that measures the ways micro-celebrity practitioners enact visibility, interaction and identity in similar and different ways across Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. Indeed, each platform offers certain affordances that work as cues that make any platform richer than others in different ways. Michael Majewski Widdersheim Biography: Michael is a PhD candidate in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. He works both online and on-campus as a master’s-level teacher in courses such as library management and leadership, copyright, ethics, and academic libraries. His students say he is “super helpful” and “so chill.” Before entering graduate study, he worked as an English-language instructor in Japan, a literacy coach for local inmates, a writing consultant, and a public librarian. As an adult services librarian, he was awarded a collection development grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association for materials related to Muslim culture. Michael’s scholarly activity demonstrates a broad intellectual prowess that spans across disciplines to address technical and conceptual questions using mixed methodologies and a variety of perspectives. He has published on the political-economic history of e-books in the US; library services for youth of diverse gender and sexual identities; and the computational ideologies inherent in learning analytics discourse. His work incorporates aspects of political science, sociology, and media studies. Michael received his MSLS degree from Clarion University where he also trained as a K–12 teacher. He holds a BA in Philosophy from Colby College.
Research: Since the mid-twentieth century, scholars worldwide have associated public libraries with the public sphere. There are two salient themes in this conversation. One theme describes libraries as a communication platform. The discourse facilitated by this platform is said to contribute to social integration, cultural reproduction, and identity formation. The other theme observes how a meta-sphere discourse manifests when libraries themselves are thematized. This meta-sphere is said to influence how libraries are legitimated and governed through time. Along with the themes of this public sphere literature, several problems are noticeable. First, more studies are needed that furnish data from actual cases. Second, studies have yet to measure or compare public sphere activity over time. And third, the dominant interpretive framework in the literature is exhausted, a hangover from early modernity. Historical case study is one approach that addresses these problems, and it is the approach adopted in this dissertation. This study develops a new public sphere framework to form the basis of data collection and analysis. A standardized instrument is then designed and validated to measure communicative events over time, from 1924 to 2016. Archival documents, interviews, and fieldnotes from a regional library system serve as source material for the analysis. Huichuan Xia
Research: My research focuses on privacy in crowdsourcing. Specifically, it consists of three components. First, I plan to investigate crowd workers’ privacy concerns in different genres of crowdsourcing systems. Second, I aim to examine how these concerns impact crowd workers’ participation and contribution. Finally, I hope to map these privacy concerns into a typology of crowdsourcing and propose a motivational model of crowdsourcing based on it. I have conducted an explorative user study on MTurk and uncovered a diverse set of privacy concerns from Turkers. My next step would be to run similar studies on two different genres of crowdsourcing, i.e., Tiramisu (mobile crowdsourcing) and Zooniverse (citizen science). In these follow-up studies, I plan to create scenarios based on these privacy concerns and present to the crowd workers in these systems. I will ask whether or how they would participate or contribute under these scenarios and how they want to be informed about these potential privacy risks in crowdsourcing. Finally, I hope to map these privacy concerns into a typology of crowdsourcing, and propose a motivational model of crowdsourcing based on it. To my knowledge, prior research hasn’t taken privacy into account to investigate motivations of participation or contribution in crowdsourcing. Pu Yan
During her undergraduate years, Pu worked as interns for several Chinese newspapers, including Xinhua News Agency, People’s Daily, and Ta Kung Pao. Her previous research focused on the influence of ICTs on Chinese rural migrant workers under the background of Chinese urbanisation process. She also conducted studies on social media and hyper-social youth in urban China and on the impact of the resettlement policies on rural residents after South-to-North Water Diversion Project. Research: Contemporary China has seen a proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Mobile technologies have particularly fuelled internet development with their pervasive use among rural and migrant Chinese populations. However, it is unclear without solid empirical evidence how the rapid development of ICTs influences the routine and mundane lives of ordinary Chinese people, yet these routine uses are fundamental to understanding the Chinese internet. Throughout the fieldwork, I will incorporate mixed methods approach in exploring information practices. The triangulation of quantitative methods with qualitative methods will inform one another, and will together contribute valuable insights to the topic. Findings of this research will have significant implications for academia, industry and policy-makers alike. Yang Yuhan
Research: China’s rise in science is becoming an uncontested fact. A great deal of research has explored the status quo and dynamics of China’s scientific publication. Yet very few studies investigated the features and development trajectory of China’s social research. Focusing on public this administration, an interdisciplinary field in soft science, we developed and exploited a dataset of highly cited publications. Over the period of 2003-2015,17729 publications in public administration were indexed in web of science with 521 involving at least one researcher from China. In this paper, citation analysis and econometrics are the main methods we will use for a comprehensive analysis between public administration papers have been published. From the state, institutions, authors, influence and other aspects of the quantitative description of the domestic and international related research, on the basis of, the trend of public management science, research content, research methods to sort out, provide some reference and ideas for the development of public management in china and world wide. In the same time we selected the top 10% highly cited paper normalized by year and country for analyzing. Combing both bibliometrics and econometric model, we tried to visualize the patterns of global knowledge diffusion and unique features, if any, of China. Yuehua Zhao
Research: The online communities on social media sites provide an efficient platform to autism patients and their caregivers where they can ask for help and advice from other users, receive assistance from the group members, and share their experiences in the communities. As people increasingly rely on self-help resources, there is a need to understand what and how information is being exchanged in these social media groups. My study centers on the research of autism affected user’s behavior within communities on social media. The research objects are the autism support groups on Facebook. Those groups consist of autism patients, their relatives, caregivers, researchers, and physicians. My study aims to develop a systematic method to evaluate the information exchange in social media in order to identify the misinformation, and examine the potential role of technology in the social lives of autism-related users. This research also has important implications for building an active and supportive online community. Through the social network analysis, identifying influential users in a support group provides group managers an opportunity to recognize their contributions and reinforce positive behaviors within the group. Doctoral Colloquium Co-ChairsQuestions about the Doctoral Colloquium may be directed to the following:
Doctoral Colloquium Mentors
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Biography: I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Information Science at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. I am currently participating in a research project sponsored by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF). My research interests lie in the fields of bibliometrics and altmetrics (alternative metrics). My particular interest is in Social Media Platforms on the Web, including online reference managers (e.g. Mendeley), and academic social networks site (SNSs). These sources offer broad coverage of scholarly publications and can reveal additional information on the impact and visibility of scholarly publications as a supplement to the traditional citation indexes. I have completed the writing of the first section of my dissertation that deals with the impact and visibility of studies in academic institutions whose research is related to LIS based on traditional citation indexes and scholarly social networking sites (SNSs). I hold a bachelor’s degree in Art History from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a Masters degree, in Information Science from Bar Ilan University. This combination of interests has led to my present position, as director of an academic library in the arts. I see myself as part of the library staff who defines themselves as ‘lifelong learners’, and in the course of their career, go on to pursue a doctorate in Information Science.
Biography: Oliver Haimson is a PhD Candidate in the Informatics Department at University of California, Irvine’s Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. He conducts social computing research focused on social media, online identity, and gender in the context of life transitions. In particular, he studies transgender people’s experiences with self-presentation and disclosure as they change gender on social network sites. Through his research, he hopes to impact technological inclusion of marginalized users. Oliver is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a Rob Kling Memorial Fellowship, a Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship, and a Faculty Mentor Program Fellowship. He works with Dr. Gillian Hayes in the STAR Group (Social and Technological Action Research), and is also part of LUCI (Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction). He has worked as a PhD Research Intern at Microsoft Research, eBay Research Labs, and Georgia Institute of Technology’s Data Science for Social Good program. Oliver received his B.S. in Economics at Carnegie Mellon University, and also participated in the iSchool Inclusion Institute (i3) at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences.
Biography: Xiaoshuang JIA, joint PhD Student in
School of Information Resource Management, Renmin University of China
and in School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University
of British Columbia. Also a researcher in Center for Chinese &
Global Affairs–Peking University. She is interested in archival theories
in particular the value or impact of archives on society like archival
socialization and archival memory, as well as archives in the digital
environment like recordkeeping in the cloud environment. She has so far
published about 30 articles in Chinese, including 9 in CSSCI journals.
She directed 2 research projects named “The Value and Development of
Family Archives in the Context of Modern Identity” and “Managing
Recordkeeping Risks in a Cloud Environment” and has also participated in
more than 10 national and international projects like InterPARES Trust
Asia project. She is also active in academic communication and has so
far attend more than 20 conferences, including gave speeches in English
in 5 international conferences, such as ASA National Conference 2015,
AERI Conference 2016 and ICA-SAE Conference 2016 etc.. She was granted a
prestigious award of Baogang Scholarship for her excellent doctoral
studies in 2016.
Biography: Kustini Lim-Wavde is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University (SMU) since 2013 under the supervision of Prof. Robert J. Kauffman. Prior to that, she received a B. Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from Universitas Indonesia in 2002 and an MBA degree in International Management from the International University of Japan in 2007.
Biography: Nathan Moles is a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. He holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Information from the University of Toronto and is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman Museum. In 2013, Moles was involved in the DigCurV project, and from 2015-2016 was a research assistant on the BenchmarkDP project.
Biography: Yanqing Shi is currently a first-year doctoral student in information science in the School of Information Management, Nanjing University, China. Yanqing Shi graduated from Shanxi University with the Masters’ degree. Her master’s thesis topic is “Research on Chinese Personal Name Authority File Sharing and Semantic Description”. She was 2016 commended award Shanxi University outstanding postgraduate. Her research interests lie in basic, applied and interdisciplinary studies in library and information science, including theories, models and experiments related to information organization, semantic web, and social network. She has published three research papers in Journal of Library Science in China, Journal of the China Society for Scientific and Technical Information and Journal of The National Library of China. She has won one doctoral research grant and secured RMB$60,000 research funding.
Biography: I am a third year PhD candidate at the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University. My advisor is Assistance Professor Jeff Hemsley. I was born and raised in Bangkok, Thailand where I received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer engineering. Before starting my PhD study, I worked for Microsoft Thailand and a local software house. My current stage of graduate career is ABD; I am now working on developing a dissertation proposal. Broadly speaking, I am interested in behavioral studies with social media data. Most of my recent publications are quantitative works—utilizing text mining, machine learning algorithms, regression analysis and statistical tests. My dissertation centers around the micro-celebrity practices on social media through the lens of media richness and celebrity theories. The overarching goal of my research is to examine the roles of technological affordances, enabled by social media platforms, in growing and maintaining the audiences, which I operationalize as the numbers of followers.
Biography: My name is Huichuan Xia. I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate advised by Dr. Yang Wang in the iSchool at Syracuse University. My research field is HCI, and I focus on information privacy. My dissertation work examines privacy in crowdsourcing. Specifically, I investigate topics, such as what privacy concerns crowd workers have, how privacy concerns impact crowd worker’s participation and contribution, and how to address these privacy concerns. I have published on privacy and crowdsourcing in conferences such as CSCW (Wang et al., 2016; Huang et al., 2017; Xia et al., 2016)), SOUPS (Xia, 2015), iConference (Tan et al., 2015) as well as in journals such as IJHCS (Huang et al., 2016a; Huang et al., 2016b) and PoPETS (Wang et al., 2016). Detailed information can be found in my Resume. I plan to defend my dissertation proposal by May 2017, and I aim to graduate in 2018. I look forward to learning from senior researchers’ experiences and advices. I will also discuss with and provide feedback to other student attendees in the colloquium.
Biography: Pu Yan is a second-year PhD candidate at Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. She doctoral research focuses on the influence of the emerging ICTs on everyday information practices in rural China and employs a mixed methods approach that combines big data research and ethnographic study into the study of human information practices. Before joining the Oxford Internet Institute, she obtained an undergraduate degree (Honour) in Journalism and Communication from Tsinghua University in 2014, and a Master degree (Distinction) in Social Science of the Internet from Oxford Internet Institute in 2015.
Biography: I am YANG Yuhan, a second-year doctoral student in public economics and policy at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Before pursuing Ph.D study, I got B.E. degree in Civil Engineering and master’s degree in finance. My research focus on the intersection of informetrics , economics and science policy. I am particularly interested in applying a mixed-method design to explore and understand the phenomena, dynmaics and drivers of China’s scientific progress. Currently I have been working with my Ph.D. supervisor Prof. Li Tang at Fudan University on a couple of projects, including China’ most highly cited research, research integrity, and research assessment. One tentative topic of my dissertation would be to investigate what factors facilitate or inhibit China’s innovative research.
Biography: Yuehua Zhao is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, United States. She received her bachelor degree in Information Management and Information System from Sichuan University and her master degree in Management Science and Engineering from Wuhan University. Her doctoral study is under the advisement of Dr. Jin Zhang. Yuehua’s research interests span a variety of areas including consumer health informatics, social media research, social network analysis, and informetrics. Working as a research assistant at the School of Information Studies, Yuehua contributed to a variety of projects involving: utilization of statistical research methods in library and information science field, analysis of health information on Q&A forums, and citation analysis of journal comparison. The working title of her dissertation is “Investigation on Autism Support Groups on Facebook”.