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iConference 2021 Summary
iConference 2021 was originally conceived as a four-day "hybrid" conference with virtual and in-person elements. As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic made travel impractical, the conference was converted to an all-virtual format spanning two weeks. 2021 ContentsQuick Links 2021 Quick LinksLocation: Virtual, via the SCOOCS online conference platform
Conference Theme: Diversity | Divergence | Dialogue Call for Participation: 2021 CFP ConfTool Submission and Registration Site: Users can visit the iConference 2021 ConfTool submission instance while it remains active. SCOOCS online platform: Registered participants can log into the SCOOCS platform and presentation library while it is still active. Official Papers Proceedings: See "Diversity Divergence Dialogue" on Springer LNCS, Part I and Part II. 2021 By the NumbersTotal virtual participants: 520 Full Research Papers: 32 (acceptance rate 31%) Chinese Research Papers: 13 Posters: 48 Virtual Interactive Sessions: 6 Archival Education submissions: 5 Doctoral Colloquium Participants accepted*: 17 Early Career Colloquium Participants accepted*: 26 Rates (listed in U.S. dollars):
2021 Supporting MaterialsOfficial Proceedings
Workshop Proposals
Sessions for Interaction and Engagement (SIE) Proposals
Virtual Interactive Sessions (VIS) Proposals
2021 OrganizersConference Chairs: Yuenan Liu, Renmin University of China; Bin Zhang, Renmin University of China Honorary Conference Co-Chair: Sam Oh, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea Local Arrangements Chairs: Jian (Jenny) Wang, Renmin University of China; Minghui Qian, Renmin University of China Program Chairs: Hui Yan, Renmin University of China; Samuel Kai-Wah Chu, The University of Hong Kong Full Research Papers Chairs: Daqing He, University of Pittsburgh; Maria Gäde, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Short Research Papers Chairs: Toine Bogers, Aalborg University; Dan Wu, Wuhan University Chinese Research Papers Chairs: Xiaobin Lu, Renmin University of China; Qinghua Zhu, Nanjing University; Zhiying (Ellen) Lian, Shanghai University; Gang Li, Wuhan University Posters Chairs: Atsuyuki Morishima, University of Tsukuba; Leif Azzopardi, University of Strathclyde Workshops Chairs: Yuxiang (Chris) Zhao, Nanjing University of Science and Technology; Jiqun Liu, University of Oklahoma Sessions for Interaction and Engagement Chairs: Ming Ren, Renmin University of China; Pengyi Zhang, Peking University Virtual Interactive Sessions Chairs: António Lucas Soares, University of Porto; Chern Li Liew, Victoria University of Wellington Archival Education Chairs: Jian (Jenny) Wang, Renmin University of China; Patricia Whatley, University of Dundee Doctoral Colloquium Chairs: Xiaomi An, Renmin University of China; Ann Gillilandm, University of California Lost Angeles Early Career Colloquium Chairs: Mega Subramanian, University of Maryland; Sohaimi Zakaria, Universiti Teknologi, MARA Student Symposium Chairs: Ian Ruthven, University of Strathclyde; Yuelin Li, Nankai University; Yao Zhang, Nankai University iSchools Doctoral Dissertation Award Chairs: Udo Kruschwitz, Universität Regensburg; George Buchanan, University of Melbourne iSchools CoordinatorsMichael Seadle, Executive Director Slava Sterzer, Business Manager Clark Heideger, Director of Communications Cynthia Ding, Social Media Katharina Toeppe, Proceedings Editor 2021 AwardsiSchools Doctoral Dissertation AwardThis award recognizes the most outstanding dissertation of the preceding year. Each member iSchool was invited to submit one dissertation for blind review by an international jury made up of iSchools leadership and faculty. The winner received $2,500 U.S., the runner up $1,000 U.S. 2021 WINNER Digital Self-Harm: Implications of Eating Disordered Behaviors Online 2021 RUNNER UP Souvick ‘Vic’ Ghosh, Rutgers University, School of Communication and Information Exploring Intelligent Functionalities of Spoken Conversational Search Systems Lee Dirks Award for Best PaperSponsored in 2021 by Springer Nature and the iSchools, the Lee Dirks Award is presented to the author(s) of the conference’s most outstanding full research paper. The 2021 award included a prize of $1,000 U.S. This award honors the memory of Lee Dirks of Microsoft Research, long-time friend and supporter of the iConference. Click here for past winners. 2021 WINNING PAPER Title: Data and Privacy in a Quasi-Public Space: Disney World as a Smart City (#357) Authors: Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo, University of Illinois; Yan Shvartzshnaider, New York University 2021 RUNNERS UP (alphabetical by title): Title: How Asian Women’s Intersecting Identities Impact Experiences in Introductory Computing Courses (#382) Authors: Mina Tari, University of Washington; Vivian Hua, University of Washington; Lauren Ng, University of Washington; Hala Annabi, University of Washington Title: Immersive Stories for Health Information: Design Considerations from Binge Drinking in VR (#328) Authors: Douglas Zytko, Oakland University; Zexin Ma, Oakland University; Jacob Gleason, Oakland University; Nathaniel Lundquist, Oakland University; Medina Taylor, Oakland University Title: A Knowledge Representation Model for Studying Knowledge Creation, Usage, and Evolution (#215) Authors: Zhentao Liang, Wuhan University; Fei Liu, Wuhan University; Jin Mao, Wuhan University; Kun Lu, University of Oklahoma Title: Multidisciplinary Blockchain Pedagogy and Design: A Case Study in Moving from Theory to Pedagogy to Practice (#398) Authors: Chelsea Kathleen Palmer, University of British Columbia; Christopher Rowell, University of British Columbia; Victoria L. Lemieux, University of British Columbia Best Short Research Paper2021 WINNER Title: Something New Versus Tried and True: Ensuring ‘Innovative’ AI Is ‘Good’ AI (#335) Authors: Stephen C. Slota, University of Texas at Austin; Kenneth R. Fleischmann, University of Texas at Austin; Sherri R. Greenberg, University of Texas at Austin; Nitin Verma, University of Texas at Austin; Brenna Cummings, University of Texas at Austin; Lan Li, University of Texas at Austin; Chris Shenefiel, Cisco Systems 2021 RUNNERS UP, alphabetical by title Title: Case study on COVID-19 and archivists’ information work (#291) Authors: Deborah A. Garwood, Drexel University; Alex H. Poole, Drexel University Title: Creating Farmer Worker Records for Facilitating the Provision of Government Services: A Case from Sichuan Province, China (#315) Authors: Linqing Ma, Renmin University of China; Ruohua Han, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Title: Development and Evaluation of a Digital Museum of a National Intangible Cultural Heritage from China (#400) Authors: Xiao Hu, University of Hong Kong; Jeremy Tzi-Dong Ng, University of Hong Kong; Ruilun Liu, University of Hong Kong Title: Promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Library and Information Science through Community-Based Learning (#444) Author: Alex Poole, Drexel University Best Poster:2021 WINNER Persuasion Strategies in Misinformation-containing Weibo Posts (#536) Authors: Sijing Chen, Wuhan University; Lu Xiao, Syracuse University; Jin Mao, Wuhan University 2021 RUNNERS UP Linguistic features and consumer credibility judgment of online health information (#640) Authors: Jiaying Liu, Peking University; Shijie Song, Nanjing University; Yan Zhang, University of Texas at Austin Perspectives of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Viewers on Live-TV Caption Quality (#638) Authors: Akhter Al Amin, Rochester Institute of Technology; Matt Huenerfauth, Rochester Institute of Technology Sustainability by design: Toward community-centered strategies for durable digital collections (#581) Authors: Courtnie Thurston, University of Maryland, College Park; Katrina Fenlon, University of Maryland, College Park Writing Security: A Curriculum Intervention for Computer Security Ethics (#483) Authors: Justin Petelka, University of Washington; Katie Shilton, University of Maryland; Megan Finn, University of Washington Best Chinese Research Paper2021 WINNER 大数据治理规则构成要素框架构想 (A components framework conception for big data governance rules, #513) Authors: Jie Huang and Xiaomi An, Renmin University of China 2021 Keynote SpeakersThe following speakers made keynote presentations at iConference 2021. Cuijuan (Jada) Xia (夏翠娟）Presentation: Building a Data Infrastructure to Enrich the Multiple Sources of Evidence for Humanities Studies: From the Perspective of Cultural Memory
From the speaker (click here for Chinese version): The theory of "Social Memory", which originated from "collective memory", systematically separates memory from history. It not only has a great influence on sociology, anthropology, culture and ethnology, but also provides a new perspective for historical research. On the basis of "double sources of evidence method", "triple sources of evidence method" and "quadruple evidence method", it develops "multiple sources of evidence method" ”. In addition to all kinds of historical books and records, it attaches great importance to folk literature and field investigation, as well as cultural memory resources such as memorials, local chronicles, family genealogies, oral history, private archives, private notes, poems and odes, painting art, gold and stone porcelain, legends and ballads, operas and dramas, festival ceremonies, site relics, and even natural science research achievements such as climate disasters, tree rings and glaciers, All of them can be the sources of evidence and mutual confirmation. Most of these cultural memory resources are stored in libraries, archives, museums, art galleries (GLAM) and other cultural memory institutions. In the era of Data & Intelligence (big data and machine intelligence), the separation of content and carrier has narrowed the gap between GLAM due to different resource carriers. Data, facts and knowledge have become the smallest unit of "cultural memory". Not only GLAM's cultural memory resources should become parts of the multiple sources of evidence reference system, but also the knowledge graph of people, places, times, events, things and other entities, as well as the quantitative analysis data and visual charts generated from large-scale, long-term, multi-dimensional and fine-grained data also constitute another important source of evidence that can not be ignored and is becoming more and more important in the multiple sources of evidence reference system. Through the long-term preservation of cultural memory resources, carrier management, knowledge organization, inheritance and dissemination for culture, GLAMs have become the infrastructure of cultural memory and is participating in the work of "building future cultural heritage". In the era of Data & Intelligence, cultural memory institutions have undergone digital transformation, and the construction of "data infrastructure" with "data" as the basic unit has become an important work to support the humanities research and inherit cultural memory. The original definition of "data" is "information that can be transmitted and stored by computer". For humanities research, "data" can be understood as information units that can be processed by machine, such as literature or physical resources, objects, concepts, people, institutions, groups or their structured descriptive information (including variables, values, text symbols or facts, etc.). In addition to the openness, publicity and sustainability of the "infrastructure", the "data infrastructure" should also fully reflect the characteristics of large-scale data, long time coverage, wide geographical scope, fine-grained and muti-dimensional, so as to support the data request, fusion, automatic analysis, statistics and data visualization in a web scale. At the same time, it should be independent of specific application development and specific field research, follow the general data standards and open sharing specification, and become a "data center" between the "back-end" of information infrastructure and the "front-end" of specific field research. Through theoretical construction and practical exploration, this presentation attempts to elaborate how cultural memory institutions enrich the multiple sources of evidence reference system for humanistic research in the Data & Intelligence age through the construction of data infrastructure. Zvi Galil (צבי גליל)Presentation: Georgia Tech’s online Master in Computer Science Program and the future of online learning
From the speaker: In March 2020, universities around the world were suddenly forced to move some or all of their teaching online. But Georgia Tech had begun the process six years earlier. In January 2014, Georgia Tech started the first MOOC-based Online Master in Computer Science program (OMSCS). OMSCS started with 380 students, but this spring the program enrolled 11,300 students — and it is still growing. This talk will tell the story of OMSCS: how it started, what we have learned and are still learning from it and the role it and its successors have played before and during the pandemic. It will also share some thoughts on the role online programs can play in the future of higher education. Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein.Presentation: Data Feminism Biographies:
From the speakers: As data are increasingly mobilized in the service of governments and corporations, their unequal conditions of production, their asymmetrical methods of application, and their unequal effects on both individuals and groups have become increasingly difficult for data scientists—and others who rely on data in their work—to ignore. But it is precisely this power that makes it worth asking: "Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? These are some of the questions that emerge from what we call data feminism, a way of thinking about data science and its communication that is informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, this talk will show how challenges to the male/female binary can help to challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems; it will explain how an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization; how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems; and why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.” The goal of this talk, as with the project of data feminism, is to model how scholarship can be transformed into action: how feminist thinking can be operationalized in order to imagine more ethical and equitable data practices. Margaret HedstromPresentation: Collaboration Around Curation
From the speaker: The term curation has become overused and abused, so much so that its ubiquity has made the word “curation” meaningless. Curation has a long history of practice in archives, museums and libraries. In the last decade, curation has emerged as a challenge in many other areas under the iSchool umbrella, such as data science, web analytics, and moderation on social media platforms. This address will identify commonalities and differences in the conceptualizations and practices of curation across the fields of research and teaching in iSchools. It will identify areas where research that cuts across these field could be mutually beneficial.
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Biography: 
Biography: 
Catherine D’Ignazio is an Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is also Director of the
Lauren F. Klein is an associate professor in the departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the 
Margaret Hedstrom is the Robert M. Warner Collegiate Professor of Information at the 
