colloquia
Bio:
Jasmine Clark is the Digital Scholarship and Africology & African American Studies Librarian at Temple University. Her primary areas of research are accessibility and metadata in emerging technology and emerging technology centers. Currently, she is leading The Virtual Blockson, a project to recreate and gamify the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection in virtual reality to teach high school students primary literacy skills. She is also doing research in 3D metadata and the development of Section 508 compliant guidelines for virtual reality experiences. She is also the chair of the DLF Digital Accessibility Working Group, as well as a Co-Chair of the DLF Committee for Equity and Inclusion.
Abstract:
The Virtual Blockson is a project that utilizes virtual reality (VR) to teach high school students primary source literacy using materials from the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection. The Blockson collection, comprised of over 700,000 items related to the African Diaspora, includes a multitude of material types such as books, sheet music, manuscripts, photographs, sculptures, and films. This rich variety of materials, covering a broad range of topics and time periods, is suited to gamification via a multi-modal medium like VR. In addition to the VR game itself, accompanying teaching guides, onboarding materials, and standalone 3D models will be created to situate the game within a broader social studies curriculum. The completion of the game, in tandem with accompanying teaching materials, will allow students to meet the learning objectives laid out in the Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy developed by a joint task force created by the Association of College & Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Rare Books & Manuscripts Section (RBMS) and the Society of American Archivists (SAA) .
When
11 a.m. to Noon March 25, 2022
Bio:
Dr. Martinez has degrees in psychology, clinical mental health, and integrated behavioral health, but his real passion is in conducting DNA research to solve genealogical questions beyond 200 years, and in identifying human migration patterns. Lee is considered an expert in leveraging Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) Y-DNA testing and is a popular speaker at genealogical society annual conferences due to his ability to make seemingly complex topics accessible.
Dr. Martinez is the Director of Quality, Compliance, and Population Health for Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health and a member of its Arizona senior leadership team. He is also a faculty associate with Arizona State University's College of Health Solutions, where he was designated "Distinguished Graduate" by the college dean his graduating year. Dr. Martinez assists full time faculty in teaching the Quality and Performance Measurement in Health Care and the Financial Management in Healthcare doctoral courses for the college. He also designs Masters level courses for them.
Abstract:
Over the last 22 years, and especially the last eight, commercially available DNA tests have revolutionized traditional genealogy methodology, enabling the amateur genealogist to participate as citizen scientists in expanding the Family Tree of Mankind. This opportunity can disrupt professional standards in historical research and peoples' private lives. Intergenerational misinformation about family origins, or even well-accepted families formed by adoption can be shattered by DNA test results. While DNA data can validate the professional researcher's work, it is just as likely to invalidate decades' worth of solid traditional research. Furthermore, the most marketed type of DNA test is not usually useful past the fifth generation, the very area that most amateur genealogists need help with. This presentation will introduce historians and genealogists to the importance of basic chemistry, molecular biology, genetics, population genetics, migration, and socio-economic patterns to complement historical research and DNA testing.
Bio:
Daniel Greene is an Assistant Professor of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. His ethnographic, historical, and theoretical research explores how the future of work is built and who is included in that future. He published his first book, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, with MIT Press in 2021. His research has also appeared in such venues as Research in the Sociology of Work, New Media & Society, and the International Journal of Communication. Daniel lives online at dmgreene.net.
Abstract:
Why do we keep trying to solve poverty with technology? What makes us feel that we need to learn to code—or else? This common sense has ruled our economic imaginary for at least 30 years. Those who cannot log on or train up are condemned to the margins of the information economy, and contained by the carceral state.
In The Promise of Access, Daniel Greene argues that the problem of poverty became a problem of technology in order to manage the contradictions of a changing economy. We cannot debunk or banish the idea—what Greene calls the access doctrine—that the problem of poverty can be solved with the right tools and the right skills because the idea helps those public institutions that face poverty to save themselves. Technological solutions help public institutions simplify their complex missions and win legitimacy and funding, but at the cost of alienating the populations they serve.
Blending political-economic theory with years of ethnographic fieldwork, Greene explores how this plays out in Washington, DC, examining organizational change in technology startups, public libraries, and charter schools. Tracing the changes to the spirit and structure of these public institutions changes reveals a fight to define the good life under contemporary capitalism--and the alliances that could win that fight.
Bio: Anna R. Leach is a PhD student at the School of Information minoring in Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural studies. Her research focuses on the interaction in online learning environments, and she is particularly interested in the ways that social network analysis can be used to analyze and visualize the ties of the interaction among people, information, and technology.
Abstract: This colloquium talk discusses research in progress around interaction in online learning environments. It begins with a brief discussion of engagement and quickly moves into types of interaction in online learning environments (OLE). Then, we will explore the possible uses of social network analysis (SNA) to examine OLE interaction. Next, we will briefly discuss critical reviews of published research that uses SNA in online learning networks. The talk ends with research directions and future work.
Bio: Aaron Trammell is an Assistant Professor of Informatics and Core Faculty in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. He graduated from the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information in 2015 and spent a year at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC as a postdoctoral researcher. Aaron’s research looks at the persistence of analog games in today's digital world. He is interested in how political and social ideology is integrated in the practice of game design and how these perspectives are negotiated within the imaginations of players. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Analog Game Studies and the Multimedia Editor of Sounding Out!
Abstract: This presentation will argue that in order to understand the normalization of whiteness in digital culture—as Kishonna Gray, Safiya Noble, and Ruha Benjamin have argued—we must better understand the people who constitute the cultures that work closely with digital technology. I look toward hobby games and hobbyists to recuperate a more complete genealogical understanding of white masculinity in geek culture. As a method, genealogy helps to reveal the complex and often counterintuitive ways that subjectivity is produced, normalized, and made invisible. My historical work shows that unlike the Irish—who cast themselves as white in order to gain social privilege in America’s racist society —hobbyists see themselves as outsiders. The denial of white male privilege established by hobbyists continues to define the socio-technical space of geek culture today.
We propose a framework to teach an automated agent to learn how to search for multi-hop paths of relations between entities in large corpora. The method learns a policy for directing existing information retrieval and machine reading resources to focus on relevant regions of a corpus.
The approach formulates the learning problem as a Markov decision process with a state representation that encodes the dynamics of the search process and a reward structure that minimizes the number of documents that must be processed while still finding multi-hop paths.
We implement the framework with reinforcement learning and evaluate it on an open-domain dataset of search problems derived from a subset of English Wikipedia using a policy gradient actor-critic algorithm and a domain-specific dataset of search problems in the biomedical domain using a temporal-difference learning algorithm.
We show that deploying the focused reading framework with reinforcement learning finds policies that retrieve more multi-hop paths while processing fewer documents compared to several strong deterministic baseline implementations.
Ontology, as a formal and explicit specification of a shared conceptualization for a particular domain, is useful in information extraction. On the one hand, since information extraction is concerned with the task of retrieving information for a particular domain, formally and explicitly specifying the concepts of that domain through an ontology defines the boundary of what information needs to be extracted. On the other, an ontology, typically consisting of classes (or concepts), attributes (or properties), and relationships (or relations among class members), contains the structured information that information extraction systems aim to extracting. In this thesis, we are interested in how using an ontology can improve the information extraction process. We explore two research directions that both employ ontologies in the information extraction process, temporal normalization and biomedical concept normalization. In both research directions, we show that leveraging resources in ontologies helps to build high-performance information extraction systems, and presenting the extracted output using such ontologies makes the structured information concise and interchangeable.
Zoom password: dongfang
Bio: Edward Benoit, III, is Associate Director and Associate Professor in the School of Library & Information Science at Louisiana State University. He is the coordinator of the archival studies and cultural heritage resource management programs. He received an MA in History, MLIS and PhD in Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research focuses on participatory and community archives, non-traditional archival materials and archival education. He is the founder and director of the Virtual Footlocker Project, which examines the personal archiving habits of the 21st century soldier in an effort to develop new digital capture and preservation technologies to support their needs.
Abstract: In the 21st century, the advent of ubiquitous computing, web 2.0, and the explosion of humanity's digital footprint led to dramatic changes in how people capture and preserve their experiences. While there is a fair amount of research about the archival practices of the general public, there is an emerging interest in understanding the archival practices among specialized groups, including military members. The Virtual Footlocker Project (VFP) address the lack of research on military members. The VFP is a research initiative that aims to understand and support active members and veterans in capturing and preserving their experiences of service. Supported by an IMLS grant, the VFP team conducted 22 focus groups with 99 members across all military branches. Originally designed as in person focus groups, the sessions switch to a virtual format due to COVID-19. This change broadened the study population to the entire U.S., rather than just a handful of states. Preliminary findings suggest record-keeping practices among active service members and veterans were informed by two fears: 1) the fear that the military may lose their records during regular bureaucratic operations and 2) the fear of losing materials during relocation between assignments. Addressing these fears is a challenge that can be tackled through conscious archival practice. The presentation will highlight the preliminary themes and discuss proposed solutions to address these challenges.
When
Noon to 2 p.m. April 9, 2021
Bio: Jack Clark is a Ph.D. student in the School of Information. She has been teaching at the University of Arizona for the last few years while working in the Extended Reality and Games Laboratory (XRG Lab). She is currently working on a multi-disciplinary project researching the efficiency of digital font preferences and completing her College Teaching Certificate. She researches information processing in new age learning styles, including gamified and immersive learning techniques. Her work focuses on the inner workings of audio and visual information processing while in technologically enhanced learning environments. The hope is to understand the capabilities of modern information processing by studying visual and auditory attention and their connection to cognitive perception.
Abstract: Multimodal learning has become paramount to continuing education under the constraints of the COVID virus this last year. It is the role of teachers to understand the nuances of multimodal learning and digital project creation as the world of education is becoming increasingly multimodal. Teachers are scrambling to create online learning environments that cater to the needs of individual students yet may be lacking the background knowledge to create a successful online classroom. Understanding these four areas of knowledge: digital literacy, information overloading, self-regulated learning, and online constructivist approaches can provide teachers a baseline of knowledge to feel more confident and successful in an online environment. This presentation will discuss theory and knowledge accumulated over years of studying educational psychology, multimodal learning, and information science at the University of Arizona. We will discuss topics like the digital divide, dual-channel processing, intuitive navigation, overabundance of resources, and how to balance autonomy in digital projects. The theories discussed in this presentation can be applied to contemporary classrooms to increase critical thinking, identity exploration, and self-directed learning in students. The hope is the collection of research discussed in this presentation will offer a bridge from traditional learning theories to modern online education.
Zoom password: ischool
When
2 p.m. to 4 p.m. March 5, 2021
Bio: David Sidi is a PhD candidate in the School of Information (iSchool) at The University of Arizona. His work focuses on technologies that improve group privacy in the long-term, sometimes trading off personal privacy in the short-term. He works collaboratively across the University, including recent projects at the Center for Quantum Networks, and the Center for University Education Scholarship. See his website for more: http://u.arizona.edu/~dsidi/.
Abstract: Is it possible to make information privacy technology less selfish? In more than 50 years of shared history between information privacy and networked personal computing, privacy technology has sought to protect the individual’s personal information piecemeal. Privacy, however, is sometimes more important to others in your community than it is to you: you may recognize others to be vulnerable to harm in a way that you are not if their privacy is violated---think of survivors of intimate partner violence whom you may know; gay people living in countries that make homosexuality unlawful; or more quotidian examples, such as young people with a need to explore to develop their understanding of themselves and the world. What form might technologies take that aim to coordinate a strategic distributed community response to privacy needs, and when might they be adopted? In this talk I present a series of projects undertaken with collaborators from around the University to address these questions, and their implications for the future of information privacy."
When
2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Feb. 12, 2021
