Information School News

Dr Gianluca Demartini  of the Information School has secured funding from The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council ( EPSRC) for his project entitled "BetterCrowd: Human Computation for Big Data". A short summary of the project proposal can be read below: In the last few years we have seen a rapid increase of available data. Digitization has become endemic. This has lead to a data deluge that left many unable to cope with such large amounts of messy data. Also because of the large number of content producers and different formats, data is not always easy to process by machines due to its its diverse quality and the presence of bias. Thus, in the current data-driven economy, if organizations can effectively analyze data at scale and use it as decision-support infrastructure at the executive level, data will lead to a key competitive advantage. To deal with the current data deluge, in the BetterCrowd project I will define and evaluate Human Computation methods...

Professor Peter Bath and Research Associate Dr Julie Ellis of the Information School have had an article published in The Conversation - a collaboration between editors and academics to provide informed news analysis and commentary. The article, entitled "Save your outrage: online cancer fakers may be suffering a different kind of illness", can be read in full  here .

In this blog post, Dr. Briony Birdi presents a shortened version of her presentation at the workshop ‘The role of the local public library’, hosted by the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, 15 July 2015. The original presentation also presented ‘four future scenarios’ of public libraries, adapted from Hernon & Matthews, 2012. The public library: outdated, or what? This short piece focuses in the main on the future of public libraries, as I was requested to do. But before I do so, I’m going to briefly go back to the Victorians – what could be the harm in that? Have a look at the following two comments: ‘How…does an idea that was adopted in the Victorian era to enhance access to learning and knowledge remain relevant in an age when many people now have such access within their homes via the world wide web?’ (McMenemy, 2009, p.3). ‘The original reasons why they [public libraries] were introduced could be argued to be of lesser importance today, since lite...

PhD student Marc Bonne attended the White Rose Doctoral Training Centre's STS (Science and Technology) PhD network in York, where the focus was on Responsible Research and Innovation. This workshop provided an opportunity for students to give brief presentations on their work and receive feedback. There is more information at http://www.york.ac.uk/satsu/news-events/news/dtcstspathwayworkshop/

Four iSchool members presented at the i3 conference in Aberdeen, Scotland in June 2015. Sheila Webber gave a paper on Self-identified Information Behaviour of learners in the FutureLearn “Play” MOOC . Three of her PhD students also presented on their research: Joseph Essel ( Conceptions of the Information literate teacher by teacher trainees at a Ghanaian University ), Syeda Shahid ( Assessing children’s IL skills: Findings from a multiple case study of six primary schools in Pakistan ) and Kondwani Wella ( Experiencing HIV and AIDS information: a phenomenological study of serodiscordant couples in Malawi ). Additionally, some iSchool alumni presented including Sara Chizari who graduated with MSc Information Management in 2010 ( How do cultural differences and cognitive styles affect online information searching behaviour? ) and Yi Wen Hon who graduated with MA Librarianship last year (presenting on her Masters research, Representations of privacy in the context of care.data: conf...

Dr Jonathan Foster of the Information School recently visited India to speak at several universities in Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi and to meet prospective Information School students to discuss the department's range of courses.  As a result of this visit, the Information School's MSc Data Science course has received coverage in The Times of India newspaper. The article was based on an interview Dr Foster gave in Delhi and can be read below:

iFutures, now in its third year, was held on the 7th of July 2015. The conference is for all information science PhD students and is organised by PhD students from the University of Sheffield’s Information School. The conference is deliberately open and welcoming for early stage researchers to present their research to their peers in a constructive environment.  The keynote speakers included Prof. Helen Kennedy in the morning session and Prof. Fabio Ciravegna in the afternoon session. As with previous years there were two parallel workshop sessions, one led by Prof. Paul Clough and the other by Dr Barbara Sen. PhD students across the Information Science discipline presented their research over three sessions:  the morning session: applied social media, the Pecha Kucha Session, and the paper session. Over l unch PhD students also had the opportunity to showcase their research via colourful poster presentations.  This year saw PhD delegates and speakers from not on...

Wasim Ahmed, Information School PhD student, has had a blog post published on the London School of Economics and Political Science website.  The post is entitled 'Using Twitter as a data source: An overview of current social media research tools'.   The popularity of social media sites and the ease at which its data is available means these platforms are increasingly becoming primary sources for social research.  Wasim Ahmed   presents a quick look at some of the tools available to social scientists for analysing social media data and also reflects on the limitations of the platforms and the methods used for this type of research. Read the full blog post  here . Wasim Ahmed's blog about his research can be found here .

Congratulations to Dr Barbara Sen of the Information School whose paper, “Community, complexity, the public library and community orientation”, has been published in Library Review and  selected by the journal’s editorial team as a Highly Commended paper in the 2015 Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence. The paper is freely available until the end of July 2015 from the Emerald Group Publishing website.