Information School News

We are pleased to announce that Dr Kate Miltner has joined the UK Young Academy, an interdisciplinary network of early-career professionals and researchers working together to tackle pressing global and local challenges and promote lasting change. Dr Miltner is among the 42 emerging leaders from across the UK selected as the newest members of the UK Young Academy. The new members come from a wide range of sectors, with backgrounds in political science, engineering, government, communications and the creative and performing industries, and more. As members of the UK Young Academy, they will have the opportunity to take action on both local and global issues. Through interdisciplinary projects and working across sectors, they will bridge gaps, drive innovation, and develop the solutions needed to address critical challenges – all while advancing their professional development and contributing to a global network of Young Academies focused on achieving positive outcomes. "I'm tru...

MORPHSS aims to investigate and promote open research practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS).  The project is designed to create frameworks and guidelines to encourage adoption of open practices in HSS as well contribute to our knowledge of such practices. The three-year, £800,000 project is a collaboration between Cambridge University Library, Cambridge Digital Humanities, Coventry University, the University of Sheffield and the University of Southampton. It is jointly funded by the Research England Development (RED) Fund, the Wellcome Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.  The work to be carried out at Sheffield will be led by Stephen Pinfield, who now has a process in train to recruit a postgraduate research associate to work on the project for the next two years. The Sheffield team will contribute to the project as a whole but will focus for a significant proportion of their time investigating open practices in the Social Sciences, pa...

Professor Stephen Pinfield has contributed to an article for The Conversation, entitled 'The peer review system no longer works to guarantee academic rigour - a different approach is needed' The article discusses the issues with academic peer review and the innovative platform MetaROR which is intended to help address some of these problems, whilst also acting as a sort of 'metaresearch experiment'. Read the article here.

Returning to Sheffield after more than a decade has been a mixture of nostalgia and new opportunities. I first came here in 2011 to complete my MA in Librarianship, and now, I find myself back as a visiting scholar at the Information School. My time as a visiting researcher at the University of Sheffield has been truly rewarding. I am an academic staff at Harran University in Turkey supported for this visit by Tubitak (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey). This visit has been a great opportunity for my academic and professional development. I am conducting research on artificial intelligence within GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) institutions. I have especially valued the support of my supervisor Dr. Andrew Cox who has guided me through this process. He is an extremely helpful, supportive and understanding person. The University of Sheffield has provided me with an excellent working environment, surrounded by helpful staff and dynamic research...

 The British Academy has today published thirteen discussion papers from a range of expert perspectives across the ‘SHAPE’ disciplines (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy) to explore the question: ‘What are the possibilities of a good digital society?’  The papers explore a wide range of issues, from the environmental impacts of digitalised daily life to the possibilities of ‘good’ Generative AI in the cultural and creative industries, to examining more closely what we mean by a ‘good digital society’. Among the papers is one authored by information School Lecturer Dr Kate Miltner, with Dr Tim Highfield from the Department of Sociological Studies. Their paper focuses on "good" uses of generative AI in the cultural & creative industries. Alongside the papers is an introductory summary that provides a thematic overview of the papers and points to how we might conceptualise the principles that underpin these diverse visions of a good digital ...

Information School Senior Lecturer Dr Susan Oman has recently joined the University of Sheffield's Centre for Machine Intelligence, as their new Human-Centric AI Theme Lead. "The CMI is a strategic initiative supported by a £3.64m investment, dedicated to the transformation and acceleration of research, innovation, and teaching on and with AI", says Dr Oman. "I am really excited to be taking one of the four academic theme lead appointments in Human-Centric AI, where I will be working across the CMI and the Faculty of Social Sciences Social Research Institute to engage with these centres and networks to develop a programme of research." Susan's research investigates data, AI, evidence, policy and practice - and how they work for the publics they claim to serve. These are often in relation to specific social policy issues, like ‘well-being’ or ‘inequality’ or ‘digital’. Find out more about this news item here .

A team led by Lecturer Dr Sharon Wagg has produced a case study on digital inclusion for The British Academy. The team also includes Dr Sara Vannini and Dr Efpraxia Zamani. This case study is part of a wider project on digital technology and inequality, which identified 5 lessons for policymakers at local, regional and national levels. Read the case study here .

 Self-tracking - the practice of capturing data about one’s own activities, often through wearable technology - is an ever-growing phenomenon, and one that is firmly established in the worlds of physical activity and public health. Recording statistics about our own activities is becoming commonplace, with our devices prompting us to measure things like step counts, heart rate, calories burned - even the quality of our sleep. Increasingly, this data is becoming linked to our perception of our own health and wellbeing, with healthcare providers even sometimes suggesting this kind of tracking as part of a programme of care. Dr Lee Pretlove - Information School PhD graduate and ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow recently began his 12-month ESRC-funded Fellowship (through the White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership) looking at self-tracking specifically in relation to running communities, building on his PhD project and examining what this kind of relationship to our data could mean for physica...

 Academic research normally goes through a peer review stage before it appears in a journal or book. This usually involves an editor selecting two or more scholars from the field that have relevant expertise and asking them to assess the submission. These reviewers then make comments about various aspects of the submission as well as giving an overall recommendation, such as: accept, ask for minor revisions and then accept, ask for major revisions and then reevaluate, or reject. The purposes of this exercise include filtering out flawed studies or papers with little value and helping the authors to improve their work by correcting errors or suggesting additional perspectives to consider. In an ideal world, every paper that passes peer review is error-free, clear and makes a valuable contribution to academic knowledge. In practice, however, there is no absolute truth and so reviewers must make judgements about the extent to which each work is high enough quality to be published. In ...

  Current student Maria shares her experience of this year's CILIP Conference in Birmingham I was one of the five fortunate students of Information School to receive a student bursary for attending the CILIP Conference in Birmingham. Participating in such an event was a unique experience for me because it was an opportunity for librarians to come together and discuss the future of librarianship. Specifically, the main topics of the conference concentrated on how the world of libraries changes underlying the important role of leadership, management, wellbeing, and AI. This was my first time attending an academic conference, so I experienced it as something challenging with enthusiasm. Initially, I felt a bit out of place, but soon after I met the other participants and my team from the University of Sheffield, I started to feel more comfortable. Also, this feeling got away when I started to participate in parallel sessions and help at the Information School exhibition stand. This al...

 Despite their many benefits, many of us intrinsically know that social media platforms are not entirely a force for good for human beings and our interactions. Use of social media is often linked with poor mental health, particularly in young people, and the kind of comparison it encourages between peoples’ lives can easily make one feel inferior, and exacerbate existing divides in society. And yet the advantages to these services are such that we continue to engage, perhaps trying to limit our own usage or engage with social media in ways that we deem to be the least damaging. “These platforms have been designed to extract value from our interactions”, says Dr Niall Docherty, Lecturer in Data, AI and Society at the University of Sheffield Information School. “They’re capitalist platforms with an economic incentive at their heart, yet somehow the users have to navigate the pressures and extremes put upon them just by using their own wits.” Dr Docherty’s forthcoming book, ‘ Healthy...

The Health, Safety and Workplace Regulations 1992 state that “Sufficient toilet and washing facilities should be provided to allow everyone at work to use them without unreasonable delay”. Yet people who work on the move - like delivery drivers, care workers and tradespeople - often struggle to access the necessary facilities. The Hand Hygiene at Work project , led by Dr Sophie Rutter from the Information School alongside Dr Lauren White from the Sheffield Methods Institute, is looking at this issue and what can be done to address it. There has been a recognised decline in provision of publicly accessible toilets. The project found that this particularly affects workers who are on the move. Seeking out access to toilets often costs workers valuable time as well as money, when factoring in things like extra petrol costs for travelling out of their route to find these facilities. This disproportionately affects those who might urgently need to access facilities such as those who are me...

“We know that people with disabilities experience a lot of inequities in both their health outcomes and the quality of the healthcare that they receive”, says Dr Denis Newman-Griffis, Lecturer in Data Science at the Information School and co-author of ‘ A roadmap to reduce information inequities in disability with digital health and natural language processing ’, a paper published in PLOS Digital Health. This narrative paper is co-authored by Dr Max Hurwitz, Dr Gina McKernan, Dr Amy Houtrow and Dr Brad Dicianno, with whom Dr Newman-Griffis worked during their post-doctoral research in biomedical informatics at the Department of Physical Medicine Rehabilitation at the University of Pittsburgh. It looks at what the sources and causes of this disparity in care experienced by people with disabilities are. Previous research shows that similar disparities are prevalent across race, class, gender and geographical lines as well, but little work has been done specifically in the area of disabil...

  “We often try to do multidisciplinary work, but it’s not often you work so closely with people from very different academic backgrounds”, says Dr Morgan Harvey, Senior Lecturer in Data Science at the Information School and Sheffield’s Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project ‘ Civil War Bluejackets: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the United States Navy ’. Though the Civil War Period of American history - the 1860s - is the context for this project, Dr Harvey says “it’s actually pretty much exactly a clean 50/50 split between the historical part of the project and the information science part.” Along with Postdoctoral Researcher Dr Adam Funk in Sheffield and former Sheffield colleague Professor Frank Hopfgartner of the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany, Dr Harvey is collaborating with historians Professor David Gleeson and Dr Damien Shiels at Northumbria University. Gleeson and Harvey lead the project as co-PIs, and the team is completed by Associate Professo...