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...

“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...

People fall in love if someone or something helps them and makes them feel happy. This can be family, a friend, a pet, a hobby, and even technology. Modern society has fallen in love with data because of astonishing things they can do. People have become fascinated by the convenience that data bring. Data are used as a vital element to develop the technologies that we demand. The recommended movies and videos for you in Netflix and YouTube are the results of algorithms trained on tons of relevant data. ChatGPT, a language model that became sensationally popular recently due to its surprising performance, has also been trained on over 8 million web pages and 300 billion words of data. These advanced technologies are enough to impress people and companies. Accordingly, the belief that data would change the world or decide a company’s life and death at least has been strengthened recent years.  Even aside from the cutting-edge technologies, data affect small decisions of our lives. Le...

I recently attended a VIP Preview Evening at Bletchley Park (BP) to launch their new exhibition called The Intelligence Factory. This also included a new temporary exhibition called The Art of Data. The new exhibition narrates how the activities at BP turned data into intelligence products that were then used for tactical and strategic decision making by the likes of Churchill. However, it is presented as a factory which not only includes the innovative technologies (e.g. Colossus for codebreaking), but also the organisation and management required to do this effectively. It also shows the need for good data and information management, analytics, visualization and storytelling etc and is a great blueprint for any analytics activities in modern day organisations. David Kenyon from BP came to present at the iSchool a couple of years back on the topic, which was his early thinking about an intelligence factory that eventually helped to this new exhibition. In the Art of Data exhibition th...

Professor of Search Analytics Paul Clough has been giving a selection of lectures at Devon County Council as part of their education programme. One of Paul's lectures was recently picked up in The Data Dispatch, a blog from Devon County Council. Read the blog here:  https://inside.devon.gov.uk/blogs/blog/the-data-dispatch-telling-stories/

Study on research data management in China Dr Andrew Cox The results of an international collaboration between Andrew Cox and Laura Sbaffi at the Information School and Yingshen Huang, from Peking University, have now been published in the prestigious Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (Early view). https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24413 The research, based on web site analysis, a survey and interviews, reveals that the support of research data management by Chinese university libraries remains in its infancy. The full reference is: Huang Y, Cox A & Sbaffi L (2020) Research data management policy and practice in Chinese university libraries. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24413

Why you should never use Microsoft Excel to count coronavirus cases Professor Paul Clough Public Health England has admitted that 16,000 confirmed coronavirus cases in the UK were missed from daily figures being reported between September 25 and October 2. The missing figures were subsequently added to the daily totals, but given the importance of these numbers for monitoring the outbreak and making key decisions, the results of the error are far-reaching. Not only does it lead to underestimating the scale of coronavirus in the UK, but perhaps more important is the subsequent delay in entering the details of positive cases into the NHS Test and Trace system which is used by a team of contact tracers. Although all those who tested positive had been informed of their results, other people in close contact with them and potentially at risk of exposure were not immediately followed up (ideally within 48 hours). This was a serious error. What could have caused it? It emerged later that that...

Dr Susan Oman Lecturer in Data, AI & Society Dr Susan Oman has had some of her research highlighted by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.    In partnership with Arts Council England, Dr Oman developed a new process to improve inequality measurement, including class background, in the UK cultural sector. Through funding from AHRC’s Creative Economy Engagement Fellowship scheme, Dr Oman’s research triggered the creation of a new network of arts and culture professionals working in publicly funded institutions which offers support in gathering and analysing Equality, Diversity and Inclusion related data. Read more here.

Digital Data Flows and the COVID-19 Pandemic - should we be paying more attention?  As a third of the global population experiences some form of lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world are adapting to new ways of living and working, and looking for radical solutions to live with the virus until some form of immunity develops. Digital technologies and the data they process have been central to this response. The production and circulation of digital data is constrained by a complex web of deeply politicised social, cultural, legal, economic and technical factors. These constraints – or, “data frictions” - can be beneficial or problematic, and whether a particular friction is one or the other is often subject to significant debate. Shifts in the nature of data frictions have the potential to influence how societies function at the most fundamental level – they shape the relationship between state and citizens, the management of worker...

New Paper: Integrating FATE/Critical Data Studies into Data Science Curricula: Where are we going and how do we get there? A number of Information School academics have published a new paper for the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. The paper (published by Dr Jo Bates, Dr David Cameron, Dr Alessandro Checco, Professor Paul Clough, Dr Frank Hopfgartner, Dr Suvodeep Mazumdar, Dr Laura Sbaffi, Dr Peter Stordy, and Dr Antonio de la Vega de León) reflects on the ethical and practical aspects of teaching critical data science to inform future data practices & make them fair.  Abstract:  There have been multiple calls for integrating topics related to fairness, accountability, transparency, ethics (FATE) and social justice into Data Science curricula, but little exploration of how this might work in practice. This paper presents the findings of a collaborative autoethnography (CAE) engaged in by a MSc Data Science teaching team b...

Today, the 12th of March, marks 30 years since Sir Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal for the World Wide Web. In an interview for the BBC , Sir Berners-Lee said that global action is required to tackle the web's 'downward plunge to a dysfunctional future', especially in the wake of events like the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. In an open letter , Sir Berners-Lee also outlined three areas of 'dysfunction' that are harming the web today, encompassing areas like hacking and clickbait. Our own Professor of Search and Analytics, Paul Clough, had this to say about the anniversary and Berners-Lee's comments: "There have been numerous cases throughout history where technologies are not used for the purposes they were originally intended [1]. Indeed the underlying infrastructure of the Web - the Internet - was originally a military experiment conducted in the context of the Cold War that now forms the backbone of communications within every industry an...

A couple of weeks ago I travelled to Atlanta, USA to attend ACM FAT* - an interdisciplinary conference that addresses issues of Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Machine Learning. Officially, I was there on the hunt for potential papers and authors to invite to submit their work to Online Information Review . However, the FAT* field is also closely related to my research interests around the politics of data and algorithms, and my teaching on the Information School’s MSc Data Science . I was keen to check out what was happening in the FAT* community, and feed my findings back into my teaching and into two new projects I am working on in this field: CYCAT & supervising a new PhD student – Ruth Beresford – whose research will investigate algorithmic bias in collaboration with the Department for Work and Pensions. I was privileged to hear a number of great papers – the best of which engaged critically with issues of social context and justice. My two favourite pa...

Andrew Cox and a colleague at Sheffield Hallam have just had a book published by Facet publishing. This book is for librarians and other support professionals who are interested in learning more about RDM and developing Research Data Services in their own institution. It will also be of value to students on librarianship, archives, and information management courses studying topics such as RDM, digital curation, data literacies and open science. Find out more and buy the book here.

Doctoral student Wasim Ahmed recently visited Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Science and attended a talk by Dr Marc Smith from the Social Media Research Foundation . Wasim shared his experiences of working with industry and how academic tools could be used to gain insight into commercial datasets.

The conference started off with an uplifting keynote speech by Dr. Carla Hayden, the current Librarian of Congress. One of the comments she made towards the start of her talk was that ‘the colleagues you meet now will be with you for the rest of your career’. This resonated strongly with me as the conference proved to be an opportunity to connect, and re-connect, with a number of peers I don’t often get to see. I found myself connecting with professionals from around the country, including current and former work colleagues, fellow students, and those I’ve come across ‘in the profession’, particularly through my volunteer work with CILIP. If these are the peers I will be working with for the rest of my career, then I am truly fortunate as they are all intelligent, motivational, and hard-working! During the 'Using Data and Information' seminar, Caroline Carruthers raised the interesting concept of data hoarding, saying how we have 'forgotten the value of the information wi...

Extract taken from the LSE Impact blog: Following his initial post on this topic in 2015, Wasim Ahmed has updated and expanded his rundown of the tools available to social scientists looking to analyse social media data. A number of new applications have been released in the intervening period, with the increasing complexity of certain research questions also having prompted some tools to increase their data retrieval functionalities. Although platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp have more active users, Twitter’s unique infrastructure and the near-total availability of its data have ensured its popularity among researchers remains high. You can read the full post here .