Information School News

Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly is giving an invited research seminar at the Faculty of Media & Communication at Bournemouth University on Wednesday 24th May, 4-5pm. The talk is entitled 'Social media and contentious parades in divided societies: Tweeting the 2014 and 2015 Ardoyne parade disputes.' The abstract for Paul's talk is below: To what extent do social media facilitate debate between Catholics and Protestants about contentious parades and protests in post-conflict Northern Ireland? Do these ‘affective publics’ tend to escalate or de-escalate the tensions caused by these events? This paper addsresses these issues through a qualitative study of how citizens used Twitter in response to contentious Orange Order parades in the Ardoyne district of North Belfast in 2014 and 2015. Twitter provided a platform for ‘affective publics’ who expressed a myriad of sentiments towards the Orange Order, in addition to the residents who opposed the loyalist parade passing the...

Professor Paul Clough from the Information School is giving an invited talk at the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) 2014 conference in Bangalore, India, between 5 and 7 December .  His talk is entitled "Examining the Limits of Crowdsourcing for Relevance Assessment "  and is based on work which he has undertaken with the UK National Archives. Evaluation is instrumental in the development and management of effective information retrieval systems and ensuring high levels of user satisfaction. Using crowdsourcing as part of this process has been shown to be viable. What is less well understood are the limits of crowdsourcing for evaluation, particularly for domain specific search.  Professor Clough will present results comparing relevance assessments gathered using crowdsourcing with those gathered from a domain expert for evaluating different search engines...

The iSchool had strong representation at the European Conference on Information Literacy held in Dubrovnik at the end of last month: Sheila Webber gave an invited talk (with Bill Johnston, Strathclyde University, Information Literacy as a discipline: a contemporary perspective ), she chaired a panel session on Relating Research and Practice in Information Literacy (with panelists Dr Ola Pilerot and Professor Louise Limberg (University of Boras, Sweden), and Bill Johnston), was one of the academics providing feedback at the doctoral forum, and also presented a poster, Digital Citizenship: Global Perspectives Across Age Levels , created with Dr Valerie Hill (Texas Woman's University, USA). Two of her PhD students also presented at the conference: Syeda Hina Shahid presented in the doctoral forum on Early findings from a study of information literacy practices in primary schools of Pakistan . Evanthia Tramantza (with Konstantina Martzoukou, Robert Gordon University) gave a presen...

The Department hosts the Fifth Joint Sheffield Conference on Chemoinformatics from 13th to 15th July 2010, in the University's Octagon Centre. More details can be found here: http://cisrg.shef.ac.uk/shef2010/ The conference will showcase the research of the Department alongside presentations from the field's leading researchers from across the world.

Mark Sanderson is an invited speaker at the MLMI conference, held in early September in Utrecht in the Netherlands. The title of Mark's talk is "Measuring interactivity on search engines is hard, unless you're Yahoo, Microsoft, or Google". http://www.mlmi.info/index.php?id=invited_speakers