Information School News

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...

In recent research, Information School alumni Xuguang Li, Senior lecturer Dr. Andrew Cox and Zefeng Wang from Shenzhen Energy Group Co explored a LinkedIn Dell User Group, where users help each other to fix product problems, as a case study in how social network sites can support the construction of knowledge. They found that the groups users were actively engaged in collaborative construction of knowledge and that a key phase in this knowledge construction took place in discussions categorised as “proposing a new idea”. The research also found that the collaboration was supported by the ways that the LinkedIn platform enables one-to-one interaction. In the group there was frequent usage of the technical symbol @ to communicate with particular members about testing their idea, to ask focused questions and more. The authors argue that the visibility of the users’ identity in the group was key to the cooperation and lack of verbal abuse that they saw in the activities on the platf...

Online Information Review, the international, ISI listed journal edited by Jo Bates, Andrew Cox, Robert Jäschke and Angela Lin from the Information School has just announced three Calls For Papers for Special issues on: Social Media Mining for Journalism http://emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/news_story.htm?id=7570 Lifelogging Behaviour and Practice http://emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/call_for_papers.htm?id=7544 Open-access mega-journals: Continuity and innovation in scholarly communication http://emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/call_for_papers.htm?id=7545

Congratulations to Dr Jo Bates , Dr Andrew Cox , Dr Angela Lin and Dr Paul Reilly at the Information School have been appointed as editors for the international Online Information Review journal.