Information School News

My name is Wasim Ahmed , and I am a doctoral student at the Information School. I recently attended the launch of the Information School research magazine Inform . This blog post highlights my key take-homes from the launch of the research magazine. Information is all around us and due to technological developments information is more readily available at speed. Our research at the Information School focuses on understanding the power of information and how it affects people, organisations, and society. The new research magazine Inform provides a cross-section of the research within the school, stories about our research, impact, recent successes, facts and figures, research culture and environment, and provides an overview of staff and students within the school. The event highlighted the international reputation of the department for world-class research. It was wonderful to see the range of multi-disciplinary areas of research which the school undertakes. The event a...

Congratulations to Professor Paul Clough, Dr Gialuca Demartini and Dr Farida Vis for their recent funding success in relation to the following projects. Paul Clough and Gianluca Demartini gained funding for an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (studentship) with the National Archives on 'Investigating entity-centric methods for information exploration and discovery in digital archives'. The aim of this research project is to investigate entity-centric methods for supporting users as they explore and navigate the UK Government Web Archive. This would allow users to explore the archive based on entities such as people, places, locations and events in addition to search and navigation based on the content itself. Forming an entity network structure over the Government Web Archive based on Linked Data would also allow connection with existing resources, such as DBPedia and Freebase. The network structure can also be used to create additional features, such as recommendati...

The Information School’s MSc Data Science programme aims to give students the chance to enhance their analysis skills by working on real data sets.  As part of a recent assignment, students have analysed data sets on crimes which have been reported to the UK police. One assignment, conducted by Rebecca Thorpe, investigated burglaries in the South Yorkshire region and specifically examined where burglaries occur in the Sheffield area, also looking for associations with other variables.  Using boxplots, time series, line charts and Holt-Winters forecasting, this assignment found that the mean number of monthly burglaries in South Yorkshire was higher in 2012 than in 2011 or 2013.  Using Holt-Winters forecasting, the assignment predicted that burglaries would decrease in South Yorkshire over the next three years.  Focusing upon burglaries in Sheffield, it was found that instances were highly concentrated in the eastern areas of the city and there was some correlation...

Dr Jonathan Foster of the Information School is the University of Sheffield partner on a Worldwide University Network (WUN) Project on 'Data Diplomacy: Political and Social Dimensions of Data Collection and Sharing'. The project is led by the University of Rochester and is part of a WUN Global Challenge on Understanding Cultures and Global Health.  The University of Auckland, University of Bristol, and the University of Western Australia are also involved in the project. Data Diplomacy is an emerging construct that integrates concepts from data science, technology, and computing, with social science, international relations, and diplomatic negotiation.  In some cases it offers a new diplomatic tool that facilitates global relationships. Equally, questions surrounding burgeoning data creation and data sharing provide areas of tension in this new space for example issues related to privacy, security, free expression, and regulation - as well as variances particular to nation...

Briony Birdi of the Information School and Anna Barton of the School of English at the University of Sheffield are set to collaborate on an Arts Enterprise project, which was recently funded by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.    The project is entitled 'Sheffield public libraries: now and then'.   It aims to explore the origins of the free library network in Sheffield and to consider the use and value of these public spaces both at their inception and today.   It will make use of the extensive records of the public library's founding committee and the original library visitor’s books held by Sheffield Archives, alongside visual, verbal and textual footage of the libraries today.   This will be used to create an exhibition, a publication and a permanent online record that will serve as an interactive document of the library's ongoing legacy at a crucial time for the public library system in Sheffield.   The work will be carried out between Septemb...

Dr Peter Stordy and Dr Andrew Cox of the Information School have been awarded funding from the University of Sheffield’s Faculty of Social Science for a project which aims to generate new sustainable ways in which the I nformation S chool S tudent- S taff C ommittee members can bring about a better student experience.   This project began in February 2014 and is based upon Appreciative Inquiry (AI).   AI is a strengths-based approach to change and aims to look towards the future and make changes and improvements based upon positive experiences and strengths.   To date, the project team of staff and students has explored the learning experiences which students have found to be positive and memorable during their time in the Information School.   These in turn have been used to help shape and inform student wishes for the future which will help to change and improve the student experience.

Jo Bates and Robert Villa have both been successful applying to the AHRC's " Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities " Big Data projects call. Jo Bates - The Secret Life of a Weather Datum The Secret Life of a Weather Datum is a 15 month research project that will explore the socio-cultural values and practices shaping, and being shaped by, the production, collation, distribution and re-use of weather data produced by the UK’s Met Office. In order to achieve this aim, the project will be following the ‘journey’ of a single weather datum from its production into three cases of re-use: climate science, weather risk markets and citizen science projects. These cases will comprise of interviews, observations, digital ethnography and policy research. The final outcome of the project will be an interactive website and multimedia research data archive that will allow members of the public to explore this journey in more detail, thus contributing to the public ...

Farida Vis' paper “Farida Vis (2013) Twitter as a reporting tool for breaking news, Digital Journalism, 1:1, 27-47, DOI:10.1080/21670811.2012.741316 .” has been identified as a key academic paper for 2013 digital media scholarship by the Journalist's Resource project, which is based at Harvard's Shorenstein Center. Over the course of the year the project reviewed around 800 papers from around 30 journals and selected 12 final highlights including Farida’s. Farida’s paper has now had nearly 3500 views and is the second most read article in the journal so far. It was written as a follow on to The Guardian's ' Reading the Riots ' project.

Dr Ana Vasconcelos and the School's Knowledge and Information Management Research Group   have been successful in securing funding to establish one of three inter-disciplinary doctoral networks across the University. The group's proposal involves three fully funded PhD projects under the theme of 'Building Economies and Resilient Societies' (BEARS), and is a collaboration between the Information School, the University departments of Architecture, English, Geography, the Management School, ScHARR, and Town and Regional Planning, along with Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council.

FP7 project OrganiK, which aims at the development of a knowledge management framework and system for knowledge intensive SMEs in Europe, is now underway. DIS will be coordinating the activities involved in the state-of-the art review, qualitative case studies on collaborative work practices at SMEs and evaluation of project results. DIS participation will be undertaken by KIM research group members Dr. Ana Vasconcelos (coord.), Dimitris Bibikas and Tim Zijlstra, in close collaboration with Dr. Iraklis Paraskakis at affiliated research centre SEERC in Greece. Dimitris Bibikas is PhD candidate at DIS and research associate at SEERC, in Greece. The OrganiK project framework stems directly from some of his PhD results. Tim Zijlstra has recently joined DIS as research assistant, having finished the MSc. in Information Management with distinction. Before coming to Sheffield he worked in various roles in libraries as well as working as an information manager in secondary education in the Net...

Prof Sheila Corrall travelled to Brussels on Wednesday 2nd April, to brief Members of the European Parliament on the impact of Digital Libraries on scientific research. The workshop was being organized as part of the EARNEST (Education and Research Networking Evolution Study) foresight study carried out within the GEANT2 project (Multi-Gigabit European Academic Network) funded by the Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development.

MAIK – Multimedia Assessment in Information and Knowledge management We have got a small grant from HEA-ICS for an action research project to investigate the issues around getting students to create multimedia as a form of assessment in a non-technical module (in this case Level 2 module, Information management in the learning organization, INF201). No skill in creating multimedia is assumed rather the focus is on demonstrating an ability to convey an idea that participates in substantive debates in the field conception through a very short multimedia presentation. The main outcome of the project will be a reflective report on the benefits and issues (support, copyright, balance with other forms of assessment). The value will be in extending the variety of available assessment methods and tapping into student interest in things like YouTube and the emergence of very easy to use tools such as slide.com and MS Photostory. We hope spin-off benefits will include some student created materi...

The 7 partner EU project, Treble-CLEF will start Jan, 2008. It will promote & investigate evaluation of digital libraries that search across languages.