Information School News

Elizabeth Chapman , who recently successfully completed her PhD viva in the iSchool, has a featured post on the CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) blog. It focuses on the subject of her dissertation, and is entitled: Improving LGBTQ* provision in your library: why and how to do it http://www.cilip.org.uk/cilip/blog/improving-lgbtq-provision-your-library-why-how-do-it

Dr Jonathan Foster  of the Information School recently visited India to speak at several universities in Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi and to meet prospective Information School students to discuss the department's range of courses. The following article on course opportunities at the Information School was written by Dr Foster and appeared in the August issue of India's Careers360 magazine:

Wasim Ahmed, a first year PhD student at the Information School and member of the Health Informatics Research Group, has recently been featured in a White Rose Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) newsletter in the White Rose DTC PhD Researchers In The News section. The newsletter highlights Wasim’s recent impact activities such as his LSE impact blog post , his very successful research blog and his management of both the @iFutures2015 and the @DataPowerConf Twitter accounts, including the moderation of a Twitter chat which was a first for a University conference. The feature highlights Wasim’s membership of the ‘New Social Media New Social Science’   network, and his management of the @NSMNSS Twitter account which has over 3,600 strong followers comprised of researchers across disciplines from around the world. The newsletter also acknowledges collaborations Wasim has set up with researchers across continents from Europe, the Americas, and Australia which have generated po...

Dr Gianluca Demartini  of the Information School has secured funding from The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council ( EPSRC) for his project entitled "BetterCrowd: Human Computation for Big Data". A short summary of the project proposal can be read below: In the last few years we have seen a rapid increase of available data. Digitization has become endemic. This has lead to a data deluge that left many unable to cope with such large amounts of messy data. Also because of the large number of content producers and different formats, data is not always easy to process by machines due to its its diverse quality and the presence of bias. Thus, in the current data-driven economy, if organizations can effectively analyze data at scale and use it as decision-support infrastructure at the executive level, data will lead to a key competitive advantage. To deal with the current data deluge, in the BetterCrowd project I will define and evaluate Human Computation methods...

Professor Peter Bath and Research Associate Dr Julie Ellis of the Information School have had an article published in The Conversation - a collaboration between editors and academics to provide informed news analysis and commentary. The article, entitled "Save your outrage: online cancer fakers may be suffering a different kind of illness", can be read in full  here .

In this blog post, Dr. Briony Birdi presents a shortened version of her presentation at the workshop ‘The role of the local public library’, hosted by the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, 15 July 2015. The original presentation also presented ‘four future scenarios’ of public libraries, adapted from Hernon & Matthews, 2012. The public library: outdated, or what? This short piece focuses in the main on the future of public libraries, as I was requested to do. But before I do so, I’m going to briefly go back to the Victorians – what could be the harm in that? Have a look at the following two comments: ‘How…does an idea that was adopted in the Victorian era to enhance access to learning and knowledge remain relevant in an age when many people now have such access within their homes via the world wide web?’ (McMenemy, 2009, p.3). ‘The original reasons why they [public libraries] were introduced could be argued to be of lesser importance today, since lite...

PhD student Marc Bonne attended the White Rose Doctoral Training Centre's STS (Science and Technology) PhD network in York, where the focus was on Responsible Research and Innovation. This workshop provided an opportunity for students to give brief presentations on their work and receive feedback. There is more information at http://www.york.ac.uk/satsu/news-events/news/dtcstspathwayworkshop/