Information School News

Elizabeth L Chapman who recently completed her PhD at the Information School will be speaking at the Southbank Centre's Changing Britain Festival on Saturday 2 May 2015 The Festival focuses upon the 1997 to 2015 period and Elizabeth will be speaking during the 'Changing Britain Bites' session at 17.00.  She will discuss the research topic of her PhD, which is the provision of LGBT fiction to children and young people in public libraries. Until recently there was little LGBT fiction available for children and young people in the UK.  Elizabeth's will discuss how this has changed over time, and will also outline some of the findings from her PhD research. For more information about the event, visit the Southbank Centre website  or follow them on Twitter .  The Festival hashtag is #changingbritain and Elizabeth can also be found tweeting as @lgbtlibrarian .

On Tuesday 28 April Professor Peter Bath will speak as part of the British Council's Science For All Talks in Istanbul, Turkey. The series focuses upon popular topics in science and Professor Bath will speak about big data and health, specifically focusing upon the importance of big data in healthcare and peoples' lives.  He will also examine the experiences in the UK and in Turkey surrounding big data and health.  Big data and data science technologies are increasingly being used in the healthcare sector to gather patient data and provide a more complete picture of a patient which can help to inform care coordination, population health management, and patient engagement. The event takes place in the Istanbul Modern Cinema Hall at 19:00.  Further information is available on the British Council website .

Anne Burns, Research Assistant at the Information School for the Picturing the Social Project , recently attended the Selfie Citizenship workshop on 16 April 2015 at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her full write up from the workshop can be found here . The workshop was organised by Adi Kuntsman, Farida Vis and Simon Faulkner. It focused on exploring the connection between social media and citizenship theories, reinforcing the importance and relevance of the work that is being carried out by the Visual Social Media Lab of which Farida Vis and Simon Faulkner are members. Thanks to funding from the Digital Society Network, ten members of staff and students from across the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Sheffield were able to attend the Selfie Citizenship workshop.

March 2015 saw the launch of the lifeofdata.org.uk website by Jo Bates and Paula Goodale as part of the AHRC funded Secret Life of a Weather Datum project. The project, which has been running over the last 15 months, aimed to pilot a new approach for better understanding and communicating how socio-cultural values and practices interact with the transformation of weather data on its journey from initial production at Sheffield’s Weston Park weather station through to re-use in climate science and financial markets. The project also explored the contribution of citizen science generated weather data to this data infrastructure. The team worked with a variety of organisations and projects including Sheffield’s Weston Park Museum, the Met Office, the Old Weather project and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The lifeofdata.org.uk website that was developed as part of the project aims to present some of the initial findings of the project in an innova...

Pamela McKinney and Emily Wheeler (former MA Librarianship student, now Research Support Advisor at University of Leeds Library) presented at the UK's information literacy conference, LILAC, this week. The presentation, Teaching or training? Academic librarians’ conceptions of their IL activities , was based on Emily's 2014 Masters dissertation.

At the start of March Dr Robert Villa presented a plenary talk entitled "Understanding assessors: a forgotten element of big data research?" at the 7th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics . This conference is run annually by the Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics and this year taking place in Valladolid. The talk discussed the importance of studying the human assessors who generate the training collections which are required when using supervised training methods, as is typical when applying machine learning techniques, and is based on work carried out in the AHRC funded project "Understanding the annotation process: annotation for Big data". In this project we're looking in more detail at the behaviour of assessors, and how gathering more information about assessor behaviour could potentially be applied in machine learning. This was a terrific opportunity to meet up with members of the corpus linguistics community, and to learning mor...

In this blog post, Wasim Ahmed , PhD student in the Information School (pictured bottom left), reports on the recent Studies in Social Data Meetup at Twitter London. The first Studies in Social Data Meetup at Twitter London was held on the 1st of April, with 150 attendees who were all eager to discuss different aspects of social data. The event was organised by Patrick Callahan from compassRed and Carl Davis from so adaptive. The event was co-sponsored by the Big Boulder Initiative (BBI). Farida Vis, Faculty Research Fellow in The Information School and involved in the BBI, contributed to opening the event by saying a few words about what the initiative is about and to flag up the upcoming Big Boulder conference this summer. In opening the Meetup Patrick and Carl commented that the event had a good turnout from both academia and industry, which was seen as positive. The event provided an overview of how social data is used in industry, government, and academia, and the diffe...

Professor Peter Bath of the Information School will take part in the 2015 24 Hour Inspire event which starts at 17:00 on Thursday 16 April and finishes at 17:00 on Friday 17 April 2015. During the event, lectures will be delivered by University of Sheffield and external speakers on a wide range of subjects.  Professor Bath's lecture - 'A problem shared...? Online sharing among people with a life-threatening illness' - starts at 06:30 on Friday 17 April.  He will describe his current research as part of the ' Space for Sharing ' project, which was funded by the cross-Council EMoTICON programme.  He will discuss some initial thoughts from the early stages of the project on the information and experiences that people with a life-threatening illness share in online discussion forums.  He will also consider how this work is being carried out, what he and his co-workers are trying to find out and the ethical considerations on this type of research. The 2015 24 Hour I...