Information School News

The Information School, in association with the Centre for Visual Studies, is pleased to announce two forthcoming events focusing upon arts-informed studies of information and arts-informed methods for information research. On Tuesday 21 October a lecture on ‘An Arts-Informed Study of Information Using the Draw-and-Write Technique’ will take place at 13:00 in the ICOSS Conference Centre.  The lecture will be delivered by Dr Jenna Hartel , Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and the University of Toronto and Visiting Scholar at the University of Sheffield Information School.   It will focus upon an arts-informed visual research project exploring the concept of information.   Graduate students participating in this project created ‘iSquare’ drawings to depict information.  The lecture will include a demonstration of the data gathering approaches which were used in the project as well as a report on iSquare research that is soon to take pla...

Dr Farida Vis of the Information School has been asked to serve a second term on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Social Media .  Council members include Deb Roy of MIT and Chief Media Scientist at Twitter.  Several new members have been appointed to the Council who have a particular focus upon issues around journalism and data story telling.  Newly appointed members include: Emily Bell   - Professor of Professional Practice and Director, Tow Center for Digital Journalism , Columbia Journalism School Mohamed Nanabhay   - Former Head of Online, Al Jazeera English, now   signalnoi.se Claire Wardle   - Senior Social Media Officer, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), formerly at Storyful, the world's first social media news agency    Xavier Damman   - Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Storify Dr Vis’ current ESRC funded ‘Picturing the Social’ project was featured in the re...

As part of the University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind event, Sunday 28 September will see the Mind Investors event take place in Sheffield city centre.  This event will see researchers pitch their ideas to an audience who can quiz the researchers on their proposals, make suggestions and vote for the projects which they think are most interesting, valuable and deserving of investment. Dr Jorge Martins of the Information School will be taking part in this event and will present several projects which he is currently involved in as part of the Sheffield Crucible programme: 'If Sheffield stones could talk’ – The p eople of Sheffield are emotionally connected to the buildings in their city.  While some of them have been transformed or disappeared, their memory remains.  This project is developing a mobile application that allows an augmented reality experience of some the city's disappeared built heritage, enriched with the living memory of its citizens. ‘F...

Yesterday, Farida Vis of the Information School gave a presentation at the first Social Media for Researchers: A Sheffield Universities Social Media Symposium (full programme details available  here ). The aim of this first symposium was to encourage researchers to maximise the potential of social media, both for their research and for their careers as researchers. A wide range of topics were covered, including  trends in social media relating to research and researchers, advice on establishing an effective online presence, the use of social media as research data, social media's role in enhancing academic conversations as well as a range of approaches (such as  Altmetrics ) for dissemination and measuring scholarly output.   The symposium was organised by the  Sheffield Hallam Researcher Development Programme ( SHaRD )  and The University of Sheffield's Research and Innovation Services ( R&IS ) and was aimed at research staff and post-gr...

Professor Peter Bath of the Information School will be giving two talks at the University’s Festival of the Mind event this week, both of which will focus upon story telling.  His talks will focus upon the Nottingham Longitudinal Study of Activity and Ageing.  His first will be included in the 'Tales from the Ivory Tower'  event in the   Spiegeltent  in Barker's Pool on Thursday 25 September between 14:00 and 15:00.  The second talk will take place on Friday 26 September between 17:30 and 20:00 as part of the ‘Researchers’ Night Tales from the Ivory Tower’ in Krebs Café, Firth Court.    All are welcome to attend.

Congratulations to Professor Peter Bath of the Information School who was awarded the Faculty of Social Science’s award for Innovation in Research at the Faculty’s recent interdisciplinary research conference. This award was presented in recognition of the innovative and multidisciplinary nature of his ESRC funded “A Shared Space and a Space for Sharing” project.  This project is being funded under the Empathy and Trust in Communicating Online (EMoTICON) call following a sand-pit organised by the ESRC in January 2014.  The aim of the project is to develop a   transdisciplinary understanding of the online sharing of personal information, emotion and resources by people experiencing extreme circumstances such as the diagnosis of a life-threatening or terminal illness, recovering from drug addiction or experiencing   natural disasters.   

The Information School’s Raspberry Pie Weather Project will be on show at the V&A Museum’s Digital Design Weekend in London on 20 and 21 September 2014. The event showcases contemporary digital art and design and it includes a range of interactive activities, workshops and demonstrations.  It is free to attend and open to everyone. Paula Goodale of the Information School will be attending the event with the raspberry pi weather station which has been created alongside the AHRC-funded Secret Life of a Weather Datum research project .   She will be joined at the event by Yuwei Lin who is also a member of the Secret Life of a Weather Datum project team.  The event will allow the general public to have hands on experience in creating a raspberry pi weather station.