Projects

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Academia-Industry Big Data Collaboration for Early Career Researchers program: Developing organizational expertise and resources for the responsible conduct of research with human generated and publicly available data

Time frame
2015-2016
Investigator
Jana Diesner
Total funding to date
$5,000.00
Funding agency
Midwest Big Data Hub & Computing Community Consortium

Researchers frequently collect, use, and analyze publicly available data from social networking platforms, online production communities, and customer review websites, among other sources, as part of their research activities. Technically, it can be feasible and straightforward to access and obtain public data, while considering the ethics, norms, and regulations applicable to these data…

An Analysis of Metadata Encoding Standards

Investigator
David Dubin

Like most XML applications, METS, the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard, overloads a small number of generic syntactic relationships (e.g., parent/child) to represent a variety of specific semantic relationships. Human beings correctly infer the meaning of METS markup, and these understandings inform the logic and design of applications that import, export, and transform METS-encoded…

An informational history of the British Diplomatic Service

Investigator
Alistair Black

In October 2009 the BBC aired a short series of radio programmes entitled Parting Shots. The programmes featured a series of final communications, called valedictory despatches, from British Ambassadors leaving their posts to take up duties elsewhere or retire from the Diplomatic Service. As opposed to being merely vehicles for conveying reflective and summary knowledge about…

Analysis of Academic Activity Patterns in Academic Literature

Time frame
2017-2017
Investigators
Jana Diesner, Vetle Torvik
Total funding to date
$25,000.00
Funding agency
Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information

The project team will work on extracting key concepts from scholarly publications and explore techniques for building a taxonomy of extracted concepts by leveraging open knowledge bases (e.g., Wikipedia). The outcome of this process will be evaluated for various science and technology knowledge platform-based analysis services. The techniques, which reduce semantic ambiguity, will analyze…

App Authors: Closing the App Gap II

Time frame
2014-2019
Investigator
Kate McDowell
Total funding to date
$248,205.00
Funding agency
Institute of Museum and Library Services

The focus of this three-year, multisite project is development of app-based curricula and tools for use in school and public libraries. These tools will teach children aged eight to twelve how to build their own apps, providing them with early programming experience, and allow them to share their creations with other children. The project further establishes libraries as places to engage youth…

ARIADNE Collaborative Browsing Project

Investigator
Michael Twidale

The use of library resources is stereotyped as a solitary activity, with hardly any mention in the library science and information retrieval literature on the social aspects of information systems. However, it is clear that end-users engage in significant collaboration; both with co-searchers, library staff and other interested parties. The skill of locating information is one that a growing…

BECHAMEL Markup Semantics Project

Investigator
David Dubin

Markup licenses inferences about a text. But the information warranting such inferences may not be entirely explicit in the syntax of the markup language used to encode the text. This paper describes a Prolog environment for exploring alternative approaches to representing facts and rules of inference about structured documents. It builds on earlier work proposing an account of how markup…

Bridging the "Two Cultures": The Architecture of the New British Library

Time frame
2016-2017
Investigator
Alistair Black

Opened in 1997, the new British Library at St. Pancras, London was designed as a building of two main volumes, one devoted to the arts and humanities, the other to science, technology and business. This dichotomy echoed the debate set in motion in 1959 by the publication of C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. The project asked in which ways this debate fed through into…

Building Broadband Infrastructure

Investigator
Kate Williams
Total funding to date
$108,000.00
Funding agency
Ford Foundation

This project, a subaward from the University of Michigan, compares broadband development processes and outcomes across three leading domestic broadband initiatives: the federal government’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) and Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP), and the experimental Google Fiber initiative. Working closely with the sponsoring organizations and a subset of…

Buildings of Hope

Investigator
Alistair Black
Total funding to date
$16,250.00
Funding agency
University of Illinois Research Board

Against the backdrop of a powerful desire for national modernization, the Long 1960s (c. 1955-1975) witnessed attempts to build, literally, a better post-war Britain. The unprecedented burst of building activity that marked the post-war years included the planning and construction of hundreds of public library buildings, clothed in a variety of modernist styles symbolic of the period's spirit…