School of Library and Information Science Papers and Such

These documents are the products of classes and associated activities from my time at SLIS. If you have any comments I'd like to hear them. Please send me some email at cdent@burningchrome.com. For the highlights see Hypertext and Knowledge Enhancement, The Computer as Tool, Creating conceptual access to the unrev-ii archive and Helium. The following list of classes is not complete. Included are only those classes for which there was an easy to present product or work of which I'm partcularly proud.

L505 ] [ L501 ] [ L542 ] [ L597 ] [ L697 ] [ A593 ] [ L594 ] [ L600 ] [ L509 ] [ L596 ] [ B649 ]

L505: Organization and Representation of Knowledge (Spring, 2001: Kathryn LaBarre)

Syllabus

Classification Project
This is a collection of references about web-based automatic classification systems used for a short class presentation. This was my outline for the presentation.
Short Papers
For each class session we had to write a short response to the readings. There's a strong thread of idealism in here. I hope to keep it that way, but I fear grad school will be crushing. These were exported from Word so may be a bit funky.
Final Project: Hypertext and Knowledge Enhancement
For the final project we were to do a "something" that demonstrated that we had synthesized the material in the class. From the project:
This project is about hypertext and knowledge enhancement, where hypertext came from and why it can be a helpful tool for knowledge enhancement. Therefore this project is about itself. It uses hypertext, search systems, an automated glossary and links to related resources to help the user know more about hypertext, learning and discovering. In the process it attempts to critique and corrupt itself, hypertext, authority and authorship.

L501: Introduction to Information Science (Fall, 2001: Dr Howard Rosenbaum and Dr John Paolillo)

Course Reflection Paper
At the end of the semester we were required to reflect upon the class and the group work performed. I chose to comment on self-organization.

L542: Human Computer Interaction (Fall, 2001: Dr Andrew Dillon)

Design Diaries
A collection of five short commentaries on technological objects, interfaces or environments with bad design. The commentaries include why something is viewed as a problem, some recommendations to fix it and references to the literature.
The Computer as Tool
Term paper: An attempt to show that viewing the computer as a tool instead of a Suchman style intentional interactive artifacts has benefits in both the short and long terms.

L597: Foundations of Information Architecture (Fall, 2001: Dr Elin Jacob)

Readings Journal
Each week in this class we were to write a short reaction or summary of each of the readings. My reactions are collected in a system of my own design called Arts. These vary from boring little summaries through pissed off little screeds to extensive commentaries synthesizing the readings.
Law School website information architecture review
A critique, with recommendations, of the information architecture of the Indiana University Law School's web site. I hated this assignment and it shows.

L697: Information Visualization (Spring, 2002: Dr Katy Börner)

Introductory Web Page
A short web page to introduce ourselves to the class, explain our interests and demonstrate some java code.
Project 2
Initial experimentation with Hyperbolic Trees and Treemaps using available visualization tools and a dataset of our choice. This is in progress, I'm attempting to map the structure of a Wiki.
Project 3
Experimentation with Latent Semantic Analysis and Spring Embedding to explore similarity between text documents. In this case the archive from the unrev-ii mailing list. This is a work in progress.
Project 4
Reimplementation of the Spring layout algorithm for graph drawing. Used in information visualization to display, amongst other things, similarity matrices. This implementation draws on developments from other systems to create an open, extensible, java-based system that can be freely used for education and research purposes.

A593: Computer Structures (Spring, 2002: Dr Jonathan Mills)

Final Project: task-switching in 68000 assembly
I opted for a custom final project because as the prof put it "I want you to get way outside the box."

L594: Independent Study (Summer, 2002: Kathryn La Barre)

Investigations of methods to partially automate the generation of facets for creating faceted access structures to email and other textual archives. Integrates faceted classification, semantic analysis, information visualization, database design, collaborative evaluation and user studies. Follow the references for more information. The independent study formalizes work begun in the Spring semester.

Formal Independent Study Proposal Form
Description of the current work in progress
Creating conceptual access to the Unrev-II archive
My latent semantic analysis and spring layout visualization work from the Spring visualization class alongside Kathryn's textual analysis theoretical context work. Includes a paper submitted to PORT's Pragmatic Web Workshop 2002 that describes the value of associative structures in the creation of formal knowledge access structures. An HTML version of the first draft of the paper is available as well as the final version. Note the difference between the two; the result of collaborative review. The archive of that review is available.
Announcement of the work at the Bootstrap Institute
We let them know what we were up to. Some conversation ensued on the email lists.
Starting point in my Warp
Provides a little more context on the project.
Search interfaces
Links to two search interfaces for the unrev-ii archive. One is simple keyword index. The other is an interface to a database that allows several styles of searching and evaluation of the messages. It is designed to be the foundation for creating the formal access structures described in the paper above.

L600: Independent Readings (Summer, 2002: Kathryn La Barre and Dr. Deborah Shaw)

A readings group to discover some of the theoretical underpinnings of information science using the augmentation of Douglas Engelbart and embodied cognition of Andy Clark as a starting point. Most discussion is held through email.

Short Description of Group and Books
Mailing list archive
There's a great deal of pithy commentary within.
Search Interface to discussion

L509: Research Methods and Statistics (Fall, 2002: Dr. John Paolillo)

A required SLIS course that introduces research principles and methods and some of the statistical methods used in quantitative research. Our course requirements include statistical exercises and reviews of existing research.

A Review of "Appreciative Inquiry as a Team-Development Intervention: A Controlled Experiment"
Learning versus Performance: A Review and Critique of: "Co-Evolution of Technological Design and Pedagogy in an Online Learning Community"

L596: Blue Oxen Associates Internship (Fall, 2002: Dr. Deborah Shaw and Eugene Eric Kim)

I chose to do an internship in the final semester as the choice of classes was getting a bit slim and I had been invited to participate in the creation of an organization called Blue Oxen Associates. As the semester advanced I moved from an intern to one of the directors and cofounders of the organization.

Blue Oxen Associates is a research group exploring high performance collaboration, especially the impact of knowledge processes and tool use on collaboration.

B649: Applied Java Design Patterns (Fall, 2002 Dr. Gregory Rawlins)

Since the beginning of my time as a grad-student, many people around IU had been telling me to take a class from Gregory Rawlins especially one involving his KnownSpace project. Other people had been telling me to take his classes because his expectations were very high. I was intrigued.

The class I took was ostensibly instruction in the use of design patterns in software engineering. It's been far more than that. The final project has been a demonstration of ways of thinking about collaboration, software design, and pretty much everything else as well. An extremely rigorous and positive experience.

The final project, Helium, put together all the pieces that we learned to create a new iteration of KnownSpace that is accessible to people so they can see the value of the architecture.

Assignments 1-5
The first assignments, although difficult, were just warmups for the final project. The first four demonstrated use of design patterns. The fifth exercised some of the issues with team dynamics and extreme programming.
Final Project
Helium was the final project. Over a two month period we took an alpha information management architecture and turned it into a usable email navigation application to demonstrate the architecture and the tools and ideas used to create it. I wrote a description of the process one evening when I was feeling enthusiastic.

Graduation: December 21, 2002


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