Billboard on South Congress Street

A newly formed SIG at the New Member ASIS&T Brunch.

From a Let’s Talk about Tagging Poster

From a Let’s Talk about Tagging Poster

From a Let’s Talk about Tagging Poster

Linn Marks Collins from Los Alamos National Lab spoke about some projects at LANL that are trying to reduce the amount of time scientists spend searching for information. One of the projects is called ScienceSifter, and is designed to use RSS to create customized feeds for different lab groups at LANL based on the reading habits in the lab. In addition to a conventional title-abstract interface for the results, they have also developed a hyperbolic tree interface. Collins urged librarians to get involved in the cyberinfrastructure movement (spearheaded by NSF) — because at this point it is scientists and not digital libraries people who are setting the agenda.

Chaomei Chen from Drexel spoke on collective intelligence and holistic sense-making. Chen defines collective intelligence as an emergent property of a society, community, etc. The idea in collective intelligence is to identify the hot topics in a subject area, how they are related, how they evolve, and (most interesting) how to identify emergent insights within the subject area.

The second session of the day was on the leisure perspective. One of the ideas of the session was to establish a “serious leisure perspective’ in information-seeking and use. Includes ELIS (Everyday Life Information-seeking), conferences (such as Information-Seeking in Context (ISIC). There are a number of findings within leisure domains that contradict widely held propositions about information-seeking behavior, such as anomalous states of knolwedge, information anxiety, or the principle of least effort.

Robert Stebbins, a sociologist from the University of Calgary, spoke about the serious leisure perspective. Part of this perspective is a typology of leisure. At the top level, leisure breaks down into casual leisure (”an immediately, intrinsically rewarding, relatively short-lived pleasurable core activity, requiring little or no special training to enjoy it”), serious leisure (”systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer core activity that people find so substantial, interesting, and fulfilling” that they pursue it as an avocation), and projects (”a short-term, moderately complicated, either one-shot or occasional, though infrequent, creative undertaking carried out in free time”). Some characteristics of serious leisure include perseverance, career, significant effort in acquiring knowledge, training, and skill, durable benefits, ethos/social world, and identity. There has been very little work done to look at amateurs in either science (astronomers?) or arts/entertainment, although there has been some work done on amateur sports participants.

I attended my first Student Chapter Advisor meeting as the new faculty advisor for the Simmons chapter, and it was interesting to hear what other student groups around the country are up to. The only bad thing about this meeting was that I wasn’t able to make it to the SIG KNIT dinner!

The Alumni Reception was great for me — a good opportunity to catch up with all my colleagues at UNC-Chapel Hill. The International Reception was kinda crazed, what with the raffle and all the silent auctions going on. I forgot to pack any of my knitted stuff to put into the auction — but I did get a book for cheap!

I’ve created a page on our wiki for the notes I’ve taken during sessions. So far I have only the plenary session up but more will be coming when I get the chance to type them up.

One of the sessions I attended was Search Result Visualization. The first speaker, Brad Eden from UCSB, gave us a quick tour of some of the places on the web you can play around with 3d information visualization. Linn Marks Collins from Los Alamos National Laboratory spoke about two tools they’ve developed, Active Graph and Science Sifter. Active Graph is an interactive scatter plot and Science Sifter uses RSS technologies to create new feeds which can be viewed as lists, lists with descriptions, or as a hyperbolic tree. Chaomei Chen from Drexel showed several cool ways of visualizing information in his talk, Collective Intelligence and Holistic Sense Making, including using one of my favorite toys, Google Earth, to show locations of citations.

Another session I went to yesterday was entitled Taking Leisure Seriously. Robert A. Stebbins gave a talk entitled Leisure and Information Science: Bridging the Gap. He has written extensively about the serious leisure perspective. He divides leisure into three categories: casual leisure, serious leisure, and projects. Serious leisure is divided into amateurism, volunteerism, and hobbies. (More info about the serious leisure perpsective)

To end on a related note, last night some members of the special interest group on knitting (SIG/KNIT) went out to dinner. Keep your eyes open for upcoming research into the yarn-seeking behavior of knitters, pattern designing for uncertainty, and 3-d visualization of yarn stashes.

In the afternoon, I spent much of the time in the hotel room working on my SIG/CON presentation and loading some pictures into flickr.

The evening was filled with receptions. The alumni reception was well attended, and featured carved roasts (turkey and beef). I have developed a taste for a local beer called Shiner Bock, as you will see in this photo. From there I went to a reception hosted by Syracuse (where I got my PhD), and then on to the SIG III International Reception, where they hold an auction to raise money to bring ASIST memebers from developing countries to the conference. Finally I was in the Presidential Suite for a tradition where past presidents welcome the new president. By that time my camera memory was overloaded, or I would have taken some pictures – some pretty important scholars and movers and shakers have been presidents of ASIST.