Faculty of Information

Permanent URI for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/1807/18288

Known as Canada’s Global Information School, the Faculty of Information’s iSchool is considered to be among the world’s leading information and knowledge management schools.

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2-Thumbs Gesture: The Design and Evaluation of a Non-Sequential Bi-manual Gesture Based Text Input for Touch Tablets
(2013-04-05) Truong, Khai ; Hirano, Sen ; Hayes, Gillian R. ; Moffatt, Karyn
We present 2-Thumb Gesture (2TG), a non-sequential bi-manual gesture-based text input technique for touch tablets, which enables the user to enter text with both hands by using each thumb to draw small strokes over the keys on their respective sides of the keyboard without waiting for their turn in the letter sequence of a word. The results of a study comparing 2TG to Swype (a 1-finger word drawing method), suggest that the learning and use of the 2TG technique to perform text input is comparable with the commercial Swype technique by those who had no prior experience with either. Furthermore, participants were able to hold and use the tablet with both hands without experiencing the substantial fatigue that results from a one-handed approach. Only 60 minutes after being introduced to the technique, participants were able to use the 2-Thumb Gesture keyboard to enter text at 24.43 wpm, with an uncorrected error rate of 0.65%.
Academic Libraries Redefined: Old Mission with a New Face
(2008) Thachill, Geeta
Digital technology has created new models of education and learning; revolutionized the publishing industry and provided new ways to access, select and produce information. Universities have seen a growth in e-learning and distance learning students. Academic libraries have seen a stronger demand for electronic resources. This has impacted on the role of library services. This paper reviews scholarly and professional literature on the role of academic libraries in supporting the new models of education by procuring electronic resources and providing access to them using proper technical infrastructure and expertise. The paper also describes the continuing need for a physical space for intellectual and interactive work in an electronic environment.
Academic TikTok Report
(2022-08) Facca, Danica; Jacob, Arun; kimm, junoh; King, J.P.; Ozceylan, Mujgan; Grimes, Sara M.
This report is the main deliverable of a pilot study that looked at the use of TikTok in academic contexts, specifically for teaching and knowledge mobilization (i.e., sharing research findings and academic theories). The pilot study included a review of the relevant literature from both academic and industry sources, an environmental scan, and the compilation of a collection (or playlist) of examples of noteworthy educational TikToks. “Academic TikTok” makes a unique, timely intervention into emerging scholarly discussions about and interest in using a corporately owned social media platform—initially made popular by adolescents creating and sharing user-generated videos—for research knowledge mobilization and pedagogical outreach. While the project’s findings are preliminary, this report provides an informed starting point and lays the groundwork for future research. The intended audience of this report is academics across disciplines and in all stages of their careers who are thinking about using TikTok for professional purposes. To help readers get started with making TikToks of their own, the report provides background and contextual information about the app and the videos that circulate on it; highlights the app’s place within youth culture; describes the aesthetics that shape content on the platform and the features that make TikTok so successful; and concludes with advice for building a community of creators and best practices for using TikTok.
Accountability and Community Economic Development: The Funder-Governed NGO
(Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking, 2005) MacNeil, Ryan
This paper considers whether or not the new accountability regime is able to redefine the work of community organizations. After defining the role of the nonprofit sector and CED (Community Economic Development) organizations, discussion turns to the theoretical roots of this accountability regime. It is argued to be the product of a government working simultaneously under two conflicting administrative models: new public management and social governance. The impact of these accountability mechanisms is examined through the case of a CED agency in Nova Scotia which has struggled in its response to funders’ pressures. Three themes from the literature are explored: shifting priorities, stifling innovation, and stumbling through issues of performance measurement. The case illustrates that government can have a profound unintentional impact on community economic development. The closing discussion seeks to understand how government might achieve accountability without circumventing local governance.
Asserting Catalogers’ Place in the “Value of Libraries” Conversation
(Taylor & Francis, 2015-03-16) Borie, Juliya; MacDonald, Kate; Sze, Elisa
Catalogers have a unique challenge to overcome in demonstrating the value of their services: the better they are at performing their work—making collections accessible and enabling user discovery—the more invisible their efforts are to users and administrators. Catalogers must participate more actively in the broader discussion and demonstration of library value undertaken by their colleagues, but to do so requires a framework and a common vocabulary shared by non-catalogers.
Assessing Digital Sustainability: The Digital Sustainability Model
(Benchmark DP, 2016) Becker, Christoph; Maemura, Emily; Moles, Nathan; Whyte, Jess; Mann, Jess
Digital sustainability is the capacity of digital resources to endure. It means that the digital resources are preserved, that the life cycle of the organization is predictable, and that the life cycle of the assets is known to be safe beyond the life cycle of the organization. We consider the ideal state of digital sustainability one in which a proactive organization continuously optimizes its digital preservation capabilities towards its identified responsibilities and goals to effectively balance cost, benefit and risk, and is thus able to sustain digital resources for a community that endorses the value provided by digital sustainability. This report presents a framework – a model, method and tool – to support organizations in evaluating their digital sustainability in order to identify and prioritize ways to improve it. The Digital Sustainability Model (DSM) aims to support organizations in evaluating their abilities, strengths and weaknesses by supporting a structured self-assessment process that can be completed quickly, yet provides robust insight and useful input for actions to improve over time. The model has been designed to be extensible and evolve over time. The framework and all components are freely available with licenses that encourage adoption and derivative works with attribution. We explain the design process and the model, and shortly report on two case studies that evaluated its application to assess two organizations with advanced capabilities. We highlight how this empirical evaluation, combined with an independent third-party review, has led to changes in the framework that make it more robust. We conclude with an outline of future opportunities and planned initiatives.
Assignment or grade appeals
(2004-01-05T16:52:37Z) Adams-Webber, Tamsin ; Devakos, Rea
Instructions for appealing assignments, grades and/or due dates.
At the Edge of the Internet: Teaching Coding and Sustainability to Himalayan Girls
(2020-04) Garrett, Frances; Price, Matt; Strazds, Laila; Walker, Dawn
This report introduces a two-week workshop on web coding and environmental sustainability at a school for girls in northeastern India. Our discussion of this teaching project reviews issues that shaped the project’s development, outlines resources required for implementation, and summarizes the workshop’s curriculum. Highspeed internet will soon arrive in the region of this recently-recognized UNESCO World Heritage Site. We believe that the training of girls in particular could help redistribute power and resources in regions where women are often poorer, less educated, and excluded from decision-making in institutional and public contexts. Relatively few code teaching projects have grappled with the difficulty of working in offline environments at the “edge of the internet,” and yet moving skills and knowledge into these regions before the internet arrives in full force might help mitigate some of the web’s worst impacts on equity and justice.
Benchmarks for Digital Preservation tools
(School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2015-11) Duretec, Kresimir; Kulmukhametov, Artur; Rauber, Andreas; Becker, Christoph
Creation and improvement of tools for digital preservation is a difficult task without an established way to assess any progress in their quality. This happens due to low presence of solid evidence and a lack of accessible approaches to create such evidence. Software benchmarking, as an empirical method, is used in various fields to provide objective evidence about the quality of software tools. However, the digital preservation field is still missing a proper adoption of that method. This paper establishes a theory of benchmarking of tools in digital preservation as a solid method for gathering and sharing the evidence needed to achieve widespread improvements in tool quality. To this end, we discuss and synthesize literature and experience on the theory and practice of benchmarking as a method and define a conceptual framework for benchmarks in digital preservation. Four benchmarks that address different digital preservation scenarios are presented. We compare existing reports on tool evaluation and how they address the main components of benchmarking, and we discuss the question of whether the field possesses the right combination of social factors that make benchmarking a promising method at this point in time. The conclusions point to significant opportunities for collaborative benchmarks and systematic evidence sharing, but also several major challenges ahead.
The Bibliographical Variants Between The Last of Us and The Last of Us Remastered
(The University of Chicago Press Journals, 2016-12-01) Young, Chris J.
Adopting Matthew Kirschenbaum’s terms for the description of born-digital texts and electronic records—layer, version, release, object, state, instance, and copy—I present a case-study of The Last of Us and The Last of Us Remastered that reveals some of the secretive publishing and manufacturing practices of the videogame industry, and suggest a potential way forward for the description and citation of PS3 and PS4 videogames released on Blu-ray discs and digital downloads through the PS Store. I only discuss the platform-specific knowledge of Sony Computer Entertainment and their PS3 and PS4 consoles and videogames, specifically the editions of The Last of Us and The Last of Us Remastered. However, in doing so I provide a close reading of The Last of Us texts that furthers our knowledge and discussion of the bibliography of videogames. Such an approach draws out the minutiae critical to developing a field of research around the bibliography of videogames that may not be as perceptible in a much larger macro analysis of born-digital texts and electronic records. However, such macro-analysis studies, or distant-reading projects, will be essential in the future if the field of bibliography is to develop systems of documentation for the bibliography of videogames and other born-digital texts and electronic records.
Carnal Indexing
(Ergon Verlag, 2017) Keilty, Patrick
While online pornography’s unusual indexes may look disorderly, in fact, they evidence the process by which viewers and algorithms interact to arrange digital materials stored in databases of amateur pornography. These arrangements take shape according to patterns of browsing that serve as algorithmic data for the continuous process of organizing sexual representations. Porn sites and search engines offer a false impression of electronic metadata’s accessibility and expanse. Indexing requires discernible metadata in order to make database retrieval effective. Images are available to viewers through the negotiation of an elaborate schema in which categories of sexual desire are produced through the sequencing of fixed subject positions always defined in relation to each other. This essay will consider both sides of that organizational process. First, I will examine how the carnal aspects of browsing pornography online create a conjoined relation between subject and object in our embodied engagements with intermediating technology. Second, I will explain how this carnal activity informs this arrangement, through algorithms, of online pornographic images. Doing so reveals that pornographic video hosting services are not merely repositories for content. Instead, their visual and technical design highlights and privileges the conjoined and dynamic relations between body, machine, and representation.
Centre for Global EHealth Innovation: knowledge management
(2004-03-24T03:11:18Z) Heller, Laura
The Challenge of Test Data Quality in Data Processing
(ACM JDIQ, 2016) Becker, Christoph; Duretec, Kresimir; Rauber, Andreas
The need for robust test data sets with test oracles presents challenging questions in data and information quality research. The profound lack of high-quality test data sets to enable the dynamic testing of data processing components highlights open research challenges in data quality related to (1) sample data quality, (2) test data synthesis and (3) quality models.
Characterising Sustainability Requirements: A New Species, Red Herring, or Just an Odd Fish?
(ACM Association for Computing Machinery, 2017-05) Venters, Colin C.; Seyff, Norbert; Becker, Christoph; Betz, Stefanie; Chitchyan, Ruzanna; Duboc, Leticia; McIntyre, Dan; Penzenstadler, Birgit
Requirements articulating the needs of stakeholders are critical to successful system development and key to influencing their long-term effects. As the concept of sustainability has entered the discourse of a number of software-related computing fields, so has the term ‘sustainability requirement’. However, it is unclear whether sustainability requirements are and should be different from how we already understand software requirements. This paper presents the results of a corpus-assisted discourse analysis study that explored the concept of sustainability requirements in order to understand how the term is being used in software and requirements engineering and related fields. The results of this study reveal that the term ‘sustainability requirement’ is generally used ambiguously and reveals significant segmentation across different fields. Our detailed analysis of selected influential papers highlights the segmented use of the term and suggests key focus questions that need to be addressed to establish a shared operative understanding of the term.
Children's Books as Academic Knowledge Mobilization: Project Report
(2024-05-14) Diaz Agudelo, Marcia; Bui, Alan; Lee, Leigh-Ann; Grimes, Sara M.
There is an emerging trend of picture books written by academic authors who want to share their scholarship and ideas with children. This opens exciting new opportunities for democratizing academic knowledge and advancing scientific and technological literacy across age groups. The Children’s Books as Academic Knowledge Mobilization Project compared and analyzed 90 children’s picture books published between 2017 and 2022 written by academics for the purpose of mobilizing research findings, theories, and ideas. First, our literature review identified six “considerations” representing key trends and insights found in the existing academic literature examining children’s picture books, literacy, and learning about research, which provided the structure of our content analysis. We then describe the findings of our content analysis, while identifying best practices and common mistakes to avoid. We recommend that academics think about the six considerations discussed in this report as (or before) they begin writing their own children’s book. After describing our content analysis findings, we provide an additional seven tips for producing an effective and high-quality children’s picture book, covering issues and decisions that arise over the book-production lifecycle. Throughout the report, we emphasize the benefits that picture books can have for children’s scientific literacy and cultural participation.
Children, Youth, and Civic (dis)Engagement: Digital Technology and Citizenship
(Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking, 2005) Bell, Brandi
Sherrod, Flanagan, and Youniss (2002) state that “research on the development of citizenship is enjoying a renaissance, fueled in part by the writings of Robert Putnam (2000), who has argued that we face a civic crisis today in terms of young people’s civic disengagement”. Some of the current literature about youth and civic participation, especially in the popular press, is directly concerned with this apparent ‘civic disengagement’ of youth, attempting to understand why youth are not engaged and to determine how to encourage increased participation. There is a substantial amount of work being done by scholars, however, which is moving beyond this traditional approach to civic engagement and participation, as well as beyond the pessimistic perspective on youth civic engagement in particular. Those undertaking this work are critically engaging with the concepts of civic engagement, civic participation, and politics and are addressing the complexities of applying such concepts to the lives and experiences of children and youth. In this paper, I will discuss recent academic literature pertaining to youth civic engagement in the Western context and map some of the important changes in the field identified by these scholars. I am particularly interested in examining contemporary approaches to issues such as how youth are conceptualized; how citizenship, civic participation, and civic (dis)engagement are understood with respect to youth; and, what roles media and internet technologies are perceived to play in youth civic engagement. It is important to note that much work has been done on youth and engagement in the context of developing countries, however, this review will engage specifically with work in the Western context as an entry point into the broader issues and concerns.
CINAHL toolkit
(2004-02-11T02:14:27Z) Adams-Webber, Tamsin ; Devakos, Rea
Class 1 Handout
(2004-01-06T22:34:52Z) Adams-Webber, Tamsin ; Devakos, Rea
Class 2 History and major trends in health care
(2004-01-06T03:55:13Z) Adams-Webber, Tamsin ; Devakos, Rea
Class 2 Introduction
(2004-01-11T23:11:48Z) Adams-Webber, Tamsin ; Devakos, Rea

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