Randy Hinrichs is CEO of 2b3d, a virtual world company with offices in Second Life. He stopped by today to demonstrate the locales that they’ve built to help clients conduct business and do work online on Second Life.

We were treated to a tour of their office. Features included board rooms, employee training facilities and medical training facilities. These spots are augmented with communicative and training tools. For example, the board room includes slideshows, blackboards, and other live conferencing tools.

Randy explained (and demonstrated) one advantage of Second Life. At a fast-food training booth, he walked through the paces that a future employee might take to learn the procedures for his job. The simulated experience is well-suited to convey mechanics and procedures that are hard to teach via powerpoint or lectures. How do you teach someone that they have to wash their hands for a full 20 seconds? The simulated experience is more capable of conveying that experience than traditional methods.

Some topics that came up in conversation:

How “inefficient” is this environment for accomplishing work?
There were a number of responses:
- There exist some frustrating quirks, but the gains in contextual and social cues are worthwhile.
- Second Life at this point is comparable to the early Web: it is a particular culture; people aren’t sure about what to do with it (they’ve tried selling traditional stuff on it and failed – think Pets.com); but it is populated, people are here, and they are innovating.

The monetary model of Linden Labs is different than the completely free model of the Web. How does this affect the future of Second Life?
- Linden Labs is not the only player. We will have to watch this and other companies as they explore different platforms and business models.

The 3D interface is known to cause vertigo for some people. Have you run into this issue with your clients?
- We haven’t really.
- This type of interaction is in demand by the next generation and we anticipate more adoption in the future.
- Potential solutions might be having different interfaces that bypass the vertigo effect for different users.

Michael Hoyle, currently Project Manager and Lead Researcher at the International Records Management Trust. This is a London-based NGO which concerns itself with helping developing countries establish electronic records-keeping tools and wrestling with the obstacles that are related to this endeavor.What does the IRMT do?
- Established 1989
- Small NGO in the UK
- Meant to respond to the collapse of records-keeping and management in developing countries (A set from one of their conferences included officials from: Angola, Botswana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe)
- Help build “evidenced-based governmence

Three key parts: 1/ Consultancy Services, 2/ Education and Training Activities, and 3/ Development Research

Research focus
Note: The definition of records that we use: “information created, received, and maintained as evidence and information, by an organization or person, in pursuance of legal obligations or in the transaction of business”

ICT and developing countries
(Issues like: cellphone adoption or merely the lack of electricality)
Computerised information must be reliable and trustworthy over time if it is to be used:
- to provide the basis for informed decision making
- for effective service industry
- for addressing corruption through increased transparency
The trustworthiness and reliability of computer applications is affected by
- quality of the documentary evidence input to and generated by electronic systems
- and the need of an audit trail to ensure accountability

Issues:
Many governments are attempting to move to the electronic evironment without taking account of the implications for managing records as evidence. Many are seeking to introduce electronic systems based on manual systems that have been poorly managed or have collapsed.

Question: When you convert governments from “no records” to “records”, how do you verify the accuracy of the new records?
Response: Agreed, the verification process is essential and, yet, can be almost impossible. How do you start with “zero”? Integrity of data is fundamental and essential.

Some Foci:
Primary focus on human resources and payroll information as a means of exploring the issues involved in transitioning from manual to electronic systems.

• Exploring the management of manual data as inputs to payroll, the management of electronic records as digital outputs, and the links between them.
• Examining the management of digital records scanned into human resource information systems.

Some problems facing developing countries: dealing with corruption & lack of transparency, finding ‘ghost workers’, meeting national and international audit requirements… Ghost workers might be people who have multiple “positions”, people who don’t exist or are dead, or who don’t work — all of which have salaries that are being collected by someone.

Question: As you get rid of corruption, is there pressure on the archivis to stop doing thier work because it exposes corruption?
Response: There is resistance to change. We have seen resistance from groups that profiteer from the old system. This is not to say that all systems are corrupt, although this is prevalent in poorer locales.

Methodology
To coordinate across researchers in North America, Europe, and Africa, we created a toolkit for researchers. Our method was to : 1/ collect qualitative information through documentary research and interview, 2/ map information flows, noting inputs and outputs plus information created and authorisation, and 3/ conduct quantitation research: collect employment data, etc…

(One trouble here is that records are often fudged for different reasons. One example is where an older employee fakes his age so as to remain employed.)

A Few Findings

• Significant human resource system upgrades either planned or being undertaken to systems.
• Flexible next generation software, using web-based browser technologies, being introduced.
• Human Resource Management often highly centralised – MDA’s will have greater system access and control.
• Devolution to local regions or office… producing a need to manage records and other information requirement implications.
• Infrastructure and regulatory environment need strengthening (records and ICT) due to this decentralisation.
• Manual systems often date from colonial times.
• ICT is seen as the solution to information management problems, but little understanding exists of records as evidence and for accountability.
• Relationship between eGovernance and electronic records management needs strengthening.
• Professional project management skills, including planning, stakeholder management, training and sensitisation are required.
• Business process re-engineering is being driven by procurement considerations as much as by information requirements.
• Interface between human resource information systems and payroll (often part of an Integrated Financial Information Management System) needs to be strengthened.
• HRIS driving the payroll rather than being used for management of human resources (planning etc…)
• Information is created in a mixed media (manual/electronic) enviroment that is often disconnected, lacking in integration…

Particular Challenges

• Gaining approval for researching in the case study nations
• Consultant and research fatigue by host countries
• Access to manual & electronic data
• Access to officials (Occasionally receiving hostile emotions about how intrusive and disruptive their research would be)
• Building resources and rapport (Sometimes taking weeks to establish)
• Language cultural issues
• Dealing with slow times in the field

Our deliverables

• A route map providing sequence strategy for moving from  manual to electronic environment
• Guidance materials for good practice in recordskeeping
• Six training modules on managing electornic records
• Database of case studies with a report summarising the findings

A late post from the week before. Also, I missed this last week’s conversation – apologies.

Deborah Finkle shared about the cyber security research program in the DOE here in Washington – how it is to run a research lab funded by the government and directed by their security concerns.Life at a National Lab

National laboratories distinguish themselves from academic due to pragmatics and an emphasis on decisions that need to be made within the year or so. National laboratories do define boxes of interest where the researchers have to fit themselves in. For example, research topics must have “national” relevance. We are very sensitive to bills that are or are not passed by Congress. This has a direct impact on our funding. The scientists who are employed are tightly tied to this. In a national laboratory, research time is scheduled for you. This is unlike the academic model where all research time is time that the research finds on their own. Thus, in the research lab, unfunded projects can only be pursued outside of paid time.

Some work

Predictive Defense– Goal: To anticipate intrusion or attacks before they are realized. Drawing on engineering and cognitive science, collaborating with human resources and human subjects boards, this project team seeks to model human behavior from different data source to identify potential terrorists. They note that there is great sensitivity and risk w.r.t. gathering data on human behavior. Also, they recognize that accountability needs to be built in such systems.

Adaptive Systems– Engineer systems that can withstand cyber attacks due to flexible and adaptive design.

Discussion

Discussion questions focused on the details of a National Laboratory and the ethic issues with surveillance. Details about worklife in National labs are noted above. As for the ethic questions, it is clear that the researchers are aware of this kind of discourse, they do show that they have considered approaches that show some sensitivity to the ethic ramifications of this technology (e.g. asking how to build accountability into these systems).

There is probably a lot more room for discourse, but the talk was over. :p

Rucha Ambikarare and Rebecca Sears from the Center for Information & Society are exploring the information needs in different countries. They report on the challenges of working with multiple research teams stationed globally and their initial findings.
Research Questions:
Where do people access information?
What kinds of information do they need?
What venues provide access at low or no cost?
How can we improve public access to ICT to serve the needs of people better?

They conducted research in 25 different countries across the world. Their criteria for choosing them was based their interest in public libraries and eliminating the very top tier and bottom tier countries with respect to level of development.

“Participatory Research”
They chose do to their research via a participatory approach, employing research teams from different countries with a total of 15 country research partners. To coordinate their efforts, they ran a series of workshops every month or two in Seattle, Kuala Lumpur, Georgia, and Costa Rica. Coordination challenges included tight timelines, different calendars across countries with different holiday seasons, international fiscal issues, contract process, drop outs, and technology. Another challenge was to manage the different points of views of all researchers. For example, a local research team dismissed the importance of cyber-cafes because only “house-wives and teenagers(?) use them” this a population that the leading research team would not have dismissed.

They categorized countries according to the level of “physical access”, “human capacity and relevance”, and “enabling environment”. An example of “human capacity” is how uncritically people tend to take in information from particular sources. (Apologies, I didn’t catch the detailed description for each of these categories.) It appears that each country had some choice in how to interpret each category. For example, religion was considered by some countries (like Turkey) but not by all countries as an important part of “environment”. In Nepal, they wanted to look at transsexuals and “access”; in another country, tsunamis were calculated with respect to “access” as well.

Question: How did you recruit fellow researchers in these countries?
We sent out an electronic call for researchers. Sociologists, linguists, & a wide range of backgrounds.

Preliminary Phase I Findings allowed them to rate the different countries amongst themselves. They grouped the countries by the level of challenge in promoting public access to information. For example, “1 mountain countries” include: Brazil, Turky, Costa Rica, Egypt, Peru, and Sri Lanka. These countries had similar rates for access to information, capacity and environment. They find that they are producing guides to NGOs for promoting public access to information sites. These findings challenge preconceptions about the challenges a country might have. For example, Kazakhstan might have been considered a weathly country and, therefore, one that would have an easier time to promote public access. However, their findings categorize it together with Algeria, Mongolia, and Namibia as “three mountain” challenges according to their measures.

Given these findings, a natural point of discussion for the workshops was to discuss suggestions for intervention.

They also found emerging insights outside of the original three areas they studied (access/capacity/environment):
(a) Collaboration across venues
(b) Changing media landscapes include new media and behaviors (mobile phones, SMS, web 2.0, community radio)
(c) Perceptions of a particular venue matter: “How cool is it?” “Libraries are not a place to go.”
(d) Legitimate Information – Information needs revisited: trivial vs. non-trivial info & use, What is offered, where are the gaps?

Anjana Susarla, from the School of Business at UW, is beginning to explore how social networks in Youtube (friends and subscribers) impact the rate in growth of “views” of freshly uploaded Youtube video.
The business motivation for studying this is that Youtube (and other user-influenced services or media) plays a heavy role in business today. Clear examples include network television and the music industry.

To study this effect, Susaria chose to explore the population of all Youtube videos that were uploaded under the “Music” category.

Variables
Each uploader was then mapped into two different social network graphs. One connected the uploaders by “friendship”, a formal Youtube tie. Another connected the uploader by “subscription”, producing a directed graph. With theory on social networks (sorry, I didn’t catch any specific references), Susaria could now assign a “centrality” value to each uploader based on their friendship ties or subscription in/out-degree. Susaria also tracked number of views, ratings, links, etc… all over time. All at a total of around two years of data collection.

Quirks to be accounted for
A particular challenge that Susaria had to face was that, unlike tradition diffusion studies, she had no way of connecting a “view” with a person. She didn’t know who viewed what video. Instead, she had to make diffusion and adoption insights from aggregate data: the total number of views that a video had to date.

Susaria also had to wean out
- effects that made a video popular due to influence outside of Youtube itself,
- video popularity effects that might be due to user heterogenity in tasks that lead to self-selection in group formation

Among her findings, she finds a tradition diffusion curve within the first 100 days of a video’s release that are based on the “centrality” of the uploader in his social network. Beyond those 100 days, external effects then come into play.

Susaria will continue her future work in this area, exploring external effects, sub-groups within the larger network, and content-related topics, such as video mash-ups.

Susan Bonzi, the director of the iSchool undergraduate program at Syracuse University, shared state of that program with us: its history, structure, and challenges.

About the program

Syracuse University is considered on of the “pioneers” of the Information School movement. Started in 1989, the undergraduate program is a 4-year program in information management and technology. Peak enrollment during the “dot com” era was at 600+ undergraduates. Current enrollment hits the 450 mark. (Students enter the 4-year program once they start school as opposed to the UW system where iSchool undergrads are juniors and seniors only.)

Some lists

The program consists of 120 credits:

• 40 for Information Management and Technology
• 36 for Arts and Sciences
• 21 for Skills
• Math/Language
• Communication (3 writing & 1 presentation)
• Computer Programming
• 23 General Electives

There are five concentrations

• Web Design and Management
• Database Management
• Telecom & Network Management
• Project Management
• Information Security
• (and more, soon)

Topics covered include

• Lots of technology
• Management concepts
• Information policy
• Users and user behavior
• Issues
• Research (a little)
• Theory (“not at all”)

Challenges

• Freshmen who enter the program often accepted it as an alternative major and have not bought into the value of an information school degree (The percentage of these kinds of students is from 50% to 80% of the entering class)
• Undergraduates require a different teaching style than for Masters or PhD students
• Faculty need to be good at that particular style

Themes

Susan emphasized the practical or “professional” perspective of the program. Namely, the students are being prepared to get jobs. She points out that this is the primary motivator for students (and their parents). This, she points out, is in contrast to the “academic” nature of the PhD program and the faculty. Research and theory is not the primary goal, instead it is practical knowledge and marketable skills. When pressed about what she meant by there being no theory in the undergraduate curiculum, she clarified a bit. First, there were no purely theoretical classes such as, “The theoretical foundations of Information Science” — the students were not exposed to readings such as Buckland (Information as Thing) or topics like Value-Sensitive Design. However, what she might call “applied theory”, was taught in classrooms. Only what theory was necessary to equip students to do their job was taught.

In a similar vein, when she was asked about undergraduate research, she noted that a few students worked with professors on their research projects, but that this was not a very common case. Unlike the UW program, no students conducted research projects on their own.

*As a side note, the professors at Syracuse had this advice to give when employing undergraduate researchers:

• Screen carefully
• Train adequately
• Provide clearly defined tasks
• Give explicit instructions
• Involve them from the beginning to encourage ownership
• Use masters & PhD students to help guide them

Final note

Despite the differences between the UW and the Syracuse programs, it appears that both are similarly successful in producing well-paid alumni with the same set of jobs (Susan’s list of alumni job titles matched the UW list). In the future, they want to augment their program with topics like gaming and much needed emphases like ethics.

Giorgia Aiello and Tom Dobrowoky introduced us to urbanarchives.org a collection of media that captures the images, texts, and general experiences of public spaces in urban areas. Urban Archives houses a number of such student projects: a historical look at Aurora Avenue, an overnight report on Sunset Bowl, and an ethnography of two city bus lines (the 271 and the 7).

Our presenters shared the pedagogical utility of Urban Archives. By having (Communications?) students choose their own projects to contribute to the archive, the instructors showed them how to recognize their own interests as valid areas of academic inquiry. A student’s general interest in graffiti or a city district (e.g. the International District), under the coaching of the instructors, could be transformed into a valuable contribution to the Archive. Students discovered the resources that they had (finding insiders, etc…) and practice difficult tasks such as learning to write photo annotations that fit a descriptive genre. Photography for archival purposes, as another example, requires a particular mindset that is deliberate and reflexive. The photographer ought to be aware of context, a perspective that should be reflected in both the photos taken and the notes taken to accompany that photo.

The Urban Archive also acts as a bridge to the community. Giorgia and Tom relate how the community has often reconnected with the project: newspapers have reported on the site and artists of the archived works have contacted them (some with corrections to the annotations).

From an archival perspective, the project leaders, as editors, spoke of the future home for the Urban Archives: they want to contribute this to the larger University Library (I think). Quality of the photographs is another issue: the editors standards for a photograph require particular a particular resolution; this causes technical restrictions, for example, cellphone photography does not meet those standards. Meta-data and (quality) annotation is the major necessity that limits what materials enter the archive.

Terry Brooks (iSchool) and Miceal Vaughan (UW Textual Studies) are collaborating on producing a digital version of Piers Plowman, a fourteenth century English poem that is the subject of textual studies and whose interpretation is taught to undergraduate and graduate students alike. The goal of the project is to make the variety of interpretations and versions of the poem digital accessible. Terry Brooks has developed and is refining an XML schema that is capable of encoding the different versions of the text and accompanying annonations to it.

In today’s talk, he presented the XML Schema as well as an XML editor that allows a scholar like Miceal Vaughan to add alternate versions of a word, write annotations, and, in essence, to create a master copy/archive of Piers Plowman in a digital format.

Note: [link to the Electronic Piers Plowman project page]

Some Insights
Brooks learned very quickly that the level of granularity that an XML encoding of poetry requires is down to the level of words and punctuation. A particular example of this is how commas are treated. Some versions require that whitespace appear before a comma. Brooks solution to this is to breakdown a poem’s lines into individual units: a word is a unit and so it a punctuation mark, like a comma. Then, whitespace requirements and other attributes are encoded in the XML schema for that unit. This way, Brooks and Vaughan can describe peculiarities important to poetry, such as whitespace.

Other version differences that Brooks has handled or will have to handle include: missing lines, reordered text, and spacing between letters.

When Vaughan gave these versions to his students to use in class, he found that students often printed out the text. There exists a tradeoff when you decide what to print on a page. Readers give up the interactivity and many layers of information that existed in the digital representation for the sake of readability and other advantages. This is a interested balance to explore.

On presentation: Vaughan insisted that the poems be presented in a clean manner: “I don’t want underlining. I don’t even want the colored text [for in-text links]“. From a usability perspective, this suggests that users approach Brooks’ application with different modes of reading: from enjoying the poem as is to investigating its intricaties, down to the punctuation.

Some Discussion and Comments
On Generalizing your work -
+ You will want to explore different kinds of poems and presentation formats to better generalize your XML schema
+ This work will be helpful add a concrete example and perspective to standards committees for XML schemas such as these.

On user-applications
+ Permit students or other communities to contribute annotations of there own
+ We need studies of how the academic community goes about studying texts and how users read such poems. This will better inform the UI design.

Michelle Garrison, PhD from the Child Health Institute, reported on the challenges of creating a system that helps patient effect behavior change. The institute is running a number of such projects. The current ones target asthmas information for parents and media choices for parents. Garrison presented two influential theories on the design of these persuasive systems, walked us through the system, and discussed some of the challenges.

The two theories that influenced the design of this system are “stages of change” and “social cognitive theory”.

“Stages of change” breakdowns the stages of behavior that a person going through to enact behavioral change in their lifestyle. These stages are:
- Pre-Contemplation
- Contemplation
- Preparation
- Action
- Maintenance
Once a person is in a stage of maintenance, they may relapse to one of the first three stages.

Drawing on this theory, the system designers recognized that they needed to be sensitive to the stage of the participant. Using survey questions, they sought to determine their current stage and to shape their health advice accordingly. For example, it would be unproductive to give action recommendations for someone who is still pre-contemplative, having not thought of the issue of asthma before.

“Social cognitive theory”

Social cognitive theory is a model of how people think about behaving. Given knowledge, external barriers, and external support as a milieu, an actor weighs their expectations for the outcomes and their personal efficacy to make goals. These lead to behavior and then to outcomes.

Here, the system designers used the model to identify barriers to behavior change. They combatted this by correcting false beliefs (knowledge barriers), teaching about outcome expectations, giving accessible baby-steps as goals for people with low self-efficacy. An example of a false belief is the association that parents made between steroids in asthma medication and harmful steroid-use in the public media. Correcting this misconception is intended to help clear the knowledge that would inform the outcome expectations.

Overall, the study appears to be still in progress. Additional challenges include health literacy of the participants, facilitating communication between the health service providers and the patients, and finding new mode to reach the populace (e.g. text messaging).

Gerald Benoit, Dept of Computer Science & Grad School of Library & Information Science
Simmons College

Gerald Benoit reported for us the rationale for a 3D-based interface for navigating the results from a search query of an Art History database of images. He reviewed other 3D interfaces, reported on the user-study of his own system (which, he admitted, was a rejection of their 3D approach), and discussed the test subjects interest in “ownership” of the catalogue and its meta-data.

A draft of his paper, “Interactive 3D Visual Retrieval for Art History Education”, is available at his website.

Benoit’s proposed at least two reasons for exploring 3D interfaces. First, is that a result-set can include relevance and clustering (e.g. associating one painting with another) data that is difficult to expose the user to. By representing the result-set in 3D space, the designers are afforded x,y, and z-axises as distinct dimensions for representing this meta-data. Secondly, Benoit suggested that a three dimensional space might be easier for certain types of people to navigate. He cited HCI research on “affect” as well as empirical work that differentiated how men and women navigate through space or how people from different disciplines (e.g. biologists) are more willing to explore novel interfaces.

Benoit reviewed a few 3D visualization systems (e.g. ArtSTOR and Greenstone). A particular criticism that he leveraged is that many of the visualization techniques: color-choices, object representation, different axises were meaningless to the user. This theme of producing a catalogue that the user has a sense of ownership over would carry over into his analysis of his own 3D retrieval system.

Next, Benoit programmed and user-tested a 3D image retrieval system for Art Historians.  Among the different findings, it is safe to say that the users generally rejected the 3D approach. The responses that drew Benoit’s attention were the curiosity and requests that they had about: how to group their own findings (e.g. like a shopping cart) and why the IR system included certain images in the result-sets for their queries. Furthermore, he found a generational difference in that the younger generation showed very little interest in the hierarchical representation of the object. Instead, they were more interested in having access to high-quality images and data to use the catalogue meta-data as a resource (e.g. as a teaching aid).

In response, Benoit has been working with the Boston Public Library (and other institutions) in producing an image catalogue, named the AuroraDL, with enriched records that supports functionality that allows users to “own” their catalogue. The system is redesigned to permit users to create their own groupings, to annotate existing entries, and relabel others. User contributions are vetting through three stages: Expert, Curatorial, and Student. He expects to produce an integrated solution such that searchers do not have to export their findings and re-import them into another setting to continue working (a software limitation that distinguishes between “searching” and other tasks, such as composing an art lecture). He anticipates that the technical strengths of this project, combined with full-text data by user-contributors, will expand the computational possibilities for data-mining, automated cataloguing, and foreign-language translations.