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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