Jesse David Dinneen

Reducing Subject Tree Browsing Complexity

Many large digital collections are currently organized by subject; although useful, these information organization structures are large and complex and thus difficult to browse. Current online tools and visualization prototypes show small, localized subsets and do not provide the ability to explore the predominant patterns of the overall subject structure. This study describes subject tree modifications that facilitate browsing for documents by capitalizing on the highly uneven distribution of real-world collections. The approach is demonstrated on two large collections organized by the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). Results show that the LCSH subject tree can be reduced to 49% of its initial complexity while maintaining access to 83% of the collection, and the MeSH tree can be reduced to 45% of its initial complexity while maintaining access to 97% of the collection. A simple solution to negate the loss of access is discussed. The visual impact is demonstrated by using traditional outline views and a slider control allowing searchers to change the subject structure dynamically according to their needs. This study has implications for the development of information organization theory and human–information interaction techniques for subject trees.

Practical and Philosophical Considerations for Defining Information as Well-formed, Meaningful Data in the Information Sciences

This paper demonstrates the practical and philosophical strengths of adopting Luciano Floridi’s “general definition of information” (GDI) for use in the information sciences (IS). Many definitions of information have been proposed, but little work has been done to determine which definitions are most coherent or useful. Consequently, doubts have been cast on the necessity and possibility of finding a definition. In response to these doubts, the paper shows how items and events central to IS are adequately described by Floridi’s conception of information, and demonstrates how it helps clarify the muddy theoretical framework resulting from the many previous definitions. To this end, it analyzes definitions, popular in IS, that conceive of information as energy, processes, knowledge, and physical objects. The paper finds that each of these definitions produces problematic or counterintuitive implications that the GDI suitably accounts for. It discusses the role of truth in IS, notes why the GDI is preferable to its truth-requiring variant, and ends with comments about the import of such a theory for IS research and practice.

For Richer, for Poorer, in Sickness or in Health...: The Long-Term Management of Personal Information

People are amassing large personal information stores. These stores present rich opportunities for analysis and use in matters of wealth, health, living and legacy. But these stores also bring with them new challenges for managing information across long periods of time. Hence personal information management (PIM) research increasingly must address the long term. For the seventh PIM workshop in a successful series started in 2005, we propose taking a look at personal information with exactly this longitudinal perspective. We expect the workshop to attract a range of people doing research related to PIM, HCI, personal digital archiving, aging, and the design of informational spaces for later life. Attendees will discuss issues related to storing information for the long run, how stored information can benefit a person throughout their lifetime (and into old age), and the legacy of a persons personal information.

Information research, practice, and education continue to invite and benefit from philosophy

It has become easy to make a case for the relevance, richness, and importance of philosophical thinking for information research and practice. The information professions regularly encounter previously unknown and unimagined relations between people and information, and information research very often touches upon the outer boundaries of science and the humanities. Both cases solicit philosophical thinking: the former frequently requires deep, critical thinking about what our relationship to information is and can be, with considerable consequences for the future of human kind and the planet, and the latter invites the same kind of thinking when our assumptions and views are shown to be insufficiently clear to allow confident conclusions and the generation of further knowledge. These domains also support philosophical thinking by providing new examples of philosophical concepts in action, inviting scholars to amend our views and definitions so that they match the information community’s perceptions of the world and gain further practical utility. A similar relationship exists between philosophy and information education. Newly-enrolled students in information science (IS) programs have the benefit of casting fresh eyes on the state of knowledge in various subfields in IS, and so quickly identify the limits of our understanding along various important topics. This often manifests when they begin asking difficult questions in the lecture hall; though the courses in such programs are mainly focused on skill mastery, many unaddressed societal, ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical issues lurk in the background, and students ask about, for example, the nature of information and its relationship to facts, knowledge, and propaganda; the digital divide and the right to information access; the implications of data collection, Web tracking, and the right to be forgotten. These are just a few common examples, each of which has been debated in scholarly literature, and the ties of information to philosophy extend into every subdomain of IS [1]. Such questions are difficult to answer – whether posed in class or in scholarly journals – in part because the concepts are complex, requiring wide and careful reading if one hopes to attempt an informed response. One could easily become lost in or intimidated by the wealth of such literature; looking only to Martens’s introductory

Cardinal: novel software for studying file management behavior

In this paper we describe the design and trial use of Cardinal, novel software that overcomes the limitations of existing research tools used in personal information management (PIM) studies focusing on file management (FM) behavior. Cardinal facilitates large‐scale collection of FM behavior data along an extensive list of file system properties and additional relevant dimensions (e.g., demographic, software and hardware, etc). It enables anonymous, remote, and asynchronous participation across the 3 major operating systems, uses a simple interface, and provides value to participants by presenting a summary of their file and folder collections. In a 15‐day trial implementation, Cardinal examined over 2.3 million files across 46 unsupervised participants. To test its adaptability we extended it to also collect psychological questionnaire responses and technological data from each participant. Participation sessions took an average of just over 10 minutes to complete, and participants reported positive impressions of their interactions. Following the pilot, we revised Cardinal to further decrease participation time and improve the user interface. Our tests suggest that Cardinal is a viable tool for FM research, and so we have made its source freely available to the PIM community.

Improving Exploration of Topic Hierarchies: Comparative Testing of Simplified Library of Congress Subject Heading Structures

Many large digital collections are organized by sorting their items into topics and arranging these topics hierarchically, such as those displayed in a tree view. The resulting information organization structures mitigate some of the challenges of searching digital information realms; however, the topic hierarchies are often large and complex, and thus difficult to navigate. Automated techniques have been shown to produce significantly smaller, simplified versions of existing topic hierarchies while preserving access to the majority of the collection, but these simplified topic hierarchies have never been tested with human participants, and so it is not clear what effect simplification would have on the exploration and use of such structures for browsing and retrieval. This study partly addresses this gap by performing a comparative test with three groups of university students (N=62) performing ten topic hierarchy exploration tasks using one of three versions of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) hierarchy: 1) the original LCSH hierarchy, acting as a baseline, 2) a shallower version of 1), and 3) a narrower version of 2). A quantitative analysis of measures of accuracy, time, and browsing shows that participants using the simplified trees were significantly more accurate and faster than those using the unmodified tree, and the narrower, balanced tree was also faster than the shallower tree. These results show that automated topic hierarchy simplification can facilitate the use of such hierarchies, which has implications for the development of information organization theory and human-information interaction techniques for similar information structures.

What an Entangled Web We Weave: An Information-centric Approach to Time-evolving Socio-technical Systems

AbstractA new layer of complexity, constituted of networks of information token recurrence, has been identified in socio-technical systems such as the Wikipedia online community and the Zooniverse citizen science platform. The identification of this complexity reveals that our current understanding of the actual structure of those systems, and consequently the structure of the entire World Wide Web, is incomplete, which raises novel questions for data science research but also from the perspective of social epistemology. Here we establish the principled foundations and practical advantages of analyzing information diffusion within and across Web systems with Transcendental Information Cascades, and outline resulting directions for future study in the area of socio-technical systems. We also suggest that Transcendental Information Cascades may be applicable to any kind of time-evolving system that can be observed using digital technologies, and that the structures found in such systems comprise properties common to all naturally occurring complex systems.

Mapping science using Library of Congress Subject Headings

Maps of scientific knowledge are generally created by analyzing scientific literature including journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and monographs. Although citation analysis is the most popular method for generating maps of science from scientific journal articles and their citations, other relationships between scientific topics can be used to map science. This study offers a map of science generated from examining non-fiction book topics and their relationships as defined by Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) co-assignments. The resulting map reveals which sub-disciplines of science must be learned together, showing that Physics and Mathematics are the central topics required to practice science, which is not revealed by previous studies. This novel LCSH-based science map reveals new relations between the major sub-disciplines of science to produce a more complete representation of scientific domains and how they interact.

Library of congress subject heading (LCSH) browsing and natural language searching

Controlled topical vocabularies (CVs) are built into information systems to aid browsing and retrieval of items that may be unfamiliar, but it is unclear how this feature should be integrated with standard keyword searching. Few systems or scholarly prototypes have attempted this, and none have used the most widely used CV, the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which organizes monograph collections in academic libraries throughout the world. This paper describes a working prototype of a Web application that concurrently allows topic exploration using an outline tree view of the LCSH hierarchy and natural language keyword searching of a real‐world Science and Engineering bibliographic collection. Pilot testing shows the system is functional, and work to fit the complex LCSH structure into a usable hierarchy is ongoing. This study contributes to knowledge of the practical design decisions required when developing linked interactions between topical hierarchy browsing and natural language searching, which promise to facilitate information discovery and exploration.