Leslie Carr

Earlier Web usage statistics as predictors of later citation impact

Abstract: The use of citation counts to assess the impact of research articles is well established. However, the citation impact of an article can only be measured several years after it has been published. As research articles are increasingly accessed through the Web, the number of times an article is downloaded can be instantly recorded and counted. One would expect the number of times an article is read to be related both to the number of times it is cited and to how old the article is. This paper analyses how short-term Web usage impact predicts medium-term citation impact. The physics e-print archive -- arXiv.org -- is used to test this.

Conceptual linking: ontology-based open hypermedia

This paper describes the attempts of the COHSE project to define and deploy a Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service. Consisting of • an ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of document terms and their relationships; • a Web-based open hypermedia link service that can offer a range of different link-providing facilities in a scalable and non-intrusive fashion; and integrated to form a conceptual hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents and hence to improve the consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents).

Big Data: Methodological Challenges and Approaches for Sociological Analysis

The emergence of Big Data is both promising and challenging for social research. This article suggests that realising this promise has been restricted by the methods applied in social science research, which undermine our potential to apprehend the qualities that make Big Data so appealing, not least in relation to the sociology of networks and flows. With specific reference to the micro-blogging website Twitter, the article outlines a set of methodological principles for approaching these data that stand in contrast to previous research; and introduces a new tool for harvesting and analysing Twitter built on these principles. We work our argument through an analysis of Twitter data linked to political protest over UK university fees. Our approach transcends earlier methodological limitations to offer original insights into the flow of information and the actors and networks that emerge in this flow.

Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources

It seems self-evident that life for teachers would be simplified if there existed a large corpus of relevant resources that was available for them to reuse and for inquisitive students to download. The learning object community has worked for the past decade and more to provide the necessary infrastructure, standards, and specifications to facilitate such beneficial activity, but the take-up has been disappointingly small, particularly in University and Higher Education, which is the subject of this research. The problem has been that practitioners have not deposited their teaching resources, or have not made them openly available, in the quantity that would achieve critical mass for uptake. EdShare and the Language Box are two initiatives that have concentrated on the issue of facilitating and improving the practice of sharing, the former in an institutional setting and the latter in a subject community of practice. This paper describes and analyzes the motivations for these projects, the design decisions they took in implementing their repositories, the approaches they took to change agency and practice within their communities, and the changes, in practice, that have so far been observed. The contribution of this paper is an improved understanding of how to encourage educational communities to share.

Identifying communicator roles in twitter

Twitter has redefined the way social activities can be coordinated; used for mobilizing people during natural disasters, studying health epidemics, and recently, as a communication platform during social and political change. As a large scale system, the volume of data transmitted per day presents Twitter users with a problem: how can valuable content be distilled from the back chatter, how can the providers of valuable information be promoted, and ultimately how can influential individuals be identified? To tackle this, we have developed a model based upon the Twitter message exchange which enables us to analyze conversations around specific topics and identify key players in a conversation. A working implementation of the model helps categorize Twitter users by specific roles based on their dynamic communication behavior rather than an analysis of their static friendship network. This provides a method of identifying users who are potentially producers or distributers of valuable knowledge.

The Semantics of Semantic Annotation

Semantic metadata will playa significant role in the provision of the Semantic Web. Agents will need metadata that describes the content of resources in order to perform operations, such as retrieval, over those resources. In addition, if rich semantic metadata is supplied, those agents can then employ reasoning over the metadata, enhancing their processing power. Keyto this approach is the provision of annotations, both through automatic and human means. The semantics of these annotations, however, in terms of the mechanisms through which they are interpreted and presented to the user, are sometimes unclear. In this paper, we identify a number of candidate interpretations of annotation, and discuss the impact these interpretations mayha ve on Semantic Web applications.

Open information services

The Distributed Link Service[5] provides hypermedia services, layered on top of, but independent of, the underlying document data services provided by the World Wide Web. This model enables enormous flexibility for providing and manipulating links and designing information architectures, but conversely abandons any guarantee of synchronicity between changes in the data layer and the links layer. This paper contrasts this approach to link management with the more generally accepted (and safer) solution of a closed information environment (perhaps in the form of an object-oriented SGML database), and presents an expanded open hypermedia service for the WWW composed of link management together with document management and consistency maintenance tools.

Visualizing the evolution of a subject domain: a case study

We explore the potential of information visualization techniques in enhancing existing methodologies for domain analysis and modeling. In this case study, we particularly focus on visualizing the evolution of the hypertext field based on author co-citation patterns, including the use of a sliding-window scheme to generate a series of annual snapshots of the domain structure, and a factor-referenced color-coding scheme to highlight predominant specialties in the field.

The evolution of hypertext link services

Hypertext, a neologism of the 1960s indicating something which is more than text, has taken over the attention of scholars, businesses and hobbyists in the form of the World Wide Web. Developed as a hypertext framework for information distribution [Berners-Lee 1992] , its overseeing organisation (W3C) has insisted on maintaining and developing a suite of open standards for data formats, communication protocols and programming interfaces to allow all comers to participate in a globally shared information repository. However the Web is just one example of how the development of hypertext philosophy, design and deployment has led to practical solutions for information dissemination, manipulation and maintenance. This paper describes how hypertext systems have evolved to become distributed and open providers of information services and examines the nature of the linking that forms the basis of hypertext functionality.

The case for explicit knowledge in documents

The Web is full of documents which must be interpreted by human readers and by software agents (search engines recommender systems clustering processes <i>etc.</i>). Although Web standards have addressed format obfuscation by using XML schemas and stylesheets to specify unambiguous structure and presentation semantics interpretation is still hampered by the fundamental ambiguity of information in <b>PCDATA</b> text. Even the most easily distinguishable kinds of knowledge such as article citations and proper nouns (referring to people organisations projects products technical concepts) have to be identified by fallible post-hoc extraction processes. The WiCK project has investigated the writing process in a Semantic Web environment where knowledge services exist and actively assist the author. In this paper we discuss the need to make knowledge an explicit part of the document representation and the advantages and disadvantages of this step.