Terrell Russell

cloudalicious: folksonomy over time

Cloudalicious is an online visualization tool that has been designed to give insight into how tag clouds, or folksonomies, develop over time. A folksonomy is an organic system of text labels attributed to an object by the users of that object. The most common object so far to be the subject of this tagging has been the online bookmark. Stabilization of a URLs tag cloud over time is the clearest result of this type of visualization. Any diagonal movement on the graphs, indicative of a change in the tags being used to describe a URL, should garner further discussion

Academic genealogy as an indicator of interdisciplinarity: An examination of dissertation networks in Library and Information Science

Interdisciplinarity has been studied using cognitive connections among individuals in corresponding domains, but rarely from the perspective of academic genealogy. This article utilizes academic genealogy network data from 3,038 PhD dissertations in Library and Information Science (LIS) over a span of 80 years (1930–2009) to describe interdisciplinary changes in the discipline. Aspects of academic pedigree of advisors and committee members are analyzed, such as country, school, and discipline of highest degree, to reveal the interdisciplinary features of LIS. The results demonstrate a strong history of mentors from fields such as education and psychology, a decreasing trend of mentors with LIS degrees, and an increasing trend in mentors receiving degrees in computer science, business, and communication, among other disciplines. This work proposes and explores the use of academic genealogy as an indicator of interdisciplinarity and calls for additional research on the role of doctoral committee composition in a students subsequent academic career.

Selection and context scoping for digital video collections: an investigation of youtube and blogs

Digital curators are faced with decisions about what part of the ever-growing, ever-evolving space of digital information to collect and preserve. The recent explosion of web video on sites such as YouTube presents curators with an even greater challenge - how to sort through and filter a large amount of information to find, assess and ultimately preserve important, relevant, and interesting video. In this paper, we describe research conducted to help inform digital curation of on-line video. Since May 2007, we have been monitoring the results of 57 queries on YouTube related to the 2008 U.S. presidential election. We report results comparing these data to blogs that point to candidate videos on YouTube and discuss the effects of query-based harvesting as a collection development strategy.

LIS Dissertation Titles and Abstracts (1930-2009): Where Have All the Librar* Gone?

This article examines the topicality of Library and Information Science (LIS) dissertations written between 1930 and 2009 at schools with American Library Association (ALA)–accredited university programs in North America. Dissertation titles and abstracts were examined for the presence of library-related keywords drawn from the core curricula of ALA-accredited schools, and trend data were created to describe the evolution of LIS doctoral research over the past eighty years. The results show that the percentage of dissertations found to contain no instance of any of the selected library keywords has steadily risen since 1980. Simultaneously, the percentage of dissertations found to contain instances of keywords in both the title and abstract has steadily declined. The results provide general empirical support for long-held anecdotal assertions that libraries are no longer the primary research focus at the doctoral level in LIS.

Tag decay: A view into aging folksonomies

As work continues with folksonomies and databases of tag activity grow large and mature, we will begin to run into the problem of staleness across our tag sets. The problem of agedness and increasing irrelevance can be combated with interesting visualizations and necessary new techniques. From the perspective of each of the other two tenets of folksonomy (objects and people) (Vander Wal, 2007), we can look at how tags are being used over time.

Using Metadata to Facilitate Understanding and Certification of Assertions about the Preservation Properties of a Preservation System

Developers of preservation repositories need to provide internal audit mechanisms to verify their assertions about how the recommendations outlined in the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model are applied. They must also verify the consistent application of preservation policies to both the digital objects and the preservation system itself. We developed a method for mapping between the OAIS Reference Model Functional Model to a data grid implementation, which facilitates such tasks. We have done a preliminary gap analysis to determine the current state of computer task-oriented functions and procedures in support of preservation, and constructed a method for abstracting state transition systems from preservation policies. Our approach facilitates certifying properties of a preservation repository and bridges the gap between computer code and abstract preservation repository standards such as the OAIS Reference Model.

Keeping the context: an investigation in preserving collections of digital video

Summary form only given. This poster presents an information model for digital video context and places the information model within the context of recent guidance on metadata for digital video, metadata for digital preservation, and the reference model for an open archival information system (OAIS)

Self-Representation of Online Identity in Collected Hyperlinks

Online identity is the representation of ones persona in a digital context. A primary factor in this representation is the collection of links that represent an individual in search. Designed by the authors, claimID (http://claimID.com) is a web service that enables individuals to use the hyperlinks about them to create a rich presentation of their online identity. In this paper, we analyze patterns of self-representation of online identity as observed in claimID.

xDCI, a data science cyberinfrastructure for interdisciplinary research

This paper introduces xDCI, a Data Science Cyber-infrastructure to support research in a number of scientific domains including genomics, environmental science, biomedical and health science, and social science. xDCI leverages open-source software packages such as the integrated Rule Oriented Data System and the CyVerse Discovery Environment to address significant challenges in data storage, sharing, analysis and visualization. We provide three example applications to evaluate xDCI for different domains: analysis of 3D images of mice brains, videos analysis of neonatal resuscitation, and risk analytics. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of potential improvements to xDCI.