Snowshoeing along the Ottawa River

ASIST 2008

ASIST 2008 was in Columbus, Ohio this year in October 24-29. I spent some time locating a reasonably priced hotel close enough to the conference hotel that I could walk or within a reasonable bus ride from the hotel. I scored a hit with a hotel that was "just down the street" in other words a 29 minute walk away, but had two buses that would take me to the conference... plus this hotel had free wireless and breakfast.

Columbus has what appeared to be a relatively heavily used bus system, Columbus Ohio Transit Association (COTA). There is actually a bus from the airport, but in order to get downtown you have to transfer at an out of the way location. The building behind the bus is a church, so it was actually busy Sunday when I flew in.



At ASIST I presented a poster which continued on from work I had presented the previous year in 2007. Both this year's poster and last year's poster are now available online.

I also spoke as part of a panel titled Tagging as a Communication Device. This panel grew out of a collaboration on an ASIST panel in 2007 and the work we did in turning the 2007 panel into an article for Ariadne.

A number of people commented favourably on the panel, which is terrific since we worked hard to make the panel interesting. I was quite pleased with how well the various sections fit together. So try the following for some notes and perspectives on the panel:

• heidi go seek: ASIS&T 2008 - Tagging as a Communication Device
  
• Christina's LIS Rant: ASIST2008: Tagging as a Communication Device
  
• Spinstah: ASIS&T 2008: Tagging as a Communication Device
  
• Laura K: ASIST08: Tagging as a Communication Device
  
• Enterprise Search and Usability: ASIS&T 2008 - Tagging as a Communication Device: Every tag cloud has a silver lining
  
• Off the Mark: ASIS&T 2008
  

One last picture from Columbus:

ISKO 2008

This year the International Society for Knowledge Organization's biennial conference was held in Montréal, Québec at Université de Montréal. The conference was sponsored by École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l'information.

The conference ran from the 5th to the 8th of August, a good thing since Montréal can be horribly hot in the summer. I had never been to the U Montréal campus before. It is accessible via the subway, though there is a transfer, and the campus is quite hilly as it is literally built into the side of Mont Royal.





I presented a paper based on a study I have been doing examining how users select search terms when searching traditional online databases versus social tagging sites. The paper is now available online. Slides from the presentation are already available. Previously, I had presented a poster at ASIST in 2007 with preliminary results from this study.

Happy Canada Day!

Canadian Association for Information Science Conference 2008

The Canadian Association for Information Science Conference (CAIS) was part of the Canadian Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities in Vancouver at UBC from June 5th to June 8th. CAIS is large enough that there are always new people attending, but small enough that I can actually attend a high percentage of the talks. This is great because I can get a larger picture of the types of research other people are doing in the field of library and information science.

This year I presented additional results from a study of affective (emotional) and subjective tags used on social bookmarking tools. These are tags like @toread, cool and fun. The paper is available from the CAIS website: http://www.cais-acsi.ca/proceedings/2008/kipp_2008.pdf and the presentation is available here: http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00013789/

Here are a few pictures from the UBC campus (Library and sunset):



And a few pictures from Vancouver in general (Chinatown Night Market, Vancouver Aquarium):

Ottawa Race Weekend 2008

This year I participated in the Ottawa Race Weekend, May23-25. My mother and I walked the MDS Nordion 10K. It was a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to doing it again next year. I've also started thinking about training to walk a half marathon.

Visual Resources Association 2008

This year I went to the Visual Resources Association Conference in San Diego to be part of a panel on tagging. The panel was entitled Free Association: Social Tagging in Online Collections. I talked about the use of affective (emotional) terms in tagging and how this might affect the organisation of information, especially visual information. Other speakers were from the UPenn PennTags project and the Steve.museum project.

While I was there I did a little sightseeing in San Diego.

Conferences in 2007

I usually try to write a short piece about the conferences I've attended along with links to presentations or papers as appropriate. This is a combined post for all conferences in 2007.

In 2007, I attended the Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas in March, the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science (CAIS) in Montreal in May, the North American Symposium on Knowlege Organisation (NASKO) in Toronto in July, the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Vancouver, also in July and ASIST in October.

At the IA Summit I presented a paper examining the use of non subject tags in social bookmarking systems. By non subject tags I mean tags that do not describe the topic of the item being bookmarked. Examples of such tags include @todo, cool and fun. These tags are interesting specifically because they are not the kinds of keywords you would find in a standard information organisation tool. The paper is available at http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/1947/ and the slides are at http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00011414/.

I really enjoyed this particular session of the IA Summit. I was able to speak to a number of people who are also doing research on the phenomenon of social bookmarking and tagging and consulting with people doing similar research is certainly one of the best reasons for going to conferences. I stayed in a cheaper hotel further down the strip and walked to the conference hotel daily experiencing the sights of a new city. I also took a trip to Arizona to see the Grand Canyon... with predictable results. It snowed and I have some unique pictures of the Grand Canyon completely shrouded in fog. Obviously I have to go back.

At CAIS I presented the second half of a paper examining the terminology used in tagging. The paper examines tags used in tagging scholarly articles on Citeulike using standard informetric measures and additionally compares them to keywords assigned to these papers in Pubmed. The paper is available from http://www.cais-acsi.ca/proceedings/2007/kipp_2007.pdf and the slides are at http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00011413/.

I enjoy the CAIS conference because it allows me to keep up with the work being done in other areas of library science, and it is small enough that I can actually attend a lot more of the sessions, which is not really an option at the bigger conferences.

At NASKO I presented a further analysis of the material in my CAIS paper as well as an analysis of a set of papers drawn from JAMA, a professional journal. The paper is available from http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/1909/ and the slides are at http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00011412/.

I had a great time at this conference. I found that I had met a lot of the presenters at previous conferences. It was great to go to a smaller conference where many more people were doing research in similar areas to mine.

At JCDL I presented a poster following on from my NASKO paper. There is a link to the poster abstract on the ACM Digital Library at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255284&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=29638545&CFTOKEN=47523958 and to the poster at http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00011411/.

I really enjoy Vancouver and it was great to visit again. Someday I have to stay for a few extra days though and take a few day trips to sites like Vancouver Island and the Capilano suspension bridge.

In October I presented at ASIST in Milwaukee. I presented a poster with the very early results from a study I am doing comparing searching an online database and a social bookmarking system via their keywords and was a presenter on a panel titled Tagging and Social Networks: The Impact of Communities on User Centered Tagging http://www.asis.org/wiki/AM07/index.php/TagSN