Doctoral candidate, Elisabeth Jones, and Professor Joe Tennis, received a Best Poster award at the 2012 iConference in Toronto, Canada.

Jones and Tennis are working on a new way of conceptualizing relationships between systems for information dissemination throughout history, based on a set of basic attributes or facets. Their winning poster illustrates one way in which these attribute-based relationships might be visualized, as a step toward illuminating novel perspectives on and comparisons between these phenomena.

The attribute-based perspective on information dissemination systems helps to highlight parallels and points of comparison between projects that are not otherwise obvious, and which may hold significant interest for researchers in the information field, by providing a novel viewing angle on their particular areas of focus.

For example, at first glance, Twitter may not seem to have much in common with a Socratic dialogue; nor cave paintings with academic publishing. Jones and Tennis suggest that there are significant linkages between these phenomena (and many others) at the level of their most basic attributes, and that these linkages provide thought-provoking new insights into how we might approach the study of a key set of phenomena for the information field: information dissemination systems.

Another Best Poster winner, Eric Meyers, assistant professor at University of British Columbia and an alumnus from the UW iSchool, showcased his work entitled, "Green Washing the Digital Playground: How virtual worlds support ecological intelligence - or do they?" There were 90 posters submitted and five awards for Best Poster at this year's iConference.