SoMe Lab wins best poster at IPP

Monday, October 1, 2012

The SoMe Lab team, Shawn Walker, Jeff Hemsley, Joe Eckert, Karine Nahon and Robert Mason, won the best poster award at the Oxford Internet Institute's IPP 2012 (Internet, Politics, Policy) conference. The theme this year was big data.   The poster, titled SoMe Tools for Social Media Research, shows the work done to date on the Occupy movement twitter feeds. By studying the Occupy network of blogs, Facebook pages and web sites, they found that Twitter is an information hub – a place where everyone seems to hear things first and where people are sent to listen for

iSchool awards stellar faculty and staff at annual meeting

Thursday, September 27, 2012

The annual all iSchool retreat, held in September, is a time to celebrate a year of achievements, introduce new faculty and staff and begin the work of the new school year. Several awards are presented to outstanding faculty and staff who are nominated by their peers for special recognition. Outstanding Service Award: Mike Crandall The OSA is to recognize faculty or staff for contributions to our community that go above and beyond their regular work duties and are unrelated to teaching. Mike Crandall, former chair of the MSIM program and current director of the iAffiliates program rec

Jacob Wobbrock awarded $500K NSF grant to design more accessible mobile devices

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

What if your smart phone was smarter? A new $500K grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will enable UW iSchool Professor Jacob O. Wobbrock and UW CSE and EE Professor Shwetak Patel to examine how various situations impair people’s abilities to use mobile computing devices. The researchers will develop sensors, algorithms, and interface designs to enable devices to adapt to off-desktop situations and thereby help users overcome what are called “situational impairments.”    “As computing has moved off the desktop, the typical computer user of today may be

Amy Ko awarded $600K NSF grant to teach computer skills to teens through social gaming

Friday, September 7, 2012

Over 90% of American teen girls play computer games such as Farmville and Bejeweled Blitz every day, sharing with friends and family, learning social and marketplace skills and having fun. iSchool Professor Amy Ko believes these games can be more than social entertainment: She wants to help teens learn how to write and debug computer programs while they play on them. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has agreed to fund a three-year project to explore Ko’s ideas. Ko’s prior research suggests that people who play online games can also learn computer programming concepts, debugging

SoMeLab awarded $997K for social media research

Friday, September 7, 2012

How can researchers use the vast amounts of data produced in Tweets, YouTube videos and Facebook posts to better understand social movements and significant cultural events? A nearly $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation will enable UW iSchool’s Social Media Lab (SoMeLab) to develop an open-source toolkit to help information and social science researchers analyze data generated through social media and apply what they learn to better understand the impact of social media on culture and society. The project was the brainchild of three University of Washington Ph.D. stude

Documents that Changed the World podcast introduced

Thursday, September 6, 2012

What does an 1854 map about cholera have in common with the papal bull issued by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582? UW Information School Professor Joe Janes believes they are both excellent examples of documents that fundamentally changed how people think about or interact with the world. In a new audio series entitled, "Documents that Changed the World," Janes and Andrew Brink, a recent graduate student in the iSchool's Master of Library and Information Science program, tell stories about important documents that merge history, politics, science, observation, culture and insights to change or

Harry Bruce president-elect of ASIS&T

Thursday, September 6, 2012

iSchool Dean Harry Bruce was named the 2013 president-elect of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) following the annual vote of its members. He will serve as president of the organization in 2014. In his statement to members prior to the vote Bruce said, "I am deeply committed to a philosophy of leadership through service. I center my efforts and actions on the needs of others; I find out how I can facilitate or support, and insert my influence or expertise where it will provide the greatest value and serve the needs of my peers, collaborators, professio

Lee Dirks, UW iSchool founding board member and advisor, dies in car crash in Peru

Friday, August 31, 2012

Lee Dirks, along with his wife Judy Lew and their Peruvian driver, were tragically killed August 28th while on vacation in Peru. The local media reports that the SUV they were riding in went off a highway and into a ravine while on their way to visit some pre-Columbian ruins in Calca, a province in Cuzco region. Dirks, who served on various iSchool boards, was the Director for Portfolio Strategy in Microsoft Research Connections, the team within Microsoft Research responsible for working closely with academia and research organizations to help solve some of the world's most challenging scie

Neel Agrawal, MLIS Law '12, wins AALL Call for Papers Award

Friday, August 31, 2012

Neel Agrawal's paper, "Training in FCIL Librarianship for Tomorrow's World," won the 2012 American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Call for Papers award in the student division. In his paper, Agrawal investigates the lack of standardized training in a major sub-field of librarianship, FCIL or foreign, comparative, and international law librarianship, and suggests that the profession would benefit from the establishment of core competencies that reflect both geography and subject matter. "Between the in-person and online training formats, participants would have the opportunity to acq

A librarian where there were none

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Wanna Net isn't certain what day or year he was born but does know one thing: He's one of the very few, maybe the only, Western-trained holder of a graduate degree in contemporary library science in Cambodia. Net recently completed a master's degree in library and information science at The UW Information School and an international development certificate from the UW Evans School of Public Affairs. His goal: to expand libraries in a culture where libraries haven't been cherished centers for education. "Cambodian libraries are underdeveloped," said Net, who believes he's about 29. "Lack

A primer on political video virality

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

What's the mechanism that makes a political video go viral? What causes a video clip to spread from a few people to millions, sometimes in a matter of hours? Is it a top-down process led by elite gatekeepers or bottoms up, driven by people at the grass roots? And how do blogs affect the life cycle of a viral video? Common wisdom might suggest that a posse of political blogs triggers virality, but research from the University of Washington indicates it often springs from just two elite blogs followed by top general interest outlets that aren't considered political. A team led by Karine Na

A problem of focus

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Technological gadgets were supposed to improve our lives, free up time to think, to create. David Levy, an iSchool professor and dedicated meditator, wonders if the opposite hasn't happened. We Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Google, skim, scan, text-message, and instant-message, half-engaged in "hmmm...what?" conversations as we madly multitask. Where, asks Levy, is the quiet time to reflect, focus, truly connect? What will happen to children who know everything about high-speed connection and nothing about the slow contemplation that leads to creativity and discovery? "This is a dangerous t

Alumni follow unique paths to entrepreneurship

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

When Kate McDill entered the iSchool a little more than a decade ago, she had aspirations to find a career in the "ascendant dotcom world." "I was drawn to dotcoms because I had entrepreneurial skills and felt more comfortable in the start-up milieu as opposed to the staid, established business world," McDill said. At the time, the 25-year-old graduate student had already tasted entrepreneurship as a proprietor of a bed-and-breakfast. "I thrived on independence and creativity," McDill said. "Things changed, and I got a bit bored. Thus, off to graduate school." The lure of the "dotcom

Alums Carry On Tradition of Books for Youth

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

The iSchool's most famous alumna is undoubtedly Beverly Cleary ('39), the beloved author of books like Beezus and Ramona. But Mrs. Cleary is just the best known example of a long tradition among our alumni of writing what Cleary Professor Eliza Dresang calls "books for youth" - everything from picture books to young adult novels. Many early alumni began writing books inspired by the children they were serving in their libraries. Ruth Hill Viguers ('26) was the longtime publisher of Horn Book Magazine, a journal of children's and young adult literature, and Gladys Conklin ('26) wrote a serie

Barbara Bintliff named Distinguished Alumna

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

The Distinguished Alumni award, established in 1961, recognizes outstanding graduates of the Information School. Alumni are chosen for their distinguished service in community affairs, and/or specific meritorious service on behalf of the Information School and the UW. Barbara Bintliff has spent her law librarianship career in Colorado, first at the University of Denver and then at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she served with distinction as the Director from 1989 to 2010. She recently started a new position as Joseph C. Hutcheson Professor of Law and Law Library Director at the