Continuing the “rant first, do research later” tradition of blogging, I had initially written about the publish->filter model of academic publishing not having heard of arXiv.org or of SciRate. (Technically, I had heard of xxx.lanl.org, which became arXiv.org, but had never had the opportunity to use it.) Having been informed of the existence of these tools, I then related my experience with arXiv.org (here and here), and am now tackling SciRate.com.  SciRate.com offers a mechanism on top of arXiv.org for registering comments on papers. Interestingly, arXiv.org  provides links to a variety of bookmark aggregators, including CiteULike, Connotea, BibSonomy, del.icio.us, Digg, and Reddit, but not to SciRate. I wonder what politics drove that decision.

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The USE SIG of ASIS&T is celebrating its 10th anniversary at the annual ASIS&T conference in Vancouver, BC this year with a symposium on collaborative information seeking, followed by a plenary reception. Continue Reading

After some confusion and frustration, I have created an entry for the JCDL2008 workshop on Collaborative Information Seeking on arXiv.org. The entry includes an overview page with an summary of the workshop and a link to an HTML page that contains links to the papers that were presented. Some of the papers made the ingestion cutoff today; the rest should appear on Friday.

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Having written about reforming the academic publication process, and having suggested that arXiv.org be used to archive workshop papers for HCIR’09 (and ’07 and  ’08), I decided to upload (with the authors’ permissions) papers from the JCDL 2008 workshop on collaborative information seeking that I co-organized last year with Jeremy Pickens and Merrie Morris. I read the info on the arXiv.org site and decided to give it a shot. It turned out to be less straightforward than one might imagine.

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One of the few things I remember about electrical engineering from my undergraduate education is the joke

Q: How do you build an amplifier?
A: Design an oscillator
Q: How do you build an oscillator?
A: Design an amplifier

This dichotomy is funny to those who’ve tried (and often failed) to build these electrical circuits. But it also underscores a similarity in the technologies involved, and points out that subtle changes in the design can produce radically different effects. It also works well as an analogy to (you guessed it) collaborative search. Social search based on recommendations, whether inferred from user behavior or from expressed through opinion, works like an amplifier: those signals (pages, documents, etc.) voted on by many people become featured more prominently (amplified) and thus are more likely to be retrieved.

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The debate over scholarly publishing continues to percolate along, with an article in CACM by Lance Fortnow, and in a recent blog post by Daniel Tunkelang on The Noisy Channel and in the subsequent comments. The issue in question is whether the established peer-review process is effective and efficient at identifying good work, or whether the peer-reviewed journal or conference is an artifact of a time when the costs of publication and distribution were high. The argument for online publication is certainly compelling; there are many free online journals, and book publishers such as Morgan Claypool are already publishing digitally or primarily digitally.

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tribescape is a newish entry into the social search arena that allows searchers to share search results with their peers through Twitter.  Rather than e-mailing URLs, you simply click on button next to each search result, pick the followers to whom you want to tweet this result, and you’re done. Convenient, yes. Collaborative? Maybe.

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I’ve made some changes and additions to the Collaborative Search Engine page in the Wikipedia to expand the entry and add more references. The entry is by no means complete! Please contribute more prose and references to make it a useful resource. In particular, more prose would be useful around the task vs. trait distinction and the division of labor vs. the sharing of knowledge.

I recently read on Jeff Dalton’s blog that a new open-source search engine, called  Ivory, has been released by Jimmy Lin. Ivory is based on Hadoop, and is  designed to handle terabyte-sized collections. Unlike Lucene, this is a research project, Jimmy Lin writes,

aimed at information retrieval researchers who need access to low-level data structures and who generally know their way around retrieval algorithms. As a result, a lot of “niceties” are simply missing—for example, fancy interfaces or ingestion support for different file types. It goes without saying that Ivory is a bit rough around the edges, but our philosophy is to release early and release often. In short, Ivory is experimental!

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In her talk at the IR Eval workshop at SIGIR 09, Sue Dumais called for an experimental platform for conducting research in information seeking (thanks Sakai-san!). She called it a Living Laboratory. This is a tremendous idea, the high tide that lifts all boats. Whether you’re interested in doing log analysis, interface design evaluation, building new indexing algorithms, or other kinds of research, having real data sets with real users and real information needs can move the field forward in ways that Cranfield-style experiments do not.

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