October is Family History Month, and I thought I would start it with some reflections on genealogical searching. This post builds on some earlier observations on genealogy and information retrieval.

Genealogy searches are an interesting example of many aspects of information seeking. In some ways, this endeavor reveals the limitations of our classification of information seeking systems and behaviors, such as recall-oriented vs. precision-oriented search, known-item vs. exploratory, etc. While each query one runs should be high precision (find me records for the person I am interested in at the moment), there are many aspects (dates and places of birth and death, details of immigration, residence, occupation) resulting in many queries. And often you really do want to try to find as much as can be found, so the overall task is recall-oriented. Similarly, you start with searching for facts for people whose existence you are documenting, and you can often recognize relevant records when you see them. This has all the hallmarks of known-item search. On the other hand, you may also discover relatives you didn’t know existed, facts you had not expected, new kinds of historical records, etc. This feels much more like exploratory search.

Finally, there is the issue of where to search for information, which databases to use, etc. The range of potential sources for the serious genealogist is quite broad, but for those just starting out there are a few obvious choices beyond interviewing your relatives. Ancestry.com is a family of web sites that federates access to a large range of historical data on individuals. While it’s not the only place one can start, it’s not a bad choice.

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The proceedings of IIiX 2010 are finally available through the ACM Digital Library! In addition, it turns out that ACM has a special series page that links to all IIiX proceedings. In addition, here are the slides from Tefko Saracevic’s keynote address.

The Best Paper award winner was a paper by Sanna Kumpulainen and Kalervo Järvelin (University of Tampere, Finland) titled “Information Interaction in Molecular Medicine: Integrated Use of Multiple Channels.” Two other papers were nominated: “Evaluating search systems using result page context” by Bailey, et al., and “Supporting polyrepresentation in a quantum-inspired geometrical retrieval framework” by Frommholz et al. The Best Poster award was shared by Loizides and Buchanan “Performing Document Triage on Small Screen Devices. Part 1: Structured Documents” and Liu et al., “Identifying Queries in the Wild, Wild Web.”

The diversity of tablet-based textbook and ebook devices seems to be increasing of late. The success of the iPad seems to have emboldened hardware manufacturers (e.g., Sharp, Dell, NEC, etc.) to announce a number of similar devices for the Android platform. In addition, there has been some competition in the software textbook space (e.g., CourseSmart, Inkling, etc.).

Another interesting development is the approach taken by  Kno: The Kno device is a prototype textbook device that seems to be designed around explicit feedback from students about how they use textbooks. It hasn’t been released yet (I couldn’t even figure out much about the hardware and OS that it will be running), but some things are clear: Kno is an integrated hardware/software platform aimed at high school and college students’ use of textbooks. It has been announced in a two-screen and a one-screen version.

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Yesterday Volker Roth came back for a visit and to give us a preview of the talk he will give next week at UIST 2010 on his work with Philipp Schmidt and Benjamin Güldenring on The IR Ring: Authenticating users’ touches on a multi-touch display. The work supports multiple users interacting with the same screen at the same time with different access and control permissions. For example, you may want to show me a document on a multi-touch display, but that does not mean you want me to be able to delete that document. Similarly, I may want to show you a particular e-mail I received, without giving you the ability to access my other e-mail messages, or to send one in my name. Roth et al. implemented hardware and software add-ons for a multi-touch display that restrict certain actions to the user wearing the IR ring emitting the appropriate signal. Users wearing different rings have different access and control privileges. In this way, only you can delete your document, and only I can access my other e-mail messages.

Roth and his coauthors frame their work as preventing “pranksters and miscreants” from carrying out “their schemes of fraud and malice.” To me, the work is most compelling as a means to avoid mistakes and to frustrate human curiosity. Continue Reading

“Hey Mike we’ve decided to develop a new product!”

“Hmm, I don’t know…”

“Don’t worry, it’s taken directly from Apple’s playbook.”

“Neat! what should we call it?”

IDEO released a concept video of three ebook-related designs: one (code-named Nelson) for reading and analyzing data, one (Coupland) for managing the social context of reading, and one (Alice) for interactive hypertext fiction. While these themes are certainly relevant to computer-mediated reading, the video breaks little new ground.

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I am pleased to announce that the Special Issue on Collaborative Information Seeking of Information Processing & Management is finally (almost) published. That is, it will be published on paper as the November 2010 issue, but is available online now. Congratulations to all the authors for their hard work and for their patience with the publication process!

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Inkling is an iPad textbook app through which textbooks books can be purchased, read, and annotated. It has a pleasant user interface, and (as of this writing) a small collection of what look like high school or intro college level textbooks on a range of topics. This content seems to have been either developed, or heavily adapted, for the iPad app. This makes for a smooth reading experience, loosely anchored on the book metaphor. In addition to reading per se, the app offers some standard navigation and annotation features, but these are works in progress.

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Tom Jennings in an interesting guy. He’s an artist, and activist, and an internet pioneer. Tom is probably best known as the creator of FidoNet. Currently he works with students at the University of California, Irvine’s Arts Computation Engineering graduate program, where he produces artwork under the name “World Power Systems.” The work is wide ranging but technology seems to be a fairly unifying theme.

Recently the band Arcade Fire worked with Chris Milk to produce an experimental music video of sorts. Called “The Wilderness Down Town,” it either combines information about the viewer into a cool multimedia music video or it crashes your web browser. It’s all done with HTML 5. Viewers are asked to provide the address of the house they grew up in and then to create a “postcard” to their younger selves. When it works it is really very cool. To be fair, if you use the browser they suggest (i.e., Google’s Chrome), it seems to work every time.

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Jeff Huang recently published a list of papers from several major conferences that won Best Paper awards. It’s a nice collection of papers, highlighted in a way that is difficult to obtain from the ACM Digital Library. (Why that should be the case is a different story.)

Clearly winning a Best Paper award is a significant achievement and authors of such papers should be proud of their work. But does this merit translate into impact? For example, do papers that win Best Paper awards get cited more frequently than other papers from the same conference?

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