Questions for 22 March

Smeulders et al.

Rating: 1

1) Why is it important to look at the past? The authors of this paper could have chosen to focus on the future and talked about where content-based image retrieval is going, but instead they are looking at what was happening 10 years before their publication to see what ideas worked out and which ones didn’t.  What value does this have for present researchers?

2) How does the end goal of the user affect the image retrieval tools used? Why do some methods fit some search patterns better than others? When I search a set of images (locally on my computer or on-line) what happens differently if I’m looking for an image of the Mona Lisa as opposed to an image of a generic tree? Since Smeulders wrote this paper has the field improved as far as using the right tools for the job is concerned?

3) The authors raise the question of how to evaluate system performance in content-based image retrieval but focus mainly on the problems associated with it without discussing possible solutions to those problems. How can some of these challenges be met? What has been tried – successfully or unsuccessfully – since the paper was published?

Saracevic, Tefko

Rating: 2

1) Saracevic claims on page 146 that we need no definition for relevance because its meaning is known to everyone. He compares it to information in this way, as though information needs no definition. But in the same paragraph he asserts that relevance “affects the whole process of communication, overtly or subtly.” He calls it a “fundamental aspect of human communication.” If relevance is so important how can we get by without defining it? Wouldn’t a definition help us understand the meaning better than when we rely on intuition alone? That understanding could, in turn, lead to improved communication.

2) How does this paper relate to the Smeulders paper we read? What is the role of relevance in content-based image retrieval? In the 25 years between the two papers did the concept of relevance evolve?

3) There are many different views on relevance described in the paper. What is the “so what?” of these views? How does this philosophical discussion of relevance affect the practical side of information science? As an example, would a follower of the ‘deductive inference view’ build a different retrieval system than a follower of the ‘pragmatic view’? What differences would there be and how would the differing schools of thought give birth to these differences?

Croft, Metzler, and Strohman

Rating: 3

1) The definition of Information Retrieval that the authors borrow from Gerard Salton is very broad. The benefit to this is that the definition is still applicable today even though it was penned 45 years ago. What is the downside to using a dated definition? Are they missing out on any potential benefits that an updated definition might bring? If they wanted to update the definition, could they? Since IR is so broad that it encompasses many fields is it possible to update the definition without driving a wedge between certain aspects of IR?

2) How does time affect IR? As time passes objects can change – especially digital objects. A new version of software is released, a website’s content is updated, Wikipedia is edited, etc. If the information I’m seeking is something that existed on a certain day or at a certain time how does this affect IR?

3) How do concepts like ‘relevance’ and/or ‘evaluation’ transfer from one branch of IR to another? How are these concepts different for, say, a search engine designer and a cartographer (who, by Salton’s definition is in an IR career)? Is there a difference?

Questions for 3-15

JISC Digital Media

Rating: 4

1) What is the risk with limiting your collection to one specific metadata schema? Is there a way to ensure that metadata that falls outside your schema is not lost? What benefits to having a schema are there and how do they outweigh the risks? Do they outweigh the risks?

2) How does they JISC definition of metadata compare to Gilliland’s definition? What differences and/or similarities are there? Could the differences arise because JISC is specifically speaking to “collections of sharable digital collections [of] still image, moving image or audio collections,” are they due to differences in author’s opinions or are they due to some other factor?

3) According to the website metadata can be kept in the digital file itself, in a database, in an XML document, or in all of the above. What are the benefits to keeping metadata in each of these locations? If each is beneficial doesn’t it make sense to use all 3 in every case? Why would some organizations choose to not do this?

Gilliland

Rating: 3

1) Metadata is currently a blend of manual and automatic processes. What would you estimate the ratio of manual to automated processes to be? How do you think this will this change as technology progresses? What are the risks in automating the collection and documentation of metadata and what benefits outweigh those risks? Regardless of what will happen, what should happen? Should we automate more processes or should we reintroduce a stronger human element?

2) How is metadata different today than it was 100 years ago? 10 years ago? Is the rate of change slow enough that we will be able to keep up with it?

3) Gilliland says that all information objects have 3 features: content, context, and structure. How do these features relate to the 5 attributes of metadata laid out later in the article? Does each attribute detail information about a single feature? Or do all the attributes exist separately for each feature? Should we look to accept either the 3 features or the 5 attributes or do they work together to paint a complete picture of the information object?

Nunberg

Rating: 5

1) Here again we see the need for a human element in computer processes. We saw it in the WordNet readings and the Church and Hanks readings from two weeks ago. We saw it in the data mining reading from the week before that. With the advances in technology we’ve experienced in our lifetime why do we still have this dependence on human input? Will computers ever be able to overcome the need for the human element? Should we be worried if this were to ever happen?

2) What kind of metadata is Nunberg talking about here? Are the things he mentions administrative? Descriptive? Technical? Something else? Is there a pattern here where some types of metadata are being bungled and others are not?

3) Why didn’t anyone tell the world that Sigmund Freud and his translator invented the internet back in 1939? Wouldn’t this have brought technology forward much more quickly? How would this have affected world history over the past 70 years?

Wiggins

Rating: 4

1) When they found that the information on the various schools’ websites were not up to date, did the authors attempt to contact the schools in question to get more reliable information? I mean, if they were already on the schools’ websites the phone number would probably have been right there. It just seems like a simple step that would have improved the results of the study. If they did not, could there be a good reason why they did not?

2) According to Table 2, UT Austin does not fit the stereotypical iSchool makeup of the members of the iSchool Caucus. We had much lower numbers of Computing faculty and we had the 3^rd highest percentage of both Humanities and Communication faculty. What does that say about the degree programs offered here in contrast with those offered at other schools? Why do you think UT has chosen to be different in the composition of its faculty? Was this a good choice?

3) Table 2 is not based off of the number of faculty from each field but the percentage of faculty. How does this affect the comparisons we draw between the schools? As an example, U Illinois has 20% of their faculty coming from the Humanities and UT has 18%. The actual numbers are that U Illinois has 6 faculty and we have 4. That is a 33% decrease represented by two percentage points. More drastic is UCLA under the same category. 10% of their faculty comes from the Humanities which turns out being 7 faculty. All of these numbers are correct, but it can be misleading because of the way they are presented. Is there a better way to organize this information?

Questions for March 1

WordNet Readings

Rating: 2

1)  Miller talks about how dictionaries leave out a lot of important information because it is assumed that human users know some important, basic information already. For WordNet this information must be explicitly stated because computers only know what we tell them. He talks about adding additional information about the hypernym, information about coordinate terms, etc. He even mentions in passing that traditional dictionaries are distinct from encyclopedias, at least in part, because of the lack of information. My question is, if WordNet is trying to fill in these information gaps and link everything together so related words have connections between them how is this project different from Wikipedia? It sounds like WordNet is trying to be more like an encyclopedia than a dictionary and since it cross-references its entries it sounds like almost the exact same project.

2) If asked to re-create a project as massive as WordNet, where would you begin? What would your process be? Seeing how detailed each part of speech becomes it seems an overwhelmingly gargantuan task. And because language is constantly changing the larger question becomes: can we keep up? Is WordNet constantly becoming more and more up-to-date or simply falling further and further behind as language evolves?

3) If concepts like ‘gradation’ and ‘markedness’ are not used in WordNet, why do Fellbaum and the others include them in the reading? Do these concepts help the reader understand the ideas that WordNet does include? Is it because they wish to be transparent about their known weaknesses? If you were the author of this article would you include these sections?

HP Grice

Rating: 3

1) Does knowing whether or not you are failing to fulfill a particular maxim matter? For example, the second maxim under ‘Quality’ is “Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.” If a speaker should have adequate evidence to support their point but is unaware that the evidence they are relying on is faulty how would this be classified? As a VIOLATION? Can a conversational implicature arise from such a situation?

2) How does Grice’s discussion of divergences in logical formal devices at the beginning set the stage for the rest of the article? In other words, why did Grice bother to talk about them? Could he have just started off with the section on Implicature?

3) Near the end of the article Grice asserts “The implicature is not carried by what is said, but only by the saying of what is said.” Does this hold true for any other type of linguistic form? If so, are there commonalities between implicature and the other forms communicated by the saying, not the said?

Church and Hanks

Rating: 2

1) What is the role of Church’s association ratio within WordNet? Would this be a benefit to the project since is helps show how some words are connected? Or would it simply overly-complicate things? Is the relevance of association ratio different for the various relations observed (Fixed, compound, semantic and Lexical)? For example, would WordNet benefit from knowing that ‘bread’ is related to ‘butter’ or ‘United’ is related to ‘States’ but not benefit from knowing ‘refraining’ is related to ‘from’?

2) Besides the number of words and a brief mention that one is mostly British and another American journalese we don’t get a lot of clarification about what is in the corpora used in the study. How would the content affect our perception of the results? For example, if one corpus was all dime-store romance novels and another was filled with various encyclopedias would that change our view of the results? If so, how?

3) As technology continues to improve computers become more and more intelligent and are able to perform more tasks that were previously thought to require human effort. Association ratio is simply a tool for lexicographers, it does not replace them, but in the future how could this technology improve to minimize the work of the lexicographer and maximize the effort of the computer?

Questions for 22 Feb.

Brookshear

Rating: 4

1)  Are lossless systems always the best way to go? If not, when should lossy systems take precedence? What conditions need to exist in order for the lost information to be acceptable?

2) Perhaps I misunderstood something, but isn’t the “commit point” the end of a process? Instead of saying a process has reached the commit point why do we not simply say a process is complete?

3) What are the advantages and disadvantages to indexed filing and hash systems? How can we determine which one works more efficiently in a given situation? Is one always better than the other? Is on usually better than the other?

DT Larose

Rating: 4

1)  Larose says that data mining cannot run itself and there is a need for human supervision over any data mining project. Will this always be the case? Computers are getting smarter all the time right? So will they ever reach the point where they can perform data mining tasks on their own?

2) One of the fallacies related to data mining put forth in the reading is that data mining quickly pay for itself most, if not all, of the time. Is there any way to predict when this will occur?

3) For case study #4 there was no real deployment stage. Does there need to be deployment for a data mining project to have value? Which of the other stages might be skipped over any how would that affect the value of data mining?

Wayner

Rating: 3

1)  How do you balance the need for greater compression with the need for stability? On pg 20 of chapter two we read that variable length coding can really compress a file a lot, but it is also very fragile. Maybe we can give up some of the space compressed if we get a little more stability. But give up too much compression and we have to ask ourselves if the compression is worth it in the first place. What is the balance?

Questions for Feb 15

Bates

Rating: 2

1)  If I were to perform a study where I examined how various people perceive the concept of a chair, would my perception of the results fall under the Information 2 definition since I’m assigning a pattern to other people’s perception? Or would I need to develop an additional definition since I’m now making a pattern of the patterns generated by others?

2)  Isn’t the phrase “given meaning” redundant in Bates’ definition of knowledge? The definition is “Information given meaning and integrated with other contents of understanding.” Bates explains that the word ‘Information’ here refers to her definition of “Information 2,” which is “some pattern of organization of matter and energy that has been given meaning by a living being.” So, an extended definition of knowledge could be made by substituting in the definition of information 2 where the word ‘information’ occurs in the definition of knowledge. This results in the following definition of knowledge: Some pattern of organization of matter and energy that has been given meaning by a living being given meaning and integrated with other contents of understanding. The second “given meaning” seems redundant. Wouldn’t it make more sense for Bates’ definition of knowledge to simply be “Information integrated with other contents of understanding?”

3)    Bates says that information does not exist on its own plane of existence but in the physical realm. Yet information is not matter or energy, it is the pattern of matter and/or energy. Given this, how does Bates feel about information-as-thing? Would she classify the pattern mentioned in her definition as an object or thing?

Buckland

Rating: 3

1)  Buckland says that words like ‘document’ and ‘documentation’ shouldn’t be limited to refer only to texts but should be much broader in scope. What is the advantage of broadening these terms in the fashion? If we were to have ‘document’ and ‘documentation’ be limited to texts, but add new vocabulary to refer to objects that perform similar functions but have different compositions (like artifacts, or antelopes) would the extra vocabulary be too cumbersome? Or would it allow us to easily qualify and categorize information-giving objects?

2)  Some of the documentalists hold that in order to be classified as a document an object must have a certain intent. It could be intended as evidence or intended as communication but the intent must be there. How do these documentalists determine intent? Is it the intent of the creator they have in mind? Or perhaps the intent of the user? If I create a clay bowl with no intent of communication or evidence – I just want a bowl – but 100 years later that bowl is in a museum, is that a document? How about if I paint my history on the bowl intending to communicate, but 100 years later nobody cares about my object and it is hidden away in a closet somewhere – is that a document?

3)  Buckland touches lightly on the implications the word ‘document’ has on digital objects. Which of the documentalists’ views would best translate to a digital environment? What adaptations, if any, would need to be made to their definition of a document in order for the transition to digital to function? 

Harper et al.

Rating: 3

1)  According to Harper et al. when Microsoft was contemplating WinFS as a possible new OS one of the reasons this didn’t happen was because legacy systems often had little or no metadata. The authors go on to suggest that one of the big ways forward is to rethink the role of metadata. What are some ways that implementation of this concept – rethinking the role of metadata – could avoid the same problem faced by WinFS?

2)  They end with phrases like “Much more needs to be done” and “Whatever future work does need undertaking – and there is [sic] obviously plenty of opportunities here.” Why don’t they elaborate on the direction future research should take? I know this isn’t a lit review, but to leave it by saying there is much to do but I can’t list any of it feels empty. So I guess my question is: What else is there to do? How best can we proceed with developing a new abstraction and a new grammar of action?

3)  They talk about the need for people to have the right to delete or own their digital works, or to manage copies being made – and I agree. But should the creator of a work be allowed to do anything they like with their work and not have any consequences to their rights? If I build a sculpture in downtown Austin, then later decide I want to “delete” my sculpture, should I be able to demand that anyone who snapped a photo (create a copy) of it erase the picture?  The creator of a work has the choice to post that work on social media, and by making that choice they are electing to give up certain rights tied to the work (most, if not all, social media sites include language for this in their terms of use). What motivation does Facebook have of saying “Sure, we’ll disseminate your content to the entire world for you for free! You go ahead and keep all rights tied to that content.”? Would a record label or book publisher make that kind of offer? No! So why should social media be different?

Questions for Feb. 8

Eppler and Mengis questions

Rating: 4

1) Does Information technology cause more problems than it solves? It seems to cause a lot of information overload, but there are also obvious benefits to using, say, email. Do these benefits outweigh the drawbacks? How does the implementation of countermeasures to fight information overload affect the issue?

2)Are the publication timeline figures useful for future research? They are only partial pictures of what is being written since they don’t contain “all the articles per field and show all the references to other overload articles” (337). How can the reader be sure that Eppler and Mengis are not missing out on a larger number of relavant articles that would change the conclusions one might reach by consulting the figures?

3)When it comes to symptoms Eppler and Mengis are really only concerned with how the symptom affects decision accuracy, decision time, and general performance. Why might they have focused on these issues and for whom are these the “correct” issues on which to focus? What groups might be interested in other symptoms like cognitive stress or low job satisfaction?

Attwood et al. questions

Rating:5

1)Looking at figure 12, isn’t it possible that by linking all of the existing information together you increase information overload instead of decrease it? The page on the right looks so busy that it would be hard to concentrate on the text. And besides making it more difficult to read you are opening the door to scads of other online sources. Sure you have access to all kinds of related articles and databases, but if there are too many of those it will be all too easy to drown in a sea of digital content.  How can we create something that forms the types of interconnections Attwood talks about without falling into the trap of feeding our readers a drink from the fire hose?

2) Many groups have already begun creating their own standards or ontologies to deal with the issues raised in this article. If we could get all interested parties to agree that universal standards are needed how do we determine which system is best? I think about the layout of our keyboards today – they aren’t even close to being the most efficient layout, but back when competing typewriter companies were hawking different keyboard configurations QWERTY somehow won out. How can this be prevented for online standards?

3) Eppler and Mengis talk about causes, symptoms, and countermeasures for information overload and how the three are related. Attwood’s article deals with countermeasures needed to combat information overload. How would Eppler and Mengis view these countermeasures? How would they say the countermeasures proposed by Attwood affect the causes of information overload?

Paul and Baron questions

Rating:2

1)The new era of writing technology discussed in the article is compared to the importance of the emergence of the printing press. The printing press allowed the renaissance and the reformation – what cultural revolutions are facilitated by the digital age? Do these revolutions overall have a more positive or negative effect on our civilization?

2)Obviously, when large amounts of information (such as millions of emails) are involved in litigation there must be some way to sift through it to find relavant information. If we turn to statistical sampling, however, the problem arises that important evidence may be missed. Should this happen and that evidence comes to light after the court proceedings have concluded how do we deal with the resulting dilemma? There could have been evidence not included in the case that would have changed the outcome.

3)Would products like those described in the Attwood article be of benefit here? What legal issues would be raised if we were to create a technology that would link all emails generated by the White House relating to the same topic?

Questions for Feb. 1

Buckland questions

Rating: 4

1) Buckland claims that whether a document, data, object, or event is informational is dependent upon the cirucumstances surrounding the document, data, object, or event. But lacking any context don’t objects, documents, etc still provide information about themselves? Would we be better off saying that whether a document, data, etc. is usefully informational is situational?

2) If we accept that information-as-thing is a Tangible Entity as in Buckland’s figure 1 then how do we classify information that comes from intangible sources? For example, when we feel emotion we receive information. But apprehension or glee or faith or whatever - these are not tangible objects or documents.

3) Are all information-as-thing items information by consensus? For example, is a phone book only informative because people agree that it is?

Capurro and Hjorland questions

Rating:3

1) Capurro and Hjorland suggest that rather than focusing on defining the term “information” it would be more beneficial for the IS field to look at the meaning of words like “signs,” “texts,” and “knowledge” (p. 350). If we accept this view shouldn’t we change the name of the field to Knowledge Science? Or Textual Science? How can we claim to be part of Information Science without bothering to define information?

2) Capurro cites himself for a work he did evaluating information's meaning throughout history. How does studying a word’s history or etymology help us understand its meaning today? Why does it matter how Virgil, or Plato, or Augustine used the word information? What do these writings tell us about the word’s meaning in our modern culture?

3) Capurro and Hjorland talk a lot about looking at various definitions of information from multiple fields. What are some of the differences between information in the arts & humanities and information in the sciences? Does the definition from one group more closely relate to information as we see it in the iSchool than the other? Do we combine these disparate definitions or maintain them as separate entities that are dealt with independent of each other?