[Sigcr-l] Reminder - Call for Posters - 17th Annual ASIS&T SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop

[Joseph Tennis]

17th Annual ASIS&T SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop
Saturday, November 4, 2006 -- Austin, TX

CALL FOR POSTERS

IMPORTANT DATES:
Submission of abstracts: August 1, 2006
Notification of acceptance: September 1, 2006
Submission of final abstracts in PDF format: September 15, 2006
Presentation of posters at SIG/CR Workshop: November 4, 2006

CALL FOR POSTERS:
Students interested in social classification, social tagging,  
bookmarking, tagspace studies, collaborative indexing and annotation,  
folksonomies, etc., are invited to submit posters outlining their  
research, for presentation at the SIG/CR Workshop on Social  
Classification.

Abstracts of posters should be submitted by August 1, 2006. (An  
earlier call for abstracts of full papers had a deadline of June 1,  
2006.) Abstracts should be a maximum of 500 words and should outline  
the purpose, scope, approach, findings, and implications of the  
research. Posters will be reviewed by the international SIG/CR  
Workshop program committee.

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP:
Social Classification: Panacea or Pandora?

Social classification (SC) is a convenient, generic label that may be  
used to refer to any of a number of broadly related processes by  
which the resources in a collection are categorized by multiple  
people over an ongoing period, with the potential result that any  
given resource will come to be represented by a set of labels or  
descriptors that have been generated by different people. The  
specific processes in question include indexing, tagging,  
bookmarking, annotation, and description of kinds that may be  
characterized as collaborative, cooperative, distributed, dynamic,  
community-based, folksonomic, wikified, democratic, user-assigned, or  
user-generated. The mid-2000s have seen rapid growth in levels of  
interest in these kinds of technique for generating descriptions of  
resources for the purposes of discovery, access, and retrieval.  
Systems that provide automated support for social classification may  
be implemented at low cost, and are perceived to contribute to the  
democratization of classification by empowering people, who might  
otherwise remain strictly consumers of information, to become  
information producers.

Efforts to conduct serious evaluations of the comparative  
effectiveness of such systems have begun, but results are scattered  
and piecemeal. Compared with retrieval systems based on traditional  
methods -- manual or automatic -- of classifying resources, how  
effectively are users of SC-based systems able to find the resources  
that they want? What is the impact on retrieval effectiveness of  
systems designers' decisions to pay limited attention to  
traditionally important components such as vocabulary control, facet  
analysis, and systematic hierarchical arrangement? Current  
implementations of SC tend to shy away, for instance, from imposing  
the kind of vocabulary control on which classification schemes and  
thesauri are conventionally founded: proponents argue that social  
classifiers should be free, as far as possible, to supply precisely  
those class labels that they believe will be useful to searchers in  
the future, whether or not those labels have proven useful in the  
past. But do the advantages that are potentially to be gained from  
allowing classifiers free rein in the choice of labels outweigh those  
that may be obtainable by imposing some form of vocabulary and  
authority control, by offering browsing-based interfaces to  
hierarchically structured vocabularies, by establishing and complying  
with policies for the specificity and exhaustivity of sets of labels,  
and/or by other devices that are designed to improve classifier-- 
searcher consistency?

Other questions arise as a result of the reliance of SC-based systems  
on volunteer labor. Given the distributed nature of SC, for example,  
how can it be ensured that every resource attracts a critical mass of  
descriptors, rather than just the potentially-quirky choices of a  
small number of volunteers? Given the self-selection of classifiers,  
how can it be ensured that they are motivated to supply class labels  
that they would expect other searchers to use? In general, are  
reductions in the costs of classification (borne by information  
producers) achieved only at the expense of increases in the costs of  
resource discovery (borne by consumers)?

The workshop will be held on NOVEMBER 4, 2006, as part of the Annual  
Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and  
Technology (ASIS&T) in Austin, TX. It will be the 17th in a series of  
annual workshops organized by ASIS&T's Special Interest Group on  
Classification Research (SIG/CR). Please see http://www.asis.org/ 
Conferences/AM06/am06call.html for further general information about  
the ASIS&T Annual Meeting, and http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~klabarre/ 
SIGCR.html for further information about SIG/CR.

SUBMISSIONS:
Abstracts of posters should be submitted to both workshop co-chairs  
by email (see below) by August 1, 2006. Authors will be notified of  
the program committee's decision by September 1, 2006. PDF copies of  
the final versions of abstracts should then be submitted to both  
workshop co-chairs by September 15, 2006. Posters will be presented  
on November 4, 2006.

WORKSHOP CO-CHAIRS:
Jonathan Furner (furner at gseis dot ucla dot edu)
Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education and Information  
Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, CA

Joseph Tennis (jtennis at interchange dot ubc dot ca)
Assistant Professor, School of Library, Archival and Information  
Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC






Joseph T. Tennis, PhD
Assistant Professor
Coordinator for the MAS and MLIS First Nations Concentration
School of Library, Archival and Information Studies
The University of British Columbia
301 - 6190 Agronomy Road
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z3
CANADA
phone: 1.604.822.2431
fax: 1.604.822.6006
jtennis at interchange.ubc.ca
http://www.slais.ubc.ca/PEOPLE/faculty/tennis-p/index.htm


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