[Sigcr-l] Call for papers: 17th SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop

[Furner,Jonathan]

17th Annual ASIS&T SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop

 

Saturday, November 4, 2006 -- Austin, TX

 

CALL FOR PAPERS -- ABSTRACTS DUE JUNE 1, 2006

 

SOCIAL CLASSIFICATION: PANACEA OR PANDORA?

 

The aims of this year's Classification Research Workshop are to provide
a forum for researchers, practitioners, and users to share their
knowledge, perspectives, and opinions on social classification (SC), and
(in the form of the proceedings) to make a lasting and authoritative
contribution to our understanding of the benefits that SC-based systems
may provide. Papers on any aspect of the conceptualization and/or
evaluation of social classification are invited for presentation at the
workshop and publication in the open-access, peer-reviewed proceedings. 

 

Social classification 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
the 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 information consumers 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, or 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 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)?

 

Abstracts (500-1000 words) of papers should be submitted to both
workshop co-chairs by JUNE 1, 2006. 

 

Authors will be notified of the program committee's decision by JULY 1,
2006. 

 

Full papers (3000-5000 words) should be submitted to both workshop
co-chairs by SEPTEMBER 1, 2006.

 

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. Please see http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM06/am06call.html
for further general information about the ASIS&T Annual Meeting.

 

Workshop co-chairs:

 

Jonathan Furner (furnerj at oclc.org)

 

Assistant Editor, Dewey Decimal Classification, OCLC Online Computer
Library Center, Inc., Washington, DC

 

Joseph Tennis (jtennis at interchange.ubc.ca)

 

Assistant Professor, School of Library, Archival and Information
Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC

 

 

 

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