[Sigsti-l] October 2007 SIG-STI Newsletter

Joe Hourcle oneiros at grace.nascom.nasa.gov
Thu Oct 18 01:10:30 EDT 2007




Okay, I admit it, I never put out a PDF version of the last one,
but I got nothing but compliments for the ASCII version.  If
there are people out there who want a PDF version, I guess I'll
do it if there's a request.

-Joe

ps. If you're looking for research funding opportunities, read all the
     way to the end.

----



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October 2007 Newsletter

======================================================================


Table of Contents
-----------------

     2007 Annual Meeting
         New Member Brunch Respresentative / SIG-RUSH
         SIG-STI Dinner
         Officer Nominees / SIG-STI Planning Meeting
         SIG-STI Sponsored Sessions
             The Future of Institutional Repositories: ...
             Live Usability Lab: ...
             Opening Science to All: ...

     Other Conferences
         Second International Conference on Geospatial Semantics
         AGU 2007 Fall Meeting
         Digital Curation Conference
         10th International Conference for Spatial Data Infrastructure
         Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration AAAI/SSS Workshop

     Miscelaneous
         Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship
         NSF initiative: Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation


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                         October 19-24, 2007
                 Hyatt Regency, Milwaukee, Wisconsion

Joining Research and Practice: Social Computing and Information Science
                 <http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM07/>

======================================================================




New Member Brunch Respresentative / SIG-RUSH
--------------------------------------------
Thank you to Phil Edwards has volunteered to be our representative at
the New Member Brunch.

Joe Hourcle and Robin Peek will be manning the table for SIG-RUSH during
the Welcome Reception (Sunday, 6:30pm-8pm), but all are welcome to come
and socialize.


SIG-STI Dinner
--------------
There will be a dutch treat dinner at Turners Historic Restaurant
(1034 N 4th St) immediately after the Welcome Reception / SIG-RUSH.
Meet up at the SIG-STI table on Sunday, at 8pm.

Please check the message boards at the meeting for a sign-up
sheet so we can attempt to get an accurate head count.  If you're
going to be coming in on Sunday afternoon/evening, but are planning
on attending, please contact Joe Hourcle <oneiros at annoying.org;
cell: 703-371-9828>.


Officer Nominees / SIG-STI Planning Meeting
-------------------------------------------
The following people have been nominated thus far:

 	Chair-Elect
 		Bill Opperman
 	Secretary / Treasurer
 		John D'Ignazio
 	Communications
 		Joe Hourcle
 	(no specific position, just nominated)
 		Phoebe Ayers

The election will occur during the SIG-STI Planning Meeting, Monday,
October 22nd, at noon.


SIG-STI Sponsored Sessions
--------------------------

The Future of Institutional Repositories: The Experts Debate (SIGs DL,
SI, STI, LT) Leslie Chan, Kenneth Frazier, Michael Leach, and Robin
Peek;  Kristin Eschenfelder and Anita Coleman (organizers)

Sunday, October 21st, 1pm

Summary
In this debate-style moderated panel, four experts on institutional
repositories (IR) will take turns answering a set of provocative
questions about the future of IR and challenges inherent in ongoing
management of IR. Panelists will also be given an opportunity to respond
to each others' comments. The debate style format will give audience
members a rich understanding of the challenges related to IR.

Debate questions include:
1. How will IRs come to vary across in 10 years in terms of presence or
    absence, but also in terms of the types of materials collected?
    (e.g., preprints versus local digital collections)?
2. What will the relationship between university libraries and
    disciplinary IRs be in 10 years? What will be the relationship
    between IR and scholarly societies, especially those which publish
    journals?
3. Under what circumstances will consortial or outsourced efforts become
    popular?
4. Under what circumstances should we expect increases in deposit
    activity among researchers and faculty?
5. Under what circumstances will IRs change the status of developing
    nation scholars and the typical flows of scholarly communications?
6. How would our investments in IR be assessed? From an
    economic/financial perspective? From a status perspective? From the
    promotion and tenure perspective? From an open access perspective?
7. How will IR be funded in the long term?

--

Live Usability Lab: Open Access Archives and Digital Repositories
(SIGs DL, SI, USE, STI), Paul Marty, Michael Twidale, Anita Coleman, Tim
Donohue, Dorothy Salo

Monday, October 22nd, 8:30am

Summary
This session proposes a solution to the usability problem in open access
archives by using an innovative and interaction-driven usability
demonstration method developed and tested over the past five years: the
Live Usability Lab (Marty & Twidale, 2005). While this would be its
first demonstration at ASIS&T, the Live Usability Lab has been presented
at seven different national and international conferences over the past
five years, each time evaluating different websites selected by the
audience. At these conferences, this method has consistently and
successfully a) demonstrated the potential and power of user testing,
and b) engaged the audience by illustrating the process with live data
instead of canned examples. Since there is very little in the literature
about the usability testing of open access archives and digital
repositories (which are, after all, another type of website) the Live
Usability Lab format will provide an exciting demonstration of the
potential of usability analysis for evaluating diverse information
interfaces.

--

Opening Science to All: Implications of Blogs and Wikis for Social and
Scholarly Scientific Communication (SIG STI, SIG BWP) Bora Zivkovic,
Jean-Claude Bradley, Janet Stemwedel, Phillip Edwards (moderator) and
K.T. Vaughan (organizer)

Tuesday October 23, 8:30am

Summary
A growing number of scientists are turning to Web2.0 communication tools
such as blogs and wikis to provide open channels for their social and
scholarly discourse. Because of these tools, scientists are increasingly
able to share data, results, and analysis of research (scholarly
communication) with distant, and sometimes unknown peers, and are also
able to enter the realm of scientific commentary (social communication)
with the general public. While many science bloggers focus on purely
social commentary on science, others include conference announcements
and reports, book reviews, brief discussion of "failed" experiments, and
non-publishable research findings. Within this environment there is a
strong awareness that readers include -- and may preferentially be --
non-scientists, perhaps even nonspecialist skeptics about established
theories. This session is not only concerned with presenting a state of
the blog for science communication, but also with thinking about the
impact of "plain English" science writing on both society and on
science.

This session is cosponsored by SIGs STI and BWP.


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The following conferences are not sponsored by SIG-STI, but may be of
interest to our members:


Second International Conference on Geospatial Semantics
November 29-30, 2007
Mexico City, Mexico
<http://www.geosco.org/>

--

AGU 2007 Fall Meeting
December 10-14, 2007
San Francisco, California
<http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm07/>

Specifically, see the Earth and Space Science Informatics:
<http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm07/?content=search&show=session&section=6
&searchBy=sponsor>

--

Digital Curation Conference
"Curating our Digital Scientific Heritage: a Global Collaborative
Challenge"
December 11-13, 2007
Washington, DC
<http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2007>

--

10th International Conference for Spatial Data Infrastructure
February 25-29, 2008
St. Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago
<http://www.gsdi.org/gsdi10/>

--

Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration AAAI/SSS Workshop
March 26-28, 2008
Stanford, CA
<http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/sss08/home/SSKI.html>



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Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship
------------------------------------------

Congrats to Phil Edwards (SIG-STI Chair-Elect) for his winning of
the Thomson ISI/ASIS&T Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship!

<http://www.asis.org/awards/awards_2007.html#isiddp>

     Phillip Edwards, School of Information at the University of
     Washington, is the winner of the 2007 Thomson ISI/ASIS&T Doctoral
     Dissertation Proposal Scholarship. Phillip's dissertation proposal
     focuses on how scholars make important decisions about how, when and
     where to publish their work. One reviewer noted that the proposal is
     very thorough, well written and well reasoned. Other comments
     include that the methodology is creative and ties the different data
     collection methods together to inform the research questions; the
     proposal is nicely structured and very interesting.

     A quote from his nomination letter further elucidates the proposal:

         It is a topic at once very simple ' how do scholars decide where
         and how to distribute the results of their scholarly work'  but
         also quite complex, with a large and growing variety of factors
         affecting those decisions and in an increasingly complicated
         communication landscape. Mr. Edwards has chosen to attack this
         problem with an innovative and robust set of theoretical
         frameworks from management and social psychology, and an
         appropriate and cogent set of methods to answer his research
         questions using those frameworks. We have been struck by the
         lack of research in this seemingly obvious and crucial area, and
         his original approach should serve him well in his
         investigation.



NSF initiative: Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI)
------------------------------------------------------------
NSF has begun a new, multi-disciplinary initiative referred to as Cyber-
enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI).  This program is expected to
start at $26M for this fiscal year and increase significantly in future
years.  Proposals submitted to CDI must be multi- disciplinary in
nature.  A good rule of thumb is to ask whether or not the project you
are thinking of proposing would result in journal publications in
multiple disciplines.  If the answer is 'no' the project would not be
appropriate for the CDI initiative.

     <http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf07603>

The CDI program is organized around three major themes:
1) From Data to Knowledge: enhancing human cognition and generating new
    knowledge from a wealth of heterogeneous digital data;
2) Understanding Complexity in Natural, Built, and Social Systems:
    deriving fundamental insights on systems comprising multiple
    interacting elements;
3) Building Virtual Organizations: enhancing discovery and innovation by
    bringing people and resources together across institutional,
    geographical and cultural boundaries.

In the first year of this initiative we will be accepting proposals in
two major categories:
A) Type 1 projects will require efforts up to a level roughly comparable
    to: summer support for two investigators with complementary
    expertise; two graduate students; and their collective research needs
    (materials, supplies, travel, etc) for three (3) years.
B) Type 2 projects will require larger efforts up to a level roughly
    comparable to: summer support for three investigators; three graduate
    students; one or two senior personnel (including post-doctoral
    researchers and staff); and their collective research needs for four
    (4) years.

In future years NSF expects an additional Type 3 class of proposals that
are larger and more multi-disciplinary than either types 1 and 2.

Because we expect to receive a large number of proposals the proposal
submission and review process will take place in three stages:
1) Letters of Intent are required.  Letters of intent must be submitted
    via FastLane no later than November 30, 2007.
2) Preliminary Proposals are required and must be submitted no later
    than January 8, 2008.  Preliminary proposals must include a 1-page
    project summary, a 1-page list of participants, and a maximum of 5
    pages describing the scope of the project.
3) Full proposals may be submitted BY INVITATION ONLY (based on the
    review of the preliminary proposal) and must be submitted by April
    29, 2008.

IMPORTANT: No one listed in the Senior Personnel in the budget page or the
cover page may be on more than two (2) proposals.

The following web page provides further information about the CDI
initiative. In addition to a brief overview of the initiative it
provides links to frequently asked questions (FAQ), a calendar of CDI
related events, examples of projects that would be appropriate for the
initiative, and references and resources.
     <http://www.nsf.gov/crssprgm/cdi/index.jsp>

The full program solicitation can be found at:
     <http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf07603>

If you have questions about CDI, we have a special email address:
     cdi at nsf.gov


** [The following was mentioned by Peter Fox (Vice-Chair of AGU's
** Earth and Space Science Informatics Focus Group) on a mailing list of
** people working on federated search of scientific data]
**
** There are detailed criteria to comply with so asking NSF program
** managers is essential.
**
** Also note this is a CISE (Computer & Information Science &
** Engineering) AO (sort of replacing the old ITR) and computer
** scientist peer participation is essential (and others, such as
** social, library, etc. are also encouraged).



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