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HICSS-40
Digital Media: Content
and Communication Track

Chair: Michael Shepherd
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Canada B3HIW5
Phone: (902) 494-3686
Fax: (902) 492-1517
shepherd@cs.dal.ca

Minitracks

Digital Divide (Karine Barzilai-Nahon)

Genres of Digital Documents (Dmitri Roussinov, Kevin Crowston, and Carina Ihlström)

Information Retrieval and Digital Library Applications (Ray R. Larson and Fredric C. Gey)

Persistent Conversation (Thomas Erickson and Susan Herring)

Search Effectiveness: User Perspective (Carolyn Watters and Amanda Spink)

Using Information: New Technologies, Ways, & Means (Dan Russell and Jonathan Grudin)

Digital Divide

This minitrack calls for papers that study the digital divide in different levels, methods and perspectives. Levels of the digital divide such as: international, national, local, sector, communal, and also individual. Subjects related to the digital divide that are in the scope of this minitrack include, but are not limited to:

• Socio-demographic factors– gender, age, education, income, ethnic diversity, race diversity, language diversity, religiosity

• Social and governmental support – for example the use of supportive initiatives, policy and applications to bridge the gap, or how society and community impact einclusion

• Access and technology – infrastructure factors

• Affordability

• Use – skills, frequency and time, locus, autonomy of use, what do users do online and for what purpose

• Accessibility focusing mainly in populations with special needs

• Measurements index – e-readiness, DiDix and more

• Conceptualization and theory of digital divide

• Comparative analysis of policy

Karine Barzilai-Nahon

Assistant Professor

University of Washington

The Information School

Mary Gates Hall, Room 370B
Box 352840

Seattle, WA 98195-2840

Phone: (206) 685-6668

Fax: (206) 616-3152

karineb@u.washington.edu

Genres of Digital Documents

This minitrack will elicit papers on the genre of digital documents. Genres are an important area of study for several reasons. They are useful because they make communications more easily recognizable and understandable by recipients and a study of genres provides useful insights into organizational or community structures and leads to designing more effective and usable systems. It is becoming increasingly clear that the successful use of digital media requires the emergence of new or transformed genres of digital communication. In a digital environment, documents have functionality as well as form and content, but in many ways the contextual clues are missing. For this reason, genre provides a certain fixity in communication and becomes increasingly important in providing users a resource for the interpretation of the content, role, and function of a digital document.

Topics the minitrack will address:

· Issues in the transformation of print genres to digital form

· The evolution of genres of digital documents

· Genre theory and its application to digital documents

· Emergent genres

· Investigations of genre in use

· Analyses of particular document genres, e.g. email, spam, and deception

· Using document genres in search and classification

· Genres in non-text digital documents

· Designing systems in support of and using genre

Dmitri Roussinov (Primary Contact)

Department of Information Systems
W.P. Carey School of Business
Arizona State University
Office: BA 267 E
P.O. Box 873606
Tempe, AZ, 85287

Phone: (480)965-8488
http://www.public.asu.edu/~droussi/

dmitri.roussinov@asu.edu

Kevin Crowston

Syracuse University

School of Information Studies

348 Hinds Hall

Syracuse, NY 13244-4100 USA
Phone: +1 (315) 443-1676
Fax: +1 (866) 265-7407

Web: http://crowston.syr.edu/

Email: crowston@syr.edu

Carina Ihlström

School of Information Science, Computer and Electrical Engineering

Halmstad University

P.O. Box 823

S-301 18 Halmstad

SWEDEN

Phone: +46 35 167531

http://www.hh.se/staff/caih

carina.ihlstrom@ide.hh.se

Information Retrieval and Digital Library Applications

Information Retrieval algorithms support the computerized search of large document and digital media collections (millions or billions of items) to select small subsets of those documents relevant to a user's information need. Such algorithms are the basis for internet search engines and digital library catalogues. The fundamental models for retrieval are Boolean/logic (including fuzzy logic), geometric/vector space similarity, and probabilistic document retrieval. Application areas include multi-language and cross-language retrieval, text categorization, text summarization, speech and broadcast retrieval, as well as multimedia retrieval including image and video retrieval. Retrieval performance can be assessed using unbiased objective testing against test collections of hundreds of queries matched to millions of documents.

Topics would include, but not be limited to the following areas:

Information Retrieval Language Models, Algorithms and Tools
Fact-based Open-domain Question Answering
Web-based Information Retrieval
Topic Detection and Tracking over time
Geographic Information Retrieval, gazeteers
Information Visualization
Text Categorization and Summarization
Cross Language Retrieval
Speech and Broadcast Retrieval
Image and Video Retrieval
XML Document and Component retrieval
Distributed Retrieval from Digital Libraries
Issues of IR and DL scaling, including Grid-based algorithms -IR Performance and Evaluation

Ray R. Larson (Primary Contact)

School of Information Management and Systems

University of California, Berkeley

102 South Hall #4600

Berkeley CA 94720-4600

Phone: (510) 642-6046

WWW: http://sims.berkeley.edu/~ray/

Email: ray@sims.berkeley.edu

Fredric C. Gey, Information Scientist

UC Data Archive & Technical Assistance

University of California

2538 Channing Way, # 5100

Berkeley CA 94720-5100

Phone: Campus: (510) 643-1298

Fax : (510) 643-8292

www: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/gey.html

e-mail: gey@berkeley.edu

Persistent Conversation

Persistent conversations occur via instant messaging, text and voice chat, email, blogs, web boards, MOOs, graphical VR environments, document annotation systems, mobile phone texting, etc. Such communication is persistent in that it leaves a digital trace, and the trace in turn affords new uses. It permits conversations to be saved, visualized, browsed, searched, replayed, and restructured. Persistence also means that conversations need not be synchronous: they can be asynchronous (stretching out over hours or days) or supersynchronous (with multiple parties 'talking' at the same time). Finally, the creation of persistent and potentially permanent records from what was once an ephemeral process raises a variety of social and ethical issues. This multi-disciplinary minitrack seeks contributions from researchers and designers that improve our ability to understand, analyze, and/or design persistent conversation systems.

Thomas Erickson (Primary Contact)

Research Staff Member

IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

3136 Irving Ave. (Remote office)

Minneapolis MN 55408-2515

Phone: 612-823-3663 (normally); 914-784-6659 (Tu-Thu, every few weeks)

Fax: 612-823-1576

email: snowfall@acm.org

Susan C. Herring

Professor of Information Science and Linguistics

School of Library and Information Science

10th St. and Jordan Ave.

Indiana University

Bloomington IN 47405

Phone: (812) 334-8883

Fax: (812) 855-6166

email: herring@indiana.edu

Search Effectiveness: User Perspective

A key objective of this minitrack is to align the user focus and the system focus by bringing together researchers and developers. This will be a multi-disciplinary forum that includes theoretical foundations, evaluation measures, methodologies, case studies and user study results.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

· User-based Web search engines effectiveness measures including relevance, utility and usefulness

· Usability of Web search tools

· Evaluation of Web search tools in information seeking problems

· Profiles and personalization to enhance Web search

· Effect of task on information seeking behavior on the Web

· Multimedia effectiveness measures

· Individual differences in Web search

Carolyn Watters (Primary Contact)

Professor of Computer Science

Faculty of Computer Science

Dalhousie University

Halifax, Nova Scotia

Canada B3H 3W5

902-494-6721

watters@cs.dal.ca

Amanda Spink

Professor of Information Technology

Faculty of Information Technology

Queensland University of Technology

Gardens Point Campus

2 George St, GPO Box 2434

Brisbane QLD 4000 Australia

ah.spink@qut.edu.au

Using Information: New Technologies, Ways, & Means
This minitrack at HICSS will focus on how new technologies for using this information are being created and used. In particular, we are interested in work regarding the design, creation and use of information in many settings, particularly in ways that are newly emerging and especially innovative. We seek high quality papers across a broad spectrum of topics in this area.

Specific topics include but are not restricted to:

· How does social tagging change the ways information is found, shared, and used? Will socially tagged content pave the way to shared taxonomies of content?

· How do people read and write in the new technologies? How is content adopted, adapted, co-opted and understood by readers?

· Content analysis, video and document summarization techniques

· New kinds of search and access mechanisms

· Multimedia document browsing, reading, interacting

· Mixes, mashups and re-edits of material are fascinating. How and why are people creating these new forms?

· Does content access control change the nature of its meaning?

· How are media designed for and used by specific populations?

· What are the privacy and accountability implications of these new media?

· What changes as tools and approaches first adopted by students or consumers move into enterprises?

· Use of rich media over a variety of displays and new technologies, from handheld devices to large interactive display surfaces

In other words, how does media literacy—in all its forms and manifestations—make a difference in the way people read and write in the new media? Studies, experiments, system designs and observational studies are all encouraged

Daniel M. Russell (Primary Contact)

Google Inc.

1400 Amphitheatre Blvd.

Mountain View, CA 94043 USA

Phone (W): 650-253-8464

Email: drussell@google.com

Jonathan Grudin

Microsoft Research

One Microsoft Way

Redmond, WA 98052-6399 USA

Phone: 425-706-0784

Email: jgrudin@microsoft.com