[Air-l] FW: CALL FOR POSTERS - 17th Annual ASIS&T SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop

[Rowin Young]

Possibly of interest to some list members?

Best wishes,
Rowin

------ Forwarded Message
From: Joseph Tennis <jtennis at INTERCHANGE.UBC.CA>
Reply-To: Joseph Tennis <jtennis at INTERCHANGE.UBC.CA>
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2006 08:43:58 -0700
To: <DC-GENERAL at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
Subject: CALL FOR POSTERS - 17th Annual ASIS&T SIG/CR Classification
Research Workshop

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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