Report on INEX 2011

INEX investigates focused retrieval from structured documents by providing large test collections of structured documents, uniform evaluation measures, and a forum for organizations to compare their results. This paper reports on the INEX 2011 evaluation campaign, which consisted of a five active tracks: Books and Social Search, Data Centric, Question Answering, Relevance Feedback, and Snippet Retrieval. INEX 2011 saw a range of new tasks and tracks, such as Social Book Search, Faceted Search, Snippet Retrieval, and Tweet Contextualization.

Overview of INEX 2013

INEX investigates focused retrieval from structured documents by providing large test collections of structured documents, uniform evaluation measures, and a forum for organizations to compare their results. This paper reports on the INEX 2013 evaluation campaign, which consisted of four activities addressing three themes: searching professional and user generated data (Social Book Search track); searching structured or semantic data (Linked Data track); and focused retrieval (Snippet Retrieval and Tweet Contextualization tracks). INEX 2013 was an exciting year for INEX in which we consolidated the collaboration with (other activities in) CLEF and for the second time ran our workshop as part of the CLEF labs in order to facilitate knowledge transfer between the evaluation forums. This paper gives an overview of all the INEX 2013 tracks, their aims and task, the built test-collections, and gives an initial analysis of the results

Report on INEX 2013

INEX investigates focused retrieval from structured documents by providing large test collections of structured documents, uniform evaluation measures, and a forum for organizations to compare their results. This paper reports on the INEX 2013 evaluation campaign, which consisted of four activities addressing three themes: searching professional and user generated data (Social Book Search track); searching structured or semantic data (Linked Data track); and focused retrieval (Snippet Retrieval and Tweet Contextualization tracks). INEX 2013 was an exciting year for INEX in which we consolidated the collaboration with (other activities in) CLEF and for the second time ran our workshop as part of the CLEF labs in order to facilitate knowledge transfer between the evaluation forums. This paper gives an overview of all the INEX 2013 tracks, their aims and task, the built test-collections, and gives an initial analysis of the results.

Overview of INEX 2014

INEX investigates focused retrieval from structured documents by providing large test collections of structured documents, uniform evaluation measures, and a forum for organizations to compare their results. This paper reports on the INEX 2014 evaluation campaign, which consisted of three tracks: The Interactive Social Book Search Track investigated user information seeking behavior when interacting with various sources of information, for realistic task scenarios, and how the user interface impacts search and the search experience. The Social Book Search Track investigated the relative value of authoritative metadata and user-generated content for search and recommendation using a test collection with data from Amazon and LibraryThing, including user profiles and personal catalogues. The Tweet Contextualization Track investigated tweet contextualization, helping a user to understand a tweet by providing him with a short background summary generated from relevant Wikipedia passages aggregated into a coherent summary. INEX 2014 was an exciting year for INEX in which we for the third time ran our workshop as part of the CLEF labs. This paper gives an overview of all the INEX 2014 tracks, their aims and task, the built test-collections, the participants, and gives an initial analysis of the results.

Report on INEX 2012

INEX investigates focused retrieval from structured documents by providing large test collections of structured documents, uniform evaluation measures, and a forum for organizations to compare their results. This paper reports on the INEX'12 evaluation campaign, which consisted of a five tracks: Linked Data, Relevance Feedback, Snippet Retrieval, Social Book Search, and Tweet Contextualization. INEX'12 was an exciting year for INEX in which we joined forces with CLEF and for the first time ran our workshop as part of the CLEF labs in order to facilitate knowledge transfer between the evaluation forums.

How long is a tweet? Mapping dynamic conversation networks on Twitter using Gawk and Gephi

Twitter is now well established as the world’s second most important social media platform, after Facebook. Its 140-character updates are designed for brief messaging, and its network structures are kept relatively flat and simple: messages from users are either public and visible to all (even to unregistered visitors using the Twitter website), or private and visible only to approved ‘followers’ of the sender; there are no more complex definitions of degrees of connection (family, friends, friends of friends) as they are available in other social networks. Over time, Twitter users have developed simple, but effective mechanisms for working around these limitations: ‘#hashtags’, which enable the manual or automatic collation of all tweets containing the same #hashtag, as well allowing users to subscribe to content feeds that contain only those tweets which feature specific #hashtags; and ‘@replies’, which allow senders to direct public messages even to users whom they do not already follow. This paper documents a methodology for extracting public Twitter activity data around specific #hashtags, and for processing these data in order to analyse and visualize the @reply networks existing between participating users – both overall, as a static network, and over time, to highlight the dynamic structure of @reply conversations. Such visualizations enable us to highlight the shifting roles played by individual participants, as well as the response of the overall #hashtag community to new stimuli – such as the entry of new participants or the availability of new information. Over longer timeframes, it is also possible to identify different phases in the overall discussion, or the formation of distinct clusters of preferentially interacting participants.

Is it tweet-worthy? Privacy in a time of sharing.

Information professionals and information organisations use Twitter in a variety of ways. Typically both organisations and the individuals that work for them have separate identities on Twitter, but often individuals identify their organization through their profile or Twitter content. This paper considers the way information professionals use Twitter and their practices with regard to privacy, personal disclosure and identifying their organisational affiliations. Drawing on data from a research study involving a questionnaire and social media observation, the paper will provoke discussion about information professionals’ use of Twitter, personal and organizational identity, and the value of Twitter for professional development. In keeping with the subject matter, a curated set of social media content will be available in lieu of a formal paper.

Library as Agent of [Re]Contextualization

Paper presented at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference in College Park, Maryland.

Do monkeys tweet?

Con texto sencillo acerca de las características de algunos animales y de sus sonidos, presenta una serie de preguntas y respuestas. La última pregunta, si los búhos ululan en medio de la noche, puede ser la única vez en que la respuesta fuera afirmativa.

Big social data and political sentiment: the tweet stream during the UK General Election 2015 campaign

The General Election for the 56th United Kingdom Parliament was held on 7 May 2015. Tweets related to UK politics, not only those with the specific hashtag ”#GE2015”, have been collected in the period between March 1 and May 31, 2015. The resulting dataset contains over 28 million tweets for a total of 118 GB in uncompressed format or 15 GB in compressed format. This study describes the method that was used to collect the tweets and presents some analysis, including a political sentiment index, and outlines interesting research directions on Big Social Data based on Twitter microblogging.

One tweet does not a revolution make : technological determinism, media and social change

This paper discusses the problematic influence of technological determinism in popular news media coverage and analysis of the Arab Spring events of 2010-11.

The purpose is to develop insights into how and why elements of a ‘soft’ technological determinism inflect both journalistic practice and news discourse in relation to the Arab Spring. In particular it discusses how the ‘bias of convenience’ and a journalistic obsession with the ‘continuous present’ connect with this determinist inflection to create a potential distortion in the journalists’ ‘first rough draft’ of history in relation to significant and complex events such as social revolution.

Tweet reach : a research protocol for using Twitter to increase information exchange in people with communication disabilities

Objective: To (a) outline the background to research evaluating Twitter use by people with severe physical and communication disabilities participating actively in online communication forums for increasing information exchange and (b) illustrate a range of potential methods that might be applied in furthering research on the use of social media by people with developmental and acquired communication disabilities. Methods: The literature on communication disabilities, augmentative and alternative communication, and social media research informed the rationale for and design of three studies investigating the use of Twitter by people with communication disabilities. Results: To date, there is little information in the literature about how people with a range of communication disabilities might use Twitter to increase their access to information and help them to feel knowledgeable and in control of their own lives. In this paper, three studies are proposed to investigate the use of Twitter by people with communication disabilities.

Nothing too much: reflecting about the role of contextualization in science teaching

The contextualization and discussion about the science role in the social and economical development are unquestionably important for the science teaching process. It doesn't mean, however, that the scientific-theoretic knowledge and the strategies involved in its construction and application might be neglected. In this way, a dangerous situation is created when the contextualization is assumed as a unique and primordial target in science education. This paper presents a research carried out with 15 future chemistry teachers and the results show a worrying "supervalorization", of the contextualization beside other equally important aspects of the chemical knowledge.