Annotation of Structured Data Project

UNC-SILS and Microsoft, 2004-2005


Project Overview

Research Team

Publications

Resouces

 

Project News

 

         (05/01/2005) Papers and posters are accepted by ASIST, JCDL, AOIR, ... New!

         (03/01/2005) Publications are accepted by / submitted to major conferences!

         (12/02/2004) Cathy Marshall visited SILS and presented a lecture on Personal Digital Libraries.

         (11/28/2004) Dr. Marchionini visited the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Nov. 18 and interviewed people on annotation of statistical databases.

         (09/01/2004) Team wiki was setup. Special thanks to John and Junliang!

 

Project Overview

SILS faculty members Dr. Gary Marchionini and Dr. Paul Solomon have been awarded a $150,000 gift from the Microsoft Corporation to research how frequent users of structured data such as statistical files and databases make sense of and annotate information.
“We hope our research will shed light on the role annotations play in seeking and understanding information in electronic environments,” Marchionini said. “People are increasingly faced with using structured data in their personal and professional lives; and, this work should provide guidance to designers and software engineers who want to create systems that make it easier for users to record notes and reflections.”
Solomon, the school's interim dean and an associate professor, and Marchionini, Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor, will form a team of SILS researchers who will collaborate with Catherine Marshall, senior research scientist at Microsoft.
“We know very little about how people annotate structured data in tables, databases and other digital repositories,” Solomon said. “We do know, however, that with existing software it's difficult for users to record thoughts, temporary notes or memory aids for future reference when dealing with data.”
The team will select a group of people doing survey, cataloging and statistical analysis work. Participants will be observed using software in their workplaces, and researchers will record how they make notes to themselves. Participants will be interviewed and observed over a one-year period to identify strategies and potential tools for annotating structured data.

(http://www.ils.unc.edu/ils/releases/RELEASE04_microsoftgift.html)

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Research Team


(Click to enlarge)

Principal Investigators

 

Cathy Marshall (Microsoft)

  Gary Marchionini (SILS)

Paul Solomon (SILS)

  Catherine Blake (SILS)
 

Other Members

 

Xin (Robert) Fu (SILS PhD student)

 

John MacMullen (SILS PhD student)

Lili Luo (SILS PhD student)

  Mary B. Ruvane (SILS PhD student)

David West (SILS PhD student)

 

Megan Winget (SILS PhD Student)

Tom Ciszek (SILS MSIS student)

   

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Publications

Blake, C., West, D., Luo, L., & Marchoinini, G. (2005). Cataloging On-Line Health Information: A Content Analysis of the NC Health Info Portal. In Proceedings of the Annual American Medical Informatics Association Conference (AMIA 2005). [Detail]


Ciszek, T. & Fu, X.
(2005). Hyperlinking: From the Internet to the Blogosphere. In Proceedings of the 6th International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Chicago, IL, October 5-9, 2005. [Detail]


Ciszek, T. & Fu, X.
(2005). An Annotation Paradigm: The Social Hyperlink. In Proceedings of the 68th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T), Vol. 42, Charlotte, NC, October 28-November 2, 2005. Poster. [Detail]


Fu, X., Ciszek, T., Marchionini, G., & Solomon, P.
(2005). Annotating the Web: An Exploratory Study of Web Users Needs for Personal Annotation Tools. In Proceedings of the 68th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T), Vol. 42, Charlotte, NC, October 28-November 2, 2005. [Detail]

 

Luo, L., West, D., Marchoinini, G.& Blake, C. (2005). A Study of Annotations for a Consumer Health Portal. The ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), Denver, Colorado, June 7-11, 2005. 388. Poster. [Detail]

 

MacMullen, W. J. (2005). Inter-database annotation linkages in model organism databases. In Proceedings of the 68th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T), Vol. 42, Charlotte, NC, October 28-November 2, 2005. [Detail]

 

MacMullen, W. John (2005). Annotation as Process, Thing, and Knowledge: Multi-domain studies of structured data annotation. SILS Technical Report TR-2005-02. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, School of Information and Library Science, Technical Report Series. [Detail]

 

Ruvane, M. B. & Dobbs, G. R. (2005). Interdisciplinary collaboration and database modeling for historical GIS: structured annotation for land grant research. Association of American Geographers, 101st Annual Meeting, Denver, CO, April 5-9, 2005. [Detail]

 

Ruvane, M. B. (2005). Annotation as Process: A Vital Information Seeking Activity in Historical Geographic Research. In Proceedings of the 68th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T), Vol. 42, Charlotte, NC, October 28-November 2, 2005. [Detail]

 

Winget, Megan (2005). Action and Interaction in Music and New Media Art: Exploration of Musicians' Performative and Interactive Decisions as Evidenced by Annotated Musical Scores. Association of Computers in the Humanities / Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing (ACH/ALLC) Annual Conference, Victoria, British Columbia, June 15-18, 2005. [Detail]
 

Winget, Megan (2005). Like a Wave Upon the Sand: Representation and Preservation of "Born Digital" Art. Paper presented at (Im)permanence: Cultures in/out of Time, a conference at the Carnegie Mellon Center for the Arts in Society. Pittsburg, PA, October 2005. [Detail]
 

Winget, Megan (2005). Digital Preservation of New Media Art Through Exploration of Established Symbolic Representation Systems. Paper discussed at the Doctoral Forum at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), Denver, Colorado, June 7-11, 2005. [Detail]

 

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Resources

Selected Readings

Conferences

Annotation Tools

 

New Resources

Personal Digital Libraries: filling in the missing pieces
(Talk given by Cathy Marshall on December 2, 2004 @ UNC-SILS)

More than three years ago, Clifford Lynch predicted that in the near future, the appliances that were conceived as electronic books would transcend their limited role as paper book surrogates and become portable personal digital libraries. Why hasn't this happened? Certainly it seems that hardware is no longer the culprit.

In this talk, I'll examine at least three other reasons why we're not there yet: (1) the mysterious nature of our interactions with what we read; (2) modes of information access apart from searching and browsing; and (3) problems with personal archiving and maintaining one's own digital library over an extended time period. In addition to discussing these obstacles, I'll also wax optimistic and talk about changes I've noted over the past three years that make personal digital libraries more likely.

 

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The Annotation Project is managed at the Interaction Design Laboratory at the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This website was created by Xin Fu  on August 8, 2004 and last modified on January 16, 2006