INLS 500 - Human Information Interaction

Interaction Diary Assignment 3:  Review and Reflection

Fall 2007

Due: Tuesday, November 20

The first diary assignment asked that you analyze your own information-seeking event, and the second asked that you describe an incidental information acquisition event. The third assignment asks that you review and reflect on someone else's attempt to communicate information to others.  

You must choose one article from a concept area or research area of particular interest to you. It can be one of the articles from class, one of the articles cited in the article, or it can be a different article. [A good choice might be one of the optional readings for the course. You are not restricted to this list, but you should choose an article related to the course content in some way.]  The article should be one that was written sometime between 1960-2004 and it should be a paper that some have deemed significant.

Your task is to analyze this paper in the broader context of the field.

Your should analyze the citations to this paper. How many times has it been cited? Who has cited it? Under what circumstances? In what fields? You should check the following online citation indexes:  ISI Web of Science (available online through the UNC Library article databases), Google Scholar, and the ACM Portal (for some technical papers). What do these citations tell you about the importance (or lack of importance) of this work?

In a brief paper, 2 to 5 pages, write an analysis of the article that reflects your personal impressions of the paper with respect to the citations and with respect to the article's structure and content. If you feel the paper has not received the attention it deserves, reflect on why that may be so. If the paper has received more attention than it deserves, reflect on why that may be so. The review should describe what you found useful in the article, what you liked about it, what the article's deficiencies or limitations are, and how the article has influenced your thinking about the field or about practice. 

You should discuss how the author structured and illustrated the point being made. How successful was the author (or authors) in making an argument or conveying their ideas? What appealed to you about the presentation (structure, illustrations, writing style, length, level of detail, etc.)? How much of the article's appeal was due to your own point of view or familiarity with the topic? What, if anything, did you learn about citation behaviors or about the citation sources themselves?

Note: It may be more fun to be critical, but one of the goals of this assignment is to recognize that the author is trying to make a point, to convey information that he/she/they believe is important, so it is important to appreciate that and place your comments in context.

Grades will depend upon the quality of your analysis, especially with respect to the aspects of the communication that are successful or unsuccessful.