Carolyn's IST590 Blog

As shown by the many links and sources on the syllabus for this topic there are lots of places one can find humor specifically about or for graduate students. One thing that I noticed is that much of the humor is making fun or graduate students or parts of graduate student life. I particularly enjoyed reading the top ten lists on the Graduate Student Humor Page ( http://www-personal.umich.edu/~danhorn/gradhumor.html). The article on correlation and causation (http://www.obereed.net/hh/correlation.html) was also entertaining, particularly because one of my classes this semester has discussed how correlation does not equal causation so I could directly equate the article to what I am doing in my classes. Another site I liked looking at for humor about graduate students was PhD Comics (http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/aboutcomics.html) or Piled Higher and Deeper. These comics were particularly fun because I had seen some of them before, but had never actually been to the webpage and did not realize how many comics there actually were.

 

For my self when I am in the mood for something humorous I usually do not look for something that is directly applicable to graduate students. Instead I will often reread some of my favorite fantasy books that also have comic parts or just reread the funny parts of some of my favorite books. For instance, when I want to read a book that has some comedy I will often reread Patricia C. Wrede's The Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Reading books is probably the way I find humor the most often although I occasionally read comics in newspapers and now I will probably start going and looking at PhD comics more often as well.

This blog posting is about how to flourish in graduate school. Here I comment on some of the suggestions from the readings for the course and explain how a few of their tips work or do not work for me.

Two suggestions that I found interesting from How to be a Good Graduate Student  (http://www.cs.indiana.edu/how.2b/how.2b.html) were "Keeping a journal of your research activities and ideas is very useful" and "One of the keys to balancing your life is to develop a schedule that's more or less consistent." These are two things that I try to do. I am starting to keep of notebook with all of my research activities so I can go back and check what I have done in the past and what I ideas I might have thought of. This is particularly useful when I have to talk with other people about my research because it means I have a reference that I can look at to help me remember exactly what I have been doing.

As for the second suggestion of developing a schedule that is also something I try to do. I know from experience that if I want to get much work done I need to start soon after I get up. If I do not start first thing in the morning I am likely to procrastinate if the tasks I am trying to accomplish are things that do not need to be done immediately. In order to deal with this I try to make myself get up and start work by around 8:00 every weekday so that I will get more work done than if I wait and work later in the day. In addition, I frequently try to go to the IST building and do work there because I am less likely to get distracted if I am not in my own home. Even on weekends I will frequently go into my office for at least a little while so that I will make sure and get some work done.

From Alice Domurat Dreger's graduate school survival (http://www.alicedreger.com/grad_school_survival.html) Two connected tips that I found were "Enjoy yourself in grad school: sleep late when you can, take naps, eat good food and enjoy great conversations with smart people..." and "...but don't laze around." The two are obviously connected. I can understand the don't laze around part of the tips and the enjoy yourself but some of the other parts do not work for me. Other people may have different ways of working and thus they may be more useful for them but for me I know sleeping late and taking naps are not good ideas. I can sleep late occasionally but generally I get more work done if I get up early and start working. Likewise naps cause me to get less work done because I have more trouble sleeping and thus am not able to get up as early and start working the next morning. So those are two specific tips that I like but that I can only do when I am certain that I do not have much to do at the time because otherwise they will impair my ability to get work done and will encourage me to laze about which is contrary to the second part of the tip.

This blog posting is about clubs and organizations that I might join. One club that I am thinking about joining is the White Course Book Club. They are a club that meets in White Course once a month, usually the last Wednesday of the month, to discuss two books a fiction and a non-fiction book. I have been meaning to join the club for several months but unfortunately every time they have had a meeting I have had something else I was supposed to be doing at the same. I was especially sorry about not being able to make the meeting this last month as the fiction book they read for October was Persuasion by Jane Austen. This is a book that I have read and like a lot so I would have enjoyed discussing it with other people. I hope that this month I will have time to read at least one of the books (either the fiction or the non-fiction book) and that I will be able to attend the meeting at the end of November. Joining this club would help me meet other people who live near me and would also encourage me to read more. I have always loved to read and was part of a book club in high school as well as briefly at a bookstore near the college I went to as an undergraduate. Both of these clubs introduced me to new books that I enjoyed but would most likely not have read otherwise. Joining the book club at White Course will likewise introduce me to new books and authors that I will enjoy reading and will allow me to share my love of reading.

Another club or organization I am considering joining is the fencing club at Penn State. I was part of a fencing club as an undergraduate and enjoyed that a lot. So, I am thinking I might want to continue with that. This would also give me a way of getting more exercise. I hope to attend one of the meetings of the fencing club soon, maybe next week, so that I can decide if I want to join. One thing I need to check is how competitive it is. I am primarily interested in fencing for fun and for exercise and am not really interested in competing. So, that is another club I am considering joining.

Both the clubs mentioned above would give me other thing to concentrate on outside of my academic life and would play different roles in my life as a graduate students, one would encourage me to continue reading for fun and the other give me a way to get more exercise.

This blog is about an academic person who is famous for work they have done related to my own interests. I chose to do someone who I have read several papers by for IST classes. T. D. Wilson is someone I have read several papers by on the topic of Information Seeking Behavior. This is a research area that interests me as I am interested in information search. Information Seeking Behavior is a part of search and looks at how searchers behave when they are searching. Because I had read the papers by him I decided T. D. Wilson was someone I wanted to know more about so I chose him as someone to look at for this blog.

Professor Tom Wilson has a detailed website (http://informationr.net/tdw/) which provides information about his life, career, research publications, consulting work, cats and photography. He is currently as Professor Emeritus at the University of Sheffield, a Visiting Professor at the University of Leeds Business School and a Visiting Professor at Högskolan i Borås in Sweden.

Professor Wilson has had a variety of positions from working as in libraries to being a lecturer at universities. From 1983 to 2000 he was a professor of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield and severed as the head of the Department from 1982 to 1997. He is currently retired though continues to do active research.  He has received several awards. His website provides more details on his career.

On his website when describing his research interests Professor Wilson writes that his interests have centered on information seeking behavior and information needs. He has also done work in office automation, information systems strategies, information service evaluation, and the impact of information technology on organizations. He has done work on electronic scholarly publishing and digital libraries and how they have affected traditional academic libraries, businesses and the web.

My research interests are related to Professor Wilson's as my interests involve Information Seeking Behavior. So, it is likely that some of his past work in that area will be helpful for some of my future research. Another thing I liked is how on his website as well as putting information about his academic career it was also clearly shown that he has several interests outside of his research as well. For instance, he states that he likes cats, traveling, photography, and birdwatching. None of these, with the exception of traveling, are particular interests of mine, but like him I have several hobbies, such as reading, listening to opera and learning about history that are not necessarily connected to my research but that I want to remain a part of my life.

This blog entry describes three publication venues that I might want to have my work published in some day.

The first publication I will mention is one that I described briefly in the last blog. That is Information Processing and Management. It is an international journal published by Elsevier. The website of the journal provides an overview of the types of refereed papers the journal is interested in. Some examples include work on information retrieval, digital libraries, information processing, search engines, information representation, classification, extraction, filtering and summarization, human information needs, seeking, searching and use. For more information see the journal's website description of the journal.
The journal is published regularly (for 2009 it will be volume 45 with 6 issues). It also is planning three special issues on "Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval", "Managing and Mining Multilingual Documents", and "Collaborative Information Seeking". Lastly, the journal has a new electronic submission and handling system called "Elsevier Editorial System" (EES), which allows for online submission, review and status update. EES is part of the journals efforts to improve the efficiency and accuracy of its' editorial procedures and the timeliness of the manuscripts published.

A second potential publication venue for me is the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. An online version of the journal is published through Wiley InterScience. This journal publishes peer-reviewed research from the field of information science and other related fields. It focuses on but is not limited to the processing of recorded knowledge. According to its' website it has "basic and applied research on the generation, recording, storage, representation, retrieval, visualization, dissemination, and evaluation of information." It is oriented towards quantitative, experimental studies, but is also interested in qualitative investigations. On the journal website the topics the journal is interested in are separated into four groups: theory (e.g. foundations of information science, informetrics, information retrieval and filtering models and principles, data mining etc.), communication (media theory, theories of communication, computer-supported collaborative work, etc.), management (e.g. economics of information, information policy, social and organizational informatics, etc.) and systems (e.g. information system design, disciplinary, organization and institutional case histories, information technology hardware and software, online and web-based retrieval systems, etc.).

The third potential publication venue for me that I will describe is ACM Transactions on the Web. It is like the other two a journal that publishes refereed articles. The articles from the journal are available online from the ACM digital library. It focuses on reporting the results of research on web content, applications, use, and related technologies. Some of the topics included in the journal are browsers and web interfaces, knowledge management and representation on the web, electronic commerce, hypertext and hypermedia. In addition, searching, indexing, classification, retrieval and querying, data mining analysis papers that deal with the web are also within the scope of the journal. More examples of other topics that are within the scope of the journal are given on the journals website.

The three journals described above are all journals that publish research in the area that I intend to do research in. For instance, all of them have published articles on information search on the web, which is an interest of mine. In addition, I have read good research articles from all three journals. This is why they seem like good journals for me to consider publishing in later on in my career.

This blog is about academic communities that I might want to be a part of some day. The first academic community that I am going to discuss is the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).  ACM was founded in 1947 and according to Wikipedia has 83,000 members. It is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. Its goal is to deliver resources that advance computing as a science and profession. It provides a Digital Library and has many publications, conferences and career resources. Some of ACM's publications include Communications of the ACM, several other magazines, several journals, and several transactions (e.g. Transactions on Information Systems and Transactions on the Web). For more information see their website.

Interestingly ACM also has a couple of publications that are joint publications with the second academic community I will describe, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). IEEE was founded in 1963 and according to Wikipedia has more than 365,000 members. It is a non-profit organization and a leading authority on many areas of engineering ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to consumer electronics. It is as source of professional and technical information, resources and services. Some quick facts about IEEE include that it has nearly 1,300 standards and projects under development, more than 1.7 million documents in its Electronic Library, publishes 144 transactions, journals and magazines and sponsors more than 850 conferences annually. For more information see their website.

The third academic communities I will describe is Information Processing and Management.     Information Processing and Management is a journal, which is aimed at "information scientists, computer scientists, librarians, cognitive scientists, and information systems and technology specialists interested in information retrieval (IR), organization of information, and management of information resources." (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/244/description#description ).  The website for journal provides information on current issues of the journal, how to submit articles, how to subscribe to the journal and other journals in the same research area.

These three communities seem like communities that I might be interested in joining one day because they all publish papers on topics related to my research. In fact I have read articles published by all three communities mentioned above. Next week I will write more about publication venues I might be interested in the future.

I choose to do this blog entry about Mimi Zhang who works with Dr. Jansen. She is originally from China and has a Bachelor of Management, in Information Management and Information Systems from Hefei University of Technology in China and a Master of Science in Information and Knowledge Management from Loughborough University in the UK. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in IST at Penn State.  She came to IST in 2005. She does not have a dissertation topic yet. Her research interests are in human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-mediated communication (CMC), cognitive psychology, e-commerce, transaction log analysis, and experimental design. She is specifically interested in information seeking behavior and applying theories from multiple disciplines to gain a better understanding of users and advance the theoretical framework. She focuses on both theoretical and empirical aspects of how people search and has been involved in many different types of user studies. Mimi has one journal paper with two other journal papers in progress or being reviewed. In addition she has published several conference and workshop papers and presented several posters. Please see her personal website (http://www.personal.psu.edu/mxz178/index.html) for more information as most of the information in the posting was taken from there.

As stated in multiple previous blogs my advisor is Dr. Jim Jansen. This blog entry will look at his academic life and career, for more detailed information see the academic portion of his personal web site: http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/academic/academic.html. Dr. Jansen is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University and has affiliate appointments with the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He is also the Co-Director of the Information Searching and Learning Laboratory. He has published 55 journal articles, 105 conference publications or presentations, 2 books, 8 book reviews, and 10 book chapters. He is a member of the editorial boards of 6 international journals and has received 14 different awards and honors: one leadership and management award, two research awards, three best paper awards, six application development awards, and two writing awards.

Dr. Jansen has published in various journals including Information Processing  & Management, IEE Computer, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, and the Communications of the ACM. He has also published in many other journals. He has had presentations at many different conferences including SIGIR, WWW, the American Society for Information Science & Technology, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, and  the IEEE International Conference on Information Technology, Coding and Computing, as well as many other conferences. In the past few semesters he has taught multiple courses including IST 590 (last spring), IST 516 (last fall) and many other IST courses including the introductory undergraduate course for IST and a Capstone Design course for IST. Dr. Jansen has also supervised many undergraduate and graduate students doing research. His research interests include web information retrieval and information system design. His website linked to above provides more detailed information on his research interests, publications, courses taught and a list of students that have worked with him on research projects and what their topics were.

As stated in previous blog entries my advisor is Dr. Bernard J. Jansen, usually referred to as Jim Jansen (his personal website is: http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/index.html). Above is a picture of him. I don't know much about my advisor's personal life, perhaps because generally when I talk to him it is about research. Most of the information in this blog posting came from his website.

Dr. Jansen is an assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. He got a B.S. in Computer Science from the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. He has a M.S. in International Relations from Troy State University, European Division and an M.CS. in Computer Science from Texas A&M University. He did his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Texas A&M University where his advisor was Dr. Udo Pooch and his dissertation was on "A Software Agent for Performance Improvement of an Existing Information Retrieval System."  Dr. Jansen was in the army from 1985- 2002 and has also taught at several different Universities. Currently Dr. Jansen lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with his family and commutes up to State College.

I will talk more about Dr. Jansen academic background, the different jobs he has held, and his research interests in the next weeks blog entry. But to close things up for this week I would like to share three things that I learned while writing the blog. First before doing this I had never heard of an M.CS. degree. Thus I had to look up the definition of it. For any one who like me is not familiar with this degree it is as Master of Computer Science. It is typically the non-thesis option in a graduate masters degree for computer science (definition taken from Wikipedia). In addition, I was interested to note that Dr. Jansen went to Texas A&M University because my father and many of his relatives went there as undergraduates. So it is a University I have heard of many times and every year my dad still watches the A&M football team on TV when he has the chance.  Lastly Dr. Jansen personal website has several pictures of him and his family under personal section of his website including pictures from State Colleges First Night Celebration and a live showing of the David Letterman Show.

The College of Information Sciences and technology (IST) is defined on the IST website as "Penn State's visionary response to the rapidly growing need in almost every field for leadership in information sciences and related technologies." It is a community made up of of faculty, undergraduate students, graduate students and industry partners that value collaboration between different disciplines and interdisciplinary work. IST like other I-schools is an interdisciplinary program. The undergraduate program offers two B.S. degrees in Information Sciences and Technology and in Security and Risk Analysis. Referring back to my previous post and the discussion of the different flavors of I-schools, IST is one of the I-schools that was founded as a new college as opposed to coming from a previously existent school. This means that IST does not have the focus on library science that some I-schools that came from library science schools have. In fact IST seems more diverse in terms of the research occurring at it than some of the other I-schools, which developed from programs that had already been in existence.

As discussed in classes on Monday IST does not have any departments. Instead IST has centers and labs for different types of research. IST also has many different research areas, which are listed on the IST website. This structure of not having departments has worked in the past. It allows graduate students to explore interests in many different parts of IST if they want to. Thus not having actual departments allows IST to be more flexible. At the same time if a student wants to concentrate on one area of IST they can but they are still exposed to many other areas. Despite having no departmental structure IST is starting to become more structured as it is branching out and introducing tracks for graduate students. It is to early to tell exactly how well the tracks will work as they are a new addition. This highlights the fact that IST is a new school and that it is still developing and discovering exactly what it's focus will be. Where do I fit into the IST structure? I work with Dr. Jim Jansen and as stated in a previous post am interested in personalization and information retrieval and search. Of the research areas listed on the IST website I fit into the Search, Information Retrieval, and Digital Library research area. In addition, some of my research interests also fit into the Human Computer Interaction research area. Some of the other research areas sound like topics that I wouldn't mind knowing more about, but that I don't necessarily want to do research in.