I'm an information scientist. My mission is to bring people and information together: to join human needs, topics and situations with the right information, having the right qualities, in the right format, at the right time. My entry into the field of information science was from the social sciences of human communication and psychology. My belief is that information systems should be considered as types of communication systems, and that we can enhance effectiveness of information systems by integrating knowledge of human communication.
The main theme throughout my academic life is this model of pursuing better information systems by drawing on knowledge of human communication. At the same time, I am committed to making information more easily accessible to all people by all available means. This is dominant in my interest in freely available information retrieval systems, my work in the classroom to enable individuals to achieve their own information goals, and my service activities.
This document is part of my argument for my readiness for promotion to associate professor with tenure in SILS. I will present the highlights of my teaching, research and service activities, with reference to the general theme of enhancing information accessibility. Combined with my research and publication record, my classroom evaluation outcomes, and the output of my service activities, I believe this evidence speaks to my suitability for promotion with tenure.
My record of innovation in the classroom is strong. My classes are popular, in part, because I desire for students to learn by doing, and to make the concepts learned as applicable as possible to their future professional lives. Based on my participation in peer evaluation and others' promotion and tenure reviews, I would rate my overall classroom presentation skill as very strong. I am especially strong in my ability to evolve my class curricula to stay current with student interests and the rapid changes in subject matter.
On the simple yardstick of the numbers of students taught, quantitative end-of-semester evaluation, new course preparations, and number of sections of different courses, my teaching is exemplary and exceeds the guidelines for promotion with tenure.
An area in which I work especially well is curriculum development, in the classes I teach and across the curricula. I have taken an active role in shaping the curriculum for technology instruction at SILS since my arrival in 1997. This has included development of some new courses or course content (INLS 102, INLS 183, and INLS 187), work to implement the laptop requirement initiative, and co-authoring (with Barbara Wildemuth) the undergraduate major proposal.
When I offered to develop and teach some new courses in 1999, I was discouraged from doing this by other faculty. (I did work to develop several new courses as part of the undergraduate major, but have only taught INLS 102). As a tenured faculty member, however, I hope to develop and teach several new courses in the information science and technology areas. Some areas in which I think we need more depth include information retrieval with systems development and evaluation, technology management, electronic publishing, and other areas.
Since my 3rd year review (fall 1998), I have had 8 refereed publications in journals and conferences, 2 book chapters (one of which was the same as a refereed publication), 5 non-refereed publications (specifically, my TREC proceedings) and a few invited or refereed presentations including poster sessions. These numbers include some forthcoming items, as listed on my full vita.
I would rate myself as a steady performer for research publications. My number of publications per year has been fairly consistent over the 14 years I have been publishing (starting in the first semester of my doctoral studies).There are no publications of which I am ashamed, and none (with the exception of a couple of items that were requested for republication) that repeat the same work found elsewhere.
Generally, I have been a solo author and researcher. However, I have a moderate number of collaborative projects that resulted in publications. This is a trend I expect to continue, particularly by seeking additional collaborative opportunities with doctoral students and other faculty.
The topics of my publications would seem to range widely, and certainly do not have a single topical focus. The theme, though, is as described above: increasing information accessibility and human communication.
One angle on my research is technology use and instruction, the subject of many of my presentations (including invited presentations) and my recent work on laptop adoption. Another angle is human communication as a basis for technology systems, including some of my more theoretical papers and my oft-cited works on electronic publishing. Of course, there is also information retrieval, which has guided my most recent funded work and has been my major research interest since my doctoral work started.
Information retrieval seems to be a tough publication area. I've collected numerous rejection notices from SIG/IR as well as J. Documentation and Information Processing and Management. Some of my IR papers have been published, notably my 2001 "Cognitive Space and Information Space" in JASIS&T, which I believe represents my best work. Apart from my TREC proceedings papers, which are not refereed, little of my empirical IR work has been published (despite this being an area to which I devote the majority of my research time). This is, I believe, partially due to the bias in information retrieval publication forums -- especially SIG/IR -- towards high-functioning systems as demonstrated through measures such as recall and precision. To this end, I have revamped my IRTools software (visit http://ils.unc.edu/tera or http://sf.net/projects/irtools) so that, this year, it will include the base functionality found in typical IR systems (vector space, probabilistic, and other models including my Information Space model and LSI). This will benefit my publication outlook, I hope, by giving me a baseline for exploring my own variations on IR and giving empirical backing to my theory. IRTools is also intended as a toolkit for IR research, suitable for use by other scholars.
There are two ultimate goals for my work in IR, which follow from my overall perspective on increasing access to information:
1. To develop IR systems that function as extensions to human memory (Bertram Brookes called these "exosomatic memory" systems). To build such a system, we would need to model both human cognitive spaces and systems' information spaces comparably and dynamically. In my 2001 JASIS&T article, I demonstrated how such consistency could be built automatically.
2. To empower individuals to have better access to information by enabling advanced research and development in IR. There is a lack of software to perform these fundamental R&D activities, but I am developing IRTools in part to enable such research. IRTools has gradually evolved from my ongoing participation in TREC.
After years of unsuccessful efforts at pursuing grants from the NSF and other large funding sources, I received a grant in 2000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for my "Terascale Retrieval" proposal. This 3-year grant for $448,000., on which I am the sole investigator, is directed specifically at providing a software toolkit for IR research (IRTools). To date, the effort has been successful, and in this last year of the project I hope to bring together all the pieces to truly achieve the grant's goals. More than just a toolkit, my work seeks to provide the basis for real-world deployment and evaluation on a significant scale (hundreds of gigabytes of data in different textual formats).
In the summer of 2002, the Terascale Retrieval grant was augmented with another $210,000 grant from the NSF, "Large-Scale Visual Interaction with Multi-Lingual Multi-Source Textual Data." As the title implies, this work will focus on cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) and visual interfaces. It is a one year grant, with options to renew for further years. Again, I am the sole investigator.
My work on visualization fits with this augmentation to my grant, and has been evident throughout my research career. As an early innovator in virtual reality research, I am driven to address the challenge of visual interfaces to textual data. This has taken many forms, and resulted in several publications. Most recently, Paul Jones (PI) and I received a $530,000 grant from the E.S.P. Das Educational Foundation to develop a 3D interface to digitized rare books. For this work, I am directing Alan Hudson of Yumetech, Inc. and chair of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) Web3D working group to develop software, and working with the UNC rare books library to identify and produce new digitized editions of Charles Dickens' works.
It has been a good year for research funding. In calendar 2002, my gross research funding is $888,000 ($530,000 with Paul Jones, $210,000 for the NSF augmentation grant, plus $148,000 for the 3rd year of Terascale Retrieval). I have hired over a dozen research assistants over the past 3 years, worked with our IT staff to spend some of my equipment funds on areas that benefit SILS' infrastructure, funded student travel, and generally tried to make the grant resources as useful as possible.
For the future, I anticipate continued funding opportunities. National funding agencies have woken up to the role of information retrieval and related technologies in achieving their mission. My credentials in information security and information ethics, along with my retrieval background and general high level of technological sophistication seems to be a good match for many current and planned grant programs.
One emerging area not yet represented in my publications list is GridIR. GridIR is information retrieval on grid computing infrastructure. Grid computing is an immensely important new area for technological development, with significant activity from academics and from companies (IBM, Oracle, Sun, etc.). For IR, grid computing yields opportunities to return to some of our 1990-era notions about distributed retrieval, but with a modern twist and all the contemporary power of networked computers. My belief is that the days of monolithic databases and search engines (e.g., Google and friends) are limited. Instead, I foresee a future where different institutions "publish" their searchable data sets to the world, customized for their own collections. The Grid also offers a security infrastructure that lets these published data sets restrict access at the collection, query or datum level. I am co-chair (with Kevin Gamiel of MCNC, in Research Triangle Park) of the GridIR working group under the international Global Grid Forum (GGF) organization.
To summarize, my research record is consistent and well funded. My citation record (as provided by the promotion and tenure committee) indicates my publications are valuable to the larger research community, across multiple disciplines. I plan to continue my many efforts in research, with a commitment to developing and evaluating software and systems that enable better access to information across a broad range of information needs and data types.
My service activities include committee work, detailed activity for SILS and UNC, and efforts beyond UNC. My committee work in SILS has included service to the Information Technology and Research committee, Undergraduate Committee (with several years as chair) and Personnel Committees. For UNC committees, I spent 3 interesting years on the UNC library administrative board, 2 years on FITAC, the faculty information technology advisory committee (immediately before the laptop implementation) and have agreed to serve another FITAC term starting this year, the nominations committee, and a task force to study the undergraduate major implementation plans.
More importantly for SILS, I have done committee and other service work that went beyond simple membership. These included my efforts to develop and implement the laptop requirement plan the SILS faculty adopted, and authoring the undergraduate major proposal. For the laptop plan (which, at this point, I would consider at best only a partial success), I revised the curricula for INLS 50, 80, 102, and 181, authored (with Scott Adams) the requirements guidelines, and maintain a popular "alternative" Web page concerning which laptop to purchase. I developed and taught the first section of INLS 102, and am currently teaching a heavily revised INLS 181 which might now be thought of as "intermediate Web design."
My work for the undergraduate major has been extensive, and demonstrates my love for curriculum design. (I have asked since 1997 to serve on the master's committee in order to give attention to the MSIS and MSLS programs, but thus far have not been given this assignment). For the undergraduate committee (chaired 1998-2000, 2002-present), I worked to set policy and develop curricula. I also wrote the first draft of the major proposal, and worked with Barbara Wildemuth during the subsequent years to continue revising the proposed major. I believe SILS will have a leading undergraduate major from day one and, with continued involvement across the faculty, has good potential to lead our field.
Turning to external service, I have had a moderate amount of leadership in academic organizations -- to a lesser extent in recent years as I tried to focus my energies elsewhere. I have a flair and interest for conference planning, and have participated in planning for conferences large and small including CPSR, ASIS&T, IRMA and others.
I am one of the half-dozen founding members of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility's (CPSR's) RDU chapter, and see a continued role in CPSR events. Consistently with my interest in bringing information to people, I am a DJ and volunteer board member at Duke's radio station, WXDU (and have led their efforts to fight recent Webcasting royalty plans imposed by the Library of Congress). In my role as Project Gutenberg's chief executive, I submitted (with the Internet Archive) a brief to the United States Supreme Court on Eldred v. Ashcroft, which challenges the 1998 copyright extension. All of these activities have helped to keep my academic interests applicable to the real world through activism and outreach.
For Project Gutenberg, the world's first all-electronic information provider (founded in 1971, I have been active since 1991), I am the volunteer chief executive of the foundation which supports Project Gutenberg's work. This involves helping to electronically publish about 200 electronic books per month, plus maintain back-end technologies. Most recently, I have designed and am supervising implementation of a set of finding aids for the Project Gutenberg eBooks that will make the full contents of 6000+ books available for import to any library's OPAC via MARC records. I have worked on several potential funding opportunities that may enable grants to come to SILS to support Project Gutenberg's work or related activities (for example, a project to create a database of books for which there was no copyright renewal -- potentially "adding" millions of books from 1923-1964 to the public domain).
Overall, my service activities have a strong tie to my academic interests. My relative impatience with large and largely impersonal organizations such as ASIS&T and ALA have led me to focus my external efforts more at the grass roots of small organizations with potential to make a big difference. As a builder and a doer, I am comfortable with my level of internal and external service, and think that on the whole these activities reflect well on SILS and UNC.
For promotion with tenure to associate professor, SILS and UNC seek strength in research, teaching and service, along with promise of future performance. I believe my record indicates success in all three areas, with promise and intent for continued success.
People who have spent time with me realize how much I care about the overall academic and larger environment we live in. I don't have a lot of tolerance for rhetoric and posturing, when it comes at the expense of action. I am someone who seeks to actively create a better world -- for information access, and for information systems -- reaching towards an idealized future where information is truly a key to freedom. My role at SILS gives me opportunity to work in the classroom, in research projects and publications, and in service activities towards this goal. I appreciate this opportunity, and hope that in turn my qualities are valued and rewarded.