Greetings from Austin! I’m having a good time at my first LIS conference. It’s been a lot of fun to meet students from so many other schools, and I’m amazed at how international the conference is. I have seen people from Japan, Finland, Australia, Ireland, India…
I’ve created a page on our wiki for the notes I’ve taken during sessions. So far I have only the plenary session up but more will be coming when I get the chance to type them up.
One of the sessions I attended was Search Result Visualization. The first speaker, Brad Eden from UCSB, gave us a quick tour of some of the places on the web you can play around with 3d information visualization. Linn Marks Collins from Los Alamos National Laboratory spoke about two tools they’ve developed, Active Graph and Science Sifter. Active Graph is an interactive scatter plot and Science Sifter uses RSS technologies to create new feeds which can be viewed as lists, lists with descriptions, or as a hyperbolic tree. Chaomei Chen from Drexel showed several cool ways of visualizing information in his talk, Collective Intelligence and Holistic Sense Making, including using one of my favorite toys, Google Earth, to show locations of citations.
Another session I went to yesterday was entitled Taking Leisure Seriously. Robert A. Stebbins gave a talk entitled Leisure and Information Science: Bridging the Gap. He has written extensively about the serious leisure perspective. He divides leisure into three categories: casual leisure, serious leisure, and projects. Serious leisure is divided into amateurism, volunteerism, and hobbies. (More info about the serious leisure perpsective)
To end on a related note, last night some members of the special interest group on knitting (SIG/KNIT) went out to dinner. Keep your eyes open for upcoming research into the yarn-seeking behavior of knitters, pattern designing for uncertainty, and 3-d visualization of yarn stashes.