This week I gave a presentation on the Social Life of Data at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. I was presenting as part of a session on “Strategies for Improved Marine and Synergistic Data Access and Interoperability” organized by Cynthia Chandler, John Graybeal, and Karen Baker. The session was a nice mix of high-level framing papers and experiences with concrete systems. In addition to my presentation, the other presentations were: Rolling Deck to Repository (R2R): Technical Design…

These questions were originally posed by Dennis Severance, and I was introduced to them by Judy Olson as a doctoral student at the University of Michigan School of Information. They serve as a way to guide the research process and structure an argument for a presentation, paper, research proposal, etc. I’ve found them really useful and frequently go back to them as a way to critique my own writing. What is the problem? (in the theoretical debate, the world) Who…

Check out James Landay’s blog, Dub for the Future, for an interesting discussion of the reviewing process at CHI and UIST. James begins: “The CHI reviews just came out and I have to say I’m pretty unhappy… not with the numbers per se… (one paper I co-authored has a 4.5 average out of 5 and I’m sure I’ll get a fair number of papers accepted), but instead with the attitude in the reviews. The reviewers simply do not value the…

Read more here…the decision has to do with accessibility for people with vision impairments.

I just got back from attending the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The conference is a fun venue and most of the Science and Technology Studies world was there. There is a significant overlap with ACM conferences like CHI and CSCW, but the approach at 4S tends to be more theoretical. I presented a talk about “Cyberinfrastructure and Scientific Validity in Metagenomics Research,” in which I looked at how large DNA sequence databases…

A journal article by Marisa Cohn and Susan Sim of UC Irvine that I co-authored has been published. It is entitled What Counts as Software Process? Negotiating the Boundary of Software Work Through Artifacts and Conversation. The abstract is below: In software development, there is an interplay between Software Process models and Software Process enactments. The former tends to be abstract descriptions or plans. The latter tends to be specific instantiations of some ideal procedure. In this paper, we examine…

Gizmodo has the juicy details.  I’m thinking that the development team that worked on the Nook systematically studied the Kindle, both on their own and in the context of real people doing real reading, and then built the Nook.  I’m excited.

It’s been obvious for a while that the Amazon Kindle, Kindle DX, and Kindle 2 would eventually face stiff competition, both in terms of hardware platform and software/services design and availability. The competition, however, has taken a while to materialize, in part because it’s hard to get a bunch of competitors to decide on e-book formats, DRM, sales questions, etc., etc. So, the news today about the Google Editions e-book store is big because its presence in the market addresses…

That’s what Gizmodo is saying…and they’re also saying this new device will combine an e-ink screen with a multitouch display surface to boot.  This idea seems obvious and necessary, and it was only a matter of time before somebody made a multitouch-enabled e-reader (other than Sony).

Short article/video of students after they are introduced to their Kindles. Daily Princetonian coverage of the project (from Princeton, one of the Universities participating in the project)