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    Gazing the Diversity Stance in North America: Bringing Practitioner Inquiry into the LIS Classroom
    (Association for Library and Information Science Education, 2016-04) Irvin, Vanessa
    This article is an exploration of ways in which LIS educators can consider culture, heritage, and identity as a framework for becoming participatory agents of their teaching practices in the LIS classroom. To support this framework, this discussion introduces the research methodology, practitioner inquiry, as a meaningful approach to studying pedagogical practice and identity in the LIS classroom as a means to LIS educators becoming more self-reflective and aware of the impacts of their own identity construction in their teaching. In this article I am affirming the case for a diversity stance within the North American LIS curriculum. I am also posing additional questions and challenges about LIS identity construction and professional practice as we teach and learn in the classroom.
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    First-Mover Advantage in a Social Q&A Community
    (2015) Gazan, Rich
    Aggregate answer ratings serve as a metric of collective intelligence in social Q&A communities. The patterns by which participants in a social Q&A community rate and recommend answers are analyzed through the lens of first-mover advantage, to address the question of whether the first answer posted has a ratings advantage over those subsequently submitted. As part of a long-term participant observation, ratings for answers submitted to the Answerbag social Q&A site were compared by order of submission and normalized for page views and answer quality. The results suggest that the first-submitted answer consistently accumulates roughly 17% more rating points than the second answer submitted, and that the rating points of each subsequent answer tend to decline. Social factors influencing rating activity and implications for interpreting future social Q&A data are discussed.
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    The Hammer of Hawking: The Impact of Celebrity Scientists, the Intent of Extraterrestrials and the Public Perception of Astrobiology
    (2013) Gazan, Rich
    This paper assesses the impact of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking’s warning about the possibly malicious intent of extraterrestrial visitors on the public opinion of the search for life in the universe, which is the domain of the interdisciplinary science of astrobiology. Using Web content analysis and sentiment analysis methods, 13 distinct categories of opinion are proposed, suggesting the role of Web comments as both public forums and naturalistic data sources. The results suggest that a significant percentage of those studied agreed with Hawking purely on the merits of his reputation, but those who disagreed tended to claim that Hawking’s argument failed logically or scientifically. How cross–domain authority manifests on the Web, and the influence of celebrity scientists on the public perception of astrobiology, are discussed.
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    Identifying Crossover Documents in an Interdisciplinary Research Environment
    (2013) Gazan, Rich
    AIRFrame is a NASA project to analyze and integrate astrobiology documents from diverse disciplines to catalyze new knowledge. This paper outlines the technical infrastructure of the current system and reports on an ongoing iterative evaluation, to address the question of how scientists perceive and integrate crossover documents in their research. Some of the obstacles preventing AIRFrame from gaining traction with its target audience of astrobiology researchers include representing their research output accurately, effectively translating and relating diverse metadata, and understanding disciplinary norms and the broader knowledge production infrastructure. The skills required to address these needs suggest a role for both researchers and information professionals to work in tandem with technical tools to catalyze interdisciplinary knowledge. A graduate seminar in interdisciplinary knowledge production, targeted at both researchers and graduate students at the University of Hawaii, has been designed to elicit and impart needed information as input to ongoing AIRFrame development.
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    Social Q&A
    (2011) Gazan, Rich
    This article presents a review and analysis of the research literature in social Q&A (SQA), a term describing systems where people ask, answer, and rate content while interacting around it. The growth of SQA is contextualized within the broader trend of user-generated content from Usenet to Web 2.0, and alternative definitions of SQA are reviewed. SQA sites have been conceptualized in the literature as simultaneous examples of tools, collections, communities, and complex sociotechnical systems. Major threads of SQA research include user-generated and algorithmic question categorization, answer classification and quality assessment, studies of user satisfaction, reward structures, and motivation for participation, and how trust and expertise are both operationalized by and emerge from SQA sites. Directions for future research are discussed, including more refined conceptions of SQA site participants and their roles, unpacking the processes by which social capital is achieved, managed, and wielded in SQA sites, refining question categorization, conducting research within and across a wider range of SQA sites, the application of economic and game-theoretic models, and the problematization of SQA itself.
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    Redesign as an Act of Violence: Disrupted Interaction Patterns and the Fragmenting of a Social Q&A Community
    (2011) Gazan, Rich
    The worst-case scenario for the redesign of an established online community is a subsequent mass migration of its core members to other sites. Using data from transaction logs, content analysis and participant observation, this paper presents a descriptive analysis of the fragmentation of a social question answering (Q&A) community in the immediate aftermath of a fundamental redesign, where site- based communication mechanisms no longer functioned. The ways in which the community and its diaspora reacted, reconnected and resettled on other sites provides empirical data to support recent research on the life cycle of online communities. The results suggest that many of the same processes that help social Q&A sites generate content and motivate participation can work to dismantle an established community if communications between members are even temporarily disrupted. Modeling a redesign as an attack on a community can help future designers anticipate alternative paths of communication and information flows.
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    The Practical Mechanics of Interdisciplinary Science
    (2010) Gazan, Rich; Miller, Lisa
    In astrobiology and all interdisciplinary science, we want to do more than just hope for synergistic interactions of diverse types of knowledge. Knowledge created by researchers in distinct scientific communities must undergo active processes of translation in order to inform one another. This paper provides an overview and discussion of successful elements of translation and integration from past studies of interdisciplinary science practice.
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    Microcollaborations in a Social Q&A Community
    (2010) Gazan, Rich
    Most social Q&A sites are designed to support solo searchers who access the aggregated opinions of other users, and ask and answer questions of their own. The purpose of this paper is to show how users in one social Q&A community defy system constraints to engage in brief, informal episodes of collaborative information seeking called microcollaborations. A brief literature review is presented, suggesting a view of information seeking as a combination of problem-centered information seeking, technological affordances and constraints, and social and affective factors. The results of content and transaction log analyses of user interactions suggest that topics of collaboration share a common threshold of complexity and invite responses containing both fact and opinion. Analysis also revealed that key elements in predicting a collaborative instance involve social capital and affective factors unrelated to the topic of the collaboration. Suggestions for supporting future lightweight microcollaborations, and implications for future research, are discussed.
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    When Online Communities Become Self-Aware
    (2009) Gazan, Rich
    Evidence from a long-term participant observation suggests that a critical point in the evolution of an online community occurs when participants begin to focus less on topical content and more on one another. When content restrictions were removed from a question answering community and social technologies were introduced, the proportion of factual content on the site steadily diminished in favor of more social content: questions specifically about site users and appropriate behavior, suggesting an awareness of themselves as a community. Positive effects of self-aware behavior included increased site participation, social support and open normative debates. Negative effects included increased conflict, rogue behaviors and factionalism.
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