Preliminary Conference Agenda

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have created innumerable opportunities for connecting people, simplifying complex tasks, and developing ecosystems of tools for our homes and workplaces. At the same time, they create new threats to the privacy of individuals, groups, and organizations due to the collection, sharing, and analysis practices that companies employ on user-generated data. iSchools are especially well-positioned to address these challenges because of our interdisciplinary expertise in sociotechnical spaces. In this workshop, we will work with participants to identify and define key domains where iSchool researchers can contribute to our understanding of information over the next 10 years. Topics of interest include research with marginalized groups; ethical issues with privacy research; bridging research, policy, and design; and expanding research on networked or group-managed privacy. Workshop goals include mapping these topic areas, connecting and networking with privacy researchers in the global iSchool community, writing a public statement on the state and future of information privacy research, and launching a call for a special issue of JASIST on this topic.

The goal of this workshop is to generate a publicly shareable manifesto around data equity. Data equity refers to the degree of fairness in responsibilities and benefits, opportunities trade-offs that all members of society experience as a result of civic datasets. As a range of civic datasets about the government, environment, education and others become increasingly avail-able, it is important to understand how current technologically-mediated practices can be improved to achieve better data equity and accountability for all, irrespective of their data literacy skills. We reflect on these datasets and technical practices through hands-on activities that have been specifically designed to expose the barriers that prevent individuals, communities, businesses, nonprofits and governments from engaging with data. We pay particular focus to the differentials based on sexism, racism and other forms of structural oppression that tend to go under-examined within such settings.

The proposed workshop will address pressing issues in forced migration research from an information perspective. It will bring together researchers in information science and related disciplines to illuminate two trends in forced migration research: information spaces and environments of refugees, and refugees’ experience in digital environments and how it impacts their resettlement process. The workshop will approach the topics from a variety of perspectives addressing researchers from different countries with a specific focus on early stage researchers. The workshop will be a day long starting with a moderated panel. There will be dedicated sessions for each theme followed by discussion rounds that allow for bringing together the main points. A call for contribution will be issued to interested researchers to present their projects or work-in-progress, as well as to submit pressing ideas for the brainstorming portion of the workshop.

A workshop to finalize and recruit people to an international study of technology helpsharing in the digital age. This help is crucial and ubiquitous among elites; what about ordinary people? By sharing and finalizing a field manual and instrument among scholars with highly varied access to study populations, we will be ready to implement a three year study that will shed light on human agency towards digital inclusion. Individual scholars will work in their own settings with a shared field manual and instrument, carrying out a short field study with students in one of their courses or with their research groups. The 2019 iConference with its emphasis on “Including,” its inclusion of community informatics research since 2005, and its broad membership of many country’s schools and programs, is the best place from which to launch this three-year study.

The organizers of this workshop are interested in building a research community among scholars interested in the intersection of information, young people, and technology. Specifically, we are interested in addressing questions such as:

• What role can iSchools play in exploring relationships between information, young people, and technology?

• What methods are best for studying young people’s digital practices around reading / writing / gaming, and their effects on how young people participate/engage?

• Which theoretical frameworks support this work?

• How do privacy issues complicate both how young people participate, and how we, as a scholarly community, study them?

While participants are not required to submit, organizers will put out a call for 500-word abstracts due January 15th, 2019. As an outcome of this workshop, organizers plan a special edition of a journal. Abstract authors may be asked to write full papers, which can be included in such journal.

This half-day workshop will provide an overview and comparison of computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS). Since adoption of these programs requires substantial time commitment and/or budget expenditure, it is vital to understand their capabilities and limitations, as well as the types of data best suited for each platform. A panel of experts will present advantages and disadvantages of several software packages, then demonstrate how to use popular CAQDAS platforms, including commercial (i.e., NVivo, ATLAS.ti, Qualtrics, Dedoose) and open source (i.e., RQDA) programs. Panelists will then invite attendees to participate in interactive breakout tables to learn more about and experiment with a product of their choice. Panelists will answer attendees’ questions and demonstrate advanced features. The workshop will conclude with a general Q&A session. Both novice and experienced researchers will benefit by learning about the variety of available CAQDAS options.

How can we raise the quality of what we find on the Web? What software might we build, what education might we try to provide, and what procedures (either manual or mechanical) might be introduced? What are the technical and legal issues that limit our responses? The speakers will suggest responses to problems, and we’ll ask the audience what they would do in specific circumstances.

Despite continuous attempts to increase the participation of disabled faculty and staff in information science workplaces, both recruitment and retention efforts fall short. Organizational cultures can range from welcoming to marginalizing, which is determined by a combination of policies, attitudes, support mechanisms, etc. This session engages the audience in an honest dialogue about disability at the workplace and offers hands-on activities that contribute to developing an inclusive climate in academic departments and information organizations. The goal of this session is threefold: 1) to generate constructive ideas for improving the recruitment, retention, and promotion of disabled faculty and staff; 2) to demonstrate how these ideas can be implemented through hands-on scenarios; and 3) to engage in introspection into our own perceptions of disabilities at the workplace through a sharing circle exercise. The session is intended for administrators of all levels and anyone interested in disability at the workplace.

This workshop will enable several research leaders across three disciplines to gain a better understanding of each other’s research communities and to foster a new interdisciplinary research agenda for Future of Work at the Human-Technology-Frontier combining Sociotechnical Systems, Human-Computer-Interaction, and Empathy research communities. The three communities will work on two common and problematic areas related to information technology: Distribution of Fake News and Healthcare Technologies. The workshop and project outcomes will provide a new research focus that utilizes the common techniques of each discipline to identify and examine research problems at the Human-Technology-Frontier. The workshop presenters will develop case studies with faculty in the School of Journalism, College of Medicine, and School of Nursing at the University of Missouri, where faculty utilize technology to engage and train students for related professions.

This half-day workshop aims to promote discussion and disciplinary convergence on the topic of work in the age of intelligent machines. The use of intelligent machines-- digital technologies that feature data-driven forms of customization, learning, and autonomous action-- is rapidly growing and has and will continue to impact a number of industries and domains. The iSchool community is uniquely situated in this landscape as a community of researchers, educators, and practitioners with a tradition of studying, supporting, and educating professionals working at the nexus between people, information, and technologies. This workshop aims to answer three questions: 1) what is new about intelligent machines today and how are they changing the nature of work; 2) how do these issues impact the iSchool community specifically; and 3) what should a forward-facing agenda for the iSchool community on the topic of work in the age of intelligent machines include? This workshop builds on an ongoing NSF Research Coordination Network (RCN) (NSF 17-45463, https://waim.network/).

Social bots have been recognized as social media accounts that actively promulgate misinformation during different events such as elections. Studying the contents generated by the social bots opens research opportunities in various applications such as social science and health. This half-day workshop will introduce the audience to the basics of Twitter data collection, social bots detection, and text data analysis. Attendees will learn how to use open source tools including Botometer and R packages to collect Twitter data, detect social bots, and use both quantitative and qualitative methods for investigating activities of social bots. Practical examples will be provided and implemented.

In data storytelling, if fears are not articulated and confronted, they can be paralyzing. Participants in this workshop will learn to articulate things that can go wrong in data storytelling. We will lead participants in an interactive workshop that will help them to learn (and practice) what you can do to prevent trouble from happening (ideally), reduce the odds of trouble happening, reduce the consequences when troubles do happen, and recover from data storytelling trouble. We call this “troubleshooting data storytelling.” Experts typically have a repertoire of such techniques. It is one of the galling aspects of being a novice that as your repertoire is more limited, things are more likely to go wrong and to throw you off. Just knowing that can reduce confidence, making certain problems even more likely to occur. We’ll introduce a six-part model of storytelling thinking that can help even the most novice data storyteller to understand how to troubleshoot everyday storytelling problems.