Dissertation proposal defense scheduled

SLIS doctoral candidate Jonathan Warren will defend his dissertation proposal:

Thursday, June 11
1:00-3:45 PM
Herman B Wells Library, Room LI030

Title: "TV in the Age of the Internet: Information quality of science fiction fansites"

Abstract:

Large, communal, Web 2.0 information repositories on certain topics (e.g., allrecipes.com) are becoming common destinations for everyday life information seeking and creation. An important question asked by many fields is "what is the quality of information, pertinent to our field, on these sites?" While medicine, history, and philosophy have produced a considerable amount of literature of this type, little work has been done on leisure topics, to which many of these sites are devoted. The current project would examine the information quality (IQ) of large sites made by fans of the Stargate (SG-1, Atlantis, Universe, and films) international TV franchise. Notably, the sites contain large amounts of information that critiques and investigatively documents the franchise in an archival way. Although termed "unsanctioned scholarship" by Bradley (2005) and cultural studies scholars, this form of information has yet to be evaluated against academic standards of IQ.

Information quality has many indicators. Generally, these indicators can be divided into how users perceive artifacts, what potential affects artifacts may have on users, and how accurately and completely an artifact represents something. IQ in the perceptual sense (e.g., credibility) is in the domain of HCI; completeness is often assessed in terms of both objective criteria and subject-specific criteria (e.g., whether a certain medical condition is mentioned); and IQ in the other senses is predominantly assessed via objective indicators. In order to focus on evaluating against academic standards the quality of artifacts that amateurs intend to be archival, as well as in order to avoid requiring multiple literatures outside of information science (e.g., on science fiction narratives and culture), the current project will only consider objective indicators of IQ. Methodologically, four large sites were found to represent the core of this phenomenon, Stargate-related data from which are plentiful, structured, and easy and ethical to collect. The general analytical approach will be mixed-methods, in that IQ variables will, first, be interpretively operationalized and content analyzed in context, and will, then, be described and modeled across sites with exploratory heuristics and statistics.

The primary contribution of this project is to understanding the quality of a new type of information, which can compete with academic literature in society at large. This project would also examine an under-studied form of that information, done in a macro- scale way that is not likely to occur in the qualitative, cultural studies literature on this phenomenon. Also, some libraries may wish to include high-quality fan-made information in their collections, and this study could facilitate that kind of collection development. More generally, this project contributes to everyday life information seeking and sociology literatures on emergent and imposed social norms, as well as to literature on open-source mass collaboration practices, within virtual communities and populations.

A digital version is available at the following URL:
http://www.mindstring.net/acad/proposal/20090527_proposal.pdf

Dissertation committee:

Chair: John Paolillo
Associate Professor of Information Science and Informatics
Adjunct Associate Professor of Linguistics

Member: Howard Rosenbaum
Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Information Science

Member: Ying Ding
Assistant Professor of Information Science
Core Faculty of Cognitive Science

Minor Representative: Karen Kafadar
Rudy Professor of Statistics and Physics, Indiana University
Adjunct Professor, Mathematical Sciences, Univ of Colorado-Denver & Health Sciences Center