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Projects

Incubators of knowledge: Predicting protege productivity and impact in the social sciences (2012-2014) http://scisip.ils.indiana.edu/index.php

NSF funded project with Cassidy Sugimoto and Ying Ding (IU). Doctoral students comprise a larger portion of the academic workforce, yet scholars have very little knowledge of their place in scholarly networks, the degree to which they contribute to scholarly output, and the impact of this output. Very little quantitative analysis shows the relationship between advisors’ scholarly practices and the future success of their advisees. This study investigates these issues from two main angles: understanding the contribution of doctoral students to social-science research (the extent and character of this contribution) and the impact of this research (visibility through citations); and examining the advisor’s knowledge base and knowledge-diffusion practices, and whether these factors are involved in expanding knowledge frontiers and how they relate to the career trajectories and future success of doctoral students.

Cascades, Islands or Streams? Time, Topic, and Scholarly Activities in Humanities and Social Science Research (2012-2014) http://did.ils.indiana.edu/index.php

Digging Into Data project with Cassidy Sugimoto and Ying Ding (IU), Mike Thelwall (University of Wolverhampton, UK) and Vincent Lariviere (L’Université du Québec ŕ Montréal, Canada). This project will examine topic lifecycles across heterogeneous corpora, including not only scholarly and scientific literature, but also social networks, blogs, and other materials. While the growth of large-scale datasets has enabled examination within scientific datasets, there is little research that looks across datasets. The team will analyze the importance of various scholarly activities for creating, sustaining, and propelling new knowledge; compare and triangulate the results of topic analysis methods; and develop transparent and accessible tools. This work should identify which scholarly activities are indicative of emerging areas and identify datasets that should no longer be marginalized, but built into understandings and measurements of scholarship.

Robotics History: Narratives and Networks (2011-2013)

Together with Prof. Selma Sabanovic (IU SoIC) and Prof. Peter Asaro (The New School), I work on a project funded by IEEE and NEH to record and analyze oral history narratives of early robotics researchers and develop an interactive, open source online archive describing the development of robotics as a scientific field.

Digital Video Navigation and Archival Content Management Tools for Non-linear Oral History Narratives (2012-2013)

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funded project with Peter Asaro (The New School University) and Selma Sabanovic (IU). The first generation of on-line oral history archives of audio and video materials are difficult to navigate and are forced into linear or flat structures, while those with search capabilities rarely offer intuitive interfaces for accessing information for non-specialists. The proposed project will enable future public oral history archives to present history in a way that makes it approachable and accessible to the average web user, including students and educators, while allowing historians to present a curated non-linear historical narrative. Namely, this project aims to build open source video tools which will enable the presentation of non-linear historical narratives and support the intuitive navigation and exploration of large digital audio and video archives.