WSDM, Day 2

This morning focused on data mining. Some papers used transaction logs to study users, which is an approach I’d never really considered. Perhaps this is another difference between computer science and information science. The three evening “late breaking results” sessions all focused on social tagging. One of the papers cited papers that I’m familiar with (finally!). Another paper compared LCSH headings to tags in Library Thing. So, we’ve had one presentation per day so far interested in categorizing books, but neither seemed to have contacted LIS departments.

I admit to being surprised about the extent to which we’re all in silos in academe. The astronomer with whom I had dinner has been working on taxonomies. He commented that, to his surprise, as he was working on the project he realized that librarians have been working on these problems for ages. There’s also a linguist here who’s interested in machine translation, etc. and she’s also interested in some of the things I am and knew of some speech recognition work being done in Europe. In fact, I came here to learn about audio-visual digital libraries, but I’m finding a lot more overlap when it comes to the organization of information aspects.

I admit I’d had high hopes for discussing my project with the people at the Google booth, but I guess digital libraries don’t always speak to everyone. Folks from Google greeted the women of the conference today in a coffee-break session, at a booth staffed by two men. I assume there are women who work at Google; perhaps they were all busy.