LIS 510 was my first experience writing a social science research paper, let alone writing one as a group. I feel extremely lucky to have been a member of what I consider to have been the best group in the class, along with Jennifer Rohan, Wanna Net, and Kristen Dietiker. Each one of us had a commitment to both the group and to the quality of the produced work, and I am incredibly proud of our result.

For this final project, which was a presentation as well as a formal paper, we worked together to continue our initial investigation of grocery stores as information grounds. Our comparative study of traditional grocery stores (like QFC or Safeway) with non-traditional places to buy groceries (like Pike Place Market) included both qualitative and elementary quantitative methods. Through interviews and observations, we collected responses and data points which we then coded to look at trends across time intervals, locations, and individuals.
Information Behavior of Grocery Shoppers: Final Paper
Information Behavior of Grocery Shoppers: Presentation

In this project, I examined a body of my own poetic work through a lens of technology. Traditional poetic analysis is through a critical reading of the texts themselves, sometimes including the precursory or manuscript versions of the poems. Similarly, textual studies scholars have used tools like concordances and word frequency analyses to reveal additional information about historical texts.

I began by looking to these traditional tools and building those methods into a more technologically-centered exploration. For one poem that had many longhand manuscript rewrites, I selected one key passage and scanned the original manuscript pages in order to make an animated web-displayable image (a .gif) showing the initial, intentional transformations. Using a command line environment for Windows, I also processed the Word documents of the poems I considered "completed," or publishable, into one very large text file of the individual lines of the poems, and then used a command-line script to build a word count and frequency file, which I then used with freely available code to transform into a tag cloud. Finally, I used the text file of the lines of poetry as a source file for freely available PHP and JavaScript scripts which I used to create randomly generated poems. These Fluxus-inspired "machine" poems, which bear a strong resemblance to poems I have created with more traditional intention, confront the ideas of textual authority and authorial intent.
Poetry Project

In Amsterdam, my group began with a successful Human Subjects Research application and went from fieldwork to analysis to presentation in less than 30 days. My colleagues, Ann Swearingen, an MLIS student, and Sunil Garg, a computer science undergraduate, worked with me to interview n = 14 subjects, perform field observations, record data, analyze it, and deliver a conference presentation on our findings.

At first, I thought that to go from a nebulous research question like "How do people find their way around?" to the fully-formed research questions, to a literature review and then writing the research instruments and Human Subjects Research application in less than one term was challenge enough. Because I had no experience with social science research outside of my group project for LIS 510, I had no idea the levels of scholarship, data collection, data analysis, and presentation that were required once those initial hurdles had been cleared, on top of trying to do these things as a group.

This process introduced me to the rigors of research scholarship, helped me appreciate what leadership means outside of a work environment, and has resulted in work I feel is representative of the best of my academic ability.
Annotative Wayfinding Behavior: Final Paper
Annotative Wayfinding Behavior: Slides

I have been able to work with Karen Fisher and her colleagues Crystal Fulton (at University College, Dublin) and Gary Burnett (at Florida State University) on Elfreda Chatman's last manuscript. This collection of the writings, transcripts and notes she was working on before her death will be developed by this team of scholars into a complete work. For the project, I built a timeline of the documents, identified which documents to collect into a preliminary version of the manuscript, then copy edited and corrected all 237 pages.

It is no small opportunity to read the words of one of Information Science's greatest thinkers, let alone one whose life's work is so inspiring to me. Elfreda Chatman's attention to the information behaviors and needs of those who often are overlooked or have no opportunity to speak for themselves is something I also aspire to. As I am a former janitor, one of Chatman's previous research groups, the chance to contribute in any small way to what will be her final work resonates deeply with me. That this work will likely include her advice and suggestions for information science researchers based her experiences is even more powerful, and I look forward to trying to live up to her expectations of what a researcher ought to be.
Elfreda Chatman: Manuscript Timeline