Greetings Wikimedians!
The Scheidel Lecture is the UW's Department of Communications big
annual lecture. This year, the speaker is Darren Gergle who will be a
talk about some /fantastic/ research he's done on Wikipedia. The event
is open to the public and free but an RSVP is requested.
Please feel free to forward on the email and link to other places!
Lots of details are below!
WHO: Darren Gergle, Professor in the departments of Communication
Studies and Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (by
courtesy) at Northwestern University
WHAT: The Wikipedia Language Gap: Understanding and Designing for
Global Communities
WHEN: Wednesday, May 17, 2017 | Presentation: 3:30 PM | Reception:
4:30 PM
WHERE: Room 120 of the Communications Building (CMU) at UW
LINKS:
Overview:
http://www.com.washington.edu/2017/04/2017-thomas-scheidel-lecture-darren-g…
RSVP:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2017-thomas-scheidel-lecture-featuring-darren-…
ABSTRACT:
Everyday people produce an extraordinary amount of user-generated
content in peer- production and social media systems such as
Wikipedia, Reddit, Flickr, Instagram and Facebook. These large-scale
repositories have been shown to provide accurate and wide-ranging
coverage of a variety of events, topics and information. Yet,
language barriers coupled with community- based coverage biases can
undermine the availability, accessibility and usefulness of the
information.
In this talk, Professor Gergle will present research that
illustrates both the challenges and opportunities of user- generated
content in the context of multilingual Wikipedia. In doing so, he
aims to achieve the following three goals: (1) to describe
large-scale data analysis techniques that can be used to empirically
assess content diversity and coverage biases that exist across
language editions of Wikipedia, (2) to elaborate the effect these
diverse representations and biases can have on both individuals that
make use of the knowledge as well as technologies that rely upon the
peer-produced data structures, and (3) to demonstrate new approaches
to the design of technologies that better support global knowledge
representation.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY:
Professor Gergle’s research is in the fields of Human-Computer
Interaction (HCI), Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and
Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) with an interest in developing
a theoretical understanding of the role that visual information
plays in supporting communication and group interactions. A key
component of his work is the application of social and cognitive
psychology theory to the design, deployment and evaluation of
computing technologies.
ABOUT THE SCHEIDEL LECTURE:
The Thomas Scheidel Lecture has been a long-standing tradition since
1998 after the Thomas M. Scheidel Faculty Lecture Fund was created
in 1997. It honors Scheidel’s lifetime of scholarship, teaching, and
academic leadership by bringing distinguished scholars to the UW
Department of Communication to meet with and lecture to faculty and
students who are pursuing advanced study in communication. During
Scheidel’s more than twenty-year career at the UW, he held the
positions of Associate Dean and Departmental Chair twice, and was
awarded for his Distinguished Service, Research, and as a
Scholar. Scheidel was inducted into the Department Alumni Hall of
Fame, Class of 2014.
Regards,
Mako
--
Benjamin Mako Hill
http://mako.cc/
Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far
as society is free to use the results. --GNU Manifesto