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-ge... RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/2017-thomas-scheidel-lecture-featuring-darren-g...

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