Instructor: Miles
Efron
Office: SZB 562E
Office Hours: Tues. 10:00-11:00
Email: miles@ischool.utexas.edu
Web: http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~miles
Class Meeting Time and Place:
Tue. 12:00-3:00 SZB 468
Unique Number: 27425
Catalog Description of Course: Introduction to general principles and features of
organizing and providing access to information, including varieties and numbers
of information-bearing objects, different traditions of practice, user
concerns, metadata and metadata formats, document representation and description,
subject access, and information system features and evaluation.
Instructor’s Description of Course: This is an information science class. It is about ideas, not particular software
or technologies. Completing this
course will help you understand what information is and how organizing it
relates to information access. Our
work will focus on three core problems: representing
information, classification, and indexing. Aside from this conceptual framework, students who complete
the course will gain a foundation in the following technical skills:
1.
Representing and
manipulating structured documents using XML
2.
Data modeling
and simple relational database design
3.
Creating and
evaluating information retrieval systems.
From this list, you can see
that this is not a course where you
will learn to catalog materials.
Nor is it a course where you will learn archival arrangement. Perhaps less obviously, this is not a
remedial technology course. We
will use computers, but students will largely be expected to perform computation
outside of class. In other words, we won’t devote much
time to learning any particular software; I take it for granted that you can do
this on your own. Finally, it
should be noted that this course (especially the latter half of it) is inherently
mathematical in its focus.
Email will be the primary
method of communication outside of class.
Thus it is crucial that all enrolled students subscribe to our class
listserv. Instructions for joining the list are at
https://utlists.utexas.edu/sympa/
The name of the list is inf384cs09.
N.B. You may email the
instructor outside of class, but before you do, please ask yourself the
following questions:
1. Can the matter wait?
In this case, save the issue for our next meeting or office hours.
2. Is it likely that other students share my concern? In this case, send your note to the
class list.
3. Is the instructor the right person to answer this
question? Don’t be afraid to lean
on your fellow students and the purpleshirts in the lab.
If you still think it’s the
right thing to do, email the instructor.
I ask you to buy the
following books for this course:
1. Weinberger, David.
(2007). Everything is Miscellaneous. Times books.
2. Hunter, Eric J.
(2002). Classification Made Simple. 2nd
Edition. Ashgate.
3. Ray, Eric. (2003). Learning XML. 2nd edition. Sebastepol, O’Reilly Media.
All other readings for this
course are available electronically.
If possible, I have linked directly to them in the syllabus below. Where this was not possible, you can
find readings in various scholarly journals that are now available online
through the UT Library website (e-journals).
|
Assignment |
Weight |
|
Metadata quality analysis (group) |
15% |
|
10% |
|
|
10% |
|
|
Midterm exam |
20% |
|
Final exam |
30% |
|
Class engagement |
15% |
Grading Details:
I will use the following
schedule in calculating final grades:
|
A+ = 100 |
A = 95-99 |
A- = 90-94 |
|
B+ = 85-89 |
B = 80-84 |
B- = 75-79 |
|
C+ = 70-74 |
C = 65-69 |
C- = 60-64 |
|
|
F = <60 |
|
A few notes on grading:
Class
Attendance
All
students must attend both the midterm and final exams. Missing either of these exams will
result in a zero grade on that test.
The only exceptions that will be made to this rule are:
1.
students who
will be absent due to a religious holiday may reschedule the exam. However, students must inform the
instructor of this plan in writing by the second class meeting.
2.
Students who are
too ill to attend class should contact the instructor as soon as possible. With a note from the student’s doctor,
a makeup will be arranged.
Short of these
contingencies, all students are required to take the exams on the dates and
times shown in the schedule below.
On non-exam days, attendance
is your prerogative. Be aware,
though, that your class engagement grade depends on the extent to which you
distinguish yourself among your peers.
I won’t take roll each week.
But I will notice who routinely says intelligent things. If you are gone, you won’t be among
these students.
|
Date |
Due |
Topics |
|
1/20 |
|
Preliminaries: information
and organization Class slides Motivations for organizing
information In-class exercise: Library OPAC search Reading:
|
|
1/27 |
|
Is ‘everything’
miscellaneous? Class slides In-class list-making exercise Reading: 1.
Weinberger,
D. (2005). Everything
is Miscellaneous. Times. Two venues for information
organization Institutional repositories Reading:
Personal Information
Management Reading: 1.
Czerwinski,
Mary et al. (2006). Digital memories in an era of
ubiquitous computing and abundant storage. Communications of
the ACM. 49(1), 44-50.
(available online) |
|
2/3 |
|
Introduction to metadata Class slides In-class Dublin Core exercise Reading:
|
|
2/10 |
XML 1 In-class XML practice Class slides All in-class XML examples
are available online Reading:
|
|
|
2/17 |
|
XML 2 -- XML
transformations, XML schemas, RDF, Semantic Web Second in-class XML practice Class slides Reading:
|
|
2/24 |
Semantic Web; RDF, RDF
Schema, Ontologies Class slides Reading: 1.
Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila, "The Semantic
Web" Scientific American (May 2001). (available online) . 2.
Natalya Noy and Deborah McGuinness "Ontology 101 (1-20, through
section 4)". (available online). 3.
Catherine Marshall. "Taking a Stand on the Semantic Web".
(available online). |
|
|
3/3 |
|
Metadata and document
representation wrap-up Reading: 1.
Shirky, Clay.
XML: No Magic Problem Solver [available online]. 2.
Weibel, Stuart
L. (2005). Border crossings:
Reflections on a decade of metadata consensus building. D-Lib
Magazine. 11(7/8). [available online]. Exam review |
|
3/10 |
|
Midterm Exam |
|
3/17 |
|
Spring Break
-- No class meeting |
|
3/24 |
|
Introduction to Relational
databases (data modeling) class slides (pdf); and slides (keynote) In-class practice Reading: 1.
Teory, T. et
al. (2006). Database Modeling and
Design. Morgan-Kaufmann. Ch. 1, Ch. 2.2, Ch. 4.1-4.3 [available through
blackboard]. |
|
3/31 |
|
Introduction to
classification Class slides Reading:
In-Class Exercise: Newspaper headline
classification |
|
4/7 |
|
ECIR -- no
class meeting |
|
4/14 |
Lecture by
iSchool visitor Statistical classification Class slides Reading:
|
|
|
4/21 |
|
|
|
4/28 |
|
Introduction to
information retrieval In-Class Exercise: Search Engine Evaluation Reading: 1.
Manning and
Scheutze. (2007) Introduction to
Information Retrieval. Cambridge. Chs. 1, 6. (available online) |
|
5/5 |
FINAL EXAM |
The core values of the
University of Texas at Austin are learning, discovery, freedom, leadership,
individual opportunity, and responsibility. Each member of the University is
expected to uphold these values through integrity, honesty, trust, fairness,
and respect toward peers and community.
All students should become
familiar with the University's official e-mail student notification policy. It
is the student's responsibility to keep the University informed as to changes
in his or her e-mail address. Students are expected to check e-mail on a
frequent and regular basis in order to stay current with University-related
communications, recognizing that certain communications may be time-critical.
It is recommended that e-mail be checked daily, but at a minimum, twice per
week. The complete text of the policy is available at http://www.utexas.edu/its/policies/emailnotify.html.
In this course e-mail will be used as a
means of communication with students. You will be responsible for checking your
e-mail regularly for class work and announcements. Note: if you are an employee
of the University, your e-mail address in Blackboard is your employee address.
The instructor keeps office
hours twice weekly (see above).
Students may email the instructor if necessary, but are encouraged to
seek advice either during office hours or in class.
Any student with a
documented disability (physical or cognitive) who requires academic accommodations
should contact the Services for Students with Disabilities area of the Office
of the Dean of Students at 471.6259 (voice) or 471.4641 (TTY for users who are
deaf or hard of hearing) as soon as possible to request an official letter
outlining authorized accommodations.