Morgan Grimes, Laurie Calhoun, Erin Barker, Tara Murray

Several APLIC members attended the SLA 2009 conference in Washington, DC. Four of us met up at Co Co. Sala for an informal APLIC meeting.

If you attended a session at SLA that you think would interest other APLIC members, please write about it for the APLIC blog! You can post directly if you are a blog author, or you can send your report to me for posting.

The latest issue of APLIC’s newsletter, the APLIC Communicator, is now available on our web site.

This issue includes Kiet Bang’s president’s message, reports from the 2009 APLIC conference, APLIC’s new logo, and a preview of the SLA conference taking place next week in Washington, DC.

We hope you enjoy this issue, and the blog posts about the conference. Please comment on the blog, and if you are interested in writing for either the blog or the newsletter, please contact me or my co-editor Laurie Calhoun.

Report from the APLIC 2009 conference, submitted by Mary Panke

Shuming Bao, Senior Research Coordinator for China Initiatives, China Data Center, University of Michigan

Dr. Bao presented attendees with a richly informative overview of groundbreaking and relatively new online China data resources emerging from the China Data Center at the University of Michigan. The Center, inherited from the CITAS project, was founded in 1997 to aid in the international study of China. Dr. Bao explained that in the past, detailed census data from China has been difficult to study for a host of reasons. The language barrier, and the fact that the data was stored in hundreds of hardcopy statistical yearbooks records created significant obstacles, but other factors contributed as well. The data was based not on geography, as with US census data, but on political units. The data had also been collected at inconsistent intervals until after the Cultural Revolution when the 1990 and 2000 collections began to conform more closely to the US standard – collecting at 10 year intervals, and with much richer data. Dr. Bao further explained how the fortuitous convergence of richer data, digitization of the data, and integration with GIS maps has yielded a powerful new frontier for quantitative research and spatial studies.

Dr. Bao acquainted attendees with some of the Groundbreaking projects undertaken at the Center. Detailed maps of China have been generated, where none existed before, plotting boundaries, rivers, highways, etc. China data is now being factored into interdisciplinary spatial studies on population, environment, hydrology, and public health. More than 2800 Census data assemblies are now available electronically, for both counties and provinces in China, furnishing a wealth information on general population, mortality, nationalities, marriage, age, education, occupation, housing migration, and more. A newly relased tool – The Census Data Reports and Maps Online – is now available in beta. This comprehensive tool includes 2000 population census data for over 50,000 townships in China, 2004 economic census data for over 5 million units, population estimates for 9.6 million square kilometer grids and summary, comparison, rank, or customizable reports as well as custom reports, maps, and charts ready for publication. As with most of the resources available through the Center, the tool is designed for use by non-specialists as well as China scholars and can generate very powerful results in only a few clicks.

Dr. Bao gave attendees a glimpse of the creative potential of these resources by reviewing some of the case studies based on this data. Studies include assessments of the current and potential impacts of earthquakes on resident populations, migration scenarios and the development of sparsely populated Western China, a GIS-based cultural map of the Silkroad to build Western awareness of cultural/artistic traditions of China, and work on rural poverty alleviation strategies using household-level surveys to study nutrition, education, government programs, credit and investment. One of the goals of the Center is to publicize the availability of these rich resources, and you can help by bringing them to the attention of your patrons and adding the following link to your demographic resource “favorites”: http://chinadatacenter.org/newcdc/

Report from the APLIC 2009 conference, submitted by Claire Twose

Presentation by Thomas Finholt, Professor and associate dean for research and innovation, School of Information, University of Michigan (April 29, 2009)

Dr. Finholt’s overall argument was that we are in the midst of a significant change in kind of virtual collaborations and virtual organizations that are active and therefore we also need new research approaches to understand and model them.

He framed the presentation in three “acts”: theoretical basis, learning from past research, and future directions.

First Act: Theory

Three ways to describe the shift that affects theoretical approaches:

1. from small group to crowd: i.e. from a focus on traditional research teams of from 5-8 to online collaborations like Wikipedia and many others
2. from Human Computer Interaction to social computing (from understanding page design and usability to the social dynamics of Facebook/mySpace)
3. from psychology (how are we parsing/navigating a screen; social psychology) to economic and sociological approaches that are tailored to model the behavior of large groups

Second Act: Lessons learned from earlier research

Dr. Finholt drew lessons on the clash of work cultures from a study of the NSF funded George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES).

The analysis of cultures he described was along four broad dimensions:

1. Hierarchy
2. Collaboration
3. Masculine/feminine (social monitoring low to high)
4. Orientation to risk: seeking or not seeking novelty

The NSF study brought together civil engineers and the best IT staff (“hackers”), who only shared one similarity on these four dimensions–they were both “low” social monitors. Civil engineers in general are extremely hierarchical and individualist, the most conservative of engineers (who are already very conservative), and very low risk orientation. The ‘hacker’ IT programmers on this project by contrast had a flat, collectivist culture, with a high risk orientation, always wanting to try new things.

Lessons learned included:

• It’s important to manage first contacts, script them, help people get over barriers of language
• Communication has to be intentional activity
• Find or create common ground, common goals
• And, the technology is pretty much irrelevant to success: people, managing relationships are the big challenges.

Third Act: New Collaborations

Dr. Finholt then described several examples of new technologies that were virtual collaborations or fostered such collaborations.

• Ultra-resolution collaboration: Images of the Optiportal at Michigan were shown, an environment to support “radical virtual collocation” using wall-sized displays that researchers in different locations can simultaneously observe. One recent example of the impact of such collaboration was the response to the SARS outbreak. Julie Gerberding, then director of the CDC, reported that video conferencing was instrumental in sharing research and analyzing the virus as quickly as they did.
• “Crowd sourcing”: E.g. Innocentive.  Finholt gave an example of a New Orleans barge operator who needed to get silt out of barges. The barge operator put out his problem on the site, along with what he was willing to pay for a successful answer. Someone from upper states responded with an idea that worked.
• “Clickworkers”:Small, incremental contributions from many people, harnessing human computation ability.
  • Scoring mars craters–it took 3 weeks to do what would have taken one expert 4.5 years to complete. Quality assessments of this project showed the voluntary contributions were at or better than expert level.
  • Picassa–creating tag fields for images