IU tree planted in honor of Rob Kling
The Rob Kling Center for Social informatics (RKCSI) is based at Indiana University, Bloomington. It is named in honor of the late Rob Kling (SLIS Professor who died in 2003). The Center’s activities include a Speaker Series that students can attend — (free and open to the public). The February 2013 speakers will be John Durham Peters (University of Iowa) and Jean Lave (University of California, Berkeley School of Information.)
Co-Directors of the Center are Associate Professors Pnina Fichman (School of Library and Information Science) and Eden Medina (School of Informatics and Computing). An Advisory Committee, comprised of faculty from various programs at Indiana University, also helps support the activities of the center’s Faculty Research Fellows and students in the Doctoral Group.
The RKCSI is planning a Symposium in 2014 to commemorate the ten year anniversary of Rob Kling’s death and to celebrate the merger of the School of Informatics and Computing and the School of Library and Information Science. Pictured here are members of the Symposium Planning Committee.
•Recent Research Highlights - RKCSI Faculty Fellows and Advisory Committee Members:
Jeffrey Bardzell, along with Shaowen Bardzell and Erik Stolterman, received over $1.85 million in July 2012 to create the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing. The IU team is part of a $12.5 million research center composed of faculty from University California Irvine, Cornell University, Georgia Tech and New York University in an exploration of information technology and digital media as social and cultural phenomena.
Alan Dennis, professor of Information Systems and the John T. Chambers Chair of Internet Systems at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, received the Association for Information Systems’ prestigious AIS Fellow Award. The award recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the information systems discipline in terms of research, teaching, and service. An AIS Fellow is also expected to have made both significant global and local contributions to the discipline.
Hamid Ekbia received an NSF Grant to continue his work on the development of a tele-rehab project, and to take part in the NSF I-Corps program that focuses on the translation of academic research into real-world applications that can make a difference in people’s lives – in this case, the roughly 1.35 million survivors of stroke, TBI, and other similar inflictions. This project builds on an earlier award by the Indiana Clinical Translational Institute (CTSI), whose goal is to encourage statewide collaborations and speed the development of new medical treatments and services.
RKCSI co-director, Pnina Fichman with Howard Rosenbaum organized a national symposium on social informatics, which was held in Baltimore MD and was co-sponsored by the RKCSI. Papers presented at the symposium will be published in 2014 in an edited volume Social Informatics: Past, Present and Future.
Susan Herring was awarded a fellowship to spend a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, where she is researching and developing methods for the analysis of multimodal discourse on the Internet. She also published the co-edited Handbook of Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication (Mouton de Gruyter, 2013).
RKCSI co-director Eden Medina received a 2012 Mellon New Directions Fellowship to support her project “Historical Perspectives on Information Technology and Human Rights.” Her book Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011) received the 2012 Edelstein Prize for outstanding book in the history of technology and the 2012 Computer History Museum Prize for outstanding book in the history of computing.
Staša Milojević received, along with others, an NSF Grant for the project “Incubators of Knowledge: Predicting Protégé Productivity and Impact in the Social Sciences.” She also received, along with Selma Šabanović and others, a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant for the project “Digital Video Navigation and Archival Content Management Tools for Non-linear Oral History Narratives.”
In addition, Selma Šabanović received an NSF EAGER Award for the project “Cultural Models in Social Robotics–Comparative Studies with Users in the US and Japan.”
Posted January 31, 2013