Social Life of Information

My paper was accepted to the ASIS&T 2007 IA Summit! It’s the same paper that I wrote for SI 658, turned into a white paper for Enlighten, and also worked into two articles for Boxes & Arrows. For the purposes of the conference, I titled it, “Data Driven Design: Using Web Analytics to Improve Information Architectures.”

This time it was a refereed submission, and fortunately at Friday’s ICOS seminar the topic was reviewing, so I had been freshly-reminded not to take the criticisms too personally. These are my first anonymous reviews, and I’m actually feeling pretty good about them, all things considered. Everyone thought it was relevant to information architecture and had excellent potential for engaging practitioners, though their evaluations of some other aspects varied a bit.

This is something of an easy but significant win for me. It was relatively easy because the paper is already written and has been vetted. A lot. I could make a presentation of it tomorrow if I had an hour to spend refreshing it today, and I’m completely comfortable with the material, so it should be no problem to present at the conference. The research track of the IA Summit is a relatively new thing and there is perhaps a bit more lenience in their acceptance. It’s a significant win because the proceedings are published, which means that I’ll get my first academic publishing credit with this paper.

So now on to the practical considerations: I will have to present the paper in Las Vegas sometime over the course of March 24 - 26. My birthday is the 25th, so I get to have a Vegas birthday; of course, I’m more interested in the opportunity to photograph some colossal neon than to even enter casinos! Unfortunately, that timing means that I’ll probably have to miss the opening of the Gallery 4 show for the Ann Arbor Area Krappy Kamera Club on March 23 due to travel, which would be really disappointing. It’s also pretty close to the end of the semester, so I will probably be a little stressed by my thesis and other degree completion activities. Nonetheless, it’s a great opportunity and I’m pretty excited.