Institute Researchers Participate in 2015 iConference

Laura I. Spears, the Institute’s Research Coordinator, presented a paper and a poster at the conference. The paper, entitled Meeting the Needs of IT Stakeholders in a Northwest Florida State College, reported on preliminary results from the Institute’s National Science Foundation grant (Assessing Information Technology Educational Pathways that Promote Deployment and Use of Rural Broadband < http://ii.fsu.edu/Research/Projects/Assessing-Information-Technology-Educational-Pathways-that-Promote-Deployment-and-Use-of-Rural-Broadband-NSF>). Spears was the lead author with Institute researchers Jisue Lee, Chandrahasa Ambaparavu, Marcia A. Mardis, Nicole D. Alemanne, Charles R. McClure. Spears also presented a poster, entitled Using Social Networks for Library Funding Advocacy: A Discourse Analysis of the Save the Miami-Dade Public Libraries Facebook Campaign, summarizing the study design for her dissertation research that examines the use of social media for public library funding advocacy. The analytical framework for this project includes the public management theory Creating Public Value (Benington & Moore, 2011).

Nicole D. Alemanne, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute, was one of 27 participants selected from almost 70 applicants for iConference’s Doctoral Colloquium. The selection process for the colloquium emphasized: 1) research fit, focusing on projects at interesting intersections
of information, technology, and people, 2) maturity, dissertation plans that were reasonably advanced and clearly presented, and 3) career stage, foregrounding students who were at a point in their development where colloquium feedback would be most beneficial. During the colloquium Nicole worked with an iSchool mentor to develop future projects from her dissertation, entitled Mapping the Social World Boundaries of Interdisciplinary Teams: Processes for Working Across Disciplines, and participated in colloquium meetings and panels.

Former Institute graduate research associate Jisue Lee presented a paper describing political communication using Twitter entitled Mysterious Influential Users in Political Communication on Twitter: Users’ Occupation Information and Its Impact on Retweetability at the iConference. Lee is the lead author on the paper, written with Jaewook Ahn (Drexel University), Jung Sun Oh (University of Pittsburgh), and Hohyon Ryu (Twitter Inc.).