Week 3: Prior Work

Mid-Class Field Trip

• October 10: Department of Education Brownbag Presentation by Rebecca Black, Assistant Professor, UC Irvine Department of Education: "Literacy and Learning in Virtual Worlds for Young Children." 12:00-1:00 pm, Education 2024. Open to the Public. – (Prof. Black will be a visitor to our class in a few

weeks, and her talk will be based on an Informatics-relevant research methodology.)

Prior Work

• Finding• Evaluating• Reading• More finding

Finding

• It takes information to find information.• What are the right sources? • What are the right keywords?

On Wikipedia

• Surprisingly effective starting place for topics you don’t know anything about.

Finding Related Work: Past, Present and Future

• Past: Scarcity (gathering problem)• Present: Abundance (filtering problem)• Future: ???

Cross-Disciplinary Related Work

• A lot of ideas have been explored.• Sometimes same ideas with different

terminology.• Reasonable to make some effort to find these

other works.• Unreasonable to learn everything about every

field.

Evaluating

• Is this paper worth reading?• Is this paper worth citing?

Titles and Abstracts

• Make the search problem easier.

Especially Hard in a Cross-Disciplinary Search

Reputability of Sources

Number of Citations

• Does that automatically make it good?

Who Wrote It?

• What can you learn about a paper from its authors?

Changing Value of Different Venues

• Harvard Law Review vs. SSRN

The Value of New Media

• Blogs?• Wikipedia?

Reading

Summarize at the Time?

• Good for remembering.• Easier than summarizing later.• Don’t know what paper you’ll be citing it in, so

it’s not perfect.

Two papers next week that go into greater depth.

More Finding

• Once you’ve read something, it may point you to other papers to read.

• Reference list• Hyperlinks

Demo ACM DL

Demo Google Scholar

Demo Zotero

• Also Papers and Mendeley

Break

• Walk to Education Department

Going over your future CVs

Bio

• Swap CVs and write a 100 word bio of your neighbor in the future.

Assignment for Next Week

• 5 Hypothetical Abstracts– Similar to the Significance statement in one– Present default structure of abstract

1) General problem domain2) Specific problem3) Approach we're taking4) Evaluation (how do we know it worked?)5) Broader impacts (how will it change the world?)

Titles

• Key words?• Key question?• Key result?

Go Over Some Specific Abstracts

Readings