Are you looking to make progress with your writing?
Step out of your busy everyday life and come to the SIS writing retreat, hosted by ASIS&T!

Friday, September 28th from 2pm-4pm @ SIS 106
This time and space has been reserved for writing in a distraction-free and supportive environment among other writers. We will use the Pomodoro technique, structuring writing time into 25-minute intervals. Feel free to drop in whenever you can and leave early if you want. Coffee and snacks will be provided.

To celebrate our success, there may be a post-writing gathering at Thompson house if there is interest. The retreat is open to everyone (MISt/PhD/Faculty/Staff) working on any kind of writing (article/grant application/PowerPoint/blog/etc.).

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We at the ASIS&T McGill student chapter are delighted to announce the next EBSI-SIS symposium, to be held on March 19, 2018 at the School of Information Studies (3661 Peel) at McGill University from 10am-4:30pm. The symposium series continues to provide a meeting place for the two departments' research communities, and will once again feature student research. Breakfast, lunch, and light snacks will be served.

Program
Click here to download a copy of the program.

Slides
To download the presenters' slides, please click here.

For further information, please contact asist.mcgill@gmail.com. We look forward to seeing you at the symposium!

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SIS Mansion, 3661 Peel, room 106, 10am-12pm

The presenter will discuss her recent research on assessment methods used in the information literacy instruction of rehabilitation sciences students, and how this research grew out of her practice as a health sciences librarian. This seminar will be interesting to both PhD and Master students, researchers, those interested in an academic career and evidence-based librarianship.

Jill Boruff, MLIS, AHIP, has been a librarian at McGill since 2007, and currently serves as the liaison for the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and the Department of Psychiatry.

SIS Mansion, 3661 Peel, room TBA, 12:30pm-1:30pm

An opportunity for those scheduled to present at the ASIS&T annual meeting in Washington DC to be able to practice their presentations in order to gain confidence and to receive valuable feedback from their peers.

Speakers:

Cynthia Kumah
Mobile device use to access information on well-being
The research focuses on young adults' use of smartphones to search for information in support of their well-being and how specific applications are used to manage their life to achieve well-being.

Vera Granikov
Overcoming the digital divide? Low education low income parents are equally likely to report benefits associated with online parenting information
Vera will describe findings from a study of perceived outcomes associated with use of online health information. Attention will be given to outcomes reported by parents with lower levels of income and education.

​Reem El Sherif
The value of user feedback: Parents' comments to online health and well-being information providers
The poster illustrates a concrete example of how feedback from information users has been integrated to improve information content. Reem will present how this was operationalized and describe the knowledge management system used in the project.

SIS Mansion, 3661 Peel, room 106, 12:30pm
A systematic review: What it is and what it isn’t
Quan Nha Hong, PhD candidate, Department of Family Medicine, McGill

Summary: This seminar will present what is a systematic literature review and compared it to other types of reviews (rapid review, scoping review, etc).

Why attend: Explanations, tips, and advice shared by Quan Nha will be useful to all those thinking of undertaking a systematic literature review as well as students embarking on the independent reading course this winter or the literature review for their doctoral project. This seminar will also benefit Master's students by introducing the basics of different types of literature reviews, in which librarians participate more and more.

Presenter bio: Quan Nha Hong is a PhD candidate at the Department of Family Medicine at McGill under the supervision of Dr. Pierre Pluye. She is an occupational therapist with Master’s degree in Clinical Sciences and Health Technology Assessment. She is interested in mixed studies reviews, methods of knowledge synthesis and critical appraisal. Her doctoral research project is on the validation of the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT).

This session will be followed by our new exciting series, C4C (Call for Collaboration), which aims to publish papers at the next ASIS&T Annual meeting which will be held in Washington DC in October.

You are all welcome to join the following three research projects, with details to be explored after the Lunch Talk. Please join us if you are interested in any of these topics:

• Social Media in LIS education: LIS faculties and their PhDs in Twitter
• Is the poster the end of the research?
• Have you published enough papers? An investigation on the threshold of winning a tenure-track position.

SIS Mansion, 3661 Peel, room 106, 12:30pm
On the Compliance of Women Engineers with a Gendered Scientific System
Gita Ghiasi, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science, Concordia University
Engineering is typically associated with technological advancements and innovation, which is central to many countries’ economic growth. Yet engineering fails to meet its promises for societal development, as women are largely underrepresented in this discipline. Attempts for integration of more women in engineering are proven to be only partially successful, as gender disparities are also rooted in cultural associations among engineering, technology, and masculinity. As a consequence, women are likely to face greater difficulties coping with the engineering culture, which is referred to as ‘in/visibility paradox’, as women are often visible as women but invisible as engineers, and they constantly have to work harder to prove themselves as professionals. In the growing literature and focus on the capacity building for women in science and technology, there is a lack of focus on women’s scientific participation and performance in engineering specialties. There remains, therefore, a clear need for disciplinarily homogeneous, contextually enhanced, and methodologically rigorous studies of gender disparities in engineering. This talk seeks to address this void and evaluates gender differences in scientific production and impact of engineers using publication and author data from Web of Science, a comprehensive database of scientific publications. It further scrutinizes the engineering scientific community and analyzes cross-gender co-authorship collaboration patterns among researchers, mapping the position of female and male engineers in a complex network of scientific collaborations.

SIS Mansion, 3661 Peel, room 310, 12:30pm
Cardinal: Novel Software for Studying File Management Behavior
Jesse David Dinneen, PhD Candidate, McGill SIS
Abstract provided by the author
At this lunch talk I will discuss my experiences with collecting data and recruiting participants for my PhD study. I'll go into detail about why I had to make custom software for my data collection, how I went about doing this and sharing the software on GitHub, how I tried to use this as an opportunity to make a methodological contribution, the successes and challenges of recruitment, and lessons learned from the whole process. To some extent this will serve as a follow-up to the ASIS&T talk Jon Dorey gave last April about getting ethics approval, since recruitment and data collection are often the next steps in a research project.

This series aims to facilitate scholarly culture at SIS and provide a platform for informal discussion of works in progress. The general format entails bringing your lunch (e.g., brown bag) to the meeting room, eating while listening to a guest speaker present their current readings or research, and discussing afterwards.

This session will be followed by the McGill ASIS&T executive meeting, where all are welcome to join us and participate!

SIS Mansion, 3661 Peel, room 106, 12:30pm
This series aims to facilitate scholarly culture at SIS and provide a platform for informal discussion of works in progress. The general format entails bringing your lunch (e.g., brown bag) to the meeting room, eating while listening to a guest speaker present their current readings or research, and discussing afterwards. This session will be followed by the McGill ASIS&T executive election. Coffee will be served.

An empirical investigation of partial alphabetical authorship in biomedicine
Philippe Mongeon, PhD Candidate, Université de Montreal
The purpose of this study is to provide original insights on the prevalence of partial alphabetical order in medical research and on its evolution over the last decade. After investigating 1,967,776 articles in biomedical research and clinical medicine with between 6 and 100 authors from Web of Science, this study find that as the number of authors per article increases, the prevalence of partial alphabetical order also increases. A plausible explanation is that a high number of authors complexifies their ordering, so only the most important contributors are ordered according to their contribution while the others are ordered alphabetically.

Exploring scholars’ downloading patterns
Sarah Cameron-Pesant, Master Student, Université de Montreal
In the context of the current “publish or perish” culture of academe, scholars’ working habits and work-life balance issues have become a subject of interest. The aim of this presentation is to examine scholars’ downloading patterns on four different timescales: hourly, weekly, monthly and by season. Our analyses are based on the web log data of Érudit, the main journal diffusion platform of French-Canadian journals in the social sciences and humanities, from 2011 to 2015. We focus on the countries with the highest number of downloads: Canada, France and the United States. Results show that Canadian and French users perform the large majority of their downloads during weekdays. Americans’ online activity, however, is steadier across the day (and night) and during weekends. Canadian users’ download activity increases at the middle of semesters, probably due to the high number of undergraduates using Érudit.

​SIS Mansion, room 106, 2pm
The ASIS&T McGill Student Chapter is pleased to announce a new series of events, called 'ASIS&Tance Workshops', wherein popular topics related to research or PhD studies will discussed. These are intended to be helpful, loosely structured meetings for the informal exchange of information and ideas between PhD and MISt students interested in research.

The first session will be a discussion and Q&A regarding the PhD Comprehensive Examination. Senior PhD candidates will be on hand to share their experiences, and to answer questions from junior PhD students.

SIS Mansion, room 310, 12:30pm
This series aims to facilitate scholarly culture at SIS and provide a platform for informal discussion of works in progress. The general format entails bringing your lunch (e.g., brown bag) to the meeting room, eating while listening to a guest speaker present their current readings or research, and discussing afterwards.

This year, the Tri-Council introduced new guidelines regarding ethics training in Canada. McGill made this training mandatory as of this term. With some of you having to apply for ethics before conducting research, this discussion will cover what you need to know before applying! Elements that will be covered include: the ethics application form, what to submit/provide, ethics training, wording issues and coordinating with the ethics review committee of other institutions. Questions are strongly encouraged!

SIS Mansion, room 310, 12:30pm
This series aims to facilitate scholarly culture at SIS and provide a platform for informal discussion of works in progress. The general format entails bringing your lunch (e.g., brown bag) to the meeting room, eating while listening to a guest speaker present their current readings or research, and discussing afterwards.

Since the 1960s, many scholars have questioned the relationship between library and information science. This paper investigates LIS doctoral dissertations in terms of their topics and interdisciplinarity. Results show that LIS is an interdisciplinary field in which library science and information science are intimately related, Information Science has surpassed Library Science to become the dominant research topic in LIS, and doctoral advisors’ academic background affects the interdisciplinarity of their student’s doctoral dissertations.

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SIS Mansion, room 310, 12:30pm
This series aims to facilitate scholarly culture at SIS and provide a platform for informal discussion of works in progress. The general format entails bringing your lunch (e.g., brown bag) to the meeting room, eating while listening to a guest speaker present their current readings or research, and discussing afterwards.

Many people want to practice the habits of a healthy lifestyle but find it difficult to motivate themselves to do so, even when aware of the benefits. Persuasive Technology (PT) – technology designed to motivate behavior and attitude change – has helped people to manage addictive behaviors, achieve personal wellness, manage diseases, and make healthy choices. However, most PT interventions are designed using a one-size-fits-all approach, and research have shown that an approach that motivates one type of person to change her behavior may actually deter behavior change for another type of person. In this talk, I will present my work on tailoring PT to increase their efficacy at motivating healthy behavior change.

Dr. Rita Orji is a Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University and a visiting Senior Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria. She received her Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Before moving to Canada, she received a M.Sc. in Information Systems from Middle East Technical University, Turkey, and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nigeria. Her research examines how Information Systems can be designed to aid and motivate people for actions and causes that are beneficial for them and their communities. She is particularly passionate about studying how Behavior Change Support Systems and Persuasive Technologies can be designed to help people move towards improved health and wellness. Dr. Orji’s work has won several awards at local, national, and international levels, including the prestigious Canadian Government Vanier Scholarship, Federal Government of Nigeria, and the Government of Turkey awards, and Best paper awards. She presented her work to the Canadian Parliament. She serves as an Associate Chair, reviewer, on editorial and scientific committees, and as a conference organizing committee member for several international journals and conferences in the area of Human Computer Interactions.

SIS Mansion, room 310, 12:30pm
This series aims to facilitate scholarly culture at SIS and provide a platform for informal discussion of works in progress. The general format entails bringing your lunch (e.g., brown bag) to the meeting room, eating while listening to a guest speaker present their current readings or research, and discussing afterwards.

The various gaps between urban designers and planners (UDPs) and soundscape researchers results in UDPs failing to incorporate in their everyday work the state of the art knowledge on the interaction between users of urban spaces and their acoustic environments. Acoustic concerns are addressed mostly in the final stages of the design or planning process and this can lead to noisy, unpleasant city soundscapes marked with barrier walls. UDPs are generally responsible for shaping and intervening in the urban environment, but can lack sufficient acoustic expertise to achieve the best outcomes. Meanwhile, soundscape researchers, study the acoustic environment as it is perceived and understood by people, yet have little power to intervene and apply their findings.

In this study, semi-structured interviews deal with issues of soundscape and acoustic concerns by inviting UDPs to discuss general concepts about acoustics followed by a discussion that puts those concepts into context with two specific interventions, from their past and present work. Using the method of grounded theory, we identified key findings on a number of topics, such as: different categories for UDPs’ conceptualization(s) of soundscape; their perceived agency for change how obtain expertise; and the way in which UDPs evaluate the success of the acoustic components of their interventions. Further questions reveal how UDPs access new knowledge. The long-term goal of the study is to identify and/or create support materials or tools for UDPs that build on their existing understanding of acoustic issues and aim to aid them in making better decisions about soundscape in their daily work.

SIS Mansion, room 310, 12:30pm
This series aims to facilitate scholarly culture at SIS and provide a platform for informal discussion of works in progress. The general format entails bringing your lunch (e.g., brown bag) to the meeting room, eating while listening to a guest speaker present their current readings or research, and discussing afterwards.

The first of talk in the series will be given by SIS PhD student Mohammed AlGhamdi, who will talk about how he used the Think Aloud protocol in a usability evaluation of 3D Virtual Learning Environments with early teens: "I’ll be discussing how I got to this topic, my research questions, methodology, and some preliminary results".