CENS Technical Seminar Series

Micro-blogging from the field: capturing contextual information in highly mobile research

Presentation Slides

Invited Speaker: Matt Mayernik, Alberto Pepe
Date: August 28, 2009
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Venue: Boelter Hall 4760

Abstract

In this talk we present the conceptual design of a mobile phone application that collects and stores descriptive contextual data from field research activities in the form of micro-blog posts, or brief text updates. We present current work in the context of ongoing research at CENS to develop an application for the Windows Mobile platform that allows simple forms of field data collection and note-taking. We discuss how micro-blogging tools can accommodate very well the variable and unpredictable nature of highly mobile research and represent a suitable mechanism to augment the context of information collected in real-world environments. Our goal is to facilitate the collection of clean, well described, and interconnected data that can be easily used and re-used by the researchers who collected them, and potentially by people outside CENS.

Biography

Matt Mayernik is a Ph.D. student and Alberto Pepe is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. They have worked in CENS since 2006 as members of the Statistics and Data Practices Team.