For pursuing intriguing concepts as leaders in their field, iSchool Professors Kelly Lyons, Lynne Howarth, and Leslie Regan Shade have received significant grants totaling more than $1.1 million CND to support their cutting-edge research projects.
Professor Lynne Howarth
“Show, Tell, Bridge: the Affordance of Objects in Negotiating Individual and Group Identity,” is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded Insight Grant project exploring how objects and storytelling can build bridges among individuals to foster community. SSHRC is supporting the project with the grant, worth $138,237, over a three-year period (2015-2018).
Prof. Howarth will be asking critical questions such as, ‘How do we share our stories with others, and can we use personal mementos to forge connections where social, cultural, language, economic, ethnic, age, ability, or other barriers might otherwise discourage or limit group cohesion?
The Toronto Public Library (TPL) is assisting Howarth and her team by hosting a series of programs where participants will be invited to talk individually and in a small group setting about an object, photograph, drawing, or other “something” of importance to them.
Together, participants will create an exhibition that combines all objects and stories into a communal narrative. Outcomes from the research will be used to design similar programs and services for others in settings where finding or fostering commonality among diversity may be important.
Factors, such as an aging population, an increasingly mobile workforce, and settlement needs of newcomers to dynamic urban settings, such as Toronto, have raised the profile of social isolation and marginalization in media and other discussions. “Within that context, it is both timely and critical that we help people tell their stories and share experiences, not only for the growth of the individual, but also for nurturing community,” says Prof. Howarth.
Professor Kelly Lyons
As the principal investigator, Professor Lyons will lead the study, “Data-Driven Knowledge Mobilization, Translation & Innovation,” with co-investigators from the University of Toronto, University of Alberta, and University of British Columbia. Funding for the project is provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Strategic Project Grant and totals $747,000 over three years.
The goal of this project is to develop methods and tools for analyzing and enhancing the data sets through which knowledge workers collaborate. The expectation is that in doing so worker productivity can effectively be amplified. Together with several partner organizations including Canadian research networks and industry partners, the methods and tools will be validated through real-world case studies. Results of the project will enable the understanding support and improvement of the end-to-end process of (a) bringing the right individuals together, (b) collaborating and contributing their complementary expertise, and (c) making use of supporting processes and practices to create value through innovation in products and services.
Dr. Lyons will work with a Postdoctoral Fellow on the newly funded NSERC Strategic Partnership Grant in the to-be-created iDB Lab at the iSchool, in collaboration with Dr. Renée Miller in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, Dr. Kellogg Booth in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, and Dr. Eleni Stroulia in the Computing Science Department at the University of Alberta.
Kelly has also received research funding from both the CFI-JELF (The Canada Foundation for Innovation’s John R. Evans Leaders Fund) with a grant of $69,021, and a NSERC Engage Grant with Dell Software Canada for “Semantic Information Extraction for Creating an Expertise Knowledge Base.”
Professor Leslie Regan Shade
As a Co-investigator, Leslie offers her expertise in youth and social media, and the policy issues of privacy and big data to a diverse team of organizations and academic experts, including the project co-leaders at the University of Ottawa, Valerie Steeves and Jane Bailey,to work on the “eQuality” project, generously funded by a SSHRC partnership grant. Leslie will receive $31,000 per year for the duration of the grant, over seven years, however, the project itself will receive a total funding amount of $2,499,520.00. Leslie’s research focus since the mid-1990’s has been to promote the notion of the public interest in ICT policy, with a specific interest in policy issues that concern gender and youth.
The overarching goal of eQuality is to inform digital economy policies, especially privacy, and bring attention to the cyberbullying debate by identifying evidence-based policies that address the issue. Specifically, the project outlines four major interrelated objectives:
(a) to create new knowledge about commercial data practices and their impact on youth, by mapping out how online and mobile information infrastructures serve as a platform for discrimination;
(b) to create new knowledge about the ways in which young people think of privacy and the potential for equality in networked spaces;
(c) to contribute to digital media policy by sharing this new knowledge to policy makers and members of the public and;
(d) to create educational materials that will help young Canadians make the most of their digital media experiences, grounded in needs identified by youth, and that fill educational gaps identified by partners of the project based on their hands-on experience serving young people.
Dr. Karen Smith
a PhD graduate of the iSchool, and now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture, and Film at Brock University, is a collaborator on the project and will bring her expertise to youth engagement and on the Concept Mapping stream. Dr. Smith’s research explores the connections between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and society, with a focus on openness, privacy, and participation.
Congratulations to our dedicated professors, as we look forward to sharing in the results of their insightful research projects.
