Taxonomies – Practical Approaches to Developing and Managing Vocabularies for Digital Information – Book review
There is probably no more difficult task in information management in being the Editor of a multi-author on any topic, and the level of difficulty goes up by an order of magnitude when the topic is taxonomy management. Taxonomies (and the strap line Practical Approaches to Developing and Managing Vocabularies for Digital Information) has been […]
The Science of Reading – Book review
You may be somewhat surprised to see a review of a book on the science of reading in Informer. It seems to be implicit in information retrieval research that ‘users’ have such a competence in reading that a consideration of reading ability can be discounted from the research analysis. If only that was the case! […]
Making knowledge management clickable – Book review
There are many books about knowledge management but very few about what I might refer to as IKM (Information and Knowledge Management) technologies. What is distinctive about this book is that it spans the crevasse between KM and IT and does so with considerable flair. The authors, Zach Wahl and Joseph Hilger established Enterprise Knowledge (based in Arlington VA) close […]
Funnelback and Me: Celebrating 30 Years of Funnelback Technology 1991-2021 – Book review
I expect that most readers of Informer will have read the 2011 edition of Modern Information Retrieval edited by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Riberio-Neto. It runs to almost 900 pages. Chapter 15 is a brilliant essay by David Hawking which sums up everything you should know about enterprise search in 40 pages. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research […]
Book review – Invisible Search and Online Search Engines
(A note from the Editor. This 161pp book was published in 2019 but recently became open access. I must have missed it first time around!) The reviewer Cass Zhixue Zhao I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield. I have obtained my PhD from Information School, University of Sheffield. […]
Book Review ‘Between the spreadsheets’ Susan Walsh
The full title of this book is Between the Spreadsheets – Classifying and Fixing Dirty Data. What a superb title! It makes you smile before you even open the book. At last there is a book that focuses on content quality and does so in a very practical way. Susan Walsh (aka The Classification Guru) […]
Book Review – Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Meaning Space Data Truth by Edward Tufte
I am concerned at the lack of interest in the IR search community in the design of search results pages and the design of the individual results snippets. You could argue that these are topics are out-of-scope and yet recent work on perceptual speed suggests that we should be taking more care about information design […]
Book Review Information Behaviour by Tom Wilson
Nowadays we are very familiar with information retrieval, interactive information retrieval, information risk and information management but information behaviour (not information behaviours – as Tom Wilson emphasizes in this book) is rarely discussed even though thanks to Luciano Floridi we have a good understanding of the philosophy of information. There is now no excuse for […]
B C, Before Computers: On Information Technology from Writing to the Age of Digital Data – Stephen Robertson
From an information technology perspective my career has seen some remarkable developments. I started out using 80-column cards at university in 1967 and then 10,000 hole optical coincidence cards at the start of my career in 1970. But did you know that the size of an 80-column card was the same size as US bank […]
Book review: Evaluating Information Retrieval and Access Tasks: NTCIR’s Legacy of Research Impact
Already hinted at in one of my previous book reviews, this year finally saw the publication of the long-awaited book “Evaluating Information Retrieval and Access Tasks: NTCIR’s Legacy of Research Impact”. If this isn’t reason enough to stop everything you are doing right now and start searching for your reading glasses, there’s even more good […]
Book Review – Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing
One of the benefits of web technology is that it is relatively easy to make design changes to a web site or intranet both at the development stage and even when in production. The same is true of course of open source enterprise applications, such as e-commerce and enterprise search. In principle it seems so […]
Book Review – Systematic Searching
The first of my fourteen books was published in 1981 and was entitled ‘Profit from Information’. It was one of the first in a series of monographs published by the Institute of Information Scientists and was about how to set up and run an information broking business. Information broking companies started to spring up in […]
Book Review: Information Retrieval: The Early Years
It’s time to make space on your book shelf again, as this year, quite a few interesting IR books have been published. This is a brief review on one of them: “Information Retrieval: The Early Years“, written by Donna Harman. Harman can rightly be described as one of the pioneers of IR who has influenced […]
Call for book reviews (Summer 2018)
Summer, sun, and a free book in your hands. What’s not to love about this!? We are again searching for reviewers for below books which have recently been published in Springer Verlag. Just drop me an email if you are interested in reviewing one of these gems and a free copy will be send to […]
Call for book reviews (Winter 2018)
Keeping up with the tradition of book reviews, we again seek reviewers for a number of recently published books in the fields of information and data science. As always, books will be allocated for review on a first-come-first-served basis and you would have about one month to carry out the review. If you are interested […]
Book review: Deep Text by Tom Reamy
When I started the London Text Analytics meetup group some seven years ago, ‘text analytics’ was a term used by few, and understood by even fewer. Apart from a handful of enthusiasts and academics (who preferred the label of “natural language processing” anyway), the field was either overlooked or ignored by most people. Even the […]
Book Review: Social Network-Based Recommender Systems
ISBN: 978-3-319-22734-4 (print) – 978-3-319-22735-1 (digital) Daniel Schall’s book presents a series of experiments in the scope of social network-based recommender systems. Our daily life increasingly involves interacting with digital social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and GitHub. Their complexity impedes deciding whom to add as a friend, expert, coworker, or collaborator. The book […]
Book Review: Fundamentals of Predictive Text Mining 2nd ed (2015)
Book Review: Weiss S. M., Indurkhya N. and Zhang T. (2015). Fundamentals of Predictive Text Mining. Springer-Verlag, London. Second Edition The volume “Fundamentals of Predictive Text Mining”, 2nd ed. has nine chapters, a table of contents, a list of references, a Subject Index and an Author Index. The book also includes a Preface written by […]
Applications of Social Media and Social Network Analysis
Applications of Social Media and Social Network Analysis Edited by Kazienko, P. & Chawla, N. Series: Lecture Notes in Social Networks 2015. Springer 240p This edited collection includes papers on sentiment analysis, information diffusion, trend spotting, reputation metrics and network structures. Perhaps on first viewing some of these topics could seem to have limited relevance […]
Book Review: Personalized Task Recommendations in Crowdsourcing Systems
Personalized Task Recommendation in Crowdsourcing Systems by David Geiger ISBN: 978-3-319 The Personalized Task Recommendations in Crowdsourcing Systems is a tightly organized book, dense with details of a thorough research addressing the subject matter of crowd sourcing systems and automated, personalized task recommendations targeted at users of such systems. Crowdsourcing systems are defined here […]
Call for Book Reviews (Autumn 2015)
This issue we include another Call for Reviews in which we seek reviewers for a number of recently published books that may be of interest to the IR community. Books will be allocated for review on a first-come-first-served basis and you would have about one month to carry out the review. If you are interested […]
Book Review: Graph-Based Clustering and Data Visualization Algorithms
Graph-Based Clustering and Data Visualization Algorithms: A review by Song Chen ISBN: 978-1-4471-5157-9 (Print) – 978-1-4471-5158-6 (Online) The book, authored by Ágnes Vathy-Fogarassy and Janos Abonyi presents the topic of graph-based clustering and presents several algorithms. Besides introducing several related methods in representing and clustering a network, the authors also proposed a novel clustering algorithm to […]
Call for Book Reviews (Spring 2014)
This issue we include another Call for Reviews in which we seek reviewers for a number of recently published books that may be of interest to the IR community. Books will be allocated for review on a first-come-first-served basis and you would have about one month to carry out the review. If you are interested […]
Call for Book Reviews (Summer 2013)
This issue we include another Call for Reviews in which we seek reviewers for a number of recently published books that may be of interest to the IR community. Books will be allocated for review on a first-come-first-served basis and you would have about one month to carry out the review. If you are interested […]
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