Research Projects
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The last several years proved to be
very productive for me. I have refocused my research for the long term
future, collected new data and published several articles. Fulbright scholar
award that I have received provided
additional boost to my research agenda. My goal is to become a well known
expert on Eastern European information practices, policies, and
institutions. I have published multiple journal articles on the subject and
have presented at a number of conferences. Enthusiastic reception of my
papers indicates that the topic is little explored, but is of great interest
to a wider research community. Within the last six months I have
received invitations to present this work at Harvard University Law School,
the National Library of Singapore and the National University of Singapore.
1.
The main focus of my current and future research is information practices,
policies, and institutions in the former Soviet block.
This work was supported with a
Fulbright fellowship award. During the
fellowship I taught and researched at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, one of Ukraine’s
leading universities. While there I established personal links with senior
personnel in the Parliament Library, the National Scientific Library, Kyiv’s
central public library, and key regional institutions in southern and
western Ukraine. I traveled to other cities within Ukraine, making numerous
presentations in provincial cities and within Kyiv. My work was featured on
four different television networks. Although I have now returned to
Milwaukee, the collaborative ties established during the visit remain
strong.
My work on Ukraine can be
further divided into two main areas:
1) File-sharing practices in
Ukraine, and their relationship to broader cultural understandings of the
role of copyright.
My interest in file-sharing practices in Ukraine, and
their relationship to broader cultural understandings of the role of
copyright evolved out of initial plans for a cross-national quantitative
comparison of downloading practices and attitudes toward intellectual
property. Pilot data was gathered at UWM, in Kyiv, and in
Australia (in collaboration with
Christopher Lueg). This
data yielded some useful results. I presented initial findings at an ASIS&T
SIGUSE workshop. My focus, however, has evolved toward a richer and more
culturally grounded approach to the topic.
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My initial approach to this came through a
paper called
“Downloading Communism: Filesharing as Samizdat in Ukraine”
(online) The paper
has now been published in Libri
and may also be included in a planned book produced from the World Computer
Law meeting. This work also was very well received at the Social Informatics
workshop at the annual meeting ASIS&T 2007
(abstract online).
I have presented work on this topic at the
Wisconsin Library Association meeting,
"Information
Resource Sharing in Ukraine: From Total Control to File Sharing Freedom"
(slides online),
the VI World
Computer Law conference in Edinburgh,
at the Social Studies of Science meeting in Vancouver (4S Annual Meeting),
and in several invited locations in Ukraine. |
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During my time in
Kyiv I collected a great deal of data on file-sharing practices,
including examination of systems only accessible from IP addresses
within Ukraine and interviews with students on their personal
practices. This led me to a new conceptual framework, borrowing the
concept of “moral economy” which originated in social history
but has been used widely in other fields such as political science.
Work within this framework received initial presentations at UWM
SOIS Center for Information Policy Research (CIPR) “Thinking
Critically: Alternative Perspectives and Methods in Information
Studies” conference, the Society for Social Studies of Science
annual meeting in Rotterdam, and the
Canadian Association for
Information Science meeting. Further work led to a more refined
version of this thesis, presented at the
Association of Internet Researchers conference
(slides online)
and published in its proceedings
(online). As a result of that presentation I was invited to
submit my work for an exclusive international workshop on
Free Culture
Research held at the Beckman Center of Harvard University’s Law
School. My ideas were very well received, and contacts from this
workshop have already led to an invited presentation at the National
University of Singapore. My latest paper on the topic appeared in
Libri (draft
online). |
2).
The social construction of Ukrainian libraries and library education, and
their co-evolution with Ukrainian national identity.
| My other main ongoing research area is the social construction
of Ukrainian libraries and library education, and their co-evolution
with Ukrainian national identity. Preliminary research on this topic,
conducted prior to my arrival in Kyiv, resulted in an article “Escaping
Lenin’s Library”
(online),
published in
The International Library and Information Review,
examining the historical role of libraries within Soviet society and
its relationship to the current state of library and information science
education within independent Ukraine. I presented this material at the
Crimea 2007
conference, the leading venue for information science research
and practice in the former Soviet Union region. A revised version received a
very positive reception at the Social Studies of Science conference in Montreal, the main international
meeting for researchers in the field of Science and Technology Studies. That
was part of a panel I organized on the topic of Institutional Ideologies of
Information (slides online).
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| Since then I have extended this work in two directions. The
first goes more deeply into the specifics of library education in
Ukraine, looking both at the Soviet period and recent changes. This
has been published as a chapter Maria Haigh, “Two Steps Forward, One
Step Back: Ideological and Historical Aspects of Library and
Information Science Education in Independent Ukraine”
(draft
online) in the book
LIS After the Fall: Post-Soviet Institutions and Practice, volume 27
in the series on
Advances in Library Administration and Organization. I have
another article under review which complements this study of the
Ukrainian system for Western readers with a summary of the American
library system for Ukrainian readers. Both are implicitly
comparative. |
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The second strand places my interest in the relationship between
libraries and national identity within a conceptual framework
provided by Benedict Anderson’s work on nations as
imagined communities. His work, influential across a range of
disciplines, stresses the role of standardized national print
languages in the emergence of modern nation states. Yet neither
Anderson nor many of his followers have thought to explore the role
of national libraries, public library networks, or classification
systems in the development of shared national identities. My paper
proposal on this topic for the 2009 annual meeting of the
Canadian
Association for Information Science was selected as one of the
top six submitted for the conference, making it eligible for
submission to a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Information
and Library Science showcasing the conference highlights. This has
now been published
(online),
but it is merely an initial overview of ideas I plan to explore in
more depth in a series of future papers. I received a competitive
grant from within SOIS to undertake more fieldwork on this topic
during the summer of 2010. My work on this topic is receiving
considerable interest, leading to an invitation to speak at the
National Library Academy in Singapore.
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I’m concluding my work on the
following two projects:
1.
Stakeholders’ Shaping of Information systems
My
published work also reflects two other streams, now concluded. Like my more
recent research, these focused on user experiences and on the interaction of
technology with social roles.
My dissertation work was in the information systems field, exploring
differences in perceived software quality priorities between various
stakeholder groups (demarcated primarily on two axes: user vs. developer and
managers vs. non-manager). This work fit into the well-established field of
software quality research, a subfield within software engineering, and was
presented at a number of competitive conferences and published in their
proceedings:
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Maria Sverstiuk,
J.Verner, J.Hand, “Software Quality: What Is Really Important and Who
Says So”, proceedings of Nimes TIC 2000, International conference on
Systems Engineering and Information and Communication Technology, Nimes,
France, September 2000, pp.241-246
(online). |
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Maria Sverstiuk,
J.Verner, “Modeling Software Quality Through Organizational Position and
Software Role: A Pilot Study” in Maxwell, K., S. Oligny, R. Kusters, and
E. van Veenendaal, Editors, Project Control: Satisfying the Customer,
Proceedings of the 12th European Software Control and Metrics conference,
London, England, April 2001, Shaker Publishing B.V, pp.417-427(online).
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Maria Haigh, June Verner,
“Examining Stakeholder Priorities for Software Quality Attribute
Requirements”, K. Cox, E. Dubois, Y. Pigneur, S. Bleistein, J. Verner,
A. Davis, R., Wieringa, Eds, (2005), proceedings of the International
Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Business Need and IT Alignment,
UNSW Press, Sydney, ISBN: 0-7334-2276-4, pp.85-92
(online)
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I have
also published two lengthy articles from my dissertation research and
have a third one under review for publication
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Maria Haigh, “Research
Versus Practice in Software Engineering: Comparison of Expert Opinions
to Measured User Priorities”, System Research and Information
Technologies, pp.133-142, Volume 8, Issue 2, 2009
(online). |
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Maria
Haigh, “Software Quality, Non-Functional Software Requirements and
IT-Business Alignment”, forthcoming in the
Software
Quality Journal |
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I
have another article based on my dissertation under review: Maria Haigh,
"Requirements Engineering for Business Stakeholders: Applying Quality
Views Framework" . |
However this topic seemed a
little too far afield for SOIS, and so since arriving at UWM I have
gradually refocused my attention on information institutions rather than
information systems.
2. Learning styles in
face-to-face and online education.
My final research area is
related to my teaching at SOIS. Like other faculty in the school I teach
many of my classes online. Online teaching posed some new challenges, and I
began to read in the academic literature on distance learning.This led
to a research project in which I collected more than one hundred and
fifty responses
from SOIS students on comparison of learning styles between online and
face-to-face sections of the same classes. This led to a peer-reviewed
quantitative article called "Divided by a Common Degree Program? Profiling
Online and Face-to-Face Information Science Students"
(online), published in refereed journal
“Education
for Information” . To focus my energies I have decided not to
pursue further research in this area.
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