Why quantitative information architecture? Why now?

Networking: 5:30-6:00pm
Event: 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Please arrive before 6pm as the doors will be locked!

You don’t have to be RainMan or Stephen Hawking to use numbers to get things
done. Quantitative methods are applicable for IA thinking be it for hypothesis
generation, instrumentation, data collection and analysis of information at
scales never before possible with insights that are comparable over time,
generalizable and extensible.

Quantitative skills can allow IAs to interpret and analyze others’ designs and
research more readily, as well as combine methods and models for meta-analysis
to help IAs move from description to prediction in designing and developing
future interfaces and architectures.

This presentation will review why you should use quantitative methods and
discuss both foundational and emerging ideas that are applicable for content
analysis, behavioral modeling, social media usage, informetrics and other
IA-related issues.

The twitter hashtag for this talk is #quantia. Feel free to send me questions directly via twitter/donturn too.

Speaker
Don Turnbull, Ph.D. is a consultant specializing in software research and development focusing on search systems, information analytics, user experience design, semantic and knowledge management technologies as well as intellectual property analysis.

Don was recently a professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin where his teaching and research focused on designing Web information architectures, information systems analysis, Information Retrieval, the Semantic Web and Knowledge Management Systems.

Don was the Director of Advanced Development at Outride, Inc., a Xerox PARC spin-off company that specialized in personalized information retrieval applications that was acquired by Google. He is also an author of many research publications, as well as the co-author of Web Work: Information Seeking and Knowledge Work on the World Wide Web published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. He received his doctorate from the University of Toronto focusing on Knowledge Discovery (Data Mining) for Informetric and Behavioral Models of Web Use.

In the nascent days of the World Wide Web, Don was the Lead Technical Architect at IBM Interactive Multimedia, working on the World Book/IBM Multimedia Encyclopedia and other large-scale information architecture, system architecture and development projects. Early in his career, Don worked as a Methodologist at KnowledgeWare, Inc. designing CASE tools for client-server applications as well as doing usability, hypertext and multimedia development research. He also worked on a number of commercial software applications including Uninstaller for Windows.