Dr. Luz Quiroga was one of my favorite professors that I had while attending the University of Hawaii at Mānoa.
She was part of the Library & Information Science (LIS) program, and she taught the classes that focused on the information science (IS) side of LIS.
Her classes focused on databases, information searching, information retrieval, algorithms, search engines, and that sort of stuff.
To learn more about her areas of expertise, check out http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lquiroga/courses.htm
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lquiroga/research/research.htm
Because of her expertise in information science, her classes had students from LIS, ICS (Information & Computer Science), CIS (Communication and Information Science), and other majors all in one class. Students came in with differing perspectives on the various topics taught in the class.
Some students in the LIS program felt intimidated to take her class because of the complexities of the topic, plus her accent (she's from Colombia) was difficult for some students to understand. But once you got to know her, you would definitely understand that she was a great mentor who believed in open communications between students and faculty. If you had difficulty, you can always arrange a time to meet with her and she'll help you find ways to approach the coursework.
I took her LIS 678 (Personalized Information Delivery: Information Filtering) in Spring 2015.
While figuring out courses to take that semester, I knew I still needed a class to fulfill the technology course requirement. I went over the options with my academic advisor, and he noted that Dr. Quiroga was in the building, so he invited her to meet with me to discuss what the class was about. After meeting with her, I was sold. I was going to take her class.
That class focused on information searching and information retrieval.
The following was what I wrote after taking the class in Spring 2015
https://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2015/05/spring-2015-semester.html (scroll down to part 2 in that post)
I took that class just to fulfill a technology course requirement! Also, because some of the students who had the same professor for a different course the previous semester said positive things about her style of teaching. Whereas the other courses in the LIS focus mostly on the L (Library) side of LIS, this class focused on the IS (Information Science) side of LIS! This class also had students from CIS (Communication and Information Science) program, who come to the Information Science field from a different perspective! Basically, this class is about search engines! While that class is called "Personalized Information Delivery", I think it should be called "Information Retrieval and Information Filtering" The Information Retrieval part is about how people search for information, and how search engines retrieve information. Now, when I mean "search engines", I'm not just talking about the famous ones like Google, Yahoo! or Bing! I'm also talking about databases and even the search tab you find in online shopping websites! We learn about the various algorithms search engines use to rank the relevant documents (files, videos, websites, whatevers) when we type in a query. I gave an interesting presentation about queries and how they get tracked, which you can view the power-point version at http://media.wix.com/ugd/c8d67a_573ba83a667043599e0443cb13c5d4f2.pdf The Information Filtering part is about how search engines (ie Google, Yahoo, Bing) and social media outlets (ie facebook, LinkedIn, etc) and other online platforms (ie YouTube) tailor what they show to you to match what interests they have tracked from you in the recent past! So, if you are on YouTube watching a lot of videos from Taylor Swift, when you enter YouTube's homepage, you'll see Taylor Swift's videos recommended to you! Or if your interest in other countries are travel oriented, when you type in a country's name (for example - Egypt), you'll see travel-oriented sites on Google! However, if your interest in other countries are focused on human rights, you might see more results about police brutality and prison torture when you type in "Egypt" instead of seeing travel-oriented sites. We also had projects that we can chose of any topic as long as we can relate it to Information Retrieval or Information Filtering. So one project I did was on "Information Literacy for Youth". My partner for this project has work in both the university and at high schools. She actually taught sessions on how to find information on library catalogs and academic databases! So we talked about how to get students to not just rely on Google or Wikipedia but to also navigate academic databases and library resources. The other project I did was on "Information-Communitiy Technologies for Underserved Populations." One partner was interested in mobile devices for women in rural communities. Another partner was interested in helping older adults with fitness-oriented technologies. And I had some experience researching library services for people with visual disabilities. For my part, I focused on BARD (Braille and Audio Reading Download), which provides access to online audiobooks for eligible users. For my individual work from this class, check out http://pwegesen.wix.com/pablowegesendlis#!lis-678-projects/c22pj
I did forget to mention in that blog post that research on information searching and retrieval goes back decades, before social media, before Google, and even before most homes in the US had internet access. We read articles from the 1980s about computer scientists trying to come up with a system similar to the social media that we use today.
In that class, we did learn about the social implications of the algorithms associated with information searching and retrieval. For example
- what results do people find when doing online searches?
- why do we see certain ads right after we mention a certain topic on social media?
- are students finding relevant information while doing research for their class?
However, I took that class in Spring 2015, which was before the following relevant events happened
- Donald Trump's campaign for president and allegations that he had help from Russian operatives to manipulate social media in his favor
- Donald Trump and other controversial figures being expelled from Twitter and other social media outlets
- An internal report from Meta about how Instagram contributed to body image issues and other mental health issues among its users
- Social media sites being blocked in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine.
- And of course, the pandemic and the spread of misinformation about covid-19, vaccines, and other public health issues
