We are happy to present our two exiting keynote speakers, Hossein Derakhshan and Katy Börner.
Hossein Derakhshan
Hossein Derakhshan, also known as Hoder, is an Iranian-Canadian blogger who was imprisoned in Tehran from November 2008 to November 2014. He is credited with starting the blogging revolution in Iran and is called the father of Persian blogging by many journalists. He also helped to promote podcasting in Iran. Derakhshan was arrested in 2008 and sentenced to 19½ years in prison in 2010. His sentence was reduced to 17 years in October 2013. He was pardoned by Iran's supreme leader and on November 19, 2014 was released from Evin prison. On his release, he found the internet stripped of its power to change the world and instead serving up a stream of pointless social trivia.
Killing the Hyperlink, Killing the Web: the Shift from Library-Internet to Television-Internet
The Web, as envisaged by its inventors, was founded on the idea of hyperlinks. Derived from the notion of hypertext in literary theory, a hyperlink is a relation rather than an object. It is a system of connections that connects distant pieces of text, resulting in a non-linear, open, active, decentralized, and diverse space we called the World Wide Web.
But in the past few years, and with the rise of closed social networks, as well as mobile apps, the hyperlink - and thereby the Web - are in serious trouble. Most social networks have created a closed, linear, centralized, sequential, passive, and homogeneous space, where users are encouraged to stay in all the time - a space that is more like television.
The Web was imagined as an intellectual project that promoted knowledge, debate, and tolerance; as something I call library-internet. Now it has become more about entertainment and
commerce; I call this tv-internet.
This topic is extensively articulated in 'The Web We Have to Save', published in July 2015 by Matter magazine.
Katy Börner
Katy Börner is an engineer, scholar, author, educator, and speaker specializing in data analysis and visualization, particularly in the areas of science and technology (S&T) studies. Katy's research focuses on the development of data analysis and visualization techniques for information access, understanding, and management. She is particularly interested in the study of the structure and evolution of scientific disciplines; the analysis and visualization of online activity; and the development of cyberinfrastructures for large scale scientific collaboration and computation. Based out of Indiana University, Bloomington, Katy is the Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science at the Department of Information and Library Science in the School of Informatics and Computing, an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Statistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Core Cognitive Science Faculty. Since 2012, she has also held the position of Visiting Professor at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam.
Data Visualization Literacy
In an age of information overload, the ability to make sense of vast amounts of data and to render insightful visualizations is as important as the ability to read and write. This talk explains and exemplifies the power of data visualizations not only to help locate us in physical space but also to help us understand the extent and structure of our collective knowledge, to identify bursts of activity, pathways of ideas, and borders that beg to be crossed. It introduces a theoretical visualization framework meant to empower anyone to systematically render data into insights together with tools that support temporal, geospatial, topical, and network analyses and visualizations. Materials from the Information Visualization MOOC (http://ivmooc.cns.iu.edu) and maps from the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit (http://scimaps.org) will be used to illustrate key concepts and to inspire participants to visualize their very own data.
