The power of information: Dr Yunhyong Kim
Issued: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 11:11:00 BST
In the new and rapidly advancing field of blog archiving, Dr Yunhyong Kim believes that sharing information between research areas holds the key.
Dr Kim is currently working on BlogForever, an EU funded project that involves the preservation of blogs. ‘These days everything has become digital, so a lot of people worry about whether we will be able to access digital material in the future,’ explains Dr Kim. ‘This is partly because software versions change, the material itself deteriorates or, in the web environment, links disappear.’
Looking at blogs in particular, the preservation of the authenticity, integrity, completeness and accessibility associated with information becomes even more difficult, because you not only want to preserve any one blog, blog post or comment, but you also want to keep all the connections and interactions with it. ‘Rather than wait until all these things disappear, we want to archive them, and find the best ways to preserve and provide access to them in the future,’ says Dr Kim, who is a postdoctoral research fellow at HATII, the Humanities Advances Technology and Information Institute.
‘HATII is great, I have found it invaluable to work here,’ she says. ‘We are diverse in our interests, so there are people interested in forensics, in digital curation, museum studies, and digital art. There are many different perspectives and that brings a really keen awareness of all the different aspects to studying information.’ The BlogForever project itself involves twelve institutes across Europe, including academic and nonacademic institutes and industrial companies. Researchers on the project include software engineers, archivists, information scientists and people with a history or humanities background.
It is perhaps unsurprising then, that postgraduate degrees at HATII can lead to careers including the legal profession, criminal forensics, and multi-media information management. This variety of opportunity is reflected in the broad range of PhD topics, with recent postgraduate students studying genealogy, digital games, and performance. The three main areas of research are: digital curation, which includes archiving and preservation; digital humanities, which connects people doing things outside the digital world but using digital technology; and information mining, which is to do with machine learning, knowledge discovery, and information seeking.
‘It’s a really exciting place to work, because it can be technological, cultural, or historical. All of these levels can work together, so I think this is a wonderful place for students,’ says Dr Kim. ‘I love Glasgow, and the team in this department includes some of the best people I have worked with. Working together and talking to each other is really important and I think that creating a network of all these areas is the way to the future.’
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