SILS Faculty to Lead NSF-Funded Project

Professors Gary Marchionini and Stephanie Haas at UNC at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science (SILS) will lead a joint university/government effort to make government statistics available over the Internet more accessible and understandable by the general public.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Marchionini, Haas, and their team a three-year, $1.3 million grant to lay the foundations for a national statistical knowledge network. UNC at Chapel Hill will be the lead institution on the project and will coordinate the nationwide effort to link state and federal statistical resources and develop user interfaces.

Other team members include researchers from the University of Maryland at College Park (Catherine Plaisant and Ben Shneiderman) and Syracuse University (Carol Hert), and representatives from a variety of federal and state statistical agencies, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census Bureau, Energy Information Administration, Social Security Administration, National Agricultural Statistical Service, and the North Carolina Office of Information Technology Services.

The project, formally titled "Integration of Data and Interfaces to Enhance Human Understanding of Government Statistics: Toward the National Statistical Knowledge Network, "builds upon studies of how people seek and use statistical information and human-computer interface designs done in collaboration with these agencies over the past five years. Based in the SILS Interaction Design Laboratory (IDL) in Manning Hall, the project's web site can be found at http://www.ils.unc.edu/govstat.

"Federal, state and local governments gather large amounts of statistical data to help public servants and the general public understand our world and make informed decisions," said Marchionini. "This project will help people without specialized training use the Internet to find, and understand, the statistical data they need."