Ryan Shaw

McColl Term Associate Professor, Undergraduate Program Coordinator, UNC School of Information and Library Science
Ryan Shaw photo
919/636-9660
ryanshaw@unc.edu
Manning Hall
Pronouns: He/Him/His

Faculty Expertise:

Information organization, digital humanities / humanities computing, philosophy of information, sociology of texts, hermeneutics, knowledge representation, public history, memory institutions, new media, digitization, the Web

Education:
BS (Symbolic Systems) Stanford University
MIMS, PhD (Information Management & Systems), University of California, Berkeley

Biography:
Dr. Ryan Shaw is an Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Coordinator at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS). He received his PhD in 2010 from the University of California, Berkeley School of Information, where he wrote his dissertation on how events and periods function as concepts for organizing historical knowledge. He is also the author of the LODE (Linking Open Descriptions of Events) ontology, recently adopted by the UK Archives Hub for their Linked Data effort.

In 2012 he received a three-year Early Career Development grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to invent new tools for applying computational text processing techniques to organize large collections of civil rights histories. He is also a co-PI of the Editors' Notes project, a Mellon Foundation-funded effort to develop open, collaborative notebooks for humanists, and the PeriodO project, an NEH-funded gazetteer of scholarly assertions about the extents of historical, art-historical, and archaeological periods. In the past he has been involved in a number of digital humanities projects through his work with the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative. In a previous life, he worked as a software engineer in Tokyo, Japan.

Courses Regularly Taught:
INLS 201 Foundations of Information Science
INLS 520 Organization of Information
INLS 620 Web Information Organization
INLS 550 History of the Book

Awards and Recognition:
2014 ASIS&T Book of the Year for The Discipline of Organizing, ed. Glushko. Dr. Shaw was a principal collaborating author of this information organization textbook, and author of the chapter titled “The Forms of Resource Descriptions."

2013 Library Juice Paper Contest winner for “Information organization and the philosophy of history.” This award is given by Library Juice Press and is intended “to encourage and reward good work in the field of library and information studies, humanistically understood, through a monetary award and public recognition.” Read more.

Selected Publications and Papers

Shaw, R. 2020. Periodization. In ISKO Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization, edited by Hjørland, B. and Gnoli, C. https://www.isko.org/cyclo/periodization

Golden, P. and Shaw, R. Period assertion as nanopublication. 2015. Semantics, Analytics, Visualisation: Enhancing Scholarly Data Workshop co-located with the 24th International World Wide Web Conference (Florence). https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2742021

Rabinowitz, A., Shaw, R. and Golden, P. 2018. Making up for lost time: Digital epigraphy, chronology, and the PeriodO project. In Digital Epigraphy. De Gruyter Open. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110607208-017 

Shaw, R. 2016. Gazetteers enriched: A conceptual basis for linking gazetteers with other kinds of information. In Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers, edited by Mostern, R., Southall, H., and Berman, M. L. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Preprint: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/28057829

Rabinowitz, A., Shaw, R., Buchanan, S. and Golden, P. 2016. Making sense of the ways we make sense of the past: the PeriodO project. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 59 (2). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-5370.2016.12037 

Shaw, R., Rabinowitz, A., Golden, P. and Kansa, E. 2016. A sharing-oriented design strategy for networked knowledge organization systems. International Journal on Digital Libraries 17 (1). http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00799-015-0164-0

Golden, P. and Shaw, R. 2016. Nanopublication beyond the sciences: The PeriodO period gazetteer. PeerJ Computer Science 2:e44. https://peerj.com/articles/cs-44   

Shaw, R. 2015. Big data and reality. Big Data and Society 2 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177%2F2053951715608877

Shaw, R., Golden, P., and Buckland, M. 2015. Using linked library data in working research notes. In Linked Data and User Interaction, edited by Cervone, H. F., Kavcic-Colic, A., and Svensson, L. Berlin: De Gruyter. Preprint: http://metadata.berkeley.edu/UILLD2013shaw.pdf

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