Alon Friedman

University of South Florida | USF · School of Information Science

Peer review is a widely utilized pedagogical feedback mechanism for engaging students, which has been shown to improve educational outcomes. However, we find limited discussion and empirical measurement of peer review in visualization coursework. In addition to engagement, peer review provides direct and diverse feedback and reinforces recently-lea...

This study investigates the relationship between student engagement and peer review performance in an online data science course. Employing a mixed-methods approach, we analyzed quantitative data on peer review metrics (word count, sentiment, and complexity) and qualitative insights from student comments from 2019 to 2021. Our findings indicate a p...

Peer review plays a pivotal role in shaping collaborative learning environments and evaluating student engagement, but there is a lack of research on the relational dynamics that underlie the interactions between students during the peer review process, which is critical for understanding the effectiveness of peer review for students’ learning outc...

Peer review is a popular feedback mechanism in higher education that actively engages students and provides researchers with a means to assess student engagement. However, there is little empirical support for the durability of peer review, particularly when using data predictive modeling to analyze student comments. This study uses Naïve Bayes mod...

This bibliometric study takes an artistic and storytelling approach to explore the term "Information visualization." Analyzing over 1008 titles collected from databases that specialize in data visualization research, we examine the titles of these publications to report on the characteristics and development trends in the field. Employing a qualita...

Peer review is a popular feedback mechanism in higher education that actively engages students and provides researchers with a means to assess student engagement. However, there is little empirical support for the durability of peer review, particularly when using data predictive modeling to analyze student comments. This study uses Na ïve Bayes mo...

Increasingly, educators are using peer review as a pedagogical tool to engage students in higher education. Studies of the effectiveness of student peer review have found that thinking critically about the work of peers improves student learning (Mulder et al. 2013). Separately, while visual literacy communication courses, in which educators teach...

In this paper we adopt Charles Sanders Peirce's concept of iconicity to analyse pictural communication. While visual semiotics has a well-developed structural school, the concepts of visual semiotics stemming from Peirce's pragmatic sign theory are often overlooked. The specific purpose of this study is to explore the semiotics of visual signs, exe...

Data from social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, are generated by people who produce, spread, share, or exchange multimedia content. Such content may include text, images, sounds, or videos. To derive insight into the behavior of social media users, researchers often use open-source technologies to visualize data and generate models...

The R programming language and computing environment is a powerful and common platform used by life science researchers and educators for the analysis of big data. One of the benefits of using R in this context is its ability to visualize the results. Using R to generate visualizations has gained in popularity due to the increased number of R packa...

Peer review is a widely utilized feedback mechanism for engaging students. As a pedagogical method, it has been shown to improve educational outcomes, but we have found limited empirical measurement of peer review in visualization courses. In addition to increasing engagement, peer review provides diverse feedback and reinforces recently-learned co...

Peer review is a widely utilized feedback mechanism for engaging students. As a pedagogical method, it has been shown to improve educational outcomes, but we have found limited empirical measurement of peer review in visualization courses. In addition to increasing engagement, peer review provides diverse feedback and reinforces recently-learned co...

With the growing use of social media in all aspects of our life, students are constantly exposed to visual content. Their literacy practices within this environment are embedded visually including photo and video creation, video chatting, and use of visual iconic characteristics they shared, according to Kędra & Žakevičiūtė (2019). Research has fou...

In visualization education, both science and humanities, the literature is often divided into two parts: the design aspect and the analysis of the visualization. However, we find limited discussion on how to motivate and engage visualization students in the classroom. In the field of Writing Studies, researchers develop tools and frameworks for stu...

Scholars in scientific disciplines face unique challenges in the creation of visualizations, especially in publications that require insights derived from analyses to be visually displayed. The literature on visualizations describes different techniques and best practices for the creation of graphs. However, these techniques have not been used to e...

This presentation is based on a new rubric developed to enhance student engagement in an R class at the University of South Florida. As more students at USF enroll in the online R course, we developed a grading scheme to allow us to facilitate and infer student engagement. The title of the course was Introduction to R, with the aim of helping stude...

Learning analytics is an emerging field in which educators and researchers are using data to improve their students’ educational experiences. One of the most common courses offered by higher academic institutions in the US is data science. This paper examines the data science syllabi found in today’s academic sector and compares the results to thos...

In today’s political and rhetorical landscape, many politicians use Twitter as their communication platform of choice. President Donald Trump is one of the best-known Twitter users. The media often analyze Trump’s tweets, and several artists have attempted to interpret them through visualizations. One of the leading visual artists to do so is Erin...

Peer-review software is often used to allow authors to evaluate their code and its technical text content. In education, peer review is a common practice used not only to evaluate the quality of academic research but also to measure students’ engagement in the classroom. In visualization education, numerous researchers have addressed techniques of...

The growing interest in Big Data from leading industries raises the question of how to teach this subject to our students. Visualization is a crucial tool for making sense of vast amounts of data, but it has also become an essential tool for educators. This paper outlines a curriculum for teaching statistics that focuses on visualization. Using the...

Statistical software applications are increasingly used to measure student engagement in the classroom. However, more work remains to be done to clarify how meaning is created and measured in classroom settings. With the growing use of technology in the classroom, students’ peer review has become a standard practice to improve students’ writing ski...

R presents unique problems to educators. The instructor who teaches R often needs to cover multiple subjects from the R data fabric, statistical analysis, the R programming and the visualization output. However, the teacher also needs to make sure the students engage in class.

Gender and student performance in the era of online learning are topics of strong interest to both institutions of higher learning and academic researchers. This study examines the role of gender and student performance in both online and face-to-face classes. The data were collected from 95,944 students in a two year institution and 50,593 student...

Growing interest in Big Data is leading industries, academics and governments to accelerate Big Data research. However, how teachers should teach Big Data has not been fully examined. This article suggests criteria for redesigning Big Data syllabi in public and private degree-awarding higher education establishments. The author conducted a survey o...

In visualization education, both science and humanities , the literature is often divided into two parts: the design aspect and the analysis of the visualization. However, we find limited discussion on how to motivate and engage visualization students in the classroom. In the field of Writing Studies, researchers develop tools and frameworks for st...

Social media advertisers often use visuals in their ads to capture their audience’s attention. Walter and Gioglio (2014) find that social media directly reduces the audience’s attention span, which they call the new commodity. In this context, visuals are our new currency. However, the subject of visual grammar theories has not been fully examined...

This study examines the productivity, eminence, and impact of literary authors using Lotka's law, a bibliometric approach developed for studying the published output of scientists. Data on literary authors were drawn from two recent surveys that identified and ranked authors who had made the greatest contributions to world literature. Data on the n...

Throughout Peirce’s writing, we witness his developing vision of a machine that scientists will eventually be able to create. Nadin (2010) raised the question: Why do computer scientists continue to ignore Peirce’s sign theory? A review of the literature on Peirce’s theory and the semiotics machine reveals that many authors discussed the machine; h...

Statistics for Library and Information Services, written for non-statisticians, provides logical, user-friendly, and step-by-step instructions to make statistics more accessible for students and professionals in the field of Information Science. It emphasizes concepts of statistical theory and data collection methodologies, but also extends to the...

The paper aims to outline the author impact based on Lotka’s Law using R. Lotka’s Law is well known as “the inverse square law of scientific productivity.” It states that the number of authors publishing a certain number of articles is a fixed ratio to the number of authors publishing a single article. The study found authoring patterns do not...

Statistics for Library and Information Services, written for non-statisticians, provides logical, user-friendly, and step-by-step instructions to make statistics more accessible for students and professionals in the field of Information Science. It emphasizes concepts of statistical theory and data collection methodologies, but also extends to the...

Statistics for Library and Information Services, written for non-statisticians, provides logical, user-friendly, and step-by-step instructions to make statistics more accessible for students and professionals in the field of Information Science. It emphasizes concepts of statistical theory and data collection methodologies, but also extends to the...

Statistics for Library and Information Services, written for non-statisticians, provides logical, user-friendly, and step-by-step instructions to make statistics more accessible for students and professionals in the field of Information Science. It emphasizes concepts of statistical theory and data collection methodologies, but also extends to the...

Statistics for Library and Information Services, written for non-statisticians, provides logical, user-friendly, and step-by-step instructions to make statistics more accessible for students and professionals in the field of Information Science. It emphasizes concepts of statistical theory and data collection methodologies, but also extends to the...

Statistics for Library and Information Services, written for non-statisticians, provides logical, user-friendly, and step-by-step instructions to make statistics more accessible for students and professionals in the field of Information Science. It emphasizes concepts of statistical theory and data collection methodologies, but also extends to the...

Statistics for Library and Information Services, written for non-statisticians, provides logical, user-friendly, and step-by-step instructions to make statistics more accessible for students and professionals in the field of Information Science. It emphasizes concepts of statistical theory and data collection methodologies, but also extends to the...

Statistics for Library and Information Services, written for non-statisticians, provides logical, user-friendly, and step-by-step instructions to make statistics more accessible for students and professionals in the field of Information Science. It emphasizes concepts of statistical theory and data collection methodologies, but also extends to the...

Introduction. Research method refers to how to conduct research, how to measure progress, and what constitutes success. Visualisation has become the platform for communicating research findings according to Friedman and Smiraglia . Knowledge organization aims to organize knowledge and many researchers employ visualisation in their findings. So, wha...

Purpose The purpose of the research reported here is to improve comprehension of the socially‐negotiated identity of concepts in the domain of knowledge organization. Because knowledge organization as a domain has as its focus the order of concepts, both from a theoretical perspective and from an applied perspective, it is important to understand h...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the basics of semiotic analysis and concept theory that represent two dominant approaches to knowledge representation, and explore how these approaches are fruitful for knowledge organization. Design/methodology/approach – In particular the semiotic theory formulated by the American philosopher C.S...

Concept maps (which show the relationship among concepts) are often discussed in the field of education as elements that facilitate the learning experience. In this study, I analyzed whether the concept maps used by knowledge organization researchers employ semiotic theory. I examined the following conference proceedings in their entirety: The Inte...

Concept mapping is a technique for representing knowledge in graphic form. It is often used in academic conference papers by professionals in thefield of knowledge organization. By examining the entire run of conference proceedings from ISKO and ASIS SIG/CR, looking specifically at the nationality and professional occupation of the authors who used...