Dr. Charles-Antoine Julien of SIS receives FQRSC & McGill SSHRC grants for research on interactive visual tools for digital information

Dr. Charles-Antoine Julien, School of Information Studies Assistant Professor, has received the following research grants:

• FQRSC (Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture) 3-year New Researcher Start Up Grant for the project "A Novel Library Collection Browsing and Information Retrieval Tool".
  
  The project aims to develop a novel kind of online library catalogue that integrates keyword searching with an interactive visual representation of the topic hierarchy that describes the collection. The resulting tool may help users to explore organized information collections and discover new promising topics.

• McGill Internal SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) 1-year start up grant for the project “Social Network Visualization to Facilitate Subject Browsing in Library Collections”.
  
  This short term project aims to explore how users could interact with visual representations showing the true shape of subject structures (i.e., lattices) that provide access to much of the world’s organized information collections. Searchers may eventually be able to see and explore the different ways in which subjects are related to one another to find the topic they are seeking or discover new ones.