My research spans topics in information retrieval, the technology that underlies search engines and other systems that provide search and organization of large volumes of text. I am generally interested in "information organization" to support a person's or a group’s making sense of and managing information encountered on a daily basis. I am currently exploring those issues using a collection of a million out-of-copyright books, developing methods and tools for supporting browsing and searching within that data. I am also very interested in techniques that support people in critical evaluation of the material they find on the web, and help them understand why a page is educative or why it is not. This set of work is driven by a vision of a tool that shows a person whether the web page in front of them discusses a provocative topic, whether the material is presented in a heavily biased way, whether it represents an outlier (fringe) idea, and how its discussion of issues relates to the broader context and to information presented in authoritative sources.
