James Allan

James Allan
James Allan

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.