It’s that time of year again! Since I did a relatively full reset last year, for this year’s State of the Tools I’ll focus on changes and a few highlights. My Zoom studio post discusses my hardware and software for video recording in more detail.

Photo by Zalfa Imani on Unsplash

Inspired by Alan Said & Sole Pera’s posts on LinkedIn, here’s a quick summary of where you can find me and/or my work at RecSys next week in Bar, Italy:

There are more intervention strategies in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
— Hamlet, sort-of

Tomorrow, I will be presenting our paper in the IR4Good track at ECIR 2024 on strategic IR impact interventions.

From my side, this paper grew out of a couple of things:

I often get comments, and sometimes questions, about my Zoom and video lecture setup in my office. In this post, I want to talk a bit about it, my choice of equipment, and things that can improve the quality of video recordings, remote teaching, and videoconferences.

There are a few key pieces to this:

1. Audio quality (microphone)
2. Video quality (camera)
3. Lighting
4. Software
5. Headphones and Monitors
6. Additional Useful Bits

I’ve often closed out the year with two blog posts: my tool report, and a year-in-review. It’s been a pretty full year!

One of the major accomplishments was moving to Philadelphia to take a new position in the information science department at Drexel University¹. I’m very excited for the coming years here, as the interdisciplinary information science context is an ideal home for my approach to research and scholarship. I did have to give up tenure for the move, but I think it was worth it.

Beyond that, a few other good things have happened this year…