Personal information
Biography
Frances is a Lecturer in Information Retrieval Systems in the Manchester Metropolitan University iSchool and Co-Director of the iSchool Research Group, Digital Semantics which focuses on use and design of search technologies and digital libraries. Early in her academic life she worked in Artificial Intelligence/ Natural Language Understanding and on projects to develop automatic abstracting systems and conversational interfaces in information seeking and question/answering. Subsequently her work at Manchester Met has been on the frameworks and evaluation tools supporting the user perspective of the effective interface in facilitating information access and discovery. This has been developed in work on externally funded projects (for example, with SERC, British Library R&DD, JISC, AHRC) and working with research student supervisions, and has led to the provision of innovative courses in search technologies, information seeking behaviour, human computer interaction, trust and ethics in experience design, and text mining in the digital humanities. During this time she has explored the use of information behaviour models, mental models and technology fit to theorise influence and to design change. Her research approach spans lab based experimental science, behavioural talk aloud protocols and applied programming in languages including Prolog. Her work has been published in leading information science journals including the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Information Processing and Management, Journal of Documentation, Information Research and across disciplines in the British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET). She regularly speaks at conferences and workshops and currently Associate Editor of Data Technologies and Applications, and Features Editor of the Health, Information and Libraries Journal. She is a member of the British Computer Society and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy