Dr. Peter Organisciak

Department Chair and Associate Professor, University of Denver, Research Methods and Information Science

University of Denver

Massive Texts Lab

0000-0002-9058-2280

Google Scholar

peter.organisciak@du.edu

Professional Positions

  • Department Chair, Research Methods and Information Science at University of Denver
    January 2025-present
  • Associate Professor at University of Denver
    September 2023-present
  • Assistant Professor at University of Denver
    September 2017-August 2023
  • Postdoctoral Research Associate at HathiTrust Research Center
    2015-2017
  • Research Intern at Microsoft Research
    April 2013 - August 2013

Education

  • Ph.D. at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    2015
    Major: Library and Information Science Dissertation: Design Problems in Crowdsourcing: Improving the Quality of Crowd-Based Data Collection Committee: Michael Twidale, J. Stephen Downie, Miles Efron, Jaime Teevan
  • MA at University of Alberta
    2010
    Major: Humanities Computing - Library and Information Studies Thesis: Why Bother? Examining the motivations of users in large-scale crowd-powered online initiatives Committee: Lisa Given, Geoffrey Rockwell, Stan Ruecker
  • BA at McMaster University
    2008
    Major: Communication Studies and Multimedia

Awarded Grants

  • Innovative AI Systems for Nurturing and Assessing Creativity in K-12 Learning Environments

    Funder: National Science Foundation · Amount: $898,326 · Grant #: 2507129 · Timeframe: 2025-2028 · Investigators: Organisciak, P. (Principal Investigator), Acar, S. (Co-PI), Dong, Y. (Co-PI)

  • Measuring Original Thinking in Elementary School: A Computational Psychometric Approach

    Funder: Institute of Education Sciences · Amount: $964,081 · Grant #: R305A200519 · Timeframe: 2020-2024 · Subgrant: DU sub-grant: $451,988 · Investigators: Selcuk Acar (University of North Texas, Principal), Dumas, D. G. (Co-Principal), Organisciak, P. (Co-Principal)

  • Collaborative Analysis Liaison Librarians (CALL)

    Funder: Institution of Library and Museum Services · Amount: $883,034 · Grant #: RE-13-19-0027-19 · Timeframe: 2019-2022 · Subgrant: DU total: $129,746.00 · Investigators: Wade Bishop (Principal, University of Tennessee Knoxville), Carole Tenopir (UTK, Co-Principal), Suzie Allard (UTK, Co-Principal), Organisciak, P. (Director)

Publications

Journal Articles

Reversing the alternate uses task

Thinking Skills and Creativity

Volume: 55

DOI:

Artificial Intelligence Enhances Human Creativity Through Real-Time Evaluative Feedback

DOI:

Status:preprint

Investigating Lasting Effects of Real-Time Feedback on Originality and Evaluation Accuracy

Creativity Research Journal

Volume: 0

DOI:

Conceptual models of the sociotechnical: Introduction to special issue

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

Volume: 76

DOI:

How creative is this child?: Student Demographics Affect How Teachers Rate Creativity

Journal of Experimental Education

Status:in-press

Research methods and the use of visual representation in library and information science research

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

DOI:

Performance and Perception of Creativity and Academic Achievement in Elementary School Students: A Normal Mixture Modeling Study

Journal of Creative Behavior

DOI:

Measuring original thinking in elementary school: Development and validation of a computational psychometric approach

Journal of Educational Psychology

DOI:

Additional Info:

Book Chapters

Toward a New AI Literacy

A Critical Look at Information Science and Librarianship in a New Age: Constellation of Insanity

Editors: W. Bishop, R. L. Chancellor, J. Sánchez.

URL:

Status:forthcoming

Making more sense with machines: artificial intelligence at the HathiTrust Research Center

Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Organisations

Editors: L. Jaillant, C. Warwick, P. Gooding, K. Aske, G. Layne-Worthey, J. S. Downie.

DOI:

URL:

Additional Info:

Research access to in-copyright texts in the humanities

Information organization in digital humanities: Global perspectives

Editors: K. Golub, Y. Liu.

Volume: 1

Edition: 1st

URL:

Proceedings Paper

“The Library is Open!”: Open Data and an Open API for the HathiTrust Digital Library

Computational Humanities Research 2023, ceur-ws.org, Paris, France

Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference 2023

Editors: Artjoms Šeļa, Fotis Jannidis, Iza Romanowska.

Volume: 3558

URL:

Enriching Library Holdings for English Language Learners: Applying Traditional Readability Formulas and Modern Cohesion Methods to Film

Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology

Volume: 60

Characterizing same work relationships in large-scale digital libraries

Information in Contemporary Society: iConference 2019

DOI:

Additional Info:

Winner, Best Short Research Paper

Access to billions of pages for large-scale text analysis

iConference 2017 Proceedings

Volume: 2

DOI:

Matching and grokking: Approaches to personalized crowdsourcing

Proceedings of the twenty-fourth international joint conference on artificial intelligence

Editors: Q. Yang, M. Wooldridge.

URL:

Additional Info:

Invited and peer-reviewed awards-track paper at a top artificial intelligent conference

Design facets of crowdsourcing

iConference 2015 Proceedings

A Crowd of Your Own: Crowdsourcing for On-Demand Personalization

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing

Volume: 2

URL:

Additional Info:

Winner, Notable Paper Award. Featured in New Scientist

When the elevator pitch meets the subject heading: How mixtures of other documents can describe what a document is about

Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology

Volume: 51

DOI:

Additional Info:

Featured in Slate

Reports

Similarities and Duplicates in Digital Libraries

Project Technical Report

DOI:

SIG-CM 2019: Workshop on Conceptual Modeling Report

DOI:

Exploring the Billions and Billions of Words in the HathiTrust Corpus with Bookworm

HathiTrust+Bookworm Project Technical Report

Extended Abstracts

Long paper abstracts at certain Humanities and Social Science venues, and poster extended-abstracts in Computer and Information Science proceedings.

Reducing Redundancy Bias in Digital Library Collections

Digital Humanities 2022

Challenges and Solutions of Identifying Similarities and Duplication in Digital Libraries

2020 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

Examining patterns of text reuse in digitized text collections

2019 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

DOI:

Worksets expand the scholarly utility of digital libraries

18th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

DOI:

Modeling creativity: Tracking long-term lexical change

Digital Humanities 2017

URL:

Information-seeking in large-scale digital libraries: Strategies for scholarly workset creation

2017 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

DOI:

Presentations (refereed)

Conference presentations refereed from peer-reviewed short abstracts, as at Education conferences and some Social Science and Humanities conferences.

Extending Automated Scoring to the Figural Form of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking

AERA Annual Meeting

Beyond Human Raters: Using AI and NLP in PISA’s Creative Thinking Tests

NCME Annual Meeting

A Text-Mining Approach to Measuring Creativity

Annual Meeting, National Council for Measurement in Education

Text Mining in Educational Research: Demonstrating Language Models for Measuring Creativity

Methodology special interest group semi-annual meeting, European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction

A computational psychometric approach to measuring creative thinking

National Council on Measurement in Education

Using text-mining models to quantify creative thinking

National Council for Measurement in Education

Relational reasoning underlies creativity: Evidence from a text-mining investigation

Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association

A Modest Payment for a Modern Proposal

Annual Meeting of the Society for Digital Humanities

Presentations (invited)

Talking with Machines: The Do's and Don'ts of Effective Chatbot Use

Executive Energy Leadership Academy Alumni Event, National Renewable Energy Lab, Golden, CO

Applications of artificial intelligence to verbal and figural tests of creativity

International Society for the Science of Creativity and Innovation, presented remotely via video link

Let’s Go Beyond the Brick: Innovative Assessments of Creativity

Identifying Related and Same-Work Relationships in Large Digital Libraries

ASIS&T Webinars

Additional Info:

Location: Online
Sponsors: ASIS&T SIG-DM

Strategies for the utilisation of copyright-protected texts for third-party research

Non-consumptive Access to In-copyright Digital Works - the US Perspective

Additional Info:

Location: Trier, Germany
Sponsors: Institute for Digital Law Trier and the Trier Center for Digital Humanities, University of Trier

Tooling the future of massive-scale text research data

DataLab, University of Washington Information School

Additional Info:

Location: Seattle, Washington

HathiTrust Research Center

Nanjing University

Additional Info:

Location: Nanjing, China

Presentations (other)

Characterizing Duplication and Similarity in Massive Digital Libraries

First Digital Front Range Symposium

Additional Info:

Location: University of Denver

Workshops (refereed)

Fairness and Accountability in Conceptual Models

Association for Information Science and Technology

References: Cancelled.

Workshop on conceptual models in digital libraries, archives, and museums

2020 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

Workshop on conceptual models in digital libraries, archives, and museums

2019 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

URL:

Teaching Workshops

Data Scholarship for the Humanities with the HathiTrust Digital Library

Additional Info:

Participants: 30 participants
Sponsors: Oxford e-Research Centre

HathiTrust Digital Library

Additional Info:

Participants: 40 participants
Sponsors: Beijing Institute of Technology

Panels

AI Today and Tomorrow in Gifted, Creativity, and Talent Research

AERA Annual Meeting

Classic and Novel Approaches in Creativity Assessment and Programming: Implications for Gifted Education

Annual Meeting, AERA, Chicago, IL

ChatGPT: The Future of Higher Ed and Libraries, Brought to You by AI

CNI Spring 2023 Membership Meeting, Coalition for Networked Information, Denver, CO, USA

Resilience in iSchools cohort education during a turbulent time: Improved normalcy through systemic inclusivity and other lessons learned to optimize virtual and physical spaces

iConference 2023, iSchools Consortium, Barcelona, Spain

Assessing the Research Data Management Landscape Through Practice and Education

Federation of Earth Science Information Partners, Online

Graduate Education in the Digital Humanities

Annual Meeting of the Society for Digital Humanities, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Posters

Conference posters associated with a peer-reviewed short abstract.

Advancing Technologies for Traditional Library Services: Utilizing Content Based Recommendation to Assist in Readers' Advisory

World Library and Information Congress (WLIC), International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, Dublin, Ireland

Conceptual Modeling of Similarities and Duplication in Large-Scale Digital Libraries

Digital Humanities 2020, Alliance for Digital Humanities Organization, Ottawa

MOODs: Identifying Outlier Passages and Texts in the Legislative Process

6th International Conference on Computational Social Science, Cambridge, MA/Online

Including Phrases in Bags of Words

Uncamp 2018, HathiTrust Research Center, Berkeley

Asking the Right Way: Design Interventions for Microtasks

The sixth AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing, Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Quebec City, Canada

Personalized Human Computation

Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2013), AAAI, Palm Springs, CA

Products

Research Websites and Tools

Open Creativity Scoring (OCS)

(2207 unique users, June 2020-August 2022)

SaDDL

Bookworm

Bookworm Playground

Software

HTRC Features Reader

A mature, long-developed library for working with non-consumptive book data.

Open Scoring

Tools for creativity scoring.

Teaching

Courses

LIS 4700AI - AI/IA - Artificial Intelligence in the Information Age

3 credit hours

Format: in-person

Materials: Link

LIS 4015 - User and Access Services

3 credit hours

Format: in-person

LIS 4015 - User and Access Services

2 credit hours

Format: online

LIS 4220 - Data Curation

3 credit hours

LIS 4235 - Scripting for Large Databases

4 credit hours

Materials: Link

LIS 4700DH - Digital Humanities

3 credit hours

590TXT, LIS4991TXT - Text Mining

3 credit hours

Format: Independent study at DU

Materials: Link

Awards

Teaching Appreciation Dinner, University of Denver, March 2020
Best Short Research Paper Winner, iSchools Conference, June 2019
Notable Paper, Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing, 2014
Outstanding Contribution Award, Canadian Society for Digital Humanities, 2014
Best Paper, Association for Information Science and Technology, 2011
Best Student Paper, Canadian Society for Digital Humanities, 2011

Media

It's Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman! The Art and Science of Mixture Descriptions
Katy Waldman, Slate (Lexicon Valley: A Blog about Language), November 23, 2015
Online crowds can guess what you want to watch or buy.
Hal Hodson, New Scientist, 2989, October 2, 2014

Directed Student Learning, Dissertation Committee Member

  • Matthew Durward . "Audience Specific Text Recommendation for English Language Learners" University of Canterbury. (2021-)
  • Jill Talley. "Paving pathways for success: The role of transition models and disability services in postsecondary education for students with disabilities" (2021)
  • Paige Alfonso. "Exploring the relations between identity and digital media activity processes: A mixed-methods psychological investigation into connective action" (2019-2020)

Capstone, Committee Chair

  • Michele Newman. "A Taxonomy of Game Mechanics" (2022)
  • Sarah Beals. "Crowdsourced Data and Visualizing Theme Park Wait Times" (2020)
  • Matthew Durward. "Constructing a Platform to Assist English Language Learners with Film Selection" (2020)
  • Kevin Stevens. "Historiography as a Signature Pedagogical Approach to Information Literacy Instruction" (2020)
  • Rita Zhang. "A Framework of Active Exploratory Book Recommendation" (2020)
  • Lee Howick. "Faculty Opinions and Use of Open Access Publishing at the University of Denver" (2020)
  • Nicolas Pares. The Effects of Research Data Management Services: Associating the Data Curation Lifecycle with Open Research Output" (2020)
  • Vince Garin. "How Digital Humanities Challenges Publishing and Academic Labor Paradigms" (2019)
  • Micah Saxton. "Best Practices for Topic Modeling," Library & Information Science. (2018)
  • Sheena Young. "Library Thunderdome: Fake News vs. Information Literacy" (2018)

Capstone, Committee Member

  • Summer Shetenhelm. "Copyright Statements in Plains to Peaks Collective Digital Collections" (2019)
  • Fatih Gunaydin. "Assessment of Current Research Data Services in Terms of Technical Services" (2019)

Thesis, Committee Chair

  • Nicolas Pares. "Human-Centered Search Process: A Grounded Theory Study on the Modern Search Experience" (2022)

Non-Credit Instruction Taught

Guest Lecture

  • Topic: "Introduction to Docker for Data Curation". Data Curation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Allen Renear. (Recorded for online course, 2018).
  • Topic: "Usability Design". Digital Libraries, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, J. Stephen Downie.

Guest Lecture, DU

  • Topic: "Digital Humanities", Organization of Information, University of Denver. Krystyna Matusiak (2017-18, recorded for online course 2019-)
  • Topic: "Scholarly and Professional Communication", Foundations of Library and Information Science, University of Denver. Mary Stansbury (2017)

Faculty Development Activities Attended

OTL Faculty Workshop or Training, "Teaching@DU Short Course," Office of Teaching and Learning, Denver, CO, NF. (August 1, 2017 - December 31, 2017).

Professional Service

University Service

Committee Member, Open Access Fund. (June 2021 - Present).

Professional Memberships

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. (November 2013 - Present).

American Society for Information Science and Technology. (2011 - Present).

Association for Computing Machinery. (2011 - Present).

Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. (2010 - Present).

Canadian Society for Digital Humanities. (2009 - 2013).

Canadian Association for Information Science. (2009 - 2011).

Committee Chair

Committee Chair, iSchools Conference Student Symposium Chair, Barcelona. (July 1, 2022 - March 2023).

Committee Member

Committee Member, Program Committee of Digital Humanities Workshop (DHW) 2021. (2021).

Committee Member, JCDL 2019 Outreach Committee. (May 2018 - June 2019).

Associate Chair, iConference 2019 Program Committee, College Park, Maryland. (June 2018 - February 2019).

Committee Member, HCOMP Program Committee. (January 2018 - October 2018).

Committee Member, JCDL Program Committee. (January 2018 - July 2018).

Guest Editor

Guest Co-Editor, Special Issue on "Conceptual Models of the Sociotechnical", Journal of Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) (2021-2022).

Editorial Review Board Member

Editorial Review Board Member, Przegląd Biblioteczny, Warsaw. (August 2021 - Present).

Editorial Review Board Member, Journal of Open Humanities Data. (July 2015 - Present).

Officer

President, Special Interest Group on Digital Libraries. (October 2020 - October 2021).

Conference Organizer

Organizer, First Digital Front Range Symposium, Digital Scholarship in the Front Range, Denver, Colorado. (May 5, 2018).

Reviewer, Grant Panelist

Panelist, National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, D.C. (August 2018).

Reviewer, Conference Paper

Since 2017.

Association for Information Science and Technology. (2010 - 2019).

Digital Humanities. (2009 - 2021).

WebConf. (November 2018).

iConference. (September 2017 - October 2017).

Human-Centered Data Science and Social Computing. (October 2, 2017).

Reviewer, Journal Article

Since 2017.

  • Creativity Research Journal (2023-)
  • Behavioral Research Methods (2022-)
  • Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology (2022).
  • Advances in Cognitive Psychology (2022).
  • Digital Humanities Quarterly. (April 2022).
  • International Journal for Digital Libraries. (March 2022 -- August 2022).
  • Data in Brief. (January 2022 - March 2022).
  • Journal of Open Humanities Data. (January 2022).
  • Symmetry. (January 2022).
  • Electronics (June 2022).
  • Mathematics. (December 2021).
  • Applied Sciences. (August 2021 - November 2021).
  • Entropy. (October 2021).
  • Telematics and Informatics. (June 2019).
  • Transactions on Information Systems. (October 2017).

Consulting

Higher Education, University of North Texas, Denton, TX. (May 2022 - July 2022).

Working with Dr. Selcuk Acar on developing a pilot of methods for scoring originality and elaboration in figural (i.e., drawn) tests of creativity.

Higher Education, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Canada. (August 2021).

Working with Dr. Pier-Luc de Chantel to develop an API to Open Creativity Scoring, making that system's scoring methods available to use in other tools and websites, such as Qualtrics.