Fidelia Ibekwe Full Professor of Information & Communication Studies School of Communication & Journalism (EJCAM) Aix-Marseille University - Marseille FRANCE Contact me: fidelia.ibekwe-sanjuan{at}univ-amu.fr

BRIEF BIO   RESEARCH   TEACHING   PUBLICATIONS   TOOLS   AWARDS    SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITIES    

BRIEF BIO

You wouldn't believe it but I started off as a Literatures major. I love reading novels. Amongst my favorite classics are predictably Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, D.H Lawrence, Tolstoi, Zola, Balzac, Stendhal... plus other unmentionable authors ;-).
After my Masters' degree studying Stendhal's 'La Chartreuse de Parme', I decided a career change was overdue. So I switched over to Information and Communication Studies in which I obtained an M.Phil (french DEA) in Library & Information science and Automatic documentation, and subsequently a Ph.D.
After several years as Associate Professor of Information & Communication Sciences, I went on to defend my Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches, the highest university degree and in the french higher education system, it enables you to officially direct doctoral students and become a Full Professor.
I have taught in different higher education institutions in France: University of Le Havre between 1996-1998; University of Lorraine (formerly Nancy 2) between 1998-2001; University of Lyon3 between 2001-2014. I am currently at Aix-Marseille University as Full Professor.

I am fully fluent in English & French. I hope to learn Italian and classical music theory when I'm retired ;-)

Summary

2014- : Full Professor, School of Journalism & Communication, Aix-Marseille University, France.
2001 – 2014: Associate Professor in Information Science, University of Lyon3, France.
2007-2009: Visiting Research Scholar, College of Information Science & Technology, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA.
1998-2001: Associate Professor in Information Science, University of Nancy2, France.
1996-1998: ATER (Adjunct Professor), Institute of Technology, University of LeHavre, France.
1997: Ph.D. in Information Science, University of Stenhdal, Grenoble France.
1989: M.A. in French Literature, University of Stendhal, Grenoble France.
1988: B.A. in Foreign Languages & Literatures, University of Port-Harcourt, Nigeria

RESEARCH

If I were to draw a list, I might include the following:
•    Information & Communication Sciences theories
•    History and Foundations of Library & Information Science
•    Usage of ICTs (Information and Communication Technology)
•    Impact of technology on science and society
•    Big Data, Open Data and Web 2.0
•    Epistemology and history of science (Science and Technology Studies)
•    Information retrieval
•    Textmining
•    Knowledge acquisition & representation from texts
•    Human Language Technology Evaluation

TEACHING

My teaching reflects my research: it spans a wide array of subjects in the broad fields of Library, Documentation & Information Studies; Information & Communication Sciences; Media Studies. Amongst the topics I've taught classes on or that I will be teaching in the near future are:
•    Information & Communication science theories
•    Usage of ICTs (Information and Communication Technology)
•    New Journalism (Citizen, Data and Participatory journalism)
•    History and Foundation of Library & Information Science
•    Documentation theories, techniques & tools
•    Electronic Document Management (EDM)
•    Content Management (CMS)
•    Records Management (RM)
•    Computational Terminology
•    Text mining & data analysis, bibliometrics, informetrics, Information retrieval
•    Metadata, Indexing
•    Knowledge organisation (thesaurus, specialised lexicons,...)

I'm keen to embrace new horizons as I go along in order to learn as I grow old and ripen like old wine...

TOOLS

I co-developed a text mining platform called TermWatch which takes in a corpus of electronic texts, runs them through programs that perform
(1) term-extraction
(2) term-filtering
(3) syntactic and semantic variant identification
(4) hierarchical clustering using our own home-grown hierarchical clustering algorithm (CPCL).

AWARDS

2012-2014: Recipient of the New Leader award from the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIST).
2013-2017 : Recipient of the Research Excellence Award (Prime d'Excellence Scientifique) from the French Ministry of Higher Education.

SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITIES