Balisage Paper: Deviant Causal Chains: A Problem for the Conceptual Modeling of Influence

ingzhu Wei is a professor in the School of Information Management at Sun Yat-sen University, where she served as assistant dean of the School from 2010 to 2016. She serves as a standing committee member in the IFLA LHG section and associate director in Library Science Publication section of Chinese Library Society of China. She teaches courses and conducts research in the foundations of information management, information ethics, digital culture, and intellectual property. She is the chief expert of a major project from the National Social Science Foundation.

Allen Renear is a professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he has served as dean of the iSchool and as director of the Illinois Institute for Informatics. Prior to coming to Illinois, he was Director of the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University. In the 1980s Renear was an Observer at X3V1.TG8 during the finalization of ISO 8879, and he has never recovered from that. He has served on several early TEI committees (he was the American Philosophical Association’s delegate on the first TEI Advisory Board), was involved in various roles in the Brown University (now Northeastern University) Womens Writers Project (1330-1830), and was the first Chair of the Open eBook Publication Structure Working Group (now ePUB/IDPF). He has been coming to Balisage and its predecessors for longer than he can remember. His current academic focus is on the conceptual foundations of information systems.