Geography Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2773
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Item Data Against Youth of Color in the Information Policing Era: How Gang Databases are Deepening Inequality(2020) Triola, Sydney Mariel; Shilton, Katie; Geography/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This paper examines how labeling gang members without consistent criteria for inclusion in law enforcement’s gang databases systemically leads to negative outcomes, also known as data violence. The concept of data violence allows for an analysis of the systemic consequences of the overrepresentation of adolescents of color in gang databases. Current gang data collection practices within law enforcement have at least one major problem, a culture of presumed criminality when interacting with adolescents of color. Data maintenance processes were also found by Propublica to have inconsistent labeling practices. Additionally, when looking through the data made available by Propublica, it is clear that there is disregard for a law entitled, 28 C.F.R. § 23. This law mandates all gang database entries that have not been renewed as a result of a criminal investigation, conviction, or adjudication, must be destroyed after five years. Another major finding, particularly emphasized by Forman and Vitale, is that police gang-tracking initiatives have an overly punitive focus for individual adolescents. In order to mitigate the need for overly punitive practices, the author recommends additional research tracking demographic trends within push factors, also known as reasons why a person might be motivated to join a gang, in order to better utilize intervention methods. Ida B. Wells and the National Black Census serve as examples of how people and communities of color have managed their own datasets when law enforcement’s criminal justice data inaccurately overrepresented their community members as criminals. The author concludes that libraries have an opportunity to disrupt data violence through education initiatives for both victims and perpetrators of data violence. Future research should continue to analyze and improve potential interventions for this data violence, both inside and outside of law enforcement.Item Local Information Landscapes: Theory, Measures, and Evidence(2019) Lee, Myeong; Butler, Brian S; Geography/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)To understand issues about information accessibility within communities, research studies have examined human, social, and technical factors by taking a socio-technical view. While this view provides a profound understanding of how people seek, use, and access information, this approach tends to overlook the impact of the larger structures of information landscapes that constantly shape people’s access to information. When it comes to local community settings where local information is embedded in diverse material entities such as urban places and technical infrastructures, the effect of information landscapes should be taken into account in addition to particular strategies for solving information-seeking issues. However, characterizing the information landscape of a local community at the community level is a non-trivial problem due to diverse contexts, users, and their interactions with each other. One way to conceptualize local information landscapes in a way that copes with the complexity of the interplay between information, contexts, and human factors is to focus on the materiality of information. By focusing on the material aspects of information, it becomes possible to understand how local information is provided to social entities and infrastructures and how it exists, forming structures at the community level. Through an extensive literature review, this paper develops a theory of local information landscapes (LIL Theory) to better conceptualize the community-level, material structure of local information. Specifically, the LIL theory adapts a concept of the virtual as an ontological view of the interplay between technical infrastructures, spaces, and people as a basis for assessing and explaining community-level structures of local information. By complementing existing theories such as information worlds and information grounds, this work provides a new perspective on how information deserts manifest as a material pre-condition of information inequality. Using this framework, an empirical study was conducted to examine the explicit effects of information deserts on other community characteristics. Specifically, the study aims to provide an initial assessment of LIL theory by examining how the fragmentation of local information, a form of information deserts, is related to important community characteristics such as socio-economic inequality, deprivation, and community engagement. Building upon previous work in sociology and political science, this study shows that the fragmentation of local information (1) is shaped by socio-economic deprivation/inequality that is confounded with ethnoracial heterogeneity, (2) the fragmentation of local information is highly correlated to people's community gatherings, (3) the fragmentation of local information moderates the effects of socio-economic inequality on cultural activity diversity, and (4) the fragmentation of local information mediates the relationship between socio-economic inequality and community engagement. By making use of three local event datasets over 20 months in 14 U.S. cities (about two million records) and over 3 months in 28 U.S. cities (about 620K records), respectively, this study develops computational frameworks to operationalize information deserts in a scalable way. This dissertation provides a theorization of community-level information inequality and computational models that support the quantitative examination of it. Further theorizations of the conceptual constructs and methodological improvements on measurements will benefit information policy-makers, local information system designers, and researchers who study local communities with conceptual models, vocabularies, and assessment frameworks.Item The Cost of Turning Heads - The Design and Evaluation of Vocabulary Prompts on a Head-Worn Display to Support Persons with Aphasia in Conversation(2015) Williams, Kristin; Findlater, Leah; Geography/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Symbol-based dictionaries could provide persons with aphasia a resource for finding needed words, but they can detract from conversation. This research explores the potential of head-worn displays (HWDs) to provide glanceable vocabulary support that is unobtrusive and always-available. Two formative studies explored the benefits and challenges of using a HWD, and evaluated a proof-of-concept prototype in both lab and field settings. These studies showed that a HWD may allow wearers to maintain focus on the conversation, reduce reliance on external support (e.g., paper and pen, or people), and minimize the visibility of support by others. A third study compared use of a HWD to a smartphone, and found preliminary evidence that the HWD may offer a better overall experience with assistive vocabulary and may better support the wearer in advancing through conversation. These studies should motivate further investigation of head-worn conversational support.Item Multilingual Use of Twitter: Language Choice and Language Bridges in a Social Network(2014) Eleta Mogollon, Irene; Golbeck, Jennifer; Geography/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Social media is international: users from different cultures and language backgrounds are generating and sharing content. But language barriers emerge in the communication landscape online. In the quest for language diversity and universal access, the vision of a cosmopolitan Internet has stumbled over the language frontier. Expatriates, minorities, diasporic communities, and language learners play an important role in forming transnational networks, creating social ties across borders. Many users of social media are multicultural and multilingual; they are mediating between language communities. In the microblogging site Twitter, information spreads across languages and countries. How are multilingual users of Twitter connecting language groups? What are the factors influencing their language choices? This research advances a step towards understanding the network structures and communication strategies that enable intercultural dialog, cross-language sharing of information, and awareness of global problems. This dissertation research aims at: (1) exploring the ways in which multilingual users of Twitter are connecting different language groups in their social network; (2) modeling how the network influences their language choices; (3) and exploring what the textual features of their posts can elicit about language choices and mediation between groups. This dissertation goes beyond survey information about multilingualism and provides a deeper understanding about the structural relations between language communities in Twitter. This research work is one of the few that apply social network analysis to the study of sociolinguistic questions on the Internet. Focusing on the social networks of multilingual users, this dissertation contributes an original classification of network types based on the patterns of connections between language groups. Also, it applies the novel idea of modeling the influence of network factors in the language choices of the user. Finally, this dissertation tests the hypothesis that the type of exchange influences language choice, and explores with a theme analysis how other textual features might elicit cross-cultural awareness. These results can inform the design of social media platforms.