Information Studies Research Works

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1632

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A New Committee Launches: Making a Case for Archival Repatriation
(2024-01) Punzalan, Ricardo; Arsenault, Jaime; Begay, Vina; Chaterera-Zambuko, Forget; Marsh, Diana; Savory, Jacob; Schlottmann, Kevin; Stoner, Melissa; Schmitt, Jack
Access to and community possession of archival materials containing Native and Indigenous knowledge, language, and lifeways is crucial to the cultural survivance, revital- ization, and continuation of communities. Nevertheless, archival organizations have yet to fully address how the profession might approach the growing demand for archival repatriation. In response, the Society of American Archivists formed the Archival Repatriation Committee with the charge to “[E]nsure that [SAA]’s services, activities, policies, communications, and products support the goal of supporting archivists in repatriating and receiving archival materials.”
Access Policies for Native American Archival Materials in the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
(Society of American Archivists, 2020-10) Marsh, Diana E.; Leopold, Robert; Crowe, Katherine; Madison, Katherine S.
This case study contributes to the history of collections access protocols by examining one repository’s policies and practices over a fifty-year period— those of the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. It describes a series of archival programs and projects that occurred before, during, and after the development of the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials in order to view changes in the archives’ access policies within a broader cultural and institutional milieu, presenting a more complex narrative than previously available. The case study assesses the influence of the Protocols as well as some challenges to the adoption of several recommendations. Finally, we make several proposals for archival repositories with comparable collections and constituencies.
Accessible Data Representation with Natural Sound
(Association for Computer Machinery (ACM), 2023-04-23) Hoque, Md Naimul; Ehtesham-Ul-Haque, Md; Elmqvist, Niklas; Billah, Syed Masum
Sonification translates data into non-speech audio. Such auditory representations can make data visualization accessible to people who are blind or have low vision (BLV). This paper presents a sonification method for translating common data visualization into a blend of natural sounds. We hypothesize that people’s familiarity with sounds drawn from nature, such as birds singing in a forest, and their ability to listen to these sounds in parallel, will enable BLV users to perceive multiple data points being sonified at the same time. Informed by an extensive literature review and a preliminary study with 5 BLV participants, we designed an accessible data representation tool, Susurrus, that combines our sonification method with other accessibility features, such as keyboard interaction and text-to-speech feedback. Finally, we conducted a user study with 12 BLV participants and report the potential and application of natural sounds for sonification compared to existing sonification tools.
Accreditation for Information Science: Has the Time Finally Come?
(1985-02) Hahn, Trudi Bellardo; Davis, Charles H.
In September 1984, representatives from 17 American and Canadian library and information science associations met in Chicago, Illinois, to "examine the scope, structure, and costs of accreditation" of library and information science programs.
Adapting an HBCU-inspired framework for Black student success in U.S. LIS education
(IOS Press, 2021-07-02) Ndumu, Ana; Walker, Shaundra
This perspective essay explores Gasman & Arroyo’s (2014) HBCU-inspired framework for Black student success as a prism for re-envisioning LIS education. In response to calls for anti hegemonic LIS education, the authors discuss a potential tool for Black student success and suggest its benefits to LIS education. The framework can introduce non-white, anti-racist educational practices to the work of educating the U.S. library workforce; it is relevant in light of ongoing racial and political strife in U.S. society.
Alcestis Underworld Outline
(2012) Beutner, Katharine
PDF outline for Katharine Beutner's contribution to the MediaCommons/New Everyday Rough Cuts: Media and Design in Process Collection, edited and curated by Kari Kraus and Amalia Levi
Aleš Hrdlička: A New Finding Aid and an Exhibit Appearance for a Controversial Figure in the History of Anthropology
(Smithsonian Collections Blog, 2020-04-03) Christensen, Katherine; Marsh, Diana
Aleš Hrdlička was an anthropologist who left a complicated legacy. His work in physical anthropology was groundbreaking, but his history is fraught with accusations of misogyny and a belief that his work contributed to major racist ideologies of the 20th century. His papers are open for research at the National Anthropological Archives and the finding aid for those papers, the original creation of which was funded by the Repatriation Office, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), is now available digitally on SOVA through recent funding from the FY2019 Collections Information (CIS) pool. Some of Hrdlička’s work is on display in the new exhibition, Documenting Diversity: How Anthropologists Record Human Life
Alternate Reality Games as Platforms for Practicing 21st-Century Literacies
(International Journal of Learning and Media, 2013) Bonsignore, Elizabeth; Hansen, Derek; Kraus, Kari; Ruppel, Marc
ASIST Members Speak: The Board Listens
(American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2003-08) Hahn, Trudi Bellardo
Benford’s Law Applies to Online Social Networks
(PLOS (Public Library of Science), 2015-08-26) Golbeck, Jennifer
Benford’s Law states that, in naturally occurring systems, the frequency of numbers’ first digits is not evenly distributed. Numbers beginning with a 1 occur roughly 30%of the time, and are six times more common than numbers beginning with a 9.We show that Benford’s Law applies to social and behavioral features of users in online social networks. Using social data from five major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, and LiveJournal), we show that the distribution of first significant digits of friend and follower counts for users in these systems follow Benford’s Law. The same is true for the number of posts users make.We extend this to egocentric networks, showing that friend counts among the people in an individual’s social network also follows the expected distribution. We discuss how this can be used to detect suspicious or fraudulent activity online and to validate datasets.
Benford’s Law applies to word frequency rank in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian
(PLoS, 2023-09-14) Golbeck, Jennifer
Benford’s Law states that, in many real-world data sets, the frequency of numbers’ first digits is predicted by the formula log(1 + (1/d)). Numbers beginning with a 1 occur roughly 30% of the time, and are six times more common than numbers beginning with a 9. We show that Benford’s Law applies to the the frequency rank of words in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian. We calculated the frequency rank of words in the Google Ngram Viewer corpora. Then, using the first significant digit of the frequency rank, we found the FSD distribution adhered to the expected Benford’s Law distribution. Over a series of additional corpora from sources ranging from news to books to social media and across the languages studied, we consistently found adherence to Benford’s Law. Furthermore, at the user-level on social media, we found Benford’s Law holds for the vast majority of users’ collected posts and significant deviations from Benford’s Law tends to be a mark of spam bots.
Bit by Bit: Using Design-Based Research to Improve the Health Literacy of Adolescents
(2015) Subramaniam, Mega; St. Jean, Beth; Kodama, Christie; Follman, Rebecca; Casciotti, Dana; Greene Taylor, Natalie
Background: Although a low health literacy level has been found to be among the most powerful predictors of poor health outcomes, there is very little research focused on assessing and improving the health literacy skills of adolescents, particularly those from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. The vast majority of existing research focuses solely on reading comprehension, despite the fact that health literacy is actually a multifaceted concept, which entails many different types of skills. Objective: The aim of this paper is to first mine existing literature to identify the many different skills that have been posited to constitute health literacy, and then, using this collection of skills as an overarching structure, to highlight the challenges that disadvantaged youth participating in our HackHealth after-school program encounter as they identify and articulate their health-related information needs, search for health-related information online, assess the relevance and credibility of this information, and manage and make use of it. Methods: We utilized the design-based research method to design, implement, and revise our HackHealth program. To collect data regarding HackHealth participants’ health literacy skills and associated challenges, we used a variety of methods, including participant observation, surveys, interviews, focus groups, and logging of Web browser activities. We also collected data through specialized instructional activities and data collection forms that we developed for this purpose. Quantitative and qualitative techniques were used to analyze this data, as well as all of the artifacts that each student produced, including their final projects. Results: We identified the various challenges that the 30 HackHealth participants faced in completing various health-related information activities during the course of the program. Based on these findings, we describe important implications for working with youth from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, how to assess and improve their health literacy skills, and offer specific recommendations for health literacy instruction aimed at this population. Conclusions: With an increased societal focus on health and a shift from viewing patients as passive recipients of medical care to viewing them as active arbiters of their own health, today’s youth need to possess an array of health literacy skills to ensure that they can live long and healthy lives. Working with adolescents to help them develop and practice these skills will also help to break the cycle between poor health literacy and poor health outcomes, thereby reducing health disparities and improving the long-term outlook for the health of our nation.
Charles Whitney Gilmore – The Forgotten “Dinosaur Hunter”
(Digging the Fossil Record: Paleobiology at Smithsonian, 2013-06) Marsh, Diana; Sues, Hans Dieter
Charles Whitney Gilmore (1874-1945), affectionately known as “Charlie” to his colleagues, was one of the last major figures of America’s “Golden Age” of dinosaur hunting. It is largely due to his efforts that the Department of Paleobiology is now home to one of the premier collections of dinosaurs and other fossil reptiles in the United States. Early in his career Gilmore commenced scientific studies of dinosaurs and many other groups of extinct reptiles, starting with the rich material from the Marsh Collection. His monographs on the skeletal structure of the armored Stegosaurus (1914), the predatory dinosaurs Allosaurus and Ceratosaurus (1920), and the sauropod Apatosaurus (1936) remain essential references for any serious student of dinosaurs. Working at a time when there were few professional vertebrate paleontologists, Gilmore also received invitations from other institutions, including the Carnegie Museum and the American Museum of Natural History, to study and publish on important specimens of dinosaurs and other fossil reptiles from their respective collections. Many important papers, including the first monograph on early Late Cretaceous dinosaurs from Inner Mongolia (China), resulted from these “extramural” research efforts. The collections of fossil reptiles in the Division of Vertebrate Paleontology offer eloquent testimony of Gilmore’s devotion and efforts and will continue to be an unparalleled resource for research and exhibition.
Community-as-a-Service: Data Validation in Citizen Science
(METHOD 2015 workshop, 2015-10-11) He, Yurong; Wiggins, Andrea
Currently, most citizen science projects that adopt a crowdsourcing model focus primarily on collecting and analyzing data. As yet, few of them leverage community interactions for effective data validation yet, which would have significant impact on improving the quality of the increasing volume of citizen science data. In this paper, we introduce an exploratory pilot study focused on understanding how an established online community can be leveraged to create a “community as a service” structure to support collaborative citizen science data validation.
Community-based Data Validation Practices in Citizen Science
(Association for Computing Machinery, 2016-03-02) Wiggins, Andrea; He, Yurong
Technology-supported citizen science has created huge volumes of data with increasing potential to facilitate scientific progress, however, verifying data quality is still a substantial hurdle due to the limitations of existing data quality mechanisms. In this study, we adopted a mixed methods approach to investigate community-based data validation practices and the characteristics of records of wildlife species observations that affected the outcomes of collaborative data quality management in an online community where people record what they see in the nature. The findings describe the processes that both relied upon and added to information provenance through information stewardship behaviors, which led to improved reliability and informativity. The likelihood of community-based validation interactions were predicted by several factors, including the types of organisms observed and whether the data were submitted from a mobile device. We conclude with implications for technology design, citizen science practices, and research.
Continuous Organizational Development—Teamwork, Learning Leadership, and Measurement
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005-01) Lowry, Charles B.
Early in my career, a colleague for whom I have great respect said to me, "The great libraries of the future will be those with great staffs." There was a rhetorical flourish in this statement intended to make a vital point. We could not simply rely on massive collections to provide information for the academy—it was necessary to pay attention to our human resources and, by extension, our organizations. By that time in the mid-1970s, the so-called "golden age of library collecting" was ending, and the "age of access" was beginning. This age of access has left us with diminished power to define our future—without significant support from allies outside our organizations. Libraries must be resilient organizations that have the strength to sustain themselves as partners in the learning and scholarly enterprises.
Contributing to Accessibility Datasets: Reflections on Sharing Study Data by Blind People
(Association for Computer Machinery (ACM), 2023-04-23) Kamikubo, Rie; Lee, Kyungjun; Kacorri, Hernisa
To ensure that AI-infused systems work for disabled people, we need to bring accessibility datasets sourced from this community in the development lifecycle. However, there are many ethical and privacy concerns limiting greater data inclusion, making such datasets not readily available. We present a pair of studies where 13 blind participants engage in data capturing activities and refect with and without probing on various factors that infuence their decision to share their data via an AI dataset. We see how diferent factors infuence blind participants’ willingness to share study data as they assess risk-beneft tradeofs. The majority support sharing of their data to improve technology but also express concerns over commercial use, associated metadata, and the lack of transparency about the impact of their data. These insights have implications for the development of responsible practices for stewarding accessibility datasets, and can contribute to broader discussions in this area.
Corporate Privacy Policy Changes during PRISM and the Rise of Surveillance Capitalism
(Media and Communication, 2017-03-22) Kumar, Priya
Disclosure of the NSA’s PRISM program demonstrated that Internet companies have become prime targets of government surveillance. But what role do companies themselves play in putting users’ privacy at risk? By comparing the changes in the privacy policies of ten companies—the nine in PRISM plus Twitter—I seek to understand how users’ privacy shifted. Specifically, I study how company practices surrounding the life cycle of user information (e.g. collection, use, sharing, and retention) shifted between the times when companies joined PRISM and when PRISM news broke. A qualitative analysis of the changes in the privacy policies suggests that company disclosure of tracking for advertising purposes increased. I draw on business scholar Shoshana Zuboff’s conceptualization of “surveillance capitalism” and legal scholar Joel Reidenberg’s “transparent citizen” to explain the implications such changes hold for users’ privacy. These findings underscore why public debates about post-Snowden privacy rights cannot ignore the role that companies play in legitimizing surveillance activities under the auspices of creating market value.
“A Counter-Friction to the Machine”: What Game Scholars, Librarians, and Archivists Can Learn from Machinima Makers about User Activism
(SAGE Publications, 2011-04) Kraus, Kari
The author examines the legal issues associated with machinima creation in relation to archival and preservation efforts. Specifically, she argues that what makes machinima as a cultural practice particularly interesting from a legal perspective is its ability to dramatize the tension between copyright law and contract law; public rights and private rights; and the right of reproduction versus the right of adaptation. She proposes that game scholars, librarians and archivists take a page from the play book of machinima creators when developing their own professional approaches to user activism and digital access and preservation.
Creating a Culture of Security in the University of Maryland Libraries
(The Haworth Press, Inc., Johns Hopkins University Press, Library of Congress, 2003) Lowry, Charles B.; Goetsch, Lori
A critical part of building a shared culture of mutual responsibility for security and safety is a thorough understanding of all the elements of a library’s security environment. To address the need for a more coherent approach to library safety and security that reinforces a philosophy of shared responsibility among all staff, the University of Maryland Libraries embarked upon an assessment of policies, procedures, and facilities in partnership with the Association of Research Libraries. Begun in the fall of 1997, the security study and subsequent development of practice and policy were implemented over a two-year period and serve as a model comprehensive approach for a large academic library system.