Information Studies Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2780
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Item The Effect of an Integrated Knowledge Management Architecture on Organizational Performance and Impact: The Case of the World Bank(2003) Fonseca, Ana Flavia; Soergel, Dagobert; Information Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, MD)Using the World Bank as Case Study, this dissertation investigates the impact of knowledge management programs on the organization performance by using a combination of three methods: Records Analysis, Interviews and Outcome Mapping. The study had two phases: quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. The Knowledge Management Program of the World Bank has had a direct and beneficial impact on its operations. The Program changed internal staff behavior, improved the sharing of information and knowledge within the organization, and promoted the design and application of participatory knowledge strategies in the countries. New knowledge products as well as strong country participation and ownership to the projects studied resulted from these changes. However, the study also shows that this impact is far from being sufficiently significant to influence or help make the knowledge management program fully integrated with the organization core processes and products. The gap between the KM Program architecture and other programs and initiatives focusing on making this concept operational within the Bank remains an issue. In spite of the fact that knowledge management principles are being mainstreamed in core services, the difference is still very wide between the overall goals of the Knowledge Bank and their translation into the implementation of knowledge products and services in the countries. The research did confirm previous research in the field of knowledge management and validated the findings from other case studies. The results of the study also allowed for the identification of 10 criteria for mainstreaming knowledge management programs within organizations and identified characteristics of knowledge delivery processes that were effective for knowledge absorption . . The importance of "how to" and "procedural knowledge"; the importance "horizontal knowledge exchanges" and a number of other elements, were confirmed as factors affecting knowledge absorption and positive changes in user behavior.Item RIKA RESILIENCE: INFORMING SUSTAINABILITY IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA(2019) Warrick, Elizabeth Muthoni; Preece, Jennifer; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The consensus in systems science is that environmental sustainability ensues from resilience, i.e., underlying capacity for preservation of core functions through adaptation in changed circumstances; and resilience itself is only sustainable when built from internal attributes of the system. Impalpability of internal resilience to external agents contributes to failures of global development in Africa, calling for analysis informed from within. This work proposes that African resilience is founded in Rika. Within Rika, ecological stewardship is integrated with noncompetitive elected representative governance and achieved through scaled modulation of systemic diversities. Eroded at macro level, Rika continues to drive grassroots enterprise. Causal attributes are, therefore, key to understanding sustainability and effecting structural reform of governance at all levels in Africa. Documented international usage of Rika concepts and terminologies has significance for research linking global expansion of Homo sapiens to the development of conceptual thinking in East Africa. Findings are based in research with the Mbeere of Kenya, East Africa, a community of 195,000, whose name Mbeere, means First Peoples. Data extracted regionally from 750,000 social media users informs context. From an indigenist method-as-theory stance (Indigenist Maths), we leverage qualitative and quantitative tools, bolstering capacity of research and practice to serve indigenous goals at the intersection of social media and Place. A dynamic indigenous information world (iWorld) ensues through community interactions interconnecting local knowledge with global information to foster economic enterprise and social ecological stewardship. We term this iWorld, Rikamedia. Examples of resilience attributes emerging from the data include: the Rika ideal of non-competitive governance, potentially impactful of conflicting democratic ideals centered in competitive governance; transcendence of natural hierarchies through unambiguous reciprocated interactions from micro to macro levels of society; design for participatory diversity, equality and inclusion with impacts on systemic divides of gender, age, and access, etc.; and lastly, a learning modality aligns governance with participatory process, emboldens risk tolerance; nurtures diversities and fosters innovation. An entrepreneurial micropilot Bamboo project ensues from community-researcher interactions, with recommendations for agroforestry citizen science, technology, funding, and diaspora capacitation. Findings are scalable in Africa South of the Sahara, and may have significance for resilience when projects incorporate Rika attributes in sustainability planning.Item CONTRADICTIONS AND OPPORTUNITIES IN MOBILE CARE MANAGEMENT (“mCare”): AN OBSERVATIONAL ANALYTIC COHORT STUDY(2019) Crowley, Patrick Kenyon; St. Jean, Beth; Butler, Brian; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Chronic diseases such as diabetes are among the most widespread, expensive, and preventable of all health problems, accounting for approximately 86 percent of the United States’ $2.7 trillion annual health care expenditures. In the face of such staggering numbers, it is surprising that our current approach to chronic disease care management has remained largely unchanged for decades, where the care team evaluates the patient and related data infrequently and episodically. However, mobile care management (mCare) information system use is growing, whereby individuals with chronic medical conditions such as diabetes are taught to monitor and manage their disease through the use of a mobile application for tracking, education and feedback, along with monitoring of vital signs with “connected” medical devices, and the support of a remote health coach. These mCare systems offer promise, but many unanswered questions exist surrounding their effects on the health and healthcare of the users, and how user individual differences may influence these effects. Informed primarily by the mobile health systems and health behavior literatures, this study provided a deeper understanding of the effects of an mCare platform on health outcomes and health services utilization of chronic disease patients, principally those with diabetes mellitus, and the effects of a user’s social support on these outcomes. This study analyzed administrative claims, device readings, app usage, demographic and social determinant data of 163 diabetic mCare users from a 21-week observation period from mCare initiation, along with a well-matched control group of diabetic non-users, and a supplemental cohort of 127 non-diabetic mCare users with other chronic medical conditions. mCare had a significant positive effect on users’ adherence to physician’s office visits, suggesting greater continuity of care, chronic care management, and a possible reduction in inpatient use (1.2 fewer encounters over 5 months, on average). The findings show that mCare had a significant beneficial effect, on average, towards the cardiovascular health of the users as measured by the change in their diastolic blood pressure (- 2.8 mmHg, - 3.3%) and systolic blood pressure (- 6.7 mmHg, - 4.9%) in the five-month observational period, which is a primary therapeutic target for diabetes care and clinically important. Furthermore, linear mixed models of cardiovascular outcomes uncovered how those mCare users with a moderate degree of social support are likely to achieve greater benefit in from mCare on average relative to those with very high or very low social support in their lives. This additional impact equated to on average a 2.4 mmHg drop (2.9%) in diastolic blood pressure and a 3.9 mmHg (3.1%) drop in systolic blood pressure over the five-month observational period, which is clinically significant. These results provide evidence to support a more precisely tailored future healthcare paradigm beyond the current one-size-fits-all archetype. A primary goal of mCare is triaging emergency department use where appropriate; however, this study found that this did not happen in a significant manner in the treatment group compared to the control group. Furthermore, the study identified specific medical problems where improved mCare design is needed, including processes to prevent hyperglycemia, hypoglycemia and exacerbations of hypertension and pulmonary issues (such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), and a need to assess pain more effectively to foster more appropriate healthcare utilization. Additional training for health coaches, as well as training and development of machine intelligence algorithms to better triage patient problems to appropriate sites of care, are productive directions for future research. mCare designers should seek to better gauge the severity of pain, and develop new sensor technologies to assess emergent issues, especially abdominal pain. mCare vendors should also seek to refine their processes to better manage glucose and respiratory issues to avoid exacerbations, and predict exacerbations earlier to intervene.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 Enhancing Decision-making in Smart and Connected Communities with Digital Traces(2019) Hong, Lingzi; Frias-Martinez, Vanessa; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The ubiquitous use of information communication technologies (ICTs) enables generation of digital traces associated with human behaviors at unprecedented breadth, depth, and scale. Large-scale digital traces provide the potential to understand population behaviors automatically, including the characterization of how individuals interact with the physical environment. As a result, the use of digital traces generated by humans might mitigate some of the challenges associated to the use of surveys to understand human behaviors such as, high cost in collecting information, lack of quality real-time information, and hard to capture behavioral level information. In this dissertation, I study how to extract information from digital traces to characterize human behavior in the built environment; and how to use such information to enhance decision-making processes in the area of Smart and Connected Communities. Specifically, I present three case studies that aim at using data-driven methods for decision-making in Smart and Connected Communities. First, I discuss data-driven methods for socioeconomic development with a focus on inference of socioeconomic maps with cell phone data. Second, I present data-driven methods for emergency preparedness and response, with a focus on understanding user needs in different communities with geotagged social media data. Third, I describe data-driven methods for migration studies, focusing on characterizing the post-migration behaviors of internal migrants with cell phone data. In these case studies, I present data-driven frameworks that integrate innovative behavior modeling approaches to help solve decision-making questions using digital traces. The explored methods enhance our understanding of how to model and explain population behavior patterns in different physical and socioeconomic contexts. The methods also have practical significance in terms of how decision-making can become cost-effective and efficient with the help of data-driven methods.Item SIMULATING REALITY: TRAINING CITIZEN SCIENTISTS TO JUDGE STREAM HABITATS IN MULTISENSORY VIRTUAL REALITY(2019) Striner, Alina Goldman; Preece, Jennifer; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Citizen science is a form of crowdsourcing that allows volunteers to participate in scientific data collection and analysis. Many citizen scientists are engaged and motivated by science-based learning and discovery, but high training costs and limited resources often result in volunteers participating in unskilled work, leading to boredom and disengagement. Advances in immersive virtual reality (VR) have created opportunities to recreate physical environments with minimal cost, making it possible to train citizen scientists to make qualitative experiential judgments usually reserved for domain experts. This research trains citizen scientists to assess outdoor stream habitats using StreamBED VR, a multisensory VR training platform. This research offers the following contributions: 1. A study of how expert and novice water monitors make qualitative assessments of outdoor stream habitats using an EPA qualitative protocol. The research found that experts develop intuitive judgments of quality, use multisensory environmental information to make judgments, and construct past and future narratives of streams using environmental characteristics. 2. Iterative design of the Ambient Holodeck multisensory system, and a study of how ambient sensory information impacts observation skills. The research found that multisensory information increased the number of observations participants made, and positively affected engagement and immersion. 3. Iterative design of the StreamBED VR training platform, and two studies; the former explores how qualitative assessment skills can be taught in VR, and the latter considers how training in VR, with and without Multisensory cues, compares to a PowerPoint (PPT) baseline. Study results found although VR participants were more excited to continue training than PPT participants, Standard VR and PPT participants scored closest to an expert gold standard, performing significantly better than Multisensory VR participants. This research concludes that VR has the potential to train qualitative assessment tasks, but qualifies that training design is multifaceted and complex, full of theoretical learning considerations and practical challenges. Further, VR realism can be a powerful tool for training, but is only effective when training cues clearly parallel assessment tasks.Item Archives in the Attic: Exile, Activism, and Memory in the Washington Committee for Human Rights in Argentina(2019) Pyle, Perri; Rosemblatt, Karin; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Spurred by the human rights violations committed by the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983), exiled Argentines in Washington, D.C. formed the Washington Committee for Human Rights in Argentina (WCHRA) to facilitate the transnational exchange of information between those under threat in Argentina and political actors in the United States. This thesis outlines the story of the WCHRA through the records they created - kept for nearly forty years in an attic - and oral interviews with former members. The collection consists of letters, testimonies, petitions, and notes that reflect the group’s extensive network and provide insight into how Argentine exile groups inserted themselves into the larger human rights movement. By critically examining how one small group of activists came together, I explore how archival records enhance, challenge, and reveal new insights into the politics of exile, activism, and memory, as seen through the lens of the records they kept.Item TWO STRIKES AND YOU’RE OUT: THE CONVERGENCE OF COLD WAR POLITICS, LABOR, AND ETHNIC TENSIONS IN THE JULY 1946 STRIKES AT KIRKUK AND ABADAN(2019) Hobson, Tiffany Claire; Wien, Peter; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis explores the convergence of Cold War politics, labor issues, and ethnic conflict on the local scale during the labor strikes which occurred in July 1946 at the oil refineries in Kirkuk, Iraq and Abadan, Iran. The roles of the local communist parties in leading the strikes are weighed against the workers' economic concerns to determine that the workers’ motivations for striking extended beyond political support for any particular party, and claims that the violence which ended the strikes was the result of inherent ethnic conflicts are debunked through examination of both regions’ ethnic histories.Item AN ANALYSIS OF VARIABILITY IN NEWSPAPER REPORTING OF NATIONALLY COVERED TOPICS(2019) Marciano, Fernando Santos; Butler, Brian; Master in Information Management; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study looks into variability in newspaper reporting of important national topics. Using a sample of seven hundred articles from ten newspapers, a quantitative analysis using analysis of variance (ANOVA) found that variability in the values of reported numerical facts was statistically significant. Further, a qualitative analysis was performed to identifying potential reasons for the variability. Variability is unique to each topic being covered; however, some follow predictable patterns, such as updates on developing stories.Item Designing Technology to Increase Adoption of Healthy Behaviors in Men in the Context of Light Food Consumption(2019) Smriti, Diva; Choe, Eun Kyoung; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Women are more likely than men to engage in healthy eating behaviors. However, men do strongly believe eating healthy, but this does not translate into their eating behaviors. Thus, there is a discrepancy in the health beliefs and behaviors of men, especially in the context of light food consumption. In this study, I aim to understand this discrepancy among young men in depth. I conducted a week-long diary study of the food items consumed by the participants (N = 17) who were all male, followed by semi-structured interviews. Findings indicate the lack of a verified and automated source of nutritional knowledge, misinformation about light food consumption among other themes, and design implications to the current nutrition-tracking mobile applications. This work contributes to the understudied existing literature on men’s food behaviors, the challenges faced by them in adopting healthy eating behaviors in the context of light food consumption, and the role mobile applications play in helping them do so.