Digital Commons Network^™

Inclusive Global Scholarly Communication: Toward A Just And Healthier Information Ecosystem, Angel Y. Ford, Daniel G. Alemneh

Information Science Faculty Scholarship

Scholarly communication has long been a central topic in the field of information science. However, philosophical, and even perhaps some legal reflections, including the moral and ethical considerations of the health of information ecosystems, are fairly recent developments. In fact, recent topics are propelled by various contextual factors including economic, disciplinary, societal norms, and cultures.This article explores literature discussing the plight of scholars in low- and middle-income countries that struggle to engage in scholarly communications in their fields. This topic has been explored for years, however, has often been addressed in disciplines outside of information science and knowledge management. This …

Textual Assessment Of Leaders Individual Differences: Exploring Talid, Michael Young

Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity Faculty Scholarship

The Textual Assessment of Leader Individual Differences (TALID) is a growing archive of leader speech and a dataset of individual difference scores for more than 750 global leaders. TALID includes texts accumulated by Social Science Automation, Inc and Margaret G. Hermann during a variety of research projects conducted since 1997. Recent additions to TALID include documents for Joseph Biden and Donald Trump contributed by the Xiamen University Digital Presidents Project. The scores in the data set are all generated using automated coding schemes running on Profiler Plus (Levine & Young, 2014). Variables included in TALID are for Leadership Trait Analysis …

Generative Ai And Photographic Transparency, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

There is a history of thinking that photographs provide a special kind of access to the objects depicted in them, beyond the access that would be provided by a painting or drawing. What is included in the photograph does not depend on the photographer’s beliefs about what is in front of the camera. This feature leads Kendall Walton to argue that photographs literally allow us to see the objects which appear in them. Current generative algorithms produce images in response to users’ text prompts. Depending on the parameters, the output can resemble specific people or things which are named in …

An Exploratory Study Of Anti-Black Racism In Social Media Behavior Intentions: Effects Of Political Orientation And Motivation To Control Prejudice, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Samantha A. Wilcox, Justine K. Brace, Melissa Anderson

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Considering the widespread prevalence of racist content and opinions on social media, there is a pressing need to understand how users react to such content in ways that might lead them to be drawn into echo chambers of racism, hate speech, and potentially even violence. We conducted an online study to investigate how two individual differences—political orientation and motivation to control prejudice (MCP)—may predispose people to accept anti-Black racism expressed in social media messages. Non-Black participants viewed racist and egalitarian mock social media posts and reported how likely they would be to respond favorably and/or engage in supportive social media …

Region-Specific Structural Covariates Of Homicide Rates In Latin America: State Legitimacy And Remittances, Guillermo Escano, William Alex Pridemore

School of Criminal Justice Other Graduate Student Scholarship

The goal of this study was to examine region-specific structural covariates of homicide rates in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). LAC nations possess 8% of the global population but 33% of homicides, yet the region receives limited attention in studies of social structure and violence. Prior literature suggests two separate social forces particularly relevant to the region, state legitimacy and monetary remittances. Theory from multiple fields provides distinct pathways through which each may influence LAC violence rates, suggesting a negative legitimacy-homicide association but competing hypotheses about the remittances-homicide association. Our unit of analysis was the nation-year, and our sample …

Improving Inferences About Exoplanet Habitability, Risinie D. Perera, Kevin H. Knuth

Physics Faculty Scholarship

Assessing the habitability of exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars) is of great importance in deciding which planets warrant further careful study. Planets in the habitable zones of stars like our Sun are sufficiently far away from the star so that the light rays from the star can be assumed to be parallel, leading to straightforward analytic models for stellar illumination of the planet’s surface. However, for planets in the close-in habitable zones of dim red dwarf stars, such as the potentially habitable planet orbiting our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, the analytic illumination models based on the parallel ray approximation …

Wireless Emergency Alerts And Organisational Response: Instructing And Adjusting Information In Alerts, Lauren B. Cain, Jeannette Sutton, Michele K. Olson

Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity Faculty Scholarship

In the United States, alerting authorities are authorized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to notify the public of imminent hazards and threats by sending Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs) through the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS). Although recent efforts have been made to examine historical WEA compliance with frameworks such as Mileti and Sorenson's (1990) Warning Response Model, less attention has been paid to information included in WEAs that is not prescribed by message design frameworks from risk communication scholarship. This paper explores the presence of Situational Crisis Communication Theory's (SCCT) instructing and adjusting information in terse …

Benchmarking It Services In Academic Libraries, Rebecca L. Mugridge, Janetta Waterhouse

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

The presenters will share the results of a 2021 survey of the academic library members of the Association of Research Libraries to determine how information technology services are organized within the libraries and whether there is a trend toward centralizing IT activities at the institution level. Survey findings from the 72 responding libraries address 14 information technology services and activities and identify who is responsible for their technology services, their level of satisfaction with the services, whether the responsibility for them has changed recently, and if so, why. Respondents also provided information about IT assessment and top three challenges. The …

A Decade Of Wireless Emergency Alerts: A Longitudinal Assessment Of Message Content And Completeness, Michele K. Olson, Jeannette Sutton, Lauren B. Cain, Nicholas Waugh

Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity Faculty Scholarship

Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs) provide a direct way for public safety officials to reach at‐risk publics via text‐based messages on their mobile devices. Although WEAs were introduced over a decade ago and can be either 90 or 360 characters in length, we currently do not know what these messages have contained. To address this gap, we quantify the contents of the last decade of WEA messages using the principles of effective warning message design. Specifically, we use quantitative content analysis to conduct a longitudinal assessment of 6080 WEAs sent by Alerting Authorities from 2012 to 2022. We code these messages …

Population-Level Alcohol Consumption And Homicide Rates In Latin America: A Fixed Effects Panel Analysis, 1961-2019, Guillermo J. Escano, William Alex Pridemore

School of Criminal Justice Faculty Scholarship

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) possesses 8% of the global population but approximately one-third of global homicides. The region also exhibits high per capita alcohol consumption, risky drinking patterns, and a heterogeneous mix of beverage preferences. Despite this, LAC violence receives limited attention in the English-language literature and there are no studies of the population-level alcohol-homicide association in the region. We examined the effects on total, male, and female homicide rates of total and beverage-specific alcohol consumption (22 nations, 1961-2019) and of risky drinking patterns (20 nations, 2005 and 2010). We collected homicide and alcohol data from the World …

Copyright First Responders: Decentralized Expertise, Cultural Institutions, And Risk, Kyle K. Courtney, Emily Kilcer

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

Today librarians and other information professionals regularly intersect with intellectual property law. As our work increasingly encompasses copyright-intensive programs and projects (e.g., digitization, scholarly publishing, open access, streaming media, MOOCs, and more), questions about fair use, public domain, and copyright law invariably emerge. Libraries occupy a liminal space, they both serve knowledge creation and information access and enjoy special privileges under copyright law.

Unfortunately, comprehensive copyright training is still not a pillar of LIS programs,1 and while there are seminal resources to look to and professional development opportunities to explore (e.g., MOOCs, copyright bootcamps, or one-offs at conferences), this sort …

Let's Speculate About It: When And Why Consumers Want To Discuss Mystery Products, Aleksandra Kovacheva, Hillary Wiener

Marketing Faculty Scholarship

Research suggests that mystery products can be appealing to consumers and can motivate interest and purchase. In this paper, we examine a different benefit of these offerings – their effect on driving conversation. We propose that such products can prompt a conversation due to their ability to motivate joint speculation, or the process of thinking about possible resolutions of the uncertainty with others. We define this novel driver of conversation, delineate it from related constructs, and situate it in the literature. We then provide initial evidence for the proposed theory in seven studies (n = 2,835), demonstrating that mystery …

Early Response To False Claims In Wikipedia, 15 Years Later, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

Fifteen years ago, I conducted a small study testing the error-correction tendency of Wikipedia. Not only is Wikipedia different now than it was then, the community that maintains it is different. Despite the crudity of that study’s methods, it is natural to wonder what the result would be now. So I repeated the earlier study and found surprisingly similar results.

Liberation’S Love-Language: The Politics And Poetics Of Queer Translation After Stonewall, Eric Keenaghan

English Faculty Scholarship

Poetry served gay and lesbian liberationists in the years following Stonewall as a mechanism for translating queer experience into a language shared amongst the members of emergent sociopolitical LGBTQ+ communities. Poetry figured prominently in the historical period's activist little magazines, newsletters, and other periodicals as means of doing this work of self-construction and world-building, a simple fact largely unappreciated by both queer studies (which overlooks non-narrative forms) and contemporary American poetry studies (which dismisses much activist poetry as identitarian agitprop). But poetry, due to its formal differences from narrativity, has been a site for queer revolutionary action and imaginaries because …

A Fault In Democracy: The Disenfranchisement Of Voters, Kylie Cooper, Razan Elsir

Library Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Research

Our project is focused on why there is variation in felon disenfranchisement policy among states. After selecting five different states (New York, Mississippi, Virginia, North Carolina, and Vermont) with various policies, we tested them against our different hypotheses: demographics (age, education level, and the number of people incarcerated), partisanship, and race. We expected race to be a strong factor, meaning that as diversity of the state increased the strictness of its felon disenfranchisement policy would increase. We expected to see a similar correlation with partisanship, that the more Republican-leaning states would have stricter policies. Additionally, we believed that age, education, …

From Stacks To Screens: Creating A Virtual Browsing Experience, Lauren Puzier, Rebecca A. Nous

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

The University at Albany Libraries has integrated visually compelling, subject-based Curated Collections into its discovery tool, Primo VE. These collections encompass resources on specific subjects, that highlight authors or groups, celebrate a genre, or that bring together a variety of resources to address campus initiatives, current events, or popular research topics. Curated Collections is an opportunity for the Libraries' to highlight what is special, new, trending, important, or underappreciated in our collections. We propose this project as a virtual browsing model to fuel intellectual curiosity, and seek to explore similar initiatives at attendees’ libraries.

A Research Data Services Fairytale, Kathleen H. Flynn, Emily Kilcer

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

Whether for assignments or research, the faculty, staff, and students at all academic institutions will work with data. Some patrons seek assistance finding open data for their projects, while others would like lessons in data analysis or visualization. Data sharing is increasingly required by journals or funding agencies, and researchers may find this challenging while also navigating Data Use Agreements, confidentiality concerns, data documentation, locating a suitable repository, and more.

Furthermore, most funding agencies require a data management plan be included in grant proposals to ensure that researchers are prepared to follow best practices regarding the collection, storage, security, and …

Relations Between Peer Influence, Perceived Cost Versus Benefits, And Sexual Offending Among Adolescents Aware Of Sex Offender Registration Risk, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Hayley M. D. Cleary, Paige M. Oja

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

A policy's general deterrent effect requires would-be offenders to be aware of the policy, yet many adolescents do not know they could be registered as sex offenders, and even adolescents who do know may still commit registerable sexual offenses. We tested whether peer influences shape the perceived costs/benefits of certain sexual offenses and, subsequently, registration policy's general deterrent potential in a sample of policy-aware adolescents. The more adolescents believed their peers approve of sexting of nude images, the more likely they were to have sexted. For forcible touching, having more positive peer expectations about sex and perceiving forcible touching as …

The Quest To End Human Trafficking: An Educational And Practical Guide For Everyone Who Wants To Help Break The Bonds And Assist Survivors, Dennis W. Mccarty

Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity Faculty Scholarship

People often assume that only legislators and law enforcement personnel can take meaningful steps to fight human trafficking, one of the most lucrative transnational crimes in the world. This inquiry sought to assess the validity of that belief. The study was informed by the author’s experience as a college instructor of human trafficking and the inspiration he drew from the range and quality of his students’ projects.

The methodology included examining the strategies that governmental and non-governmental organizations are using to fight trafficking and assist survivors. It also considered the work of individual activists and service providers such as social …

Resistance Through Existence: The Choctaw Gift To The Starving Irish In 1847 As An Act Of Agency Assertion And Cultural Preservation, Sophia Gaffney

Library Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Research

In 1847, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma donated $173 dollars to an Irish Potato Famine relief fund during the potato blight, which, intersecting with an era of British oppression, resulted in about 1 million Irish dying of starvation and other hunger-related diseases. Only 15 years before, the Choctaw had been forced to relocate 500 miles, by foot, along the Trail of Tears, starting in their ancestral homeland in Mississippi and ending in what is now called Oklahoma. It is estimated that they lost about ⅓ of their population along this journey. In this thesis, I explore why a nation not …

Study Of Fashion And Politics, Jacqueline Arena

Library Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this research is to analyze the way fashion has been used as a vessel for

political statements; specifically through studying the work of artists Jean Paul Gaultier, Alexander Mcqueen and Vivienne Westwood. Gaultier and Mcqueen showcased shocking collections that caught the public eye by testing gender boundaries and reflecting historical events. Westwood’s work was a protest, and she was an activist. The sources included highlight the success of these unique designers. Furthermore, the research evaluates how political statements by fashion designers have become harmful because today newer designers are vying for the success of trailblazers such as …

Finding Harmony: Social Tags And Name Authority Records In The Popular Music Domain, Kabel Nathan Stanwicks, Hemalata Iyer

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

Libraries and cultural institutions use cataloging and metadata standards to describe works and those responsible for creating them. These standards are used to create name authority records (NAR) to collocate creators’ works under single, authorized versions of their names. NARs employ controlled vocabulary to describe individuals and disambiguate names. NAR production is costly; therefore, few are updated when standards are revised, and controlled vocabularies are slow to adapt to a rapidly changing information landscape. Artificial intelligence provides opportunities to leverage social tagging to update and enhance NARs, while simultaneously improving user search and discovery. Our research demonstrates that social tags …

Forging The Future: Connecting Research To Communities, Angela Hackstadt

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

Lightning talk delivered at the ACRL 2023 Conference in Pittsburgh, PA.

The literature suggests that information users beyond the academy rely on a variety of sources in the course of their work, most of which can be described as grey literature. However, academic researchers tend to focus their efforts on other research publications, like peer reviewed journal articles, because there is little perceived professional benefit to producing grey literature. A 2022 survey of state government and local nonprofit workers sheds some light on the gap between academic researchers and a potential audience for their work and illustrates the potential for …

Communicating About Extreme Heat: Results From Card Sorting And Think Aloud Interviews With Experts From Differing Domains, Jeannette Sutton, Nicholas Waugh, Savannah Olivas

Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity Faculty Scholarship

Climate trends indicate that extreme heat events are becoming more common and more severe over time, requiring improved strategies to communicate heat risk and protective actions. However, there exists a disconnect in heat-related communication from experts, who commonly include heat related jargon (i.e., technical language), to decision makers and the general public. The use of jargon has been shown to reduce meaningful engagement with and understanding of messages written by experts. Translating technical language into comprehensible messages that encourage decision makers to take action has been identified as a priority to enable impact-based decision support. Knowing what concepts and terms …

Racial Injustice In Astrid Lindgren’S Kati In America, Irina I. Holden

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

This article addresses Astrid Lindgren’s Kati in America, which was written in 1950 and translated into English in 1964. The novel reflects Lindgren’s impressions of the United States, where she traveled in 1948 on assignment for the publishing house Åhland and Åkerlund. By chance, the author of this article discovered that there is a fifteenth chapter of the book in the Russian, Polish, French, Spanish, and German translations, but which is missing in the English. This missing chapter describes the racism Lindgren’s protagonist witnesses during her visit to New Orleans. Astrid Lindgren’s depiction of racial injustice in the South …

Connecting Research To Policy And Practice: A Case Study Of A White Paper Collection In An Institutional Repository, Angela Hackstadt

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reflections On Moving On And Scaling Up: Adapting Past Experience To Emerging Scholarly Communication Programs, Emily Kilcer, Julia Lovett, Mark Clemente

University Libraries Faculty Scholarship

Scholarly communication librarianship is always evolving. It is inherently malleable and context-dependent. Relevant skills can be challenging to learn in most LIS programs.

As a result, the experiences that shaped our early careers in scholarly communication were essential. Time at institutions with well-resourced, well-established, and highly visible scholarly communication programs, at MIT, Harvard, and the University of Michigan, showed us what was possible with a team working toward shared goals: where to look for opportunities, how to engage in strategic decision-making, when to keep nudging, and when to back-burner an effort.

An interesting shift we have each navigated is what …

Opioid Task Force Highly Successful In Training Residents In Naloxone Use, Center For Human Services Research, University At Albany

Health and Healthcare Services Reports and Research Briefs

Aiming to limit the increase in deaths from opioid overdose to 25% of current levels, the Genesee-Orleans-Wyoming Opioid Task Force (“the Task Force”) began a campaign in 2015 to, among other goals, increase the number of individuals trained to administer Naloxone in the tri-county area. This training is a critical need in these rural counties where there are low numbers of professional first responders dispersed over a wide geographic area. The Task Force also used these trainings to promote the importance of follow-up care after the administration of Naloxone, thus aiming to prevent opioid overdose deaths and facilitate a first …

Ember Alerts: Assessing Wireless Emergency Alert (Wea) Messages In Wildfires Using The Warning Response Model, Erica D. Kuligowski, Nicholas A. Waugh, Jeannette Sutton, Thomas J. Cova

Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity Faculty Scholarship

When evacuation is necessary in a wildfire event, affected communities must be alerted and warned of the imminent danger and instructed on what to do to protect themselves. One channel available to message providers in the United States is Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs) disseminated via IPAWS. Recent wildfire events have shed light on the need to improve WEA strategies and messages when alerting exposed populations of imminent fire threat. The purpose of this article is to assess how, when and where WEAs have been used in US wildfires; whether they comply with guidance set out by Mileti and Sorensen’s Warning …

Communicating Hazard Location Through Text And Map In Earthquake Early Warnings: A Mixed Methods Study, Jeannette Sutton, Michele M. Wood, Nicholas A. Waugh, Savanah Crouch

Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this research was to examine the effect of presenting hazard location in different formats on key warning message outcomes—understanding, personalizing, believing, deciding, and milling. We conducted two studies using experiment and focus group methods. In the experiment, we compared a standard ShakeAlert earthquake early warning message, which merely implied location, to three enhanced messages that communicated information about the earthquake epicenter via text, map, or a combined text-and-map format. Focus groups explored reactions to warning messages accompanied by different types of maps. Overall, the standard ShakeAlert message was associated with worse message outcomes compared to messages that …