Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Dh And The Digital Archive, Cal Murgu

FIMS Publications

No abstract provided.

Introduction, Karen Nicholson, Maura Seale

FIMS Publications

No abstract provided.

A Retrospective On State Of The Art Social Media Research Methods: Ethical Decisions, Big-Small Data Rivalries And The Spectre Of The 6vs, Anabel Quan-Haase, Luke Sloan

FIMS Publications

This concluding chapter offers critical reflections on some of the key themes covered in the Handbook. Ethics emerged as a concern for many scholars, both for those engaging in quantitative and qualitative approaches. Scholars agree in that there is no overarching set of rules that can be applied to all projects blindly, rather they see ethical decisions as being grounded in the specifics of the data being collected, the social group under study, and the potential repercussions for subjects. A second central theme was the value of qualitative approaches for understanding ‘anomalies’ within larger data sets. Qualitative approaches are seen …

Mapping Metroid: Narrative, Space, And Other M, Luke Arnott

FIMS Publications

Metroid: Other M, the latest game in the Metroid series, was heavily criticized for the contradictory portrayal of its avatar protagonist, Samus Aran. This article analyzes these critiques within the 25-year history of the Metroid series, noting intersections with literary theory, cognitive science, geography, and cinema. “Mapping Metroid” argues that player dissatisfaction is a result of Other M’s inconsistency in balancing gameplay constraints with player agency, and the game’s failure at “imperative” storytelling. The maps in Other M and its predecessors are treated in depth, since the relationship between cartographic and gameworld spaces must be “read” dynamically by players to …

Research Data Management: A Library Practitioner’S Perspective, Siu Hong Yu

FIMS Publications

Abstract

Column description. The Future Voices in Public Services column is a forum for students in graduate library and information science programs to discuss key issues they see in academic library public services, to envision what they feel librarians in public service have to offer to academia, to tell us of their visions for the profession, or to tell us of research that is going on in library schools. Interested students can contact Nancy Dewald.

Literacy Requirements Of Court Documents: An Underexplored Barrier To Access To Justice, Amy Salyzyn, Lori Isaj, Brandon Piva, Jacquelyn Burkell

FIMS Publications

Court forms are complex. Canadians have told researchers this in numerous studies to date. For individuals who can afford lawyers, court form complexity may result in few if any adverse consequences as the legal professionals representing them have the experience and training to navigate these documents with relative ease. The story is different, however, for the increasing number of individuals who end up representing themselves in court because they cannot afford a lawyer. For those individuals – commonly referred to as “self-represented litigants” or “SRLs” – court form complexity can be a major barrier to accessing justice. As a practical …

Visual Research In Lis: Complementary And Alternative Methods, Angela Pollak

FIMS Publications

Although visual methods are emerging as a valuable and versatile tool in qualitative social studies research, confusion around terminology, options, and best practices persists. Consequently, LIS scholars who wish to employ innovative visual approaches in their research face barriers to discovering and deciding which visual options best suit their goals. Based on a review of the literature, this article identifies and describes the scope of participatory and nonparticipatory visual methods currently in use in the social sciences, with particular attention paid to LIS contexts. While visual methods bring clear benefits to qualitative research in terms of data quality, modes of …

‘Innocence Is As Innocence Does’: Anglo-Irish Politics, Masculinity And The De Cobain Gross Indecency Scandal, 1891-3, Cal Murgu

FIMS Publications

This article reconstructs the circumstances of the little-known Edward S. W. De Cobain gross indecency scandal in the early 1890s. I examine its significance to Victorian notions of class, Anglo-Irish politics and gender performativity through an analysis of newspaper reporting, personal correspondence and court documents. Edward De Cobain, Member of Parliament for East Belfast, became the focus of attention after serious allegations of attempted buggery were launched against him. De Cobain absconded from Britain upon word of the charges, but he continued to maintain his innocence while abroad until his eventual incarceration in 1893. In this article I revisit this …

“A Process Of Controlled Serendipity”: An Exploratory Study Of Historians’ And Digital Historians’ Experiences Of Serendipity In Digital Environments, K Martin, Anabel Quan-Haase

FIMS Publications

We investigate historians' experiences with serendipity in both physical and digital environments through an online survey. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative data analyses, our preliminary findings show that many digital historians select a specific digital environment because of the expectation that it may elicit a serendipitous experience. Historians also create heuristic methods of using digital tools to integrate elements of serendipity into their research practice. Four features of digital environments were identified by participants as supporting serendipity: exploration, highlighted triggers, allowed for keyword searching and connected them to other people.

Technological Fetishism And Us Foreign Policy: The Mediating Role Of Digital Icts, Edward Comor

FIMS Publications

This article looks back at an Obama administration foreign policy initiative called Internet freedom and discusses US responses to anti-American extremism involving digital communications technologies. It does this by using Marx’s concept of the fetish to argue that technological fetishism played a constitutive and mediating role in policymaking. Through this analysis – relating international relations with political economy and Marxist theory – the empowering implications of these technologies for American state interests are shown to be also disempowering. Most US officials were likely to be aware that digital communications technologies did not have the inherent powers that their policies implied …

Motivations For Sharing News On Social Media, Lorraine (Lola) Y.C. Wong, Jacquelyn Burkell

FIMS Publications

Social media have become an important part of everyday communication, and a platform for sharing and ‘re-sharing’ of information. We discover news through our social networks and pass some of what we encounter along to others in those same networks. Numerous studies focus on the sharing of personal information (both online and offline) but less research examines practices related to the sharing of news—especially sharing via social media. Understanding why we choose to share news and non-personal content online is vital in a world where we increasingly turn to social media and our online social networks for news and …

Illusions Of A ‘Bond’: Tagging Cultural Products Across Online Platforms, Nadine Desrochers, Audrey Laplante, Anabel Quan-Haase, Kim Martin, Louise Spiteri

FIMS Publications

Structured Abstract

Purpose

Most studies pertaining to social tagging focus on one platform or platform type, thus limiting the scope of their findings. This study explores social tagging practices across four platforms in relation to cultural products associated with the book Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming.

Design/methodology/approach

A layered and nested case study approach was used to analyze data from four online platforms: Goodreads, Last.fm, WordPress, and public library social discovery platforms. The top-level case study focuses on the book Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming, and its derivative products. The analysis of tagging practices in each of the …

Rural Men’S Health, Health Information Seeking, And Gender Identities: A Conceptual Theoretical Review Of The Literature, Bradley C. Hiebert, Beverly Leipert, Sandra Regan, Jacquelyn A. Burkell

FIMS Publications

Beginning as early as 2009, recent shifts in Canadian health care delivery indicate that access to health information is essential to promote and maintain a healthy population. It is important to understand how and where various populations, such as underresourced rural populations, access health information so that public health agencies can develop and deliver appropriate information with, for, and in these contexts. There is a paucity of research that specifically examines how rural Canadian men seek health information; therefore, this review aimed to conceptualize this process based on three dynamic key constructs: health patterns of rural Canadians, health information–seeking behaviors, …

Remembering Me: Big Data, Individual Identity, And The Psychological Necessity Of Forgetting, Jacquelyn A. Burkell

FIMS Publications

Each of us has a personal narrative: a story that defines us, and one that we tell about ourselves to our inner and outer worlds. A strong sense of identity is rooted in a personal narrative that has coherence and correspondence (Conway, 2005): coherence in the sense that the story we tell is consistent with and supportive of our current version of ‘self’; and correspondence in the sense that the story reflects the contents of autobiographical memory and the meaning of our experiences. These goals are achieved by a reciprocal interaction of autobiographical memory and the self, in which memories …

Empowered To Name, Inspired To Act: Social Responsibility And Diversity As Calls To Action In The Lis Context, Sarah T. Roberts, Safiya Umoja Noble

FIMS Publications

Social responsibility and diversity are two principle tenets of the field of library and information science (LIS), as defined by the American Library Association’s Core Values of Librarianship document, yet often remain on the margins of LIS education, leading to limited student engagement with these concepts and to limited faculty modeling of socially responsible interventions. In this paper, we take up the need to increase the role of both in articulating the values of diversity and social responsibility in LIS education, and argue the field should broaden to put LIS students and faculty in dialog with contemporary social issues of …

Display-Through-Foregrounding By Photojournalists As Self-Reflexivity In Photojournalism: Two Case Studies Of Accidental Peace Photojournalism, Saumava Mitra

FIMS Publications

This article explores media self-reflexivity as understood within Peace Journalism (PJ) in the case of photojournalists and photojournalism. Carrying forward the discussion started by Allan (2011) for research into ‘peace photography’ to be extended to ‘tacit, unspoken rules’ underlying photojournalistic images, the article shows, through two examples of mainstream news images, how photojournalists can and may break from diktats of ‘news values’ to advertently or inadvertently critique the myths of the very practice they function within. Such self-reflexive, synecdochic images which display media’s own role in covering conflict are examples from which PJ can take lessons for a new visual …

The Paradox Of Privacy: Revisiting A Core Library Value In An Age Of Big Data And Linked Data, Grant D. Campbell, Scott Cowan

FIMS Publications

Protecting user privacy and confidentiality is fundamental to the ethics and practice of librarianship, and such protection constitutes one of eleven values in the American Library Association’s “Core Values of Librarianship” (2004). This paper addresses the concerns of protecting privacy in the library as they relate to library users who are defining, exploring, and negotiating their sexual identities with the help of the library’s information, programming, and physical facilities. In so doing, we enlist the aid of Garret Keizer, who, in Privacy (2012), articulates a fresh theory of the concept in light of American social life in the twenty-first century. …

Heroes For The Helpless: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Canadian National Print Media’S Coverage Of The Food Insecurity Crisis In Nunavut, Bradley Hiebert, Elaine Power

FIMS Publications

In northern Canada, the Inuit’s transition from a culturally traditional to a Western diet has been accompanied by chronic poverty and provoked high levels of food insecurity, resulting in numerous negative health outcomes. This study examines national coverage of Nunavut food insecurity as presented in two of Canada’s most widely read newspapers: The Globe and Mail (GM) and the National Post (NP). A critical discourse analysis (CDA) was employed to analyze 24 articles, 19 from GM and 5 from NP. Analysis suggests national print media propagates the Inuit’s position as The Other by selectively reporting on social issues such as …

Epic And Genre: Beyond The Boundaries Of Media, Luke Arnott

FIMS Publications

Noting the resurgence of popular and academic interest in epics across disparate media, this essay proposes a theory of the epic genre that transcends particular media and cultures. It seeks to reconcile discussions of the epic in Aristotle, G.W.F. Hegel, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach, and Northrop Frye, arguing that traditional definitions of epic narrative are instead subsets of a greater generic structure. The epic is, following Gregory Nagy and Franco Moretti, among others, a literary “super-genre” that encompasses as many other kinds of narrative as possible. The essay explains how epic narrative, disembedded from earlier oral poetry, is …

Beyond Simple Charts: Design Of Visualizations For Big Health Data, Oluwakemi Ola, Kamran Sedig

FIMS Publications

Health data is often big data due to its high volume, low veracity, great variety, and high velocity. Big health data has the potential to improve productivity, eliminate waste, and support a broad range of tasks related to disease surveillance, patient care, research, and population health management. Interactive visualizations have the potential to amplify big data’s utilization. Visualizations can be used to support a variety of tasks, such as tracking the geographic distribution of diseases, analyzing the prevalence of disease, triaging medical records, predicting outbreaks, and discovering at-risk populations. Currently, many health visualization tools use simple charts, such as bar …

Policy As Embedded Generativity: A Case Study Of The Emergence And Evolution Of Hathitrust, Alissa Centivany

FIMS Publications

The traditional core of CSCW focuses on the relationships, tensions, and gaps between technical systems and social activity. Policy orbits around this core as a persistent but marginally represented presence. In the last few years, however, CSCW has witnessed an upsurge of interest in (re)integrating policy more explicitly and meaningfully into research and practice. For example, recent scholarship stressed the mutually constitutive and interconnected threads of design, practice, and policy [31]. This paper expands upon those motivations through a qualitative case study of the role of policy in library mass digitization work and the subsequent emergence and evolution of …

“Popcorn Tastes Good”: Participatory Policymaking And Reddit’S “Amageddon”, Alissa Centivany, Bobby Glushko

FIMS Publications

In human-computer interaction research and practice, policy concerns can sometimes fall to the margins, orbiting at the periphery of the traditionally core interests of design and practice. This perspective ignores the important ways that policy is bound up with the technical and behavioral elements of the HCI universe. Policy concerns are triggered as a matter of course in social computing, CSCW, systems engineering, UX, and related contexts because technological design, social practice and policy are dynamically entangled and mutually constitutive. Through this research, we demonstrate the value of a stronger emphasis on policy in HCI by exploring a recent controversy …

Writing And Reading The Results: The Reporting Of Research Rigour Tactics In Information Behaviour Research As Evident In The Published Proceedings Of The Biennial Isic Conferences, 1996 – 2014, Lynne Ef Mckechnie, Roger Chabot, Nicole K. Dalmer, Heidi Julien, Cass Mabbott

FIMS Publications

Introduction. This study examined if and how information behaviour researchers include research rigour tactics in reports of their research projects. Method. A content analysis was conducted of the 193 research reports published in the 1996 – 2014 ISIC proceedings.

Analysis. Articles were coded for author affiliation, rigour tactics reported, and whether or not enough information was presented to allow readers to assess the quality of the research and replicate the study. Both quantitative (frequencies) and qualitative (excerpts from the articles) data are reported.

Results. In total 698 research rigour tactics were reported for an average of 3.6 per paper, a …

Boundary Objects In Information Science, Isto Huvila, Theresa Dirndorfer Anderson, Eva Jansen, Pam Mckenzie, Adam Worrall

FIMS Publications

(Accepted for publication; final date unknown at present.) Boundary objects are abstract or physical artefacts that exist in the liminal spaces between adjacent communities of people. The theory of BOs was originally introduced by Star and Griesemer in a study on information practices at the Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology but has since been adapted in a broad range of research contexts in a large number of disciplines including the various branches of information science. The aim of this review article is to present an overview of the state of the art of information science research informed by the theory …

A Model Of Social Media Engagement: User Profiles, Gratifications, And Experiences, Lori Mccay-Peet, Anabel Quan-Haase

FIMS Publications

No abstract provided.

“Taking Back” Information Literacy: Time And The One-Shot In The Neoliberal University, Karen P. Nicholson

FIMS Publications

No abstract provided.

Display And Control In Online Social Spaces: Toward A Typology Of Users, Jacquelyn A. Burkell, Alexandre Fortier

FIMS Publications

Online social networks are spaces of social display where an astronomical amount of personal information, which would once have been characterized as private, is shared with a loose community of friends or followers. This broad sharing does not preclude participant interest in control, both over the content of the social network profile and over the audience that has access to that profile. Thus, issues of display and control are in tension in the context of online social networking. The goal of this research is to articulate the different subjective perspectives that characterize Facebook users with respect to the control …

To Submit Or Not Submit: The Burden Of Evaluation On Postgraduate Medical Trainees, Elaine M. Zibrowski, Jeff Crukley, Jacqui Malett, Kathryn Myers

FIMS Publications

Purpose Academic centers utilize web-based surveillance systems to administer their evaluations, but little is known about their impact on the evaluation responsibilities delegated to medical residents. Method Using a mixed-methods approach, a retrospective content analysis was conducted of the evaluation activities experienced by a cohort of 29 residents as they completed their training in general internal medicine from 2009-2012. These data were triangulated with group interviews conducted with current internal medicine residents in 2012-2013. Results The internal medicine program electronically requested that its residents complete 8,614 evaluation reports on clinical faculty, curriculum, and junior trainees (345 requests annually per resident). …

Supporting Sensemaking Of Complex Objects With Visualizations: Visibility And Complementarity Of Interactions, Kamran Sedig, Paul Parsons, Hai-Ning Liang, Jim Morey

FIMS Publications

Making sense of complex objects is difficult, and typically requires the use of external representations to support cognitive demands while reasoning about the objects. Visualizations are one type of external representation that can be used to support sensemaking activities. In this paper, we investigate the role of two design strategies in making the interactive features of visualizations more supportive of users’ exploratory needs when trying to make sense of complex objects. These two strategies are visibility and complementarity of interactions. We employ a theoretical framework concerned with human–information interaction and complex cognitive activities to inform, contextualize, and interpret the effects …

Values, Ethics And Participatory Policymaking In Online Communities, Alissa Centivany

FIMS Publications

Drawing upon principles and lessons of technology law and policy, value-centered design, anticipatory design ethics, and information policy literatures this research seeks to contribute to understandings of the ways in which platform design, practice, and policymaking intersect on the social media site Reddit. This research explores how Reddit’s users, moderators, and administrators surface values (like free speech, privacy, dignity, and autonomy), hint at ethical principles (what content, speech, behavior ought to be restricted and under what conditions), through a continuous process of (re)negotiating expectations and norms around values, ethics, and power on the site. Central to this research are questions …