Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Visual Acceleration Perception For Simple And Complex Motion Patterns., Alexandra S Mueller, Brian Timney

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Humans are able to judge whether a target is accelerating in many viewing contexts, but it is an open question how the motion pattern per se affects visual acceleration perception. We measured acceleration and deceleration detection using patterns of random dots with horizontal (simpler) or radial motion (more visually complex). The results suggest that we detect acceleration better when viewing radial optic flow than horizontal translation. However, the direction within each type of pattern has no effect on performance and observers detect acceleration and deceleration similarly within each condition. We conclude that sensitivity to the presence of acceleration is generally …

Distinct Visual Processing Of Real Objects And Pictures Of Those Objects In 7- To 9-Month-Old Infants., Theresa M Gerhard, Jody C Culham, Gudrun Schwarzer

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

The present study examined 7- and 9-month-old infants' visual habituation to real objects and pictures of the same objects and their preferences between real and pictorial versions of the same objects following habituation. Different hypotheses would predict that infants may habituate faster to pictures than real objects (based on proposed theoretical links between behavioral habituation in infants and neuroimaging adaptation in adults) or to real objects vs. pictures (based on past infant electrophysiology data). Sixty-one 7-month-old infants and fifty-nine 9-month-old infants were habituated to either a real object or a picture of the same object and afterward preference tested with …

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 …

Historical Map Digitization In Libraries: Collaborative Approaches For Large Map Series, Cheryl Woods, Sarah Simpkin, Jason Brodeur, Amber Leahey, Colleen Beard, Sharon Janzen

Western Libraries Publications

Academic libraries are playing a role in the digitization of Canadian government documents, but maps tend to be excluded from these activities due to their unique dimensions and display requirements. Using a topographic map digitization project as a case study, this paper presents a collaborative approach to map scanning, georeferencing, and metadata creation across several Ontario universities. Collectively, the 21 institutions making up the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) possess and maintain large volumes of Canadian topographic maps. However, few OCUL universities hold complete sets of these map series. While the Canadian government’s most recent topographic maps are now …

Effect Of Maternal Age On Offspring Social Behaviour In Drosophila Melanogaster, Shirley Long

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Aging can be defined as the natural and progressive decline in physiological functioning leading to increased risk for disease and death. Although the effects of age are well characterised, much less work has been done to study whether these detrimental changes can be transmitted to offspring. Advanced parental age has been correlated with higher incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism in children. As average maternal age increases in North America, it is becoming increasingly relevant to study the effects of maternal and paternal age on offspring social behaviour. We hypothesize that advanced maternal age in Drosophila melanogaster will affect …

Time, Money, And Happiness: Does Putting A Price On Time Affect Our Ability To Smell The Roses?, Scott Connors, Mansur Khamitov, Sarah Moroz, Lorne Campbell, Claire Henderson

Psychology Publications

DeVoe and House (2012; Experiment 3) demonstrated that the process of thinking about one’s income in relation to time (i.e., as an hourly wage) affected the enjoyment that participants derived from pleasurable experiences. Participants compelled to think of “time is money” experienced more impatience and less enjoyment in reaction to listening to a pleasurable piece of music compared to participants not asked to think of time as money. These effects were attenuated when participants were financially compensated for this leisure time. This suggests that putting a price on time can influence enjoyment of leisure activities, depending on the degree to …

Attachment Avoidance And Amends-Making: A Case Advocating The Need For Attempting To Replicate One’S Own Work, Sarah C.E. Stanton, Lorne Campbell

Psychology Publications

Attachment avoidance is typically associated with negative behaviors in romantic relationships;

however, recent research has begun to uncover circumstances (e.g., being in high-quality relationships) that promote pro-relationship behaviors for more avoidantly attached individuals. One possible explanation for why more avoidant individuals behave negatively sometimes but positively at other times is that their impulses regarding relationship events vary depending on relationship context (e.g., relationship satisfaction level). An initial unregistered study found support for this hypothesis in an amends-making context. We then conducted three confirmatory high-powered preregistered replication attempts that failed to replicate our initial findings. In our discussion of these four …

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 …

Musical Artists Capitalizing On Hybrid Identities: A Case Study Of Drake The “Authentic” “Black” “Canadian” “Rapper”, Amara Pope

FIMS Publications

This study is an exploration of identity politics through an examination of the ways in which musical artists use the medium of music videos to create marketable, hybrid identities. With the rise of social media and the online consumption of information, music videos play a central role in global, cultural flows. I argue that hybrid identities are constructed by musical artists to gain popularity through the form of ethno-marketing. I include literature surrounding diaspora and hybridity to understand how hybrid identities become a production of heritage and human capital. By utilizing music videos specifically to construct their hybrid identities, musical …

Cognitive Distortions, Humor Styles, And Depression, Katerina Rnic, David J.A. Dozois, Rod A. Martin

Psychology Publications

Cognitive distortions are negative biases in thinking that are theorized to represent vulnerability factors for depression and dysphoria. Despite the emphasis placed on cognitive distortions in the context of cognitive behavioural theory and practice, a paucity of research has examined the mechanisms through which they impact depressive symptomatology. Both adaptive and maladaptive styles of humor represent coping strategies that may mediate the relation between cognitive distortions and depressive symptoms. The current study examined the correlations between the frequency and impact of cognitive distortions across both social and achievement-related contexts and types of humor. Cognitive distortions were associated with reduced use …

The Academic Data Librarian Profession In Canada: History And Future Directions, S Vincent Gray, Elizabeth Hill

Western Libraries Publications

ACRL publication

Databrarianship: The Academic Data Librarian in Theory and Practice can by purchased at the ALA store:

http://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=11774