Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

"What Is A Wave But 1000 Drops Working Together?": The Role Of Public Libraries In Addressing Lgbtqia+ Health Information Disparities, Vanessa Lynn Kitzie, A. Nick Vera, Valerie Lookingbill, Travis L. Wagner

Faculty Publications

Purpose. This paper presents results from a participatory action research study with 46 LGBTQIA+ community leaders and 60 library workers who participated in four community forums at public libraries across the US. The forums identified barriers to LGBTQIA+ communities addressing their health questions and concerns and explored strategies for public libraries to tackle them.

Design/methodology/approach. Forums followed the World Café format to facilitate collaborative knowledge development and promote participant-led change. Data sources included collaborative notes taken by participants and observational researcher notes. Data analysis consisted of emic/etic qualitative coding.

Findings. Results revealed that barriers experienced by LGBTQIA+ communities are structurally …

Co-Creation Of A Training For Community Health Workers To Enhance Skills In Serving Lgbtqia+ Communities, Vanessa Kitzie, Julie Smithwick, Carmen Blanco, M. Greg Green, Sarah Covington-Kolb

Faculty Publications

This paper describes creating and implementing a 30-h LGBTQIA+ specialty training for community health workers (CHWs). The training was co-developed by CHW training facilitators (themselves CHWs), researchers with expertise in LGBTQIA+ populations and health information, and a cohort of 11 LGBTQIA+ CHWs who theater tested and piloted the course. The research and training team collected cohort feedback through focus groups and an evaluative survey. Findings stress the importance of a curriculum designed to elicit lived experiences and informed by a pedagogical framework centered on achieving LGBTQIA+ visibilities. This training is a vital tool for CHWs to foster cultural humility for …

Queer Mediated Practices As A Method To Center And Sustain Critical Health And Media Literacies, Alexander N. Vera, Vanessa Kitzie, Travis L. Wagner

Faculty Publications

Queer communities experience challenges when accessing accurate and comprehensive health information. These challenges span across media and information environments and threaten queer health promotion. This paper explored how 11 queer community health workers (CHWs) in a Southeastern US state respond to, subvert, and resist these challenges when creating digital health information resources for their queer communities. This longitudinal action research occurred over two years and included multiple qualitative data types. We analyzed these data using qualitative coding, following deductive and inductive strategies. Findings demonstrate how queer CHWs: 1) identified risks and barriers to health promotion their communities experienced; 2) created …

“Nothing To Do But Be Borne And Steered”: Unpacking Feminist Scripts In Elana Arnold’S Damsel, Jenna Spiering, Nicole Ann Amato

Faculty Publications

Feminism in novels marketed for young adults often reflects the values of a popular feminism that relies on individual and personal means of empowerment, rather than critiquing or seeking to dismantle systems of domination. In this paper, we illumminate frameworks and methods for engaging students in careful readings and evaluations of texts marketed as feminist, through an analysis of Elana Arnold’s feminist fairy tale, Damsel (2018). Drawing on theoretical frameworks of popular feminism, feral feminism, and theories of becoming, the authors use Critical Content Anlaysis to explore several tenets in contemporary feminist thought in order to analyze Arnold’s text and …

Including Latinx Communities In Academic Libraries: A Theoretical Approach To Information Access, Andrew A. Wakelee, Kim M. Thompson

Faculty Publications

While more Latinx students continue to enroll in higher education, physical, intellectual, and socio-cultural barriers to information may continue to impede their success and inclusion. A tripartite theoretical model that examines physical, intellectual, and socio-cultural information access provides insights for academic libraries to better meet Latinx students’ information needs and include them in campus life. This paper gives an overview of the theoretical framework along with practical steps libraries can take to improve information equity.

A Contextualization Of Editorial Misconduct In The Library And Information Science Academic Information Ecosystem, Lucy Santos Green, Melissa P. Johnston

Faculty Publications

In the last decade, one of the most effective tools applied in combating the erosion of public trust in academic research has been an increased level of transparency in the peer review and editorial process. Publicly available publication ethics guidelines and policies are vital in creating a transparent process that prevents unethical research, publication misconduct, manipulation of the communication of research to practitioners, and the erosion of public trust. This study investigated how these unethical practices, specifically those coded as editorial misconduct, bring the authenticity and integrity of the library and information science academic research digital record into question. Employing …

Including Latinx Communities In Academic Libraries: A Theoretical Approach To Information Access, Andrew Wakelee, Kim M. Thompson

Faculty Publications

While more Latinx students continue to enroll in higher education, physical, intellectual, and socio-cultural barriers to information may continue to impede their success and inclusion. A tripartite theoretical model that examines physical, intellectual, and socio-cultural information access provides insights for academic libraries to better meet Latinx students’ information needs and include them in campus life. This paper gives an overview of the theoretical framework along with practical steps libraries can take to improve information equity.

Supporting Stem Education In The School Library With Digital Tools, Lucy Santos Green, Mellissa Johnston, Amanda Jones, Erica Thompson

Faculty Publications

The prominence of technology in STEM education provides opportunities for teacher librarians to collaborate with teachers across multiple disciplines and embrace leadership roles through integrating digital tools for teaching and learning. This presentation will discuss work from the federally funded REALISD project which is providing professional development for K-12 teacher librarians for designing and facilitating STEM learning in their schools. Participants will learn about locating, accessing, and evaluating digital resources, along with strategies for utilizing resources to provide learning experiences in the STEM areas through both formal and informal instruction.

‘Access Necessitates Being Seen’: Queer Visibility And Intersectional Embodiment Within The Health Information Practices Of Queer Community Leaders, Travis L. Wagner, Vanessa Kitzie

Faculty Publications

Navigating healthcare infrastructures is particularly challenging for queer-identifying individuals, with significant barriers emerging around stigma and practitioner ignorance. Further intersecting, historically marginalised identities such as one’s race, age or ability exacerbate such engagement with healthcare, particularly the access to and use of reliable and appropriate health information. We explore the salience of one’s queer identity relative to other embodied identities when navigating health information and care for themselves and their communities. Thirty semi-structured interviews with queer community leaders from South Carolina inform our discussion of the role one’s queer visibility plays relational to the visibility of other identities. We find …

Discursive Power And Resistance In The Information Worlds Maps Of Lgbtqia+ Community Leaders, Vanessa Kitzie, Travis L. Wagner, Alexander N. Vera

Faculty Publications

Purpose: This qualitative study explores how discursive power shapes South Carolina LGBTQIA+ communities' health information practices and how participants resist this power. Design/methodology/approach: Twenty-eight LGBTQIA+ community leaders from South Carolina engaged in semi-structured interviews and information worlds mapping – a participatory arts-based elicitation technique – to capture the context underlying how they and their communities create, seek, use, and share health information. We focus on the information worlds maps for this paper, employing situational analysis – a discourse analytic method for visual data – to analyze them. Findings: Six themes emerged describing how discursive power operates both within and outside …

Never Waste A Crisis: Digital Inclusion For Sustainable Development In The Context Of The Covid Pandemic, Amanda Reed, Kim M. Thompson

Faculty Publications

In responding to United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals in 2030, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions recently launched the mutual commitment of Library Pledge for Digital Inclusion and its Call to Action along with other international organizations. Domestic and foreign library leaders and well-known experts and scholars discuss the theme of Library and Digital Inclusion. Rao Quan points out that with the development of modern technology, the digital divide has become a growing problem. The National Library of China has put forward an idea of building a “National Smart Library System”, to lead public libraries to realize smart …

Making The Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion Mindset Indispensable In The Lis Classroom Through Design, Content, Communication, And Assessment, Kim M. Thompson, Clayton A. Copeland

Faculty Publications

When we incorporate diversity and inclusion into Library and Information Science course design and content and build communication and learning frameworks in the classroom on inclusive principles, we build a cohort of students who cannot “unsee” these basic principles as they engage in practice. By designing lecture and activity materials that allow students to read and engage with different perspectives about professional values and content, we create opportunities for awareness building and prepare students to engage with the same practices as they join the profession. This chapter provides insights for and examples of how to create courses that bring diversity, …

Automatic Categorization Of Lgbt User Profiles On Twitter With Machine Learning, Amir Karami, M. Lundy, F. Webb, H. R. Boyajieff, M. Zhu, D. Lee

Faculty Publications

Privacy needs and stigma pose significant barriers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people sharing information related to their identities in traditional settings and research methods such as surveys and interviews. Fortunately, social media facilitates people’s belonging to and exchanging information within online LGBT communities. Compared to heterosexual respondents, LGBT users are also more likely to have accounts on social media websites and access social media daily. However, the current relevant LGBT studies on social media are not efficient or assume that any accounts that utilize LGBT-related words in their profile belong to individuals who identify as LGBT. Our …

Analysis Of Geotagging Behavior: Do Geotagged Users Represent The Twitter Population?, Amir Karami, R. R. Kadari, L. Panati, H. Bheemreddy, B. Bozorgi

Faculty Publications

Twitter’s APIs are now the main data source for social media researchers. A large number of studies have utilized Twitter data for diverse research interests. Twitter users can share their precise real-time location, and Twitter APIs can provide this information as longitude and latitude. These geotagged Twitter data can help to study human activities and movements for different applications. Compared to the mostly small-scale data samples in different domains, such as social science, collecting geotagged data offers large samples. There is a fundamental question whether geotagged users can represent non-geotagged users. While some studies have investigated the question from different …

Analysis Of Social Media Discussions On (#)Diet By Blue, Red, And Swing States In The U.S, Amir Karami, A. A. Dahl, J. G. Shaw, S. P. Valappil, G. Turner-Mcgrievy, H. Kharrazi, P. Bozorgi

Faculty Publications

The relationship between political affiliations and diet-related discussions on social media has not been studied on a population level. This study used a cost- and -time effective framework to leverage, aggregate, and analyze data from social media. This paper enhances our understanding of diet-related discussions with respect to political orientations in U.S. states. This mixed methods study used computational methods to collect tweets containing “diet” or “#diet” shared in a year, identified tweets posted by U.S. Twitter users, disclosed topics of tweets, and compared democratic, republican, and swing states based on the weight of topics. A qualitative method was employed …

A Systematic Literature Review Of Sexual Harassment Studies With Text Mining, Amir Karami, Melek Yildiz Spinel, C. Nicole White, Kayla Ford, Suzanne Swan

Faculty Publications

Sexual harassment has been the topic of thousands of research articles in the 20th and 21st centuries. Several review papers have been developed to synthesize the literature about sexual harassment. While traditional literature review studies provide valuable insights, these studies have some limitations including analyzing a limited number of papers, being time-consuming and labor-intensive, focusing on a few topics, and lacking temporal trend analysis. To address these limitations, this paper employs both computational and qualitative approaches to identify major research topics, explore temporal trends of sexual harassment topics over the past few decades, and point to future possible directions in …

Covid-19 Vaccine And Social Media In The U.S.: Exploring Emotions And Discussions On Twitter, Amir Karami, Michael Zhu, Bailey Goldschmidt, Hannah R. Boyajieff, Mahdi M. Najafabadi

Faculty Publications

The understanding of the public response to COVID-19 vaccines is the key success factor to control the COVID-19 pandemic. To understand the public response, there is a need to explore public opinion. Traditional surveys are expensive and time-consuming, address limited health topics, and obtain small-scale data. Twitter can provide a great opportunity to understand public opinion regarding COVID-19 vaccines. The current study proposes an approach using computational and human coding methods to collect and analyze a large number of tweets to provide a wider perspective on the COVID-19 vaccine. This study identifies the sentiment of tweets using a machine learning …

Everyone, Everywhere, Every Time, Clayton A. Copeland Phd

Faculty Publications

The University of South Carolina’s Knowledge School has a commitment. The commitment: Everyone. Everywhere. Every time. The “Knowledge School” is about empowerment. It is about accessing abilities in everyone. It is about using abilities to ensure knowledge creation. And it is about using abilities to ensure equity. This chapter defines a philosophy rooted in tenets of universal access and design. It then highlights several initiatives in teaching, research, and service that put the philosophy into action.

“It's Hard To See How These Would Be Harmful To Kids”: Public Library Staff Perceptions Of Child Development And Drag Queen Storytimes, Sarah Barriage, Vanessa Kitzie, Diana Floegel, Shannon M. Oltmann

Faculty Publications

This paper reports preliminary results of a survey of 458 US public library staff members regarding their perceptions of drag queen storytimes (DQS) and the ways in which these storytimes influence child development. The majority of respondents from libraries that have hosted at least one DQS agreed that DQS support healthy child development and positively influence children’s understanding of gender and/or sexuality, while respondents from libraries that have not hosted DQS were more likely to disagree or report being undecided. Specific ways in which respondents perceive DQS to influence child development are also analyzed.

“When Someone Sees Me, I Am Nothing Of The Norm”: Examining The Discursive Role Power Plays In Shaping Lgbtq+ Health Information Practices, Vanessa L. Kitzie, Travis L. Wagner, A. Nick Vera

Faculty Publications

This paper examines how discursive power shapes LGBTQ+ community health information practices. Informed by analysis of 10 information world maps drawn by SC LGBTQ+ community leaders, our findings indicate that while community can be a valuable construct to reject mainstream discourses of regulation and correction, it inevitably is fraught and not representative of all LGBTQ+ individuals. Findings can inform strategies for community leaders to facilitate more equitable information flow among members by identifying key structural elements impeding this flow at the community level.

Using The World Café Methodology To Support Community-Centric Research And Practice In Library And Information Science, Vanessa Kitzie, Jocelyn Pettigrew, Travis L. Wagner, Nick Vera

Faculty Publications

The World Café (TWC) methodology is a form of action research that develops collective knowledge among individuals and communities to address shared problems. TWC can complement LIS research and practice that is increasingly participatory and community centric. The potentials and pitfalls for TWC are illustrated by ongoing research examining public library service to LGBTQIA+ communities for health information. The authors used TWC in a community forum between LGBTQIA+ community leaders and librarians/paraprofessionals in [name removed for blind review]. Per TWC conventions, participants engaged in day-long rotating café-style table conversations that encouraged new ideas and collective dialog. Discussion centered on two …

It Starts At Home: Infusing Radical Empathy Into Graduate Education, Nicole A. Cooke, Kellee E. Warren, Molly Brown, Athena Jackson

Faculty Publications

This interview features a conversation between a library and information science educator (Cooke) and three archival and special collections professionals with varying levels of experience in the field (Warren, Brown, and Jackson). Among the goals of this frank conversation is to highlight the lived experiences of practicing archivists and educators and discuss why it is becoming increasingly important to talk about empathy, diversity, equity, and inclusion in greater context. As part of that context, we must discuss the need to continuously infuse these values into graduate education, professional development, research, writing, and peer mentoring. Espousing and implementing an ethics of …

Struggling To Breathe: Covid-19, Protest, And The Lis Response, Amelia N. Gibson, Renate Chancellor, Nicole A. Cooke, Sarah Park Dahlen, Beth Patin, Yasmeen Shorish

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this article is to provide a follow up to “Libraries on the Frontlines: Neutrality and Social Justice,” which was published in 2017. It addresses institutional responses to protests and uprising in the spring and summer of 2020 after the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd—all of which occurred in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The article expands the previous call for libraries to take a stand for Black Lives. We describe the events of 2020 (a global pandemic, multiple murders of unarmed Black people, and the consequent global protests) and responses from …

“Library And Information Science” Literature In Web Of Science: What A Decade Tells Us About Scholarly Collaboration In The Field (2007-2016), Kim M. Thompson, Kasey Garrison, Carolina Santelices-Werchez, Paulina Arellano-Rojas, Danilo Reyes-Lillo

Faculty Publications

Ensuring access to published research is increasingly important for demonstrating research impact, supporting wide readership, creating interest in collaboration, and making way for funding opportunities. This article provides a bibliometric analysis of publications from 2007-2016 in the Web of Science (WOS) database to update understanding of recent international library science research as a means of discussing research impact and scientific collaboration. The methodology is a descriptive analysis of publications retrieved from the WOS database using keywords “library science” and WOS-generated subject descriptor “Information Science & Library Science.” Analysis focused on descriptive data related to our research questions including representation of …

Inclusive Considerations For Optimal Online Learning In Times Of Disasters And Crises, Kim M. Thompson, Clayton A. Copeland

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

“In The Beginning, It Was Little Whispers...Now, We’Re Almost A Roar”: Conceptualizing A Model For Community And Self In Lgbtq+ Health Information Practices, Vanessa Kitzie, Travis L. Wagner, Alexander N. Vera

Faculty Publications

Although LGBTQ+ populations experience significant health challenges, little research exists that investigates their health from an informational perspective. Our study addresses this gap by exploring the health information practices of LGBTQ+ communities in South Carolina, focusing on how sociocultural context shapes these practices. Thirty semi-structured interviews with South Carolina LGBTQ+ community leaders analyzed using open qualitative coding informed the development of a conceptual framework describing their information practices. Findings show that participants engaged in two broad types of practices – protective and defensive – as responses to risks and barriers experienced, which are in turn produced by social and structural …

“People Are Reading Your Work,": Scholarly Identity And Social Networking Sites, Marie L. Radford, Vanessa Kitzie, Stephanie Mikitish, Diana Floegel, Gary P. Radford, Lynn Silipigni Connaway

Faculty Publications

Scholarly identity refers to endeavors by scholars to promote their reputation, work, and networks using online platforms such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and Twitter. This exploratory research investigates benefits and drawbacks of Scholarly Identity efforts and avenues for potential library support. Data from 30 semi-structured phone interviews with faculty, doctoral students, and academic librarians were qualitatively analyzed using the constant comparisons method (Charmaz, 2014) and Goffman’s (1959, 1967) theoretical concept of impression management. Results reveal that use of online platforms enables academics to connect with others and disseminate their research. Scholarly Identity platforms have benefits, opportunities, and offer possibilities for developing …

Twitter And Research: A Systematic Literature Review Through Text Mining, Amir Karami, Morgan Lundy, Frank Webb, Yogesh K. Dwivedi

Faculty Publications

Researchers have collected Twitter data to study a wide range of topics. This growing body of literature, however, has not yet been reviewed systematically to synthesize Twitter-related papers. The existing literature review papers have been limited by constraints of traditional methods to manually select and analyze samples of topically related papers. The goals of this retrospective study are to identify dominant topics of Twitter-based research, summarize the temporal trend of topics, and interpret the evolution of topics withing the last ten years. This study systematically mines a large number of Twitter-based studies to characterize the relevant literature by an efficient …

Rethinking Curation In School Libraries And School Library Education: Critical, Conceptual, Collaborative, Jenna Spiering, Kate Lechtenberg

Faculty Publications

School library educators often assign a curation assignment to preservice school librarians in the university classroom. However, these projects emphasize a product created by librarians for teachers and learners, rather than the collaborative and critical process that the National School Library Standards suggest. In this paper, we draw on data from a qualitative inquiry of several courses for preservice school librarians, looking at both curation assignment descriptions and the final products. Through a systematic content analysis of these projects, we have found that these assignments often fall short in asking our learners to critically consider conceptual connections and diverse perspectives. …

Governed By Circumstances As They May Arise: A Short Reflection On The Knowledge School And Its Context, Jennifer Weil Arns

Faculty Publications

As technologies have moved forward and cultural assumptions have changed, we find ourselves at a moment of opportunity. Our sense of the word library is drawn from a rich array of service traditions and a value proposition based on the belief that libraries help those who use them advance in life, engage with others in their communities, and learn more about themselves and the world around them. The Knowledge School concept builds on this assumption and expands it with a broader challenge – a commitment to creating public value, changing communities, and educating those who feel a personal commitment to …