Preliminary Conference Agenda

This study investigates what information that was spread the most on Twitter regarding #BlackLivesMatter during the Black History Month of February 2022. We distinguished political affiliation through a series of interpretations of network structure and content. In doing so, we observed different political groups offering unique curated information flows on Twitter. Using qualitative coding, our findings confirmed that opinion leaders affiliated with different political groups or movements tend to curate different kinds of messages. Our findings also show that opinion leaders on the political left discuss #BlackLivesMatter in a clear supportive way towards the movement, while the ones on the political right describe the movement in a more provocative way. Further, we observed that opinion leaders in the political right group have more dense connections than the political left group. This work contributes to the bodies of literature using the theory of curated logics, the influence of opinion leaders, viral information, and the empirical work around #BlackLivesMatter on Twitter.

The popularity of social media has made meme culture more popular than ever. As a result, memes have become a digital language that extends beyond digital culture within information societies. Unfortunately, recent studies have not examined diverse factors of meme communication in interactive contexts. This study investigates how memes are used for interactive forum-based communication as cybersecurity groups interact in cyberspace. More specifically, we examine synchronous meme communication between hackers and cyber defender groups from the 2022 Southeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Qualification Competition. We adopt the theoretical lens of information domains to examine interactive meme communication scripts in fo-rum-based interactions. Collective identity and characteristics representing each information society tend to appear in synchronous meme communication between these two groups. This study also identifies unique information representation systems endemic to cyber security society. Moreover, this study interestingly finds that memes describing individual participants’ emotions and attitudes are actively used in synchronous communication. These memes reflect individuals’ emotions, and also describe the attitudes of the participants such as looking down at the opposite team. This phenomenon has rarely been observed in previous studies about meme communication in asynchronous situations.

In this article perspectives are offered by an instructor, author, and researcher involved in the open textbook Humans R Social Media and resulting OEC (Open Educational Collection) developed at a large southwestern university. The iVoices OEC is described as the unplanned fruit of teaching in connection with Open Educational Practices. OECs in general are discussed as logical outcomes of pedagogical theories including open pedagogy in general, and the theories of Funds of Knowledge and Universal Design for Learning as well as user privacy protection strategies in particular. Lessons learned are offered as recommendations for planning future OEPs and OECs including changes in memoranda language, budgeting for collection management assistance, and clearer partnerships with institutional repositories. This case study of an open textbook and accompanying OEC is offered to deepen understanding of open pedagogy in praxis.

Data science skills are critical for current and future generations of researchers, information professionals, policymakers and citizens. Until the development of these skills is embedded in the curricula of schools or in undergraduate coursework, there is an opportunity to teach the skills as a literacy skillset within an Information Science curriculum. The University of Pretoria’s Information Science Department has, in collaboration with partners, adopted a foundation-level curriculum developed by the CODATA-RDA Data Science School to facilitate a learning opportunity for Masters, PhD and post-Doc learners in South Africa. Participants from other emerging economies are also considered and provided they adhere to the qualifying criteria, are admitted to the data science school. After presenting this curriculum for three years, it is essential to re-evaluate the skills taught within this curriculum to ensure that the training still reflects the required multi-disciplinary knowledge and competencies that are needed by 4IR-age scholars.

This workshop brings together researchers working on disinformation, conspiracy theories and counter-establishment research to share methods, methodologies and theoretical frameworks. Despite the apparent “newness” of these issues, particularly in the wake of the 2016 election and the resurgence of mass white nationalism, many of the foundational concerns and questions involved in this research have deep intellectual lineages in the library and information science (LIS) field. Given this year’s theme which explicitly calls attention to “normality,” we intend to interrogate the normative assumptions embedded in current approaches to these areas of research and hope to highlight the complexity, relationality and historicity of conspiracism. The goal of this workshop is to foster intellectual community, share resources and address the state of research around counter-establishment research and conspiracy.

This panel focuses on an emerging theme in information research: data literacy. As the growth of big data transforms many aspects of daily life, not every citizen is ready to understand the value of the openly available data and read, work with, and utilize it. This raises the question: How can organizations and individuals innovate to address digital exclusion and enable individuals to use the resources that are available to participate in a connected information environment? This interactive panel aims to describe and discuss creative and experimental approaches to address data literacy practices in different contexts, theoretical models, and philosophical arguments. We address this from a variety of perspectives, including community college students’ data literacy needs, research data management in libraries, data literacy for Hispanic students in high schools, and inclusive data literacy curriculum design.

This workshop will explore key issues and challenges in digital inclusion research, drawing on the organizers’ experiences of researching the field during the COVID-19 pandemic. The workshop will have a particular focus on engaging participants from priority groups in digital inclusion research, and on longitudinal research. The workshop will be structured around interactive group activities including a game and group brainstorming, the results of which will be written up as a discussion paper made available open access online. By engaging workshop participants in guided discussion and reflection on current topics and concerns facing digital inclusion researchers, the organizers aim to grow a community of practice within the broader iSchools organization to share knowledge and understanding of effective practice in digital inclusion research.

Misinformation is a critical problem in our society as it undermines civic discourse and leads to distrust in social institutions and people. As an attempt to help combat misinformation and increase awareness of the topic through play-based approaches, researchers at the University of Washington Information School have designed multiple escape rooms as an experiential format for building (mis)information literacy. In this workshop, we will play one of the escape rooms titled “The Euphorigen investigation.” This will be followed by a discussion on effective strategies for building resilience to misinformation, opportunities and challenges of games or other play-based approaches, and implications for the concepts and principles of information literacy.

This panel embraces the conference theme: Normality, Virtuality, Physicality, Inclusivity to focus on researching virtual and physical phenomena in virtual environments and contexts, and featuring research with participants from underrepresented groups, including LQBTQIA+ communities. Expert researchers will address their involvement in ongoing projects, as they shifted from physical to virtual methods of data collection (and sometimes shifted back or blended approaches) and data verification during the pandemic and its longtail. Themes addressed include: research benefits and pitfalls presented by the pandemic including accessibility and inclusivity, lessons learned, and projections regarding the “next normal.” They will touch upon practical concerns posed by social distancing, ethical questions heightened in online data collection, and coping with the pandemic’s effect on current and future research. Following the panel, participants will engage in “solution room” groups to share problems encountered within virtual research situations and brainstorm to create solutions, concluding with a summary debrief.

Citizen scientists make valuable contributions to science but need to learn about the data they are working with to be able to perform more advanced tasks. We present a set of design principles for identifying the kinds of background knowledge that are important to support learning at different stages of engagement, drawn from a study of how free/libre open source software developers are guided to create and use documents. Specifically, we suggest that newcomers require help understanding the purpose, form and content of the documents they engage with, while more advanced developers add understanding of information provenance and the boundaries, relevant participants and work processes. We apply those principles in two separate but related studies. In study 1, we analyze the background knowledge presented to volunteers in the Gravity Spy citizen-science project, mapping the resources to the framework and identifying kinds of knowledge that were not initially provided. In study 2, we use the principles proactively to develop design suggestions for Gravity Spy 2.0, which will involve volunteers in analyzing more diverse sources of data. This new project extends the application of the principles by seeking to use them to support understanding of the relationships between documents, not just the documents individually. We conclude by discussing future work, including a planned evaluation of Gravity Spy 2.0 that will provide a further test of the design principles.

Memory organisations need to constantly address the adoption of digital technology to remain relevant in light of recent innovations that constitute the so-called fourth technological revolution. This study aims to expand the understanding of the current adoption of Artificial Intelligence for digital preservation tasks by investigating it through the lenses of the Diffusion of Innovations theory in relation to disruptive innovations. The analysis takes the form of an exploratory qualitative inquiry, performed on the transcripts of four focus groups presenting opinions on specific applications of Artificial Intelligence systems, mostly related to Computer Vision, expressed by professionals engaged in digital preservation. The study results indicate that there is strong interest in adopting these innovations. However, further research and the development of a dialogue among the involved communities of practice are necessary to determine the implications and potential outcomes of this technological advancement in the context of digital preservation.

A participatory geographic information system (GIS) is a process through which disadvantaged groups can access geospatial information technologies and techniques to enhance their capacity to generate, manage, analyze, and communicate different spatial information. Environmental information regarding climate change impacts, natural disasters, access to natural resources, and ecological degradation are significant for nature-dependent disadvantaged groups in developing climate-vulnerable countries, making participatory GIS relevant. These groups can also use such information to claim environmental justice at local, national, and global levels since their marginalization is due to unequal exploitation of ecological resources by more powerful groups. The fisherfolk community in Bangladesh is a nature-dependent disadvantaged, unorganized working group where participatory GIS could be relevant to build an environmental information ecosystem for them to claim environmental justice. However, since fisherfolks lack participation in the policymaking process due to a lack of information, motivation, organization, and digital inclusion impacted by their socio-economic status, participatory GIS may not work without understanding the enabling socio-economic factors. Therefore, this short research paper aims to set a research agenda for participatory action research by exploring the potential of a participatory geographic information system since academic literature has not adequately focused on this issue.

While heuristics are useful resources for designing the web’s information architecture (IA) from scratch today, IA practitioners occasionally receive requests to redesign established products, and guidelines are also needed to address such “redesign” requests. Past studies on IA design tend to focus on prototyping and how iterations contribute to final products, but such iterations have more to do with how users interact with the prototype than with its IA per se. This commentary paper reports a workflow for re-designing and optimizing two websites’ information architecture (IA). Based on two case studies, we explored a redesigned workflow of IA, which contains five stages: 1) screening, 2) synergizing, 3) synchronizing, 4) IA development 5) evaluation & execution. Compared to designing an IA from scratch, a team who redesigns an IA may communicate with more stakeholders and consider internal politics’ impact. Our proposed IA redesign workflow helps web designers allocate their resources and prioritize their work when given rede-sign tasks.

The fourth dimension of the Records Continuum Model, pluralize, is often characterized as the link to understanding records’ function in the societal and collective memory. Recently, Frings-Hessami (2021) presented the con-cept of societal embeddedness as an enhanced understanding of the fourth dimension. The concept is proposed to be used as a tool to interpret and ana-lyse pluralization processes, and Frings-Hessami argues that pluralization does not just involve sharing in the future—but also societal expectations in both records and recordkeeping. The purpose of this paper is, from a user perspective, to test the concept of societal embeddedness as an analytical tool in a specific recordkeeping story, and to reflect on the societal contexts of records to enhance sustainable recordkeeping of digital information. The paper is based on a research project in the context of the Swedish private sec-tor and digital recordkeeping of company bankruptcies. The results strongly suggest that the concept of societal embeddedness can contribute to an en-hanced understanding to why records are created, used, and consequently, understanding user need. Overall, analyses show that the fourth dimension affects all other dimensions and societal embeddedness can be used as a tool to understand the actions taking place in them.

Journal classification systems use a variety of (partially) overlapping and non-exhaustive subject categories which results in many journals being classified into more than a single subject category. Given a subject category, respective journals are often ranked based on a common metric such as the Journal Impact Factor or SCImago Journal Rank. However, given a specific journal, it might be ranked very differently across its associated subject categories.

In this study, we set to explore the possible association between the number of categories a journal is classified to and its associated rankings using the two most widely used indexing systems - Web Of Science and Scopus.

Using known distance measures, our results show that a higher number of classified categories per journal is associated with an increased range and variance of the associated rankings within them. Findings and possible implications are discussed.

Privacy is a complicated and extensively discussed topic in human-computer interaction (HCI) research and practice. Helen Nissenbaum’s con-textual integrity (CI) theory, which examines privacy by the integrity of en-trenched information collection and flows in a particular context, has been a popular theoretical lens to consider privacy in HCI. Many HCI scholars have also advocated for and applied the CI theory to investigate privacy is-sues in various contexts. However, this article critiques using the CI theory when its original positions and limitations about context, norms, and phys-ical privacy are somewhat dismissed in HCI research. Finally, this article proposes that privacy contains specific universal and fundamental values that are not necessarily context-dependent.

What makes a technology privacy-enhancing? In this study, we construct an explanation grounded in the technologies and practices that people report using to enhance their privacy. We conducted an online survey of privacy experts (i.e., privacy researchers and professionals who attend to privacy conferences and communication channels) and laypersons that catalogs the technologies they identify as privacy enhancing and the various privacy strategies they employ. The analysis of 123 survey responses compares not only self-reported tool use but also differences in how privacy experts and laypersons explain their privacy practices and tools use. Differences between the two samples show that privacy experts and laypersons have different styles of reasoning when considering PETs: Experts think of PETs as technologies whose primary function is enhancing privacy, whereas laypersons conceptualize privacy enhancement as a supplemental function incorporated into other technologies. The paper concludes with a discussion about potential explanations for these differences, as well as questions they raise about how technologies can best facilitate communication and collaboration while enhancing privacy.

Cross-session search (XSS) describes situations in which users search for information related to the same task across multiple sessions. While there has been research on XSS, little attention has been paid to users’ motivations for searching multiple sessions in real-life contexts. We conducted a diary study to investigate the reasons that lead people to search across multiple sessions for their own tasks. We applied Lin and Belkin’s [24] MISE theoretical model as a coding framework to analyze users’ open-ended responses about their XSS reasons. We open-coded reasons that the MISE model did not cover. Our findings identified a subset of session resuming reasons in the MISE model (i.e., spawning, transmuting, unanswered-incomplete, cultivated-updated, and anticipated) as the main reasons that caused people to start a search session in our participants’ real-world searches. We also found six additional session resuming reasons rarely discussed in the context of XSS: exploring more topic aspects, finding inspiration and examples, reviewing the information found earlier, monitoring task progress, completing a search following a scheduled plan, and feeling in the mood/having the energy to search. Our results contextualize and enrich the MISE session resuming reasons by examining them in real-world examples. Our results also illustrate that users’ XSS motivations are multifaceted. These findings have implications for developing assisting tools to support XSS and help design different types of search sessions to study XSS behavior.

Provenance is the story of objects: how they have come to be, what they could have been, what they will be. This paper explores the temporal complexity of provenance and suggests the need for the concept of subjunctive provenance. Using the example of building an IKEA LACK table, the authors explore the established concepts of retrospective and prospective provenance to highlight gaps and the potential for subjunctive provenance.

Metadata education is evolving in the Arabian Gulf region. To ensure the effective instruction and skill-building, empirical data is needed on the outcomes of these early metadata instruction efforts. This paper is the first one to address this need and provide such data from one of the countries in the region. It reports results of the examination of metadata records for Arabic-language eBooks. The records were created by novice metadata creators as part of the undergraduate coursework at a Kuwaiti university in one of the classroom assignments over three semesters. Analysis focused on two important criteria of metadata quality: accuracy and completeness. The results are presented in-context, after introducing the metadata teaching practices at this undergraduate program, and the major Dublin Core skill-building assignment. Discussion of results is followed by discussion of future research.

This exploratory study is the first one that examined student-created metadata for physical non-text resources. We applied in-depth qualitative and quantitative content analysis to the Dublin Core (DCTERMS) metadata created by the graduate students in two sections of an introductory digital library metadata course. The analysis of bibliographic records that represent paintings identified record fields in which novice metadata creators tend to make mistakes. Examples of the most common kinds of metadata errors for each quality criterion (accuracy, complete-ness, and consistency) are discussed and compared with results of previous relevant research. Finding of comparative analysis for the asynchronous course section and the section with synchronous class meetings are also presented. Implications are discussed, along with future directions for research.