Preliminary Conference Agenda

Mental healthcare access continues to be a significant challenge in the United States, with marked disparities across socioeconomic divides. As technology and algorithms increasingly play pivotal roles in healthcare access, understanding unique symptom manifestations in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities is crucial. In this context, we embarked on a comprehensive analysis of mental health search patterns in Alabama counties, leveraging Google search data. Distinct trends emerged between socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged areas. The advantaged regions predominantly showed clinically specific searches, suggesting a higher degree of mental health literacy or more considerable access to healthcare professionals. Residents in disadvantaged areas primarily utilized generalized mental health symptom terms, such as anxiety and depression, hinting at a potential awareness or resource gap. A similar pattern was evident for somatic symptoms, with the disadvantaged showing a preference towards generalized and pain-related terms. This trend could signify disparities in access to specialized care or inappropriate clinical treatments, raising concerns like potential opioid misuse. Additionally, counties with higher population density had more mental health-related searches, while predominantly African-American counties showed fewer, suggesting potential cultural or linguistic barriers. Our findings emphasize the potential of refining search engines to cater to diverse user needs and the importance of tailored health campaigns for marginalized communities. However, potential ethical challenges, such as unintentional exacerbation of existing biases, must consistently be recognized. Future research will elevate this analysis to a national scope, considering the effects of significant global occurrences, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, on search behaviors.

Moretti’s “distant reading” is regarded as a pioneer and an exemplar of computational literary studies. “Distant reading” puts forward a strict boundary between hermeneutics and quantitative analysis. The relationship between the two and the nature of quantitative analysis in literary studies are key issues in the theory of computational literary studies. This paper analyzes the claims and issues behind Moretti’s dichotomy, and introduces Bourdieu’s field theory perspective, pointing out that the nature of quanti-tative analysis must be understood in relation to the larger disciplinary discursive practices in which it is embedded.

Across the world, grassroots community organisations contribute to local socioeconomic development and community empowerment. Most of these grassroots community organisations initially start as informal groups autonomously formed by like-minded members of the community or shaped due to the influence of external agencies like large non-government organisations in the development sector. Different factors, notably the vision of leaders, desire for sustaining long-term operations, and financial gains, often influence these entities to embrace the formal shape of an organisation. Owing to this transition from informality to formality, grassroots community organisations also have to change their approach to recordkeeping practices from reactive to proactive ones. Although the recordkeeping literature has a strong focus on organisational practices, the literature hardly looked at the specific case of grassroots community organisations. The literature did not investigate the influencing factors that reshape the recordkeeping practices of grassroots community organisations. In this regard, the push-pull-mooring theory adopted initially by scholars in migration studies has the potential to be applied to grassroots community organisations’ recordkeeping practices to explain the influencing factors. Considering this, we aim to explore the potential application of the push-pull-mooring theory in the context of the transitional recordkeeping practices of grassroots community organisations.

The Information Action Briefs (IAB) introduced in this paper use the format of a policy brief and serve as a resource and action guide to develop and create transformational actions using information to advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The IAB is designed to inspire and mobilize library and information science (LIS) professionals (researchers, educators, scholars, students, practitioners, and policymakers) to act locally or globally, and personally or collectively in applying information-related work to promote community well-being and socioeconomic sustainability. LIS professionals are called to research, create, and use an IAB to advance the SDGs, by addressing the general aspects of a particular SDG as well as focusing on more specific topics at a granular level. LIS educators can use the IAB as a teaching tool, assigning the IAB for students to conduct research, propose solutions and write about sustainable development. In this manner, we hope readers will be similarly inspired as the authors to use the IABs in a variety of ways to conduct their research and practice, and document their work while integrating the SDGs towards greater relevance and impact of their efforts in information work environments and beyond.