Conference Agenda (All times are shown in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) unless otherwise noted)

Translational research converts research knowledge into practical wisdom for a community (What is Translational Research, n.d.). Storytelling for translational research means that the researcher knows the audience; crafts a narrative; sticks to the plot; and imparts wisdom in a meaningful way – all elements of a good story from a good storyteller. In this hybrid panel and workshop, led by members of the ASIS&T Research Engagement Committee, our successful researchers/storytellers will illustrate how a good translational research impact story is structured. Then, our storytelling experts will help participants craft their own research narratives to put translational research storytelling into practice for their own research stories. Dr. Kate McDowell, panelist and storytelling expert, teaches both storytelling and data storytelling courses, and is the 2022 recipient of the ASIS&T Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award. She states: “When research successfully translates into legislative or policy changes, it always comes down to a shared narrative experience. The story emerges in the dynamic interaction between the teller and the audience.” The aim of this session is to create confident storytellers. Hosted by the Research and Engagement Committee.

Information literacy research is growing in importance but has been critiqued for remaining focused on practical topics of interest and attainment approaches to practice. Prior attempts to conceptualise information literacy have further often taken place without a comprehensive understanding of the ontological or epistemological foundations of theoretical work. The aim of this panel is to critically examine theory development and use within information literacy research through discussing the ways in which critical, sociomaterial and discursive theoretical approaches both enable and constrain understandings of information literacy, including how it happens and how it shapes social life. Providing a space to discuss and reflect on the impact of theory on information literacy scholarship, this panel creates a focal point for researchers, practitioners and students interested in the construction and advancement of conceptually rich information literacy research and practice.

The cross-domain knowledge diffusion from science to policy is a prevalent phenomenon that demands academic attention. To investigate the characteristics of cross-domain knowledge diffusion from science to policy, this study suggests using the citation of policies to scientific articles as a basis for quantifying the diffusion strength, breadth, and speed. The study reveals that the strength and breadth of cross-domain knowledge diffusion from scientific papers to policies conform to a power-law distribution, while the speed follows a logarithmic normal distribution. Moreover, the papers with the highest diffusion strength, breadth, and fastest diffusion speed are predominantly from world-renowned universities, scholars, and top journals. The papers with the highest diffusion strength and breadth are mostly from social sciences, especially economics, those with the fastest diffusion speed are mainly from medical and life sciences, followed by social sciences. The findings indicate that cross-domain knowledge diffusion from science to policy follows the Matthew effect, whereby individuals or institutions with high academic achievements are more likely to achieve successful cross-domain knowledge diffusion. Furthermore, papers in the field of economics tend to have the higher cross-domain knowledge diffusion strength and breadth, while those in medical and life sciences have the faster cross-domain knowledge diffusion speed.

The Triple Helix interactions among different institutions have become increasingly important for science and technology development. In this study, we explore the synergic effect of the Triple Helix relationships of universities, industries, and governments in the field of climate change from the perspectives of vertical evolution and horizontal comparison. T indicators are utilized to measure the bilateral and trilateral institutional information transfer quantity based on the Web of Science core collection database from 2001 to 2021. The results indicated that the UIG collaborative innovation system of climate change is basically formed, but the synergic effect has been continuously eroded in recent years. In addition, we focus on a more detailed comparison among different topics and countries. Specifically, the bilateral and trilateral synergetic effects in the United States outperform that of other countries.

While major funding agencies are striving for diversity and fairness, the mechanisms behind funding success have yet to be fully elucidated. Existing studies reveal valuable evidences about the effect of the applicant's individual attributes, e.g., gender and age, on the funding success. However, the relationship between funding success and academic activities, e.g., collaborators’ characteristics, remains underexplored. This work collects massive scholarly data from open academic graphs and public data about National Institutes of Health awards to investigate the effect of various academic graph-based factors on the “K to R” success. Leveraging a heterogeneous graph model for predicting the “K to R” success, we regard the gain in the model performance of a factor as a proxy variable for the magnitude of its effect on the “K to R” success. Our preliminary results suggest that the quality and publishing year of an applicant’s citations are strongly correlated with the outcome. Meanwhile, the applicants’ social connections, e.g., their collaborators, can also contribute to the outcome.

This article investigates the lengths of time that publications with different numbers of policy document mentions take to receive their first mention (the beginning stage), and then compares the lengths of time to receive two or more mentions after receiving the first mention (the accumulative stage) based on complete policy document dataset from Altmetric database. We find that in the beginning stage, that is, from zero to one mention, high- and medium-, mentioned papers exhibit obviously different lengths of time compared with low-mentioned papers. Moreover, in the accumulative stage, that is, from one to N citations, highly mentioned papers begin to receive mentions much more rapidly than medium- and low-mentioned papers. Moreover, as N increases, the difference in receiving new mentions among high-, medium-, and low-mentioned publications increases quite significantly.

There is limited systematic research on understanding the trends of STEM education in libraries. While reviews of STEM education from various funding agencies exist, these reviews encompass STEM education across formal and informal settings, which may not provide specific implications that centers around libraries. This paper aims to examine the trend of collaboration among libraries and other collaborating organizations involved in STEM education that are funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Through content analysis and geocode analysis of 128 projects that are funded by IMLS in 2012–2022, this study shows the diverse engagement of different types of informal learning institutions in STEM education over time. Findings also demonstrate that while few informal learning institutions represented the leading and collaborating organizations in IMLS STEM education in the beginning, leading and collaborating organizations diversified with a higher level of collaboration.

Records play an important role in supporting business activities and in ensuring accountability in all types of organisations. However, recordkeeping research has mostly focused on the government sector and on large organisations. Little attention has been paid to small organisations which have limited resources to create and manage the records that they are required to produce and the records that could support their engagement in diversified activities. In this paper, we report the findings from 16 focus group discussions with community-based organisations in Bangladesh which are in the process of transitioning from informal to registered organisations and, in order to do so, must formalise their recordkeeping practices. We discuss the recordkeeping needs and capabilities of these organisations and the recordkeeping problems that they are experiencing. We argue that it is important to support the development of a recordkeeping culture as part of capacity-building in these organisations so that they can function effectively and be sustainable.

This paper presents how Brazilian judiciary organizations are advancing towards a preserved digital environment, and how this process is improving the country’s legal system. First, it analyzed the legal norms published by some of the most relevant Brazilian institutions and how these norms fostered the major courts to immediately start projects related to digital preservation. Second, the major challenges faced by these organizations while fulfilling the legal requirements were listed, and a general strategy to attend to them was defined. Subsequently, a model was established to fulfill these requirements. The model was structured to consider the possibilities of future expansion. As the main result of this research, a model capable of setting archival digital preservation projects was designed for the first time, enabling their consequent application by judiciary institutions in Brazil.

This paper reports on an exploratory analysis of the social media policies of municipal governments in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. With a strong Public Records law and language clearly indicating that social media posts are government records, Massachusetts provides a framing for research into municipal policy on social media use, retention, preservation, and access. Of the 351 municipalities in the Commonwealth, just 87 have publicly accessible Social Media policies. These policies indicate that municipal governments take their responsibilities around social media records management seriously, they do not offer many specifics around how they will engage directly with posts from privately-owned social media platforms. Implications of these findings suggest that the digital preservation community must continue to develop tools and methods to preserve social media records the support broader efforts around government transparency and accountability, as well as advocate for platforms to include features to support responsible public sector social media use.

Archives serve as repositories for items of enduring value. Archivists use a process called appraisal to evaluate the value of these items. While various theories and methods have been developed to guide the appraisal and many issues have been identified, little is known about how archivists conduct appraisals or what efforts they undertake to mitigate these issues. As such, this exploratory and qualitative study aims to examine the appraisal practices of archivists in university special collections, the role of the collection policy, and how these policies deal with problematic aspects of appraisal. This study found that university special archivists view appraisal as a complex but systematic process and implement the collection policy’s principles and methodologies into their appraisal practices. Moreover, this study revealed that archivists try to establish and maintain effective relationships with donors and communities throughout the entire appraisal process.

This paper examines social science and humanity theories that have been applied to studies dealing with misinformation. We identified 273 articles published from 2012 to 2023 from Web of Science, Scopus, and ScienceDirect. These articles are empirical studies that have applied one or more social science or humanity theories. Applying content analysis approach, we identified 124 theories that authors have used in their studies. These theories belong to different disciplines or fields, such as political science, psychology, communication, sociology, and economics. We discuss the top 11 theories and how they have been used to understand misinformation and its impacts. This study provides insights into understanding current misinformation studies and rich resources for information evaluation and information literacy education.

False information, also known as misinformation or disinformation, has long been a serious concern in health information behavior research. The phenomenon of false information in health information behavior is complex and multifaceted, and it involves a range of factors related to the production, dissemination, and consumption of health information. This paper aims to understand through which channels people receive false health information and which information behavior patterns exist towards this kind of information. Based on 21 qualitative semi-structured interviews with interactive and visual participative elements, five patterns of health information behavior towards the receivement of false health information were identified. Further, a strong relationship between these patterns, the context in which false health information was encountered, and the information source was observed. Additionally, two specific information behavior patterns (information avoidance and intentional non-information behavior) as well as the urgency and impact of false information on the health of individuals and society, were identified as potential drivers for the dissemination of false health information.

Focusing on information services to marginalized urban communities in the United States between 1940 and 1975, this paper argues that African American librarians played foundational roles in early Community-Based Librarianship (CBL) initiatives. In doing so, Black librarians skillfully and resourcefully fought information poverty, pushed for social and political equality, and promoted their communities’ well-being through proactive information provision. By fighting the systemic racism throttling inner-city Black communities, moreover, their labors constituted a vital contribution to the post-World War II United States civil rights movement. As a result, theirs was a specifically Black CBL (BCBL). This heretofore hidden history offers fruitful lessons for current library and information science practice. It therefore aligns with the annual meeting theme, “Translating Information Research into Practice, Policy, and Action,” particularly in its emphasis on “creating effective models of information provision," "creating empathetic information services," and "understanding the power of information to develop human happiness, equality, and wellbeing.”

Mass media and big data constitute powerful information tools that fuel extremist, populist messaging. Demagogues turn to mass media and social networks to convey polarizing views, and governments increasingly rely on data and artificial intelligence to manage immigration. The speakers will describe how three global, deep-seated, and historic societal ills—anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and misinformation— converge to typecast, vilify, and pathologize Black diasporic immigrants. The speakers will also share examples of anti-Black, anti-immigrant, and misinformed policymaking, rhetoric, and cultural norms within the United Kingdom and the United States.

This paper brings concepts from social practice theory into conversation with the question of how information practices relate to one another. In doing so, this paper speaks to the persistent challenge of articulating interconnections among information practices. To illustrate these interconnections, the paper presents the concept of embodied mutual constitution, which results from a recent empirical study of everyday information practices. This concept holds potential as a next step in identifying how multiple co-existing information practices can be explored. By contributing in this way to the advancement of information practices theory, this paper supports our expanding understanding of the nature and role of information in diverse life experiences.

This short paper reflects on previous personal information management (PIM) research using the theme of “invisible PIM.” Three scholars gathered to reflect on how this theme is relevant to their research. After comparing reflections, the following threads of invisibility are highlighted as holding potential for future exploration: the role that PIM can play in reinforcing invisibility, the concept of maintaining information over time as being more likely to be labeled as invisible labor, and a focus on non-work experiences of sample populations. This work in progress concludes with suggestions of how reflecting on themes versus following PIM activities (a departure from previous practices for these researchers) was a useful activity to think about a future PIM research agenda.

While all individuals deal with increasingly large amounts of digital information in their everyday lives and professionally, prior works suggest visual artists have unique information management practices and challenges. This study therefore examined the personal information management (PIM) practices and challenges of six practising visual artists using guided tours and short interviews. It was found that the visual artists had some unique practices connected to their strong emphasis on serendipity, inspiration, and visual dimensions of information. Like non-artists, the participants faced challenges across all phases of PIM, chiefly an excess of information and fragmented organisation, and they found it especially hard to assess how personal and valuable their information could be. After characterising this rarely discussed PIM demographic, we draw on the findings to provide concrete recommendations for artists doing PIM, for information and cultural heritage institutions, and for designers of PIM software.

This study represents the initial phase of a broader investigation into the significance of information seeking and personal information management (PIM) practices during life transitions. It focuses on early-career researchers who experience multiple academic transitions and aims to identify the information practices they use and their role in promoting successful life transitions. To achieve this goal, in-depth semi-structured interviews were held with 15 early-career researchers who recently completed their PhDs or graduated. Findings suggest that the participants relied on iterative cycles of various information seeking and validation practices to transition between positions and academic institutions, which improved their knowledge about the transition and reduced uncertainty. Once a network of transition-related information was established, participants began utilizing PIM practices to organize their information and plan for the transition, thereby enhancing their sense of control over their information and maintaining it over the long term in an unstable environment. The study underscores the importance of information practices during life transitions and recommends interventions such as institutional support and information skills training programs to assist early-career researchers in challenging transitions. The subsequent study will build upon these findings to further examine the role of information behavior in facilitating life transitions.

Incidental human-robot encounters are becoming more common as robotic technologies proliferate, but there is little scientific understanding of human experience and reactions during these encounters. To contribute towards addressing this gap, this study applies Grounded Theory methodologies to study human reactions in Human-Robot Encounters with an autonomous quadruped robot. Based upon observation and interviews, we find that participants’ reactions to the robot can be explained by their attitudes of familiarity, certainty, and confidence during their encounter and by their understanding of the robot’s capabilities and role. Participants differed in how and whether they utilized opportunities to resolve their unfamiliarity, uncertainty, or lack of confidence, shedding light on the dynamics and experiential characteristics of Human-Robot Encounters. We provide an emerging theory that can be used to unravel the complexity of the field as well as assist hypothesis generation in future research in designing and deploying mobile autonomous service robots.

Digital content management systems have enabled cultural heritage institutions and humanities researchers to create interactive, public-facing, and open-access scholarly work, including digital libraries, databases, archives, manuscripts, and collections. Exploratory tools have become a widely deployed feature of such digital projects that support in-depth, creative interaction with digital materials. However, producing and managing a digital project with such tools can be complex, time-consuming, and expensive, requiring significant financial investment, institutional support, and human capital. This has led to a critical need to evaluate the effectiveness of such embedded exploratory infrastructures across different stages of digital projects. This 90-minute panel discussion aims to explore the questions of how to evaluate the use and effect of such exploratory infrastructures, from diverse perspectives of researchers, developers, and downstream users. The panelists will draw from case studies to address questions such as: (1) the perceived value and impact of embedded exploratory tools, (2) the involvement of communities and stakeholders in the evaluation process, and when to conduct such evaluations, (3) the methods and approaches to evaluation, and (4) the interpretation of evaluation outcomes. The discussion will also delve into the challenges and opportunities associated with evaluating embedded exploratory tools in digital projects and scholarship.

Bringing library and information science (LIS) research into practice often means identifying ways for our work to effect positive change within information institutions. Such change is more likely if it is well-grounded in understanding of how practitioners engage with research, and how research influences change within institutions. This panel addresses these issues through the diverse perspectives of its international panelists, who all bring diverse and substantial experience working in both research and practice contexts. Panelists will speak to lessons from experiences such as research co-design, researcher-in-residence programs, mentorship, and community-based research. Attendees will have opportunities to discuss strategies for enhancing the impact of their own research on practice.

Science, technology and medicine (STM) journals play a pivotal role in advancing the open access (OA) movement by offering various OA services. Despite their significance, few studies have explored the factors that influence adopting OA practices and the underlying mechanisms from an editorial standpoint. In this study, we investigate the attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions of 17 editors from China’s STM journals through semi-structured interviews. Our preliminary findings suggest that motivations, behavioral intentions to engage in OA practices, individual journal characteristics, social reference norms and institutional policy contexts would influence OA practices in STM journals, thus structuring a theoretical framework. We believe that such an understanding of influencing forces and viewpoints of STM journals can provide valuable insights for stakeholders seeking to bridge gaps and strengthen the open science ecosystem.

This short paper presents an analysis of the distribution of downloads in medical literature, with the aim of understanding the specific conditions unique to the medical research field that necessitate the use of black open access sources such as Sci-Hub. The dataset used in this analysis was obtained by scraping the official Sci-Hub domains during the summer of 2022, and it provides valuable insights into user behavior and interaction with the website. The results demonstrate that a significant portion of the downloads from Sci-Hub during the period were related to medical journals, indicating the acute needs and time-sensitive nature of medical research. The data further highlights that a majority of the downloaded papers were related to medicine or medical subjects, underscoring the importance of easy and immediate access to the latest research and literature. The study emphasizes the pressing need for universal access to essential health-care information and the importance of continued efforts to democratize access to medical literature. The use of black open access sources like Sci-Hub serves as a reminder of the urgency to find alternative solutions that ensure medical professionals have the necessary resources to provide the best possible care for their patients

Despite increasing advocacy for open access (OA), the uptake of OA in some disciplines has remained low. Existing studies have linked the low uptake in OA publishing in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) to disciplinary norm, limited funding to pay for article processing charges (APCs), and researchers’ preferences. However, there is a growing concern about inequity in OA scholarly communication as it has remained inaccessible and unaffordable to many researchers. This study therefore investigated inequity in OA publishing in Canada. Using semi-structured interviews, qualitative data was collected from 20 professors from the HSS disciplines of research-intensive universities in Canada. Data was analyzed with NVivo software following the reflexive thematic analysis approach. Findings revealed three main causes of inequity in OA publishing among the participants. These are the cost of APCs, unequal privileges, and gender disparities. Hence, there is a need for concerted efforts by funding agencies, stakeholders, higher education institutions, and researchers to promote equity in OA scholarly communication. Some recommendations for improving equity in OA publishing are provided in this paper.

This study investigates the impact of open review on citation counts of academic articles. By collecting articles published in the material science area of Nature Communications from 2014 to 2018, we exploit the adoption of voluntary open review in 2016 to examine how article citation counts are associated with open review using propensity score matching and regression analysis. OLS regression results show that open review comes at the expense of fewer citations received by articles. Specifically, open-reviewed articles received 44% fewer citations than their non-open-reviewed counterparts. An additional mediation analysis reveals that this decrease in citations may be partially attributed to the lengthening of the review cycle of articles that were open reviewed–open-reviewed articles experienced 16% longer review cycles; every 16% extension of the review cycle led to 5.8% fewer citations. Results remained qualitatively similar when we restricted the citation windows to three years since publication. Contrary to previous findings concerning the positive effects on articles’ citation impact, our preliminary results call for additional efforts in identifying the costs and benefits associated with open review.

Ownership of digital information products in the digital age presents an intricate issue. While research has shown that individuals experience a sense of ownership over their digital possessions, the scope of digital ownership rights in comparison to physical entities remains unclear. Amongst various digital products, e-books stand out due to their ubiquity. This paper presents the results of an empirical research study that used an online survey to examine e-book consumers’ perspectives on digital ownership and digital rights. The study revealed that while most participants value and desire ownership rights, certain conventional ownership rights, such as reselling, gifting, and lending, are deemed less significant and can be relinquished by consumers due to cost-related factors. Furthermore, contrary to prevailing assumptions, the study found no discernible generational gap concerning people’s perceptions of digital ownership rights. These findings hold implications for researchers, policymakers, and public-interest groups seeking to advocate for the public’s digital rights.

The digitization, curation, and utilization of Chinese ancient books are crucial to the digital humanities. Despite progress in these areas, issues with data interoperability, data sharing, and data linkage persist due to a lack of standardized annotated ancient corpus and a general description framework for ancient books. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes an ontology-based description framework that integrates catalogs of Chinese ancient books from various institutions, creating a standardized, interpretable, and researchable knowledge base. The framework combines general standards with unique ancient book characteristics, revealing complex relationships between books and books, books and people, and books and times, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the knowledge contained within ancient books. Additionally, this paper applied the framework to The National Rare Ancient Book Directory, a catalog containing 13,026 books from over 400 institutes, to develop an interactive system. The system is available at https://rarebib.pkudh.org/. Our results demonstrate that the framework standardizes data and provides a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the knowledge within ancient books. This has noteworthy implications for individuals engaged in research, scholarship, and reading in the digital age.

Mapping between different representations of similar data is a common challenge in digital humanities (DH). In practical DH collections, the ‘person’ is an essential and centric unit and other parts could link to the ‘person’ to form the knowledge base. However, there is still no general and useful person-oriented ontology in DH community. Many practical DH projects have developed their own ontologies by DH experts, but these ontologies are not interoperable. Therefore, it is important to explore existing biographical ontologies and develop a comprehensive person-oriented ontology for DH.

Using the metadata crosswalk method, we examined the ontologies provided for persons in three DH collections to analyze how they map onto standard ontologies such as FOAF (friend of a friend). This paper uncovers a significant and consistent gap between standard biographical ontologies and those used in practical DH collections, arriving at a set of heterogeneous problems, including different granularities of metadata. Consequently, we propose three key person-oriented ontological types of elements, drawing on this metadata crosswalk: basic biographical elements, relational elements, and explanatory elements (such as career, connected with role and time). This metadata crosswalk provides a foundation for future matching between person-oriented ontologies and facilitates semantic interoperability between DH collections.

Interdisciplinary research plays a crucial role in addressing complex challenges in science, technology, and society. Predicting interdisciplinary links between topics can unveil potential interdisciplinary relationships and foster innovation. Considering topics extracted from interdisciplinary research as interdisciplinary topics, we predict the potential links among them based on their co-word network, and we propose integrating topic semantic content features, author direct-collaboration features, and indirect-collaboration features to improve prediction accuracy. Based on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), Graph Attention Networks (GAT), GraphSAGE, Bert, and Node2vec, interdisciplinary topic link prediction models are constructed. We use digital humanities as a case study and our experimental results show that the integration of semantic content, direct-collaboration, and indirect-collaboration features significantly enhances the Area Under the Curve (AUC) and Average Precision (AP) performance, outperforming predictions based solely on the co-word network. The predicted results provide valuable research directions and references for digital humanities scholars, with examples in the fields of cultural heritage and historical geographic information systems.

Named Entity Recognition (NER), the automated identification and tagging of entities in text, is a popular natural language processing task, and has the power to transform restricted data into open datasets of entities for further research. This project benchmarks four NER models–Stanford NER, BookNLP, spaCy-trf and RoBERTa–to identify the most accurate approach and generate an open-access, gold-standard dataset of human annotated entities. To meet a real-world use case, we benchmark these models on a sample dataset of sentences from Native American authored literature, identifying edge cases and areas of improvement for future NER work.

Dementia is a progressive and incurable disease which impacts both people who have been diagnosed with some type of neurocognitive disorder but also their family members. Since dementia care has lately started to include not only pharmacological treatment and medical care but also a person-centered and evidence-based (neuro)rehabilitation in the community, library and information science scholars and professionals have started to investigate how they can contribute to development of dementia friendly communities. The paper discusses how findings from an ongoing multi-phase research have been translated into practice in the city of Osijek, Croatia. Information sciences scholars have collaborated with librarians, civic organizations, neurology and human rights professionals to develop diverse programs in the local community, which aim to raise the quality of life of older citizens, people with dementia and their caregivers through information sharing and raising awareness, supporting their health and wellbeing, and capacity building of librarians.

Digital technology has a great potential for assisting older people in their everyday tasks and general well-being. However, older adults are relatively slow to adopt the new technology and one of the obstacles may be their negative perception or perceived uselessness of the technology. The paper presents preliminary findings from a study into the attitudes toward digital technology and its perceived usefulness among the older adults in the city of Osijek, Croatia. Results show that majority of respondents have positive attitudes toward digital technology and majority perceives it as very useful. The study identified a number of factors, such as age, gender, education and quality of life that affect the respondents’ varying attitudes toward digital technology and its perceived usefulness. The research findings can help policy makers and local institutions such as libraries in designing digital literacy courses and provision of support to older adults.

The welding industry in the U.S. faces a serious shortage of skilled welders. The goal of this paper is to explore welding instructors’ attitudes toward applications of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) as well as artificial intelligence (AI) in welding training. Such approaches could allow future welders to acquire welding skills faster and in a safer work environment. Also, the welding industry could attract a more diverse group of workers. This paper builds on previous literature and studies researching the use of AR, VR, and AI in welding and in other comparable industries. The paper reports findings from interviews with eight welding instructors at a community college to obtain insights regarding how they believe AR, VR, and AI could be used in welding training. The paper provides implications for using AR, VR, and AI to attract and retain the next generation of welders.

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to the widespread use of videoconference (VC) technologies, particularly in education and this trend is projected to continue. Prolonged VC usage can lead to “videoconference fatigue” (VCF). While research on factors contributing to VCF has been conducted among university students, there is limited research on younger students (especially teenagers). To fill this gap, this study adopts an affordance-based approach to identify VC affordances (resources and constraints) contributing to VCF in teenagers. Specifically, the objectives are to examine if (a) VC affordances (visibility, information, and availability), and (b) demographic profiles (age and gender) have effects on VCF among teenagers. A large-scale survey was conducted and responses from 491 teenagers were analyzed using Hierarchical Regression Analysis. Results indicate that the three identified VC affordances contribute to VCF in teenagers. In addition, teenage girls and older teenagers are more prone to VCF.

This high-exposure study explores the information seeking practices of a specific unstably housed, mobile population. Vehicle residents earn a wage but have chosen to move into their vehicles as a survival strategy during a time when housing expenses account for more than half of lower-income Americans’ monthly income. Drawing from previous work that highlights the importance of place in information behavior, this study investigates the ways that places influence information seeking for a population whose information environment is ever-changing. This study is informed by two sets of semi-structured interviews with seven individuals, including information horizon interviews and guided tours, from November 2020-June 2021. Key initial findings demonstrate that both place and mobility constrain and facilitate information seeking for participants. Overall, understanding the unique features and needs of this particular group results in a more thorough comprehension of their information seeking practices to better understand information and service provision, information inequality, and inequity.

Negativity bias is the tendency to pay more attention and give more weight to negative information than positive information. This study explored how negativity bias affects information search, processing, and sensemaking when reading news articles on controversial topics. We conducted an eye-tracking experiment with 43 participants who sought and read positive and negative articles about the three-child policy debate. We measured their eye movements, cognitive load, attitude change, and sensemaking outcomes. We found that: (1) negativity bias occurs in both information search and information processing, and the outcomes of sensemaking also tend to show negative changes; (2) reading positive articles increase cognitive load more than reading negative articles; (3) gender and prior attitude have an influence on negativity bias; (4) people use different cognitive strategies when making sense of positive and negative information. This paper contributes to a better understanding of negativity bias in information seeking, processing, and sensemaking, which can help design news systems that adapt to readers' needs, and suggests people view information objectively.

Reaction video, a new form of online video that records users' instant reactions to a particular thing, has emerged on social media in recent years. Its unique content composition and hedonic and emotional characteristics make the information cues that influence the affective generation in danmaku comments quite different from those in traditional videos. To explore the information cues of danmaku comments to stimulate users’ affective generation in reaction videos, we conduct thematic coding using the content analysis method by selecting the danmaku resources, video content, and reactors’ responses from 11 popular videos in different categories as samples to identify information cues that influence user affects in danmaku comments. The preliminary findings show that there are three main types of information cues in the reaction videos: the content of the original video, reactors’ reaction and danmaku comments, which could trigger danmaku users’ affect in reaction videos from the perspective of orientation type, parasocial interaction, and peer influence, respectively.

This paper applies the concept of ‘lived experiences’ to understand people’s subjective and everyday encounters with automated systems. We reflect on how qualitative longitudinal research methods are useful for capturing the affective and emotional dimensions of these experiences; these flexible methods also allow for iterative changes that can react to new findings and participant feedback. Using our empirical study on Universal Credit (UC), the UK’s largest social security payment, we demonstrate how studying lived experiences via qualitative longitudinal research helps us reflect on both the topic of the research and our position as researchers in relation to study participants. We argue that the lived experience framework is extremely valuable for understanding the consequences of automated decisions for users of these systems and to redress the uneven power dynamics of representing the voices of those sharing these encounters.

Geospatial technologies collect, analyze, and produce information about earth, humans, and objects through a convergence of geographic information systems, remote sensors, and global positioning systems. A microanalysis of Google’s U.S. Patent 9,420,426 Inferring a current location based on a user location history (Duleba et al, 2016) reveals how geospatial innovation employs artificial intelligence (AI) to train computer-vision models, infer, and impute geospatial data. The technical disclosures in patents offer a view within black-boxed digital technologies to examine potential privacy implications of datafied citizens in a networked society. In patented geospatial innovation, user agency is subverted through AI and anonymous knowledge production.

Presently, the Fourth Amendment does not adequately protect citizens in a networked society. Data privacy legal cases are interpreted through a lens of inescapability (Tokson, 2020), which assumes perpetual agency to consent to sharing data. In short, agency-centered privacy models are insufficient where AI can anonymously produce knowledge about an individual. Privacy implications are exemplified in geofence warrants—an investigative technique that searches location history to identify suspects in a geofenced region in the absence of evidence. This analysis demonstrates that digital privacy rights must expand to datafication models (Mai, 2016) centered on knowledge production.

As part of a larger project, this paper reports on preliminary findings of a study exploring use cases of ChatGPT and associated behaviors and experiences among users of an online forum. Posts on a ChatGPT-related forum on Reddit (n = 452) were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. This paper reports on themes relevant to this study, including the types of tasks for which users used ChatGPT, user experiences, and perceived impacts of ChatGPT. ChatGPT was often used to facilitate various writing tasks (e.g., writing an essay), academic tasks (e.g., finding scientific references for a research paper), everyday tasks (e.g., creating a meal plan), and conversational purposes (e.g., having a simulated conversation about a past event). Users expressed positive (e.g., excited, amazed) and negative (e.g., fooled, concerned) feelings toward the technology. They raised various issues and problems with ChatGPT at the content (e.g., inaccuracy, incompletes) and system (e.g., unavailability, instability) levels. Users discussed the perceived impacts of ChatGPT on individuals (e.g., unemployment) and society (e.g., AI divide). Study findings can inform the design of policies and guidelines for mitigating AI problems and promoting the effective and ethical use of emerging AI technologies.

The recognition of data literacy as an important learning outcome in higher education has led to a call for assessment tools to measure students’ data literacy. Although there has been a growing interest in the conceptualization of data literacy, the literature lacks a measuring instrument to operationalize data literacy. This study developed and validated a three-factor, 24-item data literacy assessment tool using a sample of 573 students from four community colleges in the United States. The data literacy scale developed in this study has respectable reliability and construct validity, supported by a concept analysis of data literacy, a comparative analysis of data literacy competency frameworks, an expert panel review, exploratory factor analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis.