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

This is the first extensive research on the information practices of Finnish transgender people. This research focuses on embodied information, which is defined as information derived from the sensory and sentient experiences of people in practice. The findings contribute to the developing knowledge on transgender individuals’ experiences of the ways that senses, affects, body-related self-observations and observations of other people’s bodies are a part of information practices. The conceptual framework of the research builds upon a theorisation of information behaviour and practices, transitions and queer theory and transgender studies in an interdisciplinary fashion. Methodologically, interpretive phenomenology informs the research. The thesis is founded on four peer-reviewed articles (Studies I, II, III and IV), and a compilation report combining their results with a focus on transgender individuals’ embodied experiences. The empirical material was

collected through 12 interviews in 2013 (Study I) and 25 interviews in 2016 (Studies II, III and IV) with Finnish people who identified as transgender. The data were analysed using qualitative content analysis and queer phenomenology. The findings of this research illustrate how personal and interpersonal factors shape information practices of transgender individuals, including information encountering, seeking, creation, sharing, use, avoiding and hiding.

Nowadays, users trusting search engines appears fundamental, although this claim is build on little research. In face of new developments of search, the question comes up again: to what extent users trust a search engine, how it is build and which consequences does it imply. Based on interdisciplinary research on trust, the individual concepts of trust, trustworthiness,

and trust-related behavior are outlined and applied to the web search context. To date, there is not an adequate instrument for collecting the ambiguous concept of trust for technical artifacts like search engines. Therefore, a trust measure will be developed with the help of a qualitative laboratory study and validated with an online survey. Afterwards, the measure will be applied

in an experiment to the search engines Google and Ecosia and scenarios from the health and finance domain. The expected results indicate the causes and effects of trust in a search engine. In consequence, misplaced and legitimate cases of trust in search engines can be identified and discussed among civil society, researchers, and policymakers.

In recent decades, there has been an alarming increase in the number of university and college students struggling with intensifying psychological distress, which has become a mental health crisis on campuses. To address this issue, this study proposes social VR as a potential platform to promote social interaction and improve mental well-being for college students. In this study, 68 students explored a variety of social VR applications in a classroom setting. Results showed that a) virtual space, audio, avatar, communication types, and activities were key contributing features that facilitated social interaction among college students in social VR and have the potential to enhance mental wellness, and b) the anonymous nature, communicative cues, and designated private areas provided by social VR platforms were effective in facilitating self-disclosure, indicating social VR’s potential in delivering mental health services such as individual and group counseling and therapy. This study provides evidence that social VR can enhance social interaction and communication while serving as a platform for professional mental health care, a venue that has yet to be explored in previous studies.

This article provides a theoretical background on participatory approaches in (health) information behavior studies. Furthermore, it introduces and discusses the implementation of a visual participatory approach applied in two explorative health information behavior studies, each conducted online via Zoom and with the virtual whiteboard Miro. One study examined the health information behavior and digital well-being of individuals with social anxiety (n=22), while the other explored health information behavior in the context of false information and scientificity (n=21). The approach aimed to actively engage participants within the interview setting through creative and visual elaboration and representation of health information interactions using the virtual whiteboard Miro. Findings show that using visual materials during face-to-face interviews facilitated the communication about sensitive health content and supported to capture key statements in situ, promoting the externalization of tacit knowledge during the interviews. Despite the content differences of the two studies, the unifying aspect examined in this article is how the implementation of the visual participatory approaches could enhance interview settings and lead to gathering rich data. This article fills a gap for methodological considerations of participatory techniques within (health) information behavior studies.

Attempting to understand visual frame perspectives in social movement posts online is important to develop an account of how social movements communicate and for what purpose. This paper builds a Mixed-Methods Matrix framework that combines computational applications with visual methodologies to discover frames of meaning making in a large image collection. Frame analysis and Critical Visual Methodology are reviewed and used in the framework to work in tangent with quantitative research methods. The quantitative methods consist of network analysis applications and network structure analysis. Visual sentiment analysis is explored using methods of computer vision. The methods framework is presented in the form of a matrix that enables researchers to identify applications for looking at social movements online through theoretical and computational approaches. The broader implication for the framework is to help researchers understand how online image collections can show meaning through perspective.

LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) activism has played a significant role in effecting legislative and social change in New Zealand and overseas, promulgating public attitudinal shifts towards tolerance and inclusion. These societal changes do not however appear to have resulted in the visible representation of LGBTQ+ communities in New Zealand’s GLAMU (galleries, libraries, archives, museums and universities) institutions. Using a survey, this study investigated what has been occurring in GLAMU institutions with respect to LGBTQ+ collecting and donating through a queer theory lens. The findings indicated that broad, inclusive collection policies do not equate to representation when coupled with passive collecting and little connectivity not only with LGBTQ+ communities but between GLAMU institutions. The evident need revealed by the research findings, particularly the facilitation of GLAMU interconnectivity, offered the chance to alter the existing state of affairs. This paper shows how ongoing research can be applied as the opportunity arises to inform current practices and initiate change.

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. 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. Results revealed that barriers experienced by LGBTQIA+ communities are structurally and socially entrenched and require systematic changes. Public libraries must expand their strategies beyond collection development and one-off programming to meet these requirements. Suggested strategies include outreach, community engagement, and mutual aid initiatives characterized by explicit advocacy for LGBTQIA+ communities and community organizing approaches. Public libraries can readily adopt strategies overviewed in this paper for LGBTQIA+ health promotion.

The goals of open science are driven by policies requiring data management, sharing, and accessibility. One way of measuring the impact of open science policies on scientific knowledge is to access data that has been prepared for re-use. But how accessible/available are data resources? In this paper, we discuss a method for exploring and locating datasets made available by scientists from federally funded projects in the US. The data pathways method was tested on federal awards. Here we describe the method and the results from analyzing fifty federal awards granted by the National Science Foundation to pursue data resources and their availability in publications, data repositories, or institutional repositories. The data pathways approach contributes to the development of a practical approach on availability that captures the current ways in which data are accessible from federally funded science projects –ranging from institutional repositories, journal data deposit, PI and project web pages, and science data platforms, among other found possibilities. This paper discusses some background and motivations for such a method, the method, research design, barriers encountered when searching for data resources from projects, and how this method can be useful to future studies of data availability.

Data users need relevant context and research expertise to effectively search for and identify relevant datasets. Leading data providers, such as the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), offer standardized metadata and search tools to support data search. Metadata standards emphasize the machine-readability of data and its documentation. There are opportunities to enhance dataset search by improving users’ ability to learn about, and make sense of, information about data. Prior research has shown that context and expertise are two main barriers users face in effectively searching for, evaluating, and deciding whether to reuse data. In this paper, we propose a novel chatbot-based search system, DataChat, that leverages a graph database and a large language model to provide novel ways for users to interact with and search for research data. DataChat complements data archives’ and institutional repositories’ ongoing efforts to curate, preserve, and share research data for reuse by making it easier for users to explore and learn about available research data.

This paper explores sociotechnical perceptions of formats as they relate to work in the recovery and reuse of scientific data from historical, archival, and defunct data sources. The paper utilizes data gathered from 23 qualitative interviews with practitioners involved in various processes within scientific data curation lifecycles, ranging from marine biologists to data librarians. This paper focuses on how these practitioners understand, engage with, and utilize formats within their data curation work. Additionally, this paper enumerates the formats present throughout the scientific data curation process during the creation, preservation, curation, and redistribution of data. The paper explores how practitioners creating and curating scientific data encounter, make sense of, and utilize formats by identifying format types and their functions. Specifically, the paper focuses on practitioner perceptions concerning formats around the following themes: how practitioners' historical relationships to challenging formats inform their ongoing work with format-based curation, the importance of contexts in prioritizing or ignoring formats within scientific curation work, and how formats reveal more significant sociotechnical issues within the curation of science. The paper concludes by exploring practical and theoretical implications for navigating formats within the recovery and reuse of scientific data and offers suggestions on reconfiguring formats within data curation.

This paper aims to investigate the Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC) process by examining the communication practices and risk communication dynamics among auditors during the audit. Through an in-depth, qualitative analysis of the audit process and the interactions between auditors, this paper provides valuable insights into the importance of diverse backgrounds, effective communication, and consensus building in the assessment of TRAC checklist requirements. Furthermore, the paper highlights potential areas of improvement within the audit process, addressing concerns related to disagreements, reliance on leadership, and the comprehensiveness of risk identification and communication.

This paper explores the relationship between cultural heritage and collective memory through the lens of information. We explicitly frame the heritage-memory-relationship as constituting a theoretical foundation for the field of Cultural Heritage Informatics. In framing heritage and memory as information phenomena, we leverage two information frameworks that appear most suitable to host, translate, and overlay heritage and memory theory: Context, relevance, and labor (Fremery and Buckland, 2022) and Information as thing (Buckland, 1991). Altogether, this preliminary exploration 1) establishes a terminological understanding of cultural heritage, collective memory, and information/informatics; 2) maps these concepts with recourse to the Context, relevance and labor framework (Fremery and Buckland, 2022); 3) articulates cultural heritage informatics as the intersection of heritage and memory focused on processes of selection, transfer, and integration of historic information in the service of identity maintenance; and 4) offers a cultural heritage information framework that highlights the unique potential of Cultural Heritage Informatics to guide future information research in cultural information studies.

The primary goal of this paper is to explore users' desires for digitized historical image collections, examining their desires based on different use purposes and information interaction activities. In addition, we investigate the image attributes that users wish to search from the collection. To accomplish this, we conducted 21 qualitative interviews with active users of a digitized historical photograph archive. Our findings suggest that users' desires relate to three contexts: tools, collection, and socio-organizational issues. Moreover, our results indicate that users require support for various information interaction activities, not just searching. We found that users' desires vary based on their specific use purposes, and that users prioritize conceptual access points that can already mostly be generated through automated annotation methods. Ultimately, this study contributes to a better understanding of users' real-life image needs and offers implications for improving access to digital image collections.

Digital, community-based knowledge infrastructures confront complex, systemic challenges to their sustainability over time. From digital community archives to computationally amenable corpora, databases, or data models created by and serving research communities, these sites of grassroots knowledge production tend to be maintained without long-term institutional commitments. Yet, they hold unique cultural evidence of enormous value. Prior work on the sustainability of digital humanities scholarship has surfaced numerous factors in project sustainability, including technical, organizational, and financial concerns. The roles of communities themselves in sustaining community-based knowledge infrastructures, however, are under-studied. This qualitative, multi-case study of digital humanities projects and digital community archives addresses community-centered approaches to understanding and implementing sustainability for digital knowledge infrastructures. This study finds that communities of various kinds—from public communities to networks of research practice—conceive of the sustainability of their digital projects as inextricably linked to the sustainability of communities themselves. We offer an exploration of factors in the mutual relationship of sustainability between communities and their knowledge infrastructures, including how they support the wellbeing of individuals and cohesion among communities, and how they promote activism and advocacy efforts within broader publics and disciplinary cultures.

The open data movement is hyped as a sweeping strategy to democratize science, promote diverse data reuse, facilitate reproducibility, accelerate innovation, and much more. However, it is rare that the potential perils of open data are studied and discussed at the same level as these promises. As we invest more into open data, we need to study the full spectrum of what open data facilitates in practice, which can then inform future policy and design decisions. This paper does this by describing the data practices of one contrarian community, anthropogenic climate change (ACC) skeptics, specifically how they process, analyze, preserve, and share data through an investigative digital ethnography. Skeptics often reuse data in ways similar to conventional data reusers, although to unorthodox ends, with differing levels of trust and expertise. ACC skeptics’ data practices call into question the assumption that open data is a universal good. These findings have implications for data repositories and how they might curate data and design their database with this type of reuse in mind.

Polarization of views (known as ideological polarization) is one of the greatest societal challenges of our time, potentially sewing distrust and hate among individuals and communities and threatening to undermine the fabric of democracy. Divisive issues such as abortion and gun control are ever-present and can drive issue polarization, and even affective polarization—a disdain for ‘the other side,’ which can further divide society. Social media has been flagged as a breeding ground for polarized views, with private groups and personalized algorithms facilitating self-creation of echo chambers that may lead to polarization. While there is prior research on the technological influences on view strengthening, scant Human-centered research exists and most of it has focused on view change in general, rather than view strengthening specifically. To investigate peoples’ experiences of view strengthening on social media, we interviewed 10 people who recently strengthened their views on important topics. While some took steps to avoid creating echo chambers (e.g., by seeking out opposing views), others intentionally created them to allow their views to strengthen without interference. These findings have important implications for designing social media platforms that support careful and conscious view strengthening while mitigating against the risk of information manipulation.

The fear of crime is an emotional response individuals have toward crime or the anticipation related to being the victim of crime. The increasing exposure to crime information presents considerable risks to people’s psychological health and well-being. Nevertheless, the fear of crime in online discourses is under-researched despite abundant conversations about crime. This work presents a mixed-methods study to comprehend how people disclose the fear of crime and what linguistic content or cues are associated with the fear. We gathered conversations about crime in the Baltimore subreddit. The content analysis revealed a necessity to differentiate between "experienced" and "expressive" fear of crime. The regression modeling identified strong factors related to the fear of crime, such as negative sentiment, objective expression, and first-person pronouns. This work extends the conceptualization of the fear of crime in online discourses and suggests potential ways to detect the fear automatically.

The mutual causal interdependence between offensive language use and negative emotions has been largely underexplored in the public event. Using 784,179 posts about the Tangshan violence event collected from Sina Weibo, nine themes were recognized based on framing theory. The mutual causal relationship between offensive language and negative emotions under each theme was examined through Convergent Cross Mapping. Results suggested that the mutual causal relationships between offensive language and negative emotion intensity under various themes were different with bidirectional causality under moral judgement, emotional venting, and power conflict, unidirectional causality under the vulnerable framework and the trust framework, and no causality under other themes. More detailed examination revealed special bidirectional or unidirectional causality between offensive language and some fine-grained negative emotions under the vulnerable framework, the trust framework, and secondary opinion. This study provides insight into the interaction between offensive language and negative emotions and helps emergency managers make targeted strategies to solve the problems of offensive language use and negative emotions.

Twitter has emerged as an important forum for discussion among academic librarians. We took a mixed-methods approach to study the thematic content and sentiment of tweets authored by academic librarians in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. We found differences in the semantic content and themes present in the data from each country that point to differences in how librarians in each country engage on Twitter. We also present a methodological intervention by using two different sentiment analysis methods, VADER, and Zero Shot Learning, to classify posts by academic librarians. While more work remains to be done, we cast new light on how members of professional communities use social media. Our qualitative analysis identified 11 thematic categories in academic librarians’ Twitter discussions, with a focus on professional topics. U.K. librarians exhibited a higher frequency of labor- and employment-related terms compared to their U.S. and Canadian counterparts. Using the state-of-the-art Zero Shot Learning (ZSL) approach for sentiment classification, we significantly outperformed an off-the-shelf classifier like Vader. Sentiment ratios for U.S. and Canadian tweets were similar, while the U.K. displayed nearly double the positive-to-negative tweet ratio.

An explosion at the Port of Beirut resulted in over 200 fatalities and displaced many more. Hundreds recorded and thousands shared the event, sparking discourse communities across social media. We provide a mixed-methods analysis of 26 TikTok videos about the port explosion. Our study involved a semiotic analysis of the videos and a content analysis of the related 21,150 comments. The discourse surrounding the explosion extends a growing body of literature on the role of TikTok in disseminating crisis-related information. We use a collective sensemaking framework to investigate how TikTok contributes to the understanding of an event. Our results advance an existing classification of crisis discourse, capturing distinctions between crisis discourse on Twitter and our study. In particular, we find that Middle Eastern content creators contributed more to collective sensemaking about the event than non-Middle Eastern creators. We additionally examine the current state of collective sensemaking on TikTok and provide platform implications.

The concept of ‘information crisis’ is playing an increasingly prominent role within information studies literature and practice. Yet, the term is rarely defined and its meaning often remains both inconsistent and ambiguous. This opacity calls for a greater grounding of the term if it is to become a key concept in the field, including how it operates and what it enforces. This short paper draws upon information studies literature to present a conceptual analysis of the information crisis concept. From this analysis, we argue that an information crisis framing is typically used to either establish the status quo, through centring challenges to established information ecosystems, or maintain the status quo, by outlining the operations needed to renew or protect these landscapes. These findings illustrate how ‘information crisis’ can obscure the very contexts of inequality and injustice through which crisis operates and delimits the possibility of changing/disrupting the status quo.

The aim of this paper is to examine the second- and third-level digital divides in U.S. society through empirical research on 5,253,530 web trajectory data of 642 unique participants. Through systematic analyses of the association between self-reported socioeconomic characteristics and the usage log, the paper exposed the inequality in application usage as a consequence of unequal cultural, temporal and capital resources. The research is strictly data-driven with a theoretical basis on the domestication theory and digital divide literature. This research can advise researchers and policymakers in understanding the multidimensionality of the digital divide and social inequality after the arose of tech giants and platforms.

Hacking is an opening gate to cybercrimes. Millions of hacked accounts are traded underground and misused for fraudulent activities. A majority of previous studies on hacking have been about hacked accounts detection and account security; however, relatively little is known about experiences of being hacked from gender perspectives. This study aims to explore experiences of being hacked with a focus on gender disparities from the perspective of the third-level digital divide—socially constructed gaps of digital use outcomes even among users who have similar digital access and skills. Tweets mentioning accounts hacked were obtained (N=13,731) and analyzed using topic modeling. Gender classification was performed on user profiles. Results show that women reported more experiences of being hacked in all online service types except gaming. Women were more likely to experience negative impacts of being hacked including reputational harm, money loss, and having personalized content modified. Furthermore, gender differences were found in coping strategies. Men were more likely to perform active strategies like warning others, rebuilding accounts, and deducing hackers’ origins. Meanwhile, women were more likely to seek help from others. The findings of this study imply that interventions to tackle cybercrimes need to be developed considering gender differences.

Libraries offer an array of programs and services–in and out of the library–that are infused with important learning principles and concepts and can provide children and families, particularly from underserved groups, with valuable access to these principles and concepts. And yet libraries often are unsure how to reach these groups, where significant barriers can hinder community engagement and access. A research study, [removed for blind review], employed value-sensitive design to develop co-designed tools and a toolkit to help library staff interact with and learn from community groups and partners using a strengths-based and social justice approach. Two of the co-designed tools were then tested with MLIS students at two universities, whose feedback yielded several valuable findings. Students indicated that the tools helped them develop a deeper understanding of underserved groups and their values and gave the students the time and space to reflect on their understanding of the socio-cultural and value contexts of their communities and the values they hold. This study can help libraries more effectively design strengths-based learning experiences that are meaningful and relevant to underserved groups and their values, particularly for children and families who do not or cannot come into the library.

Beyond the easy and equal access to massive online contents, will digital reading bring more social welfare values for disadvantaged groups? Take left-behind children (LBC) in rural China as example, whose mental health issue has widely aroused public concern. Lacking of sufficient parental supervision and educational resources leads to insufficient development of psychological resilience and makes them vulnerable to mental health problems. As psychological resilience is a critical protective factor for maintaining mental health, in this paper, we wonder whether digital reading could perform as an alternative way with easy accessibility and numerous resources to supplement LBC’s resilience development. We conducted a field questionnaire study on LBC (N=217) and investigated the predictive effect of digital reading on psychological resilience. After controlling sociodemographic variables and common resilience protective factors, hierarchical regression results demonstrated that digital reading predicted an additional 4.3% of the variation in resilience above the control variables, indicating digital reading a positive promoter of LBC's psychological resilience. Moreover, by systematically exploring the fine-grained digital reading variables, we also found intrinsic motivation to read and recreational digital reading (e.g., reading comics and communicating online) to be the two most stronger predictors of psychological resilience.

While accessibility is a core part of diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and social justice (DEIASJ) considerations, disability and accessibility are rarely centered in Library and Information Science (LIS) curricula. The lack of disability and accessibility coverage is problematic since information professionals must have the required knowledge and skills to effectively serve patrons with disabilities. This paper presents preliminary findings from a content analysis of 39 pre-filtered syllabi examining how disability and accessibility topics are covered in LIS courses. While nearly all of the syllabi analyzed contained a high level of detail, only 13 were ultimately determined to contain a “partial” depth of coverage of disability- and accessibility-related content and two a “detailed” level of coverage. Even fewer syllabi included a conceptualization of disability or accessibility beyond simply including the words alone. The paper offers suggestions for LIS instructors to better address disability and accessibility within their syllabi and course content.

The research reported in this paper is part of a larger project focusing on the iSchools’ identity and interactions in a globalized world. This paper presents the research management strategy for conducting a global research project among international research communities, and for investigating the current research focus of iSchools members based on the insights of global iSchools’ leaders. It found that information management was the dominant research area and that digital humanities, data science, and “informatics+ scenarios” are the key growth points. The most significant contribution of iSchools to society lies in social services. The research focuses on and benefits worldwide iSchools by outlining development strategies and strengthening the connection between research and society to increase social awareness, influence and reputation.

This case study describes the development of a management and leadership (M/L) iSchool course. To design a course that balanced traditional topics with current professional needs, we identified M/L topics currently covered in iSchools’ curricula, then assessed the importance of these topics for information professions through a survey of academic and professional communities. Survey participants selected topics in the areas of information economy, organizational management, and project management that they thought were most important for iSchool students to learn. They also suggested additional topics related to communication, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), financial literacy and strategic planning skills. Thirteen survey participants were interviewed by the researchers; they suggested further topics related to emotional intelligence and personal skills, such as time-management, risk-taking and confidence. This paper aims to support a culture of transparency in curricula design and, by sharing methods, findings, and lessons learned, ease the faculty tasks of course development.

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.

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.