Shannon Oltman | September 27, 2022
ILS Colloquium + RKCSI Speaker Series
Defending Intellectual Freedom
Shannon M. Oltmann, Associate Professor in the School of Information Science at the University of Kentucky, is an MIS and Information Science PhD alum from the ILS department. Her interest in information ethics, censorship, intellectual freedom, and public libraries have led her to examine intellectual freedom, its role in librarianship, and the rise in book bans across the country. In her presentation, Oltmann examined the current threats against intellectual freedom, reinforced the centrality of intellectual freedom for libraries, and offered suggestions for defending that principle.
Lindsay Thomas | October 7, 2022
ILS Colloquium
Public Discourse in an Age of Private Data: LexisNexis, TikTok, and the Problem of Scale
Focused on digital humanities, cultural studies, and contemporary US literature, Lindsay Thomas is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami. From 2017-2021, she was co-director of WhatEvery1Says, a multi-institutional public humanities project that used computational text analysis to examine public discourse on the value of the humanities on a large scale. According to host Allen Riddell, “Faculty and students in attendance gained a deep understanding of the results of the landmark WhatEvery1Says project.”
Focusing on two case studies involving US newspaper articles held by data broker Lexis Nexis and videos posted on TikTok, Thomas argued that the enclosure produced by the privatization of public information and the fracturing of communities of consumption places pressure on how we understand the relationship between scale and the public, suggesting that our visions of “public” discourse are themselves already restricted by the owners of that data.
Mikihito Tanaka | October 28, 2022
RKCSI Speaker Series
“Meanwhile in Japan”: A case study of different reactions toward global pandemic
Mikihito Tanaka is a Professor of Science and Media Studies in the Journalism Course at the Graduate School of Political Science, Waseda University, Japan. Tanaka has been involved with Covid-19 countermeasures as a member of the expert advisory group of the Japanese government as a science/risk communication expert. In his talk, Tanaka discussed the Japanese reaction toward Covid-19 from the viewpoints of science and technology studies, mass/social media studies, and computational social science. His findings showed the differences and similarities between the reaction in the United States and Japan, and he presented his reflection as a chance to reevaluate how the expertise and lay expertise should tame risk or rethink the meaning of a resilient society.
Yiqiong Zhang | January 20, 2023
ILS Colloquium
Graphicon evolution in Chinese social media: Trends and impacts
Currently a visiting research scholar with the ILS Department, Yiqiong Zhang is a Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (China). While at IU, Zhang is working with Professor Susan C. Herring on a project about graphicon evolution in Chinese social media. Zhang presented quantitative research showing a rise in use of emojis and stickers, which significantly correlated with the decrease of the frequencies of Sentence Final Particles (SFPs), which express speakers’ attitudes and sentiments and appear at the end of sentences as most graphicons do. Zhang argued that graphicons are starting to grammaticalize as non-obligatory parts of grammar, while the precise mechanisms of the competition between graphicons and language remain to be explored for understanding how the language system adapts to the ever-changing digital context.
Jeff Hemsley | February 10, 2023
RKCSI Speaker Series
Curating Virality: Exploring Curated Logics Within #BlackLivesMatter on Twitter
Understanding information diffusion, particularly in the context of politics or social movements, in social media is a major part of Jeff Hemsley’s research. An Associate Professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, Hemsley has recently focused on the sharing behavior of Twitter actors within the context of the #BlackLivesMatter social movement and its related discussions #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter during Black History Month (February) 2022. Using qualitative content analysis and machine learning to classify message types, they then analyzed actors’ curation behavior. Hemsley presented findings suggesting that different levels of actors do tend to curate different types of messages and that different types of messages tend to get more attention depending on the discussion space. According to Hemsley, this research contributes to updating the theories of curated logics and virality, in part by examining which concept (gatekeepers, influencers and/or opinion leaders) seems to fit best for this kind of work.
Annie T. Chen | March 10, 2023
ILS Colloquium
Collaboratively interpreting life experiences through textual and visual media: Reflections from digital humanities and health-related research
Annie T. Chen is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Washington (UW) School of Medicine. Her research leverages diverse forms of data to improve health management, including data analytic approaches and stakeholder-engaged approaches. In her talk, Chen examined challenges in collaborative interpretation of human experience as facilitated by textual and visual media, drawing from two research contexts – the Svoboda Diaries Project, and the Virtual Online Communities for Aging Life Experiences. Both projects involve situations in which personal and collective goals, communication style, and perspective can affect research outcomes. Chen posed questions about the best ways to facilitate learning and collaboration in these settings, concluding with a reflection on challenges, recommendations, and outstanding questions for facilitating collaborative interpretation in different contexts.
David Wallace | April 14, 2023
ILS Colloquium
Engaging Communities though Interdisciplinary Archival Collaborations > Stories for Hope: Rwanda (2009-2014) and Countersurveying District Six, South Africa (2018-present)
David A. Wallace, Clinical Associate Professor at the School of Information, University of Michigan, has been a main contributor to the South African History Archive’s Freedom of Information Programme and Stories for Hope, and intergenerational storytelling project in Rwanda. He presented on these two interdisciplinary archival projects and reviewed their impacts and findings. Wallace discussed how both respective projects, geomatics – archival and psychological – archival collaborations, raised substantial community engagement issues, especially ethical issues involving social memory and individual identity issues. He emphasized that both projects highlight how archives can be mobilized in striving for historical and contemporary justice.
Victoria Rubin | April 28, 2023
RKCSI Speaker Series
Disrupting Mis- and Disinformation: Educational, AI-Based, and Regulatory Countermeasures
Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies and Director of the Language and Information Technologies Research Lab (LiT.RL) at the University of Western Ontario, Victoria L. Rubin specializes in information retrieval and natural language processing techniques that enable analyses of texts to identify, extract, and organize structured knowledge. In her talk, Rubin posits that three interacting factors cause the spread of mis- and disinformation, and that sustained disruptions of these interactions should dampen the epidemic of misinformation. She proposes that one such solution could be the use of artificial intelligence (AI) as an assistive technology using natural language processing and machine learning. Rubin discussed existing works where these AI systems automatically discriminate various types of text-based “fakes” from verified legitimate content and truthful language.