Shohana Akter (Ph.D.) Research Overview:
The recent popular idea of ‘Gen-Z wave’ claims that the youth are the savior of mainstream politics. Adopting this idea, we attempted to study youth online political contributions on TikTok from a partisan viewpoint. We analyzed 100 most watched video posts shared by 10 accounts, claiming to be the supporters of Democratic and Republican parties of U.S., and 124,963 comments posted on these videos. Our topic modeling analysis revealed that young supporters from both parties engaged in target-based politics, while having their own unique content and strategies. Our sentiment analysis of the user comments found that the audience were significantly more positive towards young Democrat supporters and significantly more negative toward the young Republicans. Audience reactions on Democrats supporter’s posts were made with humor, while young Republicans received more sarcasm and hostility. The study concluded with suggestions for future research to address some logical debates.
Gordon Amidu (Ph.D.) Co-Authored a paper with Pnina Fichman:
The research paper was published online on 17 Aug 2024. The collapsing of social contexts online and its impact on identify, privacy, and self-presentation have been widely documented. However, the increased levels of conflict and misunderstanding that those collapsing contexts trigger requires more scholarly attention. Informed by social informatics, this paper examines collapsing contexts and TikTok’s features that support reciprocal trolling. A comparative case analysis of three TikTok influencers reveals how they took advantage of the platform’s features (Duet, Stich, Share, and Sounds); how they developed their own trolling style and utilized a different repertoire of trolling tactics in initiating and in responding to trolling; and how they proactively utilized social, spatial, and temporal collapsing contexts in their reciprocal trolling activities. The study makes two significant contributions to research by (1) extending our understanding of collapsing contexts beyond the reactive notion of flattened contexts, contributing to social informatics a nuanced understanding of context; and by (2) demonstrating how TikTok’s features foster reciprocal trolling and the process by which it spills over into other social media platforms, raising a need for more cross-platform research.
Gordon Amidu, “Political Trolling and Religion in Ghana,” which focuses on a study addressing the gap in literature on political trolling in Ghana’s social media landscape. This study specifically investigated how religion, political discourse, and trolling intersect in Ghana’s digital political landscape, and how this contributes to an understanding of online political communication in Ghanian democratic discourse.
Sarah Carter (MLS/MIS) Internship at the Library of Congress Music Division:
Sarah had the opportunity during the summer of 2024 to intern at the Library of Congress Music Division and had the unique opportunity to define her own internship project. She set out to create the framework for a finding aid that could bring a consistent baseline level of access to the Dayton C. Miller Collection, a unique collection that came to the Library in 1942 and is commonly considered the largest archival collection pertaining to the flute and flute-related instruments in the world. Along the way, Sarah also had the opportunity to process some unprocessed portions of the collection and complete the sheet music series of that finding aid.
This March, Sarah presented on this internship experience at the 94th Annual Meeting of the Music Library Association in a conference talk titled “Learn by Fluting: Developing a Finding Aid for the Dayton C. Miller Collection as a Library of Congress Music Division Intern.” The presentation discussed how the process of creating a finding aid framework for the collection unfolded, as well as how the unique idiosyncrasies of the Miller Collection and her own perspective as an IU graduate student affected the project.
Ece Gumusel (Ph.D.) Defended Dissertation Proposal and Member at EDUCAUSE Cybersecurity and Privacy Guide Advisory Committee:
Ece defended her dissertation proposal in August 2024. She is also a member at EDUCAUSE Cybersecurity and Privacy Guide Advisory Committee.
Published and in press articles:
Gumusel, E. Are chatbots safe? A look at user privacy concerns. (2024, October 16). Information
Matters, Vol. 4, Issue 10.
Zhou, K., Killhoffer, Z., Sanfilippo, M., Underwood, T., Gumusel, E., Wei, M., Choudhry, A., & Jinjun, X. (2024). Ethics, Governance, and User Mental Models for Large Language Models in Computing Education. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students 31(1), 46–51. https://doi.org/10.1145/3688089
Gumusel, E.+, Xiao, Y.+, Qin, Y., Qin, J., & Liao, X. (2024). Understanding Legal Professionals’ Practices and Expectations in Data Breach Incident Reporting. The 31st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS). October 14-18, 2024, Salt Lake City, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3658644.3670371
Wu, Y., Wang, C., Gumusel, E., & Liu, X. (2024). Knowledge-Infused Legal Wisdom: Navigating LLM Consultation through the Lens of Diagnostics and Positive-Unlabeled Reinforcement Learning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, 15542–15555, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI:10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.918
Gumusel, E. (in press). Exploring Adoption of Privacy Enhancing Technologies among LGBTQ+ LIS Students in the US: Motivations and Challenges. Journal of Education for Library and Information Science.
Gumusel, E. (2024). A literature review of user privacy concerns in conversational chatbots: A social informatics approach: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24898
Panel co-organized and presented:
Rosenbaum, H., Gumusel, E., Sanfilippo, M., Sweeney, M., Sawyer, S., & Zhou, K. (2024). Exploring Some Impacts of Advances in Artificial Intelligence: A Social Informatics Approach. Proceedings of 87th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), 61(1), 818-821. Calgary, Canada, October 2024. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.1109
Guest lectured:
Gumusel, E. Understanding Legal Professionals’ Practices and Expectations in Data Breach Incident Reporting. Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University Bloomington, October 2024. [Guest Lecturer: CSCI-B 649 Data Driven Security & Privacy]
Gumusel, E. User Privacy and Conversational Chatbots. School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, July 2024. [Guest Lecturer: I226 Human-Computer Interaction]
Gyuri Kang (Ph.D.) Presented Co-Authored Paper with Professor John A. Walsh:
“The effect of a thing”: Nature and the Environment in Percy Bysshe Shelley and Algernon Charles Swinburne,” at the Digital Humanities Congress 2024, which was held at the University of Sheffield, on the 4th and 5th September 2024. This paper investigates potential relationships between two English poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Algernon Charles Swinburne, by applying computational methods to investigate discourses related to nature and the environment in their poetry. In addition to distant reading with the help of computational methods, they amplified the preliminary qualitative analysis results through targeted close reading. Having applied this mixed-methods approach, they reported their findings on Shelleyan influence in Swinburne and the similarities and differences in each poet’s discourse on the natural world.
Maesa Ogas (MLS) Received Internship:
Maesa received an internship with the Center for Documentary Research and Practice (CDRP’s) Oral History Archive that they are completing this semester.
Haining Wang (Ph.D.) Research Overview:
A vast amount of scholarly work is published daily, yet much of it remains inaccessible to the general public due to dense jargon and complex language. To address this challenge in science communication, we introduce a reinforcement learning framework that fine-tunes a language model to rewrite scholarly abstracts into more comprehensible versions. Guided by a carefully balanced combination of word- and sentence-level accessibility rewards, our language model effectively substitutes technical terms with more accessible alternatives, a task which models supervised fine-tuned or guided by conventional readability measures struggle to accomplish. Our best model adjusts the readability level of scholarly abstracts by approximately six U.S. grade levels — in other words, from a postgraduate to a high school level. This translates to roughly a 90% relative boost over the supervised fine-tuning baseline, all while maintaining factual accuracy and high-quality language. An in-depth analysis of our approach shows that balanced rewards lead to systematic modifications in the base model, likely contributing to smoother optimization and superior performance. We envision this work as a step toward bridging the gap between scholarly research and the general public, particularly younger readers and those without a college degree.
Julie Wasserman (SPLIS) Research Overview:
The diversity of edible plants that we know and enjoy today is a direct result of our ancestors saving, replanting, and sharing seeds within their communities over millennia. However, over the last century, food crop diversity has been declining at an alarming rate. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that at least 75 percent of food crop diversity has already been lost. This has been attributed to a variety of interrelated trends, such as industrialized agricultural practices and the food system at large, urbanization, government policies, privatization of seed, and the breakdown of community seed exchange networks. Varying initiatives have been established worldwide to protect the loss of food crop diversity. One type of response involves the (re)establishment of community seed exchange networks in which seed – particularly open-pollinated and heirloom varieties – can be freely utilized, shared, and circulated. Examples in the United States include Native American seed banks, seed libraries, and online seed exchange. Yet the political context of seed sharing in the United States has created numerous barriers, specifically The Federal Seed Act and the Plant Variety Protection Act, which limit both the physical and genetic movement of seed respectively. As such, community seed exchange networks tend to exist in a legal grey area and seed regulation can often be misconstrued by both law enforcement and the public. Within the last decade alternative legislation has been proposed to protect community seed exchange, but with mixed results.
Alex Wingate (Ph.D.) Archival Research Work in Spain:
Alex spent over 11 weeks this summer working in three different archives in Navarre, Spain performing archival research funded by the Willison Charitable Trust. This was the last big push to collect data for her dissertation, and she transcribed 209 documents partially or completely. They provide valuable information about the types of books circulating in Navarre during the 16th and 17th centuries as well as about the people and practices involved in that circulation. Much of the data about the books will eventually be made available in Alex’s database Libros en Navarra alongside the transcriptions.
In early October, Alex traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina to present at the TEI2024 conference about her research on two potential standards book professionals had for describing books in early modern Navarre based on her analysis of 19 book inventories encoded in TEI.