This paper examines digital literacy and how it relates to the philosophical study of ignorance. Ignorance of how digital technologies work (e.g. how users’ online activities can be used to the advantage of platform owners without the users’ knowledge, and how browsing can be confined) is still not well understood from the perspective of user practice.
Based on the following Special Issue of Teaching in Higher Education: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1547276
Talk done at Lancaster University, Edinburgh University, the SRHE conference, Sussex University,
MIT Program on Information Science Talk -- Julia Flanders on Jobs, Roles, Ski...Micah Altman
Julia Flanders, who is the Director of the Digital Scholarship Group in the Northeastern University Library, and a Professor of Practice in Northeastern's English Department gave a talk on Jobs, Roles, Skills, Tools: Working in the Digital Academy as part of the Program on Information Science Brown Bag Series.
In the talk, illustrated by the slides below, Julia discusses the evolving landscape of digital humanities (and digital scholarship more broadly) and considers the relationship between technology, tool development, and professional roles.
For more see: http://informatics.mit.edu/event/brown-bag-jobs-roles-skills-tools-working-digital-academy-julia-flanders
Brief presentation on challenges I've found during my research on/through social media. Part of a larger panel on Digital and Social Media for Research as part of UBC's Year of Research in Education.
“Social Networking Sites: A Surveillance Studies Primer”
In recognizing social networking sites as sites of sociological concern, this presentation will offer a surveillance studies perspective to this topic. Using Facebook as a case study, a review of key surveillance material as well as preliminary findings will underscore directions for future research. In particular, the popularized and controversial practice of 'Facebook stalking' will serve to illustrate how lateral (or peer-to-peer) surveillance not only supplements, but may also amplify conventional forms of monitoring.
Questions:
1) Can practices such as deception or dissimulation on social networking sites be regarded as ways of resisting surveillance?
2) What kind of connections does Facebook enable between peer-based forms of surveillance, and practices such as employee screening?
This paper examines digital literacy and how it relates to the philosophical study of ignorance. Ignorance of how digital technologies work (e.g. how users’ online activities can be used to the advantage of platform owners without the users’ knowledge, and how browsing can be confined) is still not well understood from the perspective of user practice.
Based on the following Special Issue of Teaching in Higher Education: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1547276
Talk done at Lancaster University, Edinburgh University, the SRHE conference, Sussex University,
MIT Program on Information Science Talk -- Julia Flanders on Jobs, Roles, Ski...Micah Altman
Julia Flanders, who is the Director of the Digital Scholarship Group in the Northeastern University Library, and a Professor of Practice in Northeastern's English Department gave a talk on Jobs, Roles, Skills, Tools: Working in the Digital Academy as part of the Program on Information Science Brown Bag Series.
In the talk, illustrated by the slides below, Julia discusses the evolving landscape of digital humanities (and digital scholarship more broadly) and considers the relationship between technology, tool development, and professional roles.
For more see: http://informatics.mit.edu/event/brown-bag-jobs-roles-skills-tools-working-digital-academy-julia-flanders
Brief presentation on challenges I've found during my research on/through social media. Part of a larger panel on Digital and Social Media for Research as part of UBC's Year of Research in Education.
“Social Networking Sites: A Surveillance Studies Primer”
In recognizing social networking sites as sites of sociological concern, this presentation will offer a surveillance studies perspective to this topic. Using Facebook as a case study, a review of key surveillance material as well as preliminary findings will underscore directions for future research. In particular, the popularized and controversial practice of 'Facebook stalking' will serve to illustrate how lateral (or peer-to-peer) surveillance not only supplements, but may also amplify conventional forms of monitoring.
Questions:
1) Can practices such as deception or dissimulation on social networking sites be regarded as ways of resisting surveillance?
2) What kind of connections does Facebook enable between peer-based forms of surveillance, and practices such as employee screening?
ABSTRACT : Computational social science (CSS) is an academic discipline that combines the traditional social sciences with computer science. While social scientists provide research questions, data sources, and acquisition methods, computer scientists contribute mathematical models and computational tools. CSS uses computationally methods and statistical tools to analyze and model social phenomena, social structures, and human social behavior. The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief introduction to computational social science.
Key Words: computational social science, social-computational systems, social simulation models, agent-based models
Making Decisions in a World Awash in Data: We’re going to need a different bo...Micah Altman
In his abstract, Scriffignano summarizes as follows:
l explore some of the ways in which the massive availability of data is changing and the types of questions we must ask in the context of making business decisions. Truth be told, nearly all organizations struggle to make sense out of the mounting data already within the enterprise. At the same time, businesses, individuals, and governments continue to try to outpace one another, often in ways that are informed by newly-available data and technology, but just as often using that data and technology in alarmingly inappropriate or incomplete ways. Multiple “solutions” exist to take data that is poorly understood, promising to derive meaning that is often transient at best. A tremendous amount of “dark” innovation continues in the space of fraud and other bad behavior (e.g. cyber crime, cyber terrorism), highlighting that there are very real risks to taking a fast-follower strategy in making sense out of the ever-increasing amount of data available. Tools and technologies can be very helpful or, as Scriffignano puts it, “they can accelerate the speed with which we hit the wall.” Drawing on unstructured, highly dynamic sources of data, fascinating inference can be derived if we ask the right questions (and maybe use a bit of different math!). This session will cover three main themes: The new normal (how the data around us continues to change), how are we reacting (bringing data science into the room), and the path ahead (creating a mindset in the organization that evolves). Ultimately, what we learn is governed as much by the data available as by the questions we ask. This talk, both relevant and occasionally irreverent, will explore some of the new ways data is being used to expose risk and opportunity and the skills we need to take advantage of a world awash in data.
For further details contact:
N.RAJASEKARAN B.E M.S 9841091117,9840103301.
IMPULSE TECHNOLOGIES,
Old No 251, New No 304,
2nd Floor,
Arcot road ,
Vadapalani ,
Chennai-26.
www.impulse.net.in
Email: ieeeprojects@yahoo.com/ imbpulse@gmail.com
Towards improvement of information literacy in the digital era through useful and meaningful educational programmes
If you can't find it on Google it does not exist.
Dr Scott A Hale introduced and facilitated discussion on the latest research updates and research needs at the Trusted Media Summit in December 2019. This summit brought together media organizations throughout APAC.
ASIS&T is a multidisciplinary organization with over 4,000 members from such fields as librarianship, computer science, linguistics, management, engineering, law, medicine, chemistry, and education. ASIS&T helps these professionals keep up with the rapid advancements and changes in library and information science, communications, networking, and computer science.
Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) for University of Tennessee, Knoxville, School of Information Sciences. As Chair of ASIS&T student chapter, I was thrilled to help bring Dr. Chirag Shah to speak about his research on information seeking behavior. The flyer was fun, the intro made me nervous. ;)
Online Data Preprocessing: A Case Study ApproachIJECEIAES
Besides the Internet search facility and e-mails, social networking is now one of the three best uses of the Internet. A tremendous number of volunteers every day write articles, share photos, videos and links at a scope and scale never imagined before. However, because social network data are huge and come from heterogeneous sources, the data are highly susceptible to inconsistency, redundancy, noise, and loss. For data scientists, preparing the data and getting it into a standard format is critical because the quality of data is going to directly affect the performance of mining algorithms that are going to be applied next. Low-quality data will certainly limit the analysis and lower the quality of mining results. To this end, the goal of this study is to provide an overview of the different phases involved in data preprocessing, with a focus on social network data. As a case study, we will show how we applied preprocessing to the data that we collected for the Malaysian Flight MH370 that disappeared in 2014.
CATEGORIZING 2019-N-COV TWITTER HASHTAG DATA BY CLUSTERINGijaia
Unsupervised machine learning techniques such as clustering are widely gaining use with the recent increase in social communication platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Clustering enables the finding of patterns in these unstructured datasets. We collected tweets matching hashtags linked to COVID-19 from a Kaggle dataset. We compared the performance of nine clustering algorithms using this dataset. We evaluated the generalizability of these algorithms using a supervised learning model. Finally, using a selected unsupervised learning algorithm we categorized the clusters. The top five categories are Safety,
Crime, Products, Countries and Health. This can prove helpful for bodies using large amount of Twitter data needing to quickly find key points in the data before going into further classification.
ABSTRACT : Computational social science (CSS) is an academic discipline that combines the traditional social sciences with computer science. While social scientists provide research questions, data sources, and acquisition methods, computer scientists contribute mathematical models and computational tools. CSS uses computationally methods and statistical tools to analyze and model social phenomena, social structures, and human social behavior. The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief introduction to computational social science.
Key Words: computational social science, social-computational systems, social simulation models, agent-based models
Making Decisions in a World Awash in Data: We’re going to need a different bo...Micah Altman
In his abstract, Scriffignano summarizes as follows:
l explore some of the ways in which the massive availability of data is changing and the types of questions we must ask in the context of making business decisions. Truth be told, nearly all organizations struggle to make sense out of the mounting data already within the enterprise. At the same time, businesses, individuals, and governments continue to try to outpace one another, often in ways that are informed by newly-available data and technology, but just as often using that data and technology in alarmingly inappropriate or incomplete ways. Multiple “solutions” exist to take data that is poorly understood, promising to derive meaning that is often transient at best. A tremendous amount of “dark” innovation continues in the space of fraud and other bad behavior (e.g. cyber crime, cyber terrorism), highlighting that there are very real risks to taking a fast-follower strategy in making sense out of the ever-increasing amount of data available. Tools and technologies can be very helpful or, as Scriffignano puts it, “they can accelerate the speed with which we hit the wall.” Drawing on unstructured, highly dynamic sources of data, fascinating inference can be derived if we ask the right questions (and maybe use a bit of different math!). This session will cover three main themes: The new normal (how the data around us continues to change), how are we reacting (bringing data science into the room), and the path ahead (creating a mindset in the organization that evolves). Ultimately, what we learn is governed as much by the data available as by the questions we ask. This talk, both relevant and occasionally irreverent, will explore some of the new ways data is being used to expose risk and opportunity and the skills we need to take advantage of a world awash in data.
For further details contact:
N.RAJASEKARAN B.E M.S 9841091117,9840103301.
IMPULSE TECHNOLOGIES,
Old No 251, New No 304,
2nd Floor,
Arcot road ,
Vadapalani ,
Chennai-26.
www.impulse.net.in
Email: ieeeprojects@yahoo.com/ imbpulse@gmail.com
Towards improvement of information literacy in the digital era through useful and meaningful educational programmes
If you can't find it on Google it does not exist.
Dr Scott A Hale introduced and facilitated discussion on the latest research updates and research needs at the Trusted Media Summit in December 2019. This summit brought together media organizations throughout APAC.
ASIS&T is a multidisciplinary organization with over 4,000 members from such fields as librarianship, computer science, linguistics, management, engineering, law, medicine, chemistry, and education. ASIS&T helps these professionals keep up with the rapid advancements and changes in library and information science, communications, networking, and computer science.
Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) for University of Tennessee, Knoxville, School of Information Sciences. As Chair of ASIS&T student chapter, I was thrilled to help bring Dr. Chirag Shah to speak about his research on information seeking behavior. The flyer was fun, the intro made me nervous. ;)
Online Data Preprocessing: A Case Study ApproachIJECEIAES
Besides the Internet search facility and e-mails, social networking is now one of the three best uses of the Internet. A tremendous number of volunteers every day write articles, share photos, videos and links at a scope and scale never imagined before. However, because social network data are huge and come from heterogeneous sources, the data are highly susceptible to inconsistency, redundancy, noise, and loss. For data scientists, preparing the data and getting it into a standard format is critical because the quality of data is going to directly affect the performance of mining algorithms that are going to be applied next. Low-quality data will certainly limit the analysis and lower the quality of mining results. To this end, the goal of this study is to provide an overview of the different phases involved in data preprocessing, with a focus on social network data. As a case study, we will show how we applied preprocessing to the data that we collected for the Malaysian Flight MH370 that disappeared in 2014.
CATEGORIZING 2019-N-COV TWITTER HASHTAG DATA BY CLUSTERINGijaia
Unsupervised machine learning techniques such as clustering are widely gaining use with the recent increase in social communication platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Clustering enables the finding of patterns in these unstructured datasets. We collected tweets matching hashtags linked to COVID-19 from a Kaggle dataset. We compared the performance of nine clustering algorithms using this dataset. We evaluated the generalizability of these algorithms using a supervised learning model. Finally, using a selected unsupervised learning algorithm we categorized the clusters. The top five categories are Safety,
Crime, Products, Countries and Health. This can prove helpful for bodies using large amount of Twitter data needing to quickly find key points in the data before going into further classification.
Standing Against the Online White Nationalist Movementkbesnoy
Online White Nationalism poses a threat to our democracy. This article offers instructional resources teachers can use to empower their students to stand against the white nationalist movement.
These slides were part of the kickoff for the Social Computing Collaborative group at the University of Minnesota - Jan. 2011. Each participant presented a single slide as part of their introduction of themselves and their social computing research interest areas.
Search and Society: Reimagining Information Access for Radical FuturesBhaskar Mitra
The field of Information retrieval (IR) is currently undergoing a transformative shift, at least partly due to the emerging applications of generative AI to information access. In this talk, we will deliberate on the sociotechnical implications of generative AI for information access. We will argue that there is both a critical necessity and an exciting opportunity for the IR community to re-center our research agendas on societal needs while dismantling the artificial separation between the work on fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics in IR and the rest of IR research. Instead of adopting a reactionary strategy of trying to mitigate potential social harms from emerging technologies, the community should aim to proactively set the research agenda for the kinds of systems we should build inspired by diverse explicitly stated sociotechnical imaginaries. The sociotechnical imaginaries that underpin the design and development of information access technologies needs to be explicitly articulated, and we need to develop theories of change in context of these diverse perspectives. Our guiding future imaginaries must be informed by other academic fields, such as democratic theory and critical theory, and should be co-developed with social science scholars, legal scholars, civil rights and social justice activists, and artists, among others.
The Last MIL or the Last Chance?
Daniel Pimienta.
que se presentó dentro de la Conferencia Internacional "Tangible and Intangible Impact of Information and Communication in the Digital Age", UNESCO/IFAP, Khanty-Mansiysk, Russian Federation, June 3–8, 2018.
In this session, we talk about the mobile and social web, and how it shapes economy, individual behavior and well-being, political events, and society as a whole.
What Data Can Do: A Typology of Mechanisms
Angèle Christin .
International Journal of Communication > Vol 14 (2020) , de Angèle Christin del Departamento de Comunicación de Stanford University, USA titulado "What Data Can Do: A Typology of Mechanisms". Entre otras cosas es autora del libro "Metrics at Work.
Overcoming Barriers to Online Engagement through carefull design and delivery...EADTU
Empower Webinar Week. Disclaimer: Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
Information Literacy: ‘Medicine’ in Improving Ways of Managing Information Ex...inventionjournals
We are now living in the information society and global village of which we are bombarded with huge sums of information which is not all relevant to us. It is therefore imperative to be well equipped with information literacy skills so as to curb the information explosion. Simply being exposed to a great deal of information will not make people informed citizens, they need information literacy skills. Information literacy comes as a ‘medicine’ in curing the information exposition. Information seekers can tackle information explosion by employing strategies such as information literacy education, development of information search skills, library education, user orientation, bibliographic user instruction, information fluency and all other information literacy competencies.
Knowledge production in Indonesian universities: Literacies and research writingQueen's University Belfast
KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN INDONESIAN UNIVERSITIES: THE ROLE OF LITERACIES IN RESEARCH WRITING
PRODUKSI PENGETAHUAN DI PERGURUAN TINGGI INDONESIA: KAJIAN PENULISAN ILMIAH
Ibrar Bhatt, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK, and Udi Samanhudi, Universitas Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa, Indonesia
Thursday 11th August 2022, 16:00 WIB / 10:00 BST
This paper presents an overview of a recently published monograph (Bhatt 2017) which offers a novel approach to the study of writing and digital literacy. Through in-depth accounts of assignment writing in college classrooms, I examine ways of understanding how students engage with digital media in curricular activities and how these give rise to new practices of information management and knowledge creation manifested in digitally mediated writing. I then consider what these new practices portend for a richer theory of writing and literacy in an age of informational abundance and ubiquitous connectivity.
Looking also at how institutional policies and strategies on digital media are applied in classroom writing tasks, and how students end up embracing or avoiding imposed technologies, this study offers an in-depth study of learner practices. I argue that it is through the comprehensive study of such practices that we can better understand the efficacy of technological investments in education, and the dynamic nature of the writing carried out by students charged with using those technologies.
Bhatt, I. (2017). Assignments as controversies: digital literacy and writing in classroom practice, Routledge Research in Literacy. New York: Routledge T&F.
In this talk I will address issues of "rigour" and "quality" in qualitative research, and the way that the two are closely aligned with how the researcher may explore various points of focus within the research process itself. Rigour and quality are inseparable from the generative nature of much qualitative inquiry, and the need to "show your workings" in the field within which the research is carried out. I will discuss this using examples of particular aspects of qualitative research that I have been involved with recently, both in design and execution. I will also discuss the opportunities and challenges of making a case for qualitative insights to augment and add value to other forms of research.
Research into the ‘Digital University’ necessitates decidedly digital methodologies. However, much of the recent discussion surrounding digital methods in education, including Higher Education, places more emphasis on quantitative approaches and the affordances of learning analytics (e.g. Sclater et al., 2016). There therefore remains a need to theorise and problematise the use and usability of new and digital methods to augment qualitative and ethnographic approaches to research. I argue that this is particularly pertinent for research on writing activities.
In this paper I discuss how my research team approached the study of the writing and knowledge producing work of academics. I reflect upon how we conducted in situ observations of the writing practices of our participants as part of a broader ethnographic and multi-method study. I argue that our theoretical and methodological ideas have the potential to open up new possibilities and opportunities for writing research in the contemporary university environment.
Most of the research which investigates writing in university contexts focusses on student writing, and the social practices of writing as part of student learning. In this seminar we present selected findings from our research project (see http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/acadswriting/), which examines the writing of academics in three English universities. We have spent the last 18 months working closely with academics across different departments, universities, and disciplines, and used repeated interviews and observations of writing processes to explore their cultures of professional writing. Specifically for this seminar, we focus on elements of our data where our academic participants recall how they became acquainted with the demands and conventions of their professional writing; in short, how they learned to write as academics.
We outline the management of ongoing and ‘on the job’ learning to write, new challenges of collaboration and digitisation, developing strategies to cope with changes, and mastering an increasing diversity of genres and text-types.
We hope that this seminar will stimulate an important discussion about the choices academics make about their writing, and the most appropriate ways of approaching professional development for academics, both at the early career stage and throughout their professional lives.
The dynamics of knowledge creation: academics' changing writing practices – i...Queen's University Belfast
A seminar for The Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE).
This seminar is based on an ESRC-funded project entitled ‘Dynamics of knowledge creation: academics’ writing practices in the contemporary university workplace’. The speakers are mapping how knowledge is produced and distributed through writing practices across disciplines and types of universities in England, and how these are shaped by recent changes. These include the new relationships with students and pressure to marketise teaching, associated with the introduction of higher fees; managerialist approaches to research writing associated with research evaluation; and the shift to diverse forms of digital communication and self-presentation.
The speakers explore the diversity of academics’ workplace writing practices associated with teaching, service, and administration, as well as research. Their mixed methods project first examined the professional lives of academics using various types of focused interviews. This has been complemented with close up in situ recordings of writing processes. They are now engaging with managerial and administrative staff, to locate individual experiences in the broader university context.
In completing their ‘telling case’ of English universities, the speakers are in contact with academics internationally and are beginning to explore international differences, including: different managerial contexts and cultures of writing; North-South disparities, including access to technologies; language issues, especially around English as a global language for academia; and global networks and academic mobility.
See http://www.researchcghe.org/events/2016-10-13-the-dynamics-of-knowledge-creation-academics-changing-writing-practices-international-implications/ for further information.
This paper explores how changes in higher education are transforming academics’ writing practices and sense of professional identity. It reports on preliminary findings from an ERSC-funded project that involves interviewing a range of academics from three different disciplines across three contrasting higher education institutions in the UK about their literacy practices around research, teaching and admin-related writing. [from the abstract]
Palestine last event orientationfvgnh .pptxRaedMohamed3
An EFL lesson about the current events in Palestine. It is intended to be for intermediate students who wish to increase their listening skills through a short lesson in power point.
The Roman Empire A Historical Colossus.pdfkaushalkr1407
The Roman Empire, a vast and enduring power, stands as one of history's most remarkable civilizations, leaving an indelible imprint on the world. It emerged from the Roman Republic, transitioning into an imperial powerhouse under the leadership of Augustus Caesar in 27 BCE. This transformation marked the beginning of an era defined by unprecedented territorial expansion, architectural marvels, and profound cultural influence.
The empire's roots lie in the city of Rome, founded, according to legend, by Romulus in 753 BCE. Over centuries, Rome evolved from a small settlement to a formidable republic, characterized by a complex political system with elected officials and checks on power. However, internal strife, class conflicts, and military ambitions paved the way for the end of the Republic. Julius Caesar’s dictatorship and subsequent assassination in 44 BCE created a power vacuum, leading to a civil war. Octavian, later Augustus, emerged victorious, heralding the Roman Empire’s birth.
Under Augustus, the empire experienced the Pax Romana, a 200-year period of relative peace and stability. Augustus reformed the military, established efficient administrative systems, and initiated grand construction projects. The empire's borders expanded, encompassing territories from Britain to Egypt and from Spain to the Euphrates. Roman legions, renowned for their discipline and engineering prowess, secured and maintained these vast territories, building roads, fortifications, and cities that facilitated control and integration.
The Roman Empire’s society was hierarchical, with a rigid class system. At the top were the patricians, wealthy elites who held significant political power. Below them were the plebeians, free citizens with limited political influence, and the vast numbers of slaves who formed the backbone of the economy. The family unit was central, governed by the paterfamilias, the male head who held absolute authority.
Culturally, the Romans were eclectic, absorbing and adapting elements from the civilizations they encountered, particularly the Greeks. Roman art, literature, and philosophy reflected this synthesis, creating a rich cultural tapestry. Latin, the Roman language, became the lingua franca of the Western world, influencing numerous modern languages.
Roman architecture and engineering achievements were monumental. They perfected the arch, vault, and dome, constructing enduring structures like the Colosseum, Pantheon, and aqueducts. These engineering marvels not only showcased Roman ingenuity but also served practical purposes, from public entertainment to water supply.
Ethnobotany and Ethnopharmacology:
Ethnobotany in herbal drug evaluation,
Impact of Ethnobotany in traditional medicine,
New development in herbals,
Bio-prospecting tools for drug discovery,
Role of Ethnopharmacology in drug evaluation,
Reverse Pharmacology.
Instructions for Submissions thorugh G- Classroom.pptxJheel Barad
This presentation provides a briefing on how to upload submissions and documents in Google Classroom. It was prepared as part of an orientation for new Sainik School in-service teacher trainees. As a training officer, my goal is to ensure that you are comfortable and proficient with this essential tool for managing assignments and fostering student engagement.
How to Make a Field invisible in Odoo 17Celine George
It is possible to hide or invisible some fields in odoo. Commonly using “invisible” attribute in the field definition to invisible the fields. This slide will show how to make a field invisible in odoo 17.
The Art Pastor's Guide to Sabbath | Steve ThomasonSteve Thomason
What is the purpose of the Sabbath Law in the Torah. It is interesting to compare how the context of the law shifts from Exodus to Deuteronomy. Who gets to rest, and why?
Unit 8 - Information and Communication Technology (Paper I).pdfThiyagu K
This slides describes the basic concepts of ICT, basics of Email, Emerging Technology and Digital Initiatives in Education. This presentations aligns with the UGC Paper I syllabus.
Unit 8 - Information and Communication Technology (Paper I).pdf
Ignorance and Epistemic Harm Lessons for Digital and Information Literacy
1. Ignorance and Epistemic Harm
Lessons for Digital and Information Literacy
The Society for Research into Higher Education , Digital University Network, 5th May 2017
Photo by ibrar bhatt https://www.flickr.com/photos/87248369@N03/32967559021/
Dr Ibrar Bhatt
Lecturer in Education
@ibrar_bhatt
i.bhatt@qub.ac.uk
Dr Alison MacKenzie
Lecturer in Education
a.mackenzie@qub.ac.uk
2. Some ideas about curation and information
management
• Digital content curation (Rosenbaum, 2011)
• Subjective and ideological (Snyder, 2015)
• Curation links information to knowledge and meaning-making (Bhatt, 2017)
• Crap detection (Rheingold, 2012)
• Curation is both human and computational, and a form of stewardship (Khan & Bhatt,
forthcoming)
4. Misinformation
“While the benefits of our hyper-connected communication systems are undisputed, they could
potentially enable the viral spread of information that is either intentionally or unintentionally
misleading or provocative. Imagine a real-world example of shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre.
In a virtual equivalent, damage can be done by rapid spread of misinformation even when correct
information follows quickly.
Are there ways for generators and consumers of social media to develop an ethos of
responsibility and healthy scepticism to mitigate the risk of digital wildfires?”
(World Economic Forum Report 2013: p. 11)
5. The power of algorithms
The mediation of traditional stewardship (librarians, teachers, and even parents) has partially
given way to the work of computational curators
Social media executives hold the keys to the secrets to their algorithms tightly
They are increasingly powerful for in decision making for individuals, employers, and
governments (O’Neil 2016)
Their self-regulatory nature raises serious questions (Ibid)
6. Epistemic ignorance; epistemic harm?
Algorithms are ways of not knowing; or, rather, constructing and sustaining ignorance
Ignorance results from the configuration of interest
Knowing that we do not know/not caring to know – not linked to present interests
We do not know that we do not know – current interests/knowledge block such interests
Willed/willful ignorance – they do not know and don’t want to know
Types of ignorance as substantive epistemic practices
7. Discussion
Looking at the platforms and tools which you use, and your online habits, reflect
on the extent to which you are reliant on algorithms in your life.
Reflect on how your access to forms of knowledge are obstructed or constructed
through these algorithms.
8. Final points
Theories, frameworks, and research agendas surrounding digital and
information literacy should take into account the potential for epistemic harm.
The study of digital and information literacy is intrinsically connected to the
study of knowledge production, and therefore also to the production and
sustenance of ignorance.
9. References:
Bhatt, I. (2017) Assignments as controversies: digital literacy and writing in classroom practice, Routledge Research in
Literacy
Khan, S. & Bhatt, I. (forthcoming) Curation. In The International Encyclopedia of Media Literacy (R. Hobbes & P.
Mihailidis, Eds.).
O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. New
York: Crown.
Rheingold, H. (2012). Net smart: How to thrive online. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Snyder, I. A. (2015). Discourses of 'curation' in digital times. In Discourse and digital practices: Doing discourse analysis
in the digital age (R. H. Jones, A. Chik, & C. A. Hafner, Eds.), pp. 209-225, Abingdon Oxon UK: Routledge.
World Economic Forum (2013) Digital wildfires in a hyperconnected world. Global Risks 2013: An Initiative of the Risk
Response Network. Geneva. from http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2013/risk-case-1/digital-wildfires-in-a-
hyperconnected-world/