This is were I deviate back to science communication because I needed synthesize what is already floating around in the air. This page also doubles as a rather informal bibliography and literature review.
The Information Search Process (ISP) is a six stage model of the users’ holistic experience in the process of information seeking. The ISP model, based on two decades of empirical research, identifies three realms of experience: the affective (feelings), the cognitive (thoughts) and the physical (actions) common to each stage. Central to the ISP is the notion that uncertainty, both affective and cognitive, increases and decreases in the process of information seeking. A principle of uncertainty for information seeking is proposed that states that information commonly increases uncertainty in the early stages of the search process. Increased uncertainty indicates a zone of intervention for intermediaries and system designers.
I LOVE this page because it’s an overview of ISP and has a timeline and it open source. Plus there’s multigenerational perspective! It’s subtly but powerfully reinforces what I want Knowledge Communication to be about; sustainable epistemic care.
Key Insight: Knowing is emotional. Confusion, frustration, and doubt are not failures of intelligence, but are in fact milestones.
Why It Matters: Knowledge Communication affirms these moments as part of the form, not interruptions to it.
...we propose a new framework for understanding this: personal information burden (PIM-B). We propose PIM-B as a conceptual tool that may provide frameworks for understanding inequalities that occur when marginalized groups are burdened with disproportionate PIM requirements to obtain and/or engage with necessary personal information, such as a birth certificate for their children.
This led us to propose the following characteristics of a PIM-B:
- Additional PIM activities There exists an understanding that a marginalized group or class of people must engage in additional required PIM activities (sometimes with an associated extra cost) to obtain access to a service or entitlement, in which non-marginalized populations do not have to engage. These additional PIM activities create a burden. The additional activities also track to PIM activities established by Jones (2008);
- Negative affect: The PIM is discussed as highly affectual and most often negatively; closely aligning it with the stress experienced from information overload as described by Bawden et al. (1999); Allan and Wilson (2003); and affective interactions discussed by Alon and Nachmias (2020);
- Lack of identity self extension to the personal information: There exists a disagreement with the "represents me" characteristic and link between personal information and identity findings from Cushing (2012, 2013) and others. This can lead to a feeling of vulnerability (Potnis & Winberry, 2021);
- Additional information seeking: There exists an understanding that the information seeking process is designed for the non-marginalized, majority group. This creates the requirement for the marginalized group to engage in additional information seeking to complete the same task that the non-marginalized group can potentially arrive at in fewer procedural steps.
...Often this PIM-B, particularly considering our participants, results in minority communities being burdened with the labor of explaining their inequalities to broader mainstream society. The often-invisible PIM work became a means by which to explain the marginalized group's burden to non-marginalized groups. Our participants demonstrated this need to explain their inequalities through their interactions with government officials, which often resulted in them having to complete additional PIM tasks. In this sense, the PIM burden becomes a tool to make inequality measurable: by explaining the extra PIM and procedural steps required to avail of equality.
Thinking through PIM-B in this way supplies a framework which, can help in understanding the vulnerabilities created for a swathe of minority and vulnerable communities, and also, exposes the ways in which mainstream, normative institutions that govern the conventions of PIM can create vulnerabilities. Developing this framework can help other communities who face PIM-B. When an organization or State imposes processes and procedures that require PIM activities that vary greatly in task and complexity for different groups, inequality may be present.
In a (paywalled) paper published in 2021 Vanessa L. Kitzie, Travis L. Wagner, Valerie Lookingbill, and Nicolas Vera countered the implication made by previous researchers that marginalized communities are “inherently impoverished” because they lack mainstream/authoritative resources. They put forth that not all communities need the same information and that communities can and do produce, promote, and circulate their own information. In actuality, the LGBTQIA+ community is an example of how “mainstream” information, or information that “reinforces the status quo” rather than an information “need” may in fact be “irrelevant” at best or directly harmful at worst.
Although often referred to and treated as a singular entity by authoritative institutions, the LGBTQIA+ “community” is a multiplicity of smaller communities coexisting as “sites of resistance” and “fundamentally challenge normative ideas and values related to what constitutes ‘acceptable 'information practices or forms of knowledge” . The researchers theorized that the community formation of LGBTQIA+ groups was a response to marginalization and the researchers sought to construct a conceptional model of shared information practices among marginalized groups. Their research was assembled from five data sets from the southeastern region of the United States including semi-structured interviews, world mapping, world café methodology structured small-table conversations, and virtual focus groups. Participants included LGBTQ+ community leaders and library staff. Notably the researchers emphasized a reframing of “community” as a “unit of observation”.
Building off previous research and models they identified LGBTQIA+ information practices as “tactical and agentic responses to and refutations of social and structural barriers and risks”. “Barriers” were defined as “immediate obstacles individuals and communities face that prevent them from achieving desired informational outcomes” and “risks” were defined as “perceived exposure to danger, harm, or loss that might result from engaging in a specific practice or activity”. The researchers highlight one of the focus group participants, a white nonbinary person in their 20s, as an example. The participant described the process of having an acute medical issue and needing to assess the risk of going to the emergency room where they would face the barriers of transphobia and cisheteronormativity.
The researchers also noted that risks and barriers produced two distinct types of information practices which they dubbed “defensive” and “protective”. “Defensive” was clarified as practices that “seek to mitigate adverse outcomes produced by barriers” while protective practices "proactively guard against a perceived risk to an individual and community”. While certain practices by their LGBTQIA participants could be labeled as “uninformed’ or ‘unsafe’ in authoritative or dominated social and cultural contexts they were noted by researchers to in fact be “informed and agentic responses to barriers and risks”. An example of an informed and agentic response to barriers and risks was the practice of looking up symptoms on WebMD for the purpose of self-diagnosis before visiting a doctor or clinic to counter the expectation of being under diagnosed by medical professionals. Kitzieet al. identified examples of defensive information practice (mitigating outcomes produced by barriers) and protective practice (guarding against perceived risk).
The findings collected from the user-based methods both challenges and deconstructs establish information dichotomies such as “expert or novice, safe or risky, [and]informed or uninformed” and highlights the agency of marginalized individuals regarding their use of information practices . Transgender and nonbinary focus group participants described the additional barrier of transphobia and described networks of information sharing regarding safe and unsafe medical professionals and services. The practice of “word of mouth” defined by Kitzie et al. as the “act of passing experiential, trustworthy information, often in the form of personal experiences and stories, from person to person within a community” (an information practice often deemed unreliable in the larger social context) was an important defensive information practice among transgender and nonbinary focus group participants.
When world mapping the participants used “visual tactics such as leaving blank space or deliberately leaving people, places, and things out of the map” to illustrate “missing links” in the healthcare system. The researchers noted that “less than half of all maps analyzed so far include medical institutions” reemphasizing the disparity of trustworthy health information and resources. Participants with intersecting identities, such as identifying as both LGBTQIA+ and Black, illustrated additional barriers to information by “using absence to mark the dangers of any movements of non-intersectional LGBTQIA+ assimilation such as drawing their communities as physically apart from assimilative information sources like courthouses”. Black focus group participants emphasized a fear and distrust of doctors a trend also observed in Jia et al.’s systematic review of the available literature on LGBTQ information seeking. Black participants saw information from doctors as unreliable or untrustworthy because of institutional racism.
Advancing information practices theoretical discourses centered on marginality, community, and embodiment: Learning from the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) communities | Kitzie V. et al. (2021)These entries are in order of discover, but this is actually the most influencial paper for me.
Imagine a surfer carving a trail down the face of a wave. When we focus on her performance in that brief moment, we judge her decisions as good and her skill as adequate. We surmise that her content knowledge, skills, attitude, and experience in surfing are sufficient to the task. But if we do not look forward and backward from that moment, we miss the factors that led her to drop in—to choose that wave—just as we miss how her choices could take her safely into the shallows or up onto a reef. And if we focus on the surfer only, if we ignore the shape, velocity, and direction of the wave, we will never really understand why she did what she did or what happens in the end. Her individual competence in an isolated moment explains only a part of the story, only a drop in the ocean.
Now imagine two people reading an opinion essay about the effectiveness of mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. The essay makes a strong claim that mask mandates are ineffective, based on the author's interpretation of a published and peer-reviewed review of research. The first reader is a father of two young children who, out of concern for his family's health, paid close attention to institutional public health advice and made cautious decisions throughout the early years of the pandemic. He saw the essay while scrolling through headlines on his phone and decided to read it despite a baseline mistrust of the author, a well-known conservative columnist. The second reader is a young adult who lost her job during lockdown and, though sympathetic to the needs of those she saw as vulnerable, was deeply frustrated by the social and professional cost of public health measures. She encountered the essay on social media, where it was shared by a friend with conservative political beliefs and reinforced by the comments of mutual acquaintances.
It is not hard to imagine how these two people might respond differently to the essay. They are not alone. Research consistently shows that prior experience, identity, and many layers of context shape how people engage with science (Irwin &mp Wynne, 1996; Nisbet &mp Scheufele, 2009; Zummo et al., 2021). Like the surfer, both of these readers will react to new informational challenges according to their particular goals and experiences. If we look only at what they do while they are reading and interpreting the article, we risk misinterpreting their thoughts and actions. Our educational interventions may be poorly suited to the challenges they face...
...For science education, the challenges posed by disinformation and science denial should be seen as part of a bigger challenge: improving public engagement with science. Recent research on disinformation and science denial has the potential to make an important contribution to that challenge by focusing our attention on the outcome space—what we want people to be able to do with science in their lives (Allchin, 2023; Osborne &mp Pimentel, 2022). But such research will only reach its full potential when science educators learn to put it in context. In particular, science education must move past the individualistic approaches that dominate the field's response to dis- and misinformation and emphasize, instead, how people work together to make sense of their complex information environment (Aikenhead, 2006; Feinstein &mp Waddington, 2020; Irwin &mp Wynne, 1996).
Science communication often treats its' audience as sponges soaking up information instead of agentic curators of their own knowledge. Going forward I have three presumptions: