Week 6: Introduction
By Susie Chin and Shant Shahoian
Introduction
This week, you will be exploring a topic that has become more salient and important in recent years: the impact of algorithms to "manage" and commodify our interests, thoughts, opinions, and preferences when seeking information. Keep in mind, how do algorithms impact what you think your information need is? This unit sheds a different light on the darkness of how our consumption of information is not often something we have control over.
Algorithms
This week we learn about some ideas that border on topics that may elicit a more personal or emotional response from you. Strive to learn and understand, not necessarily any particular issue or political perspective, but how the machine of information retrieval and the process of consumption are impacted by things we might take for granted on a daily basis. When responding to other students, keep this in mind. Keep the conversation respectful and focus on the various goals of the class, to become more aware of our diet of information consumption, the information ecosystem, and the goals of digital citizenship.
Information Creation and the Information Cycle
Additionally, you will be looking at the nature of information sources more closely. As you learned from Information Creation as Process, sources are indelibly linked to the period in the information cycle/timeline in which they are produced; information source characteristics, such as accuracy, relevance, and appropriateness, are determined by the time frame in which that information was created. Think about a news event that interested you that happened a few months ago or even a couple of years ago. Imagine the route of this particular event's information timeline. How does the veracity, reliability, and authority of the information created on this event evolve throughout the event's information cycle/timeline?
Not all information is produced in this manner. For example, the study of an artistic or literary work such as art, novels, poetry, etc. does not go through an information cycle/timeline in the same way. Popular sources such as newspapers and magazines or social media sources, for example, are not a significant part of the information cycle for these areas of study because popular and social media sources are not particularly relevant to this type of academic research. Studying a novel written by Ernest Hemingway or poetry by Emily Dickinson would fall under the specialized study of literature or literary research; with the exception of book reviews written at the time of publication, research, that is, scholarly sources such as interpretation and criticism are written by professors/scholars in English or Literature.
Clearly, criticism about literature evolves: contemporary criticisms build on the work of those who came before them, but the nature of literary research is divergent in nature, having multiple "right" answers, as opposed to convergent, having the most "right" answer. That is, ideas in the arts and humanities are not striving toward a single convergent truth in the same way that the natural and social sciences do; they aim for a multiplicity of voices and ideas, each complementing a pluralistic vision of the work of art in question.
Your reading from the textbook last week, “Types of Sources”, from the textbook, Choosing and Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research, you delved into the various characteristics of sources. For novice researchers who have only accessed information electronically or online in most instances, distinguishing one type of source from another is challenging.
Different Sources
If you think about it, while there are many benefits and advantages to online access, such as the flexibility and portability of accessing information, it also becomes challenging to understand exactly how and why the sources you encounter are different from each other and how these differences serve your information and research needs. For example, the characteristics of an article from a newspaper, magazine, scholarly journal, books, reference sources, etc. are largely indistinguishable on a screen because what you see is a two-dimensional object of the black font on a (usually) white background. For that matter, if you didn’t know that a book could amount to hundreds of pages long, you wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking at the screen. In a sense, all information appears flat from this perspective. There are no obvious signposts, unless you know where and how to look for them!
Look at the stack of papers in the below picture. If I told you that the stack contained the printouts of one book, a newspaper article, a magazine article, and a scholarly journal article, would you be able to figure out which is which just by looking at this stack of papers? Probably not. The picture is quite literally a representation of seeing sources on the monitor and printing them out. There are no visual distinguishing factors.
“Stack of Papers (Links to an external site.)” by Phillip Wong (Links to an external site.) is licensed under CC BY 2.0
But there is! So what about this picture?
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo (Links to an external site.) on Unsplash (Links to an external site.)
You could probably make out the magazines from the books, right? We’ll be looking more closely at how you can distinguish different types of sources when the signs aren’t as obvious as the ones in the second picture.
These differences are important for anyone who will be working in a discipline or industry that requires in-depth research. You read about many of these distinctions in this last week’s chapter from the textbook. Some of these differences are a result of the information cycle, the purpose and intent of the creator of the source, and the depth and scope of the content, among other things.
We’ll explore these concepts deeper in the coming weeks when we look closely at analyzing the identifying features of each type of source.