‘Ask Me Anything,’ say SILS faculty
In their first fall webinar, three School of Information and Library Science researchers fielded questions about search engines and other topics.
With information and misinformation topics so prominent in the day’s news, the School of Information and Library Science has once again made its faculty experts available to answer questions from the public about their areas of expertise. The webinars are streamed live on YouTube at noon on Fridays.
Here are a few soundbites from the first “Ask Me Anything” webinar this fall, hosted Aug. 19 by Brian Sturm, SILS professor and associate dean for academic affairs. Watch the recording on the SILS YouTube channel.
Francesca Tripodi
Francesca Tripodi
assistant professor, School of Information and Library Science; senior faculty researcher, Center for Information, Technology and Public Life
Faculty expertise:
Social media, political partisanship and democratic participation, particularly how Google and Wikipedia are manipulated for political gains; patterns of gender inequality on Wikipedia.
Latest publication:
“The Propagandists’ Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy” (2022, Yale University Press).
How do these propagandists redirect the public from the news of the day to their specific message?
Keyword curation and strategic signaling is more than just an online information system. It requires stitching together radio, television, newspapers, digital content. And you repeat these phrases on these broadcasts or podcasts. And then you’re signaling people to search for information on the subject. What I find through detailed content analysis of news and podcasts is that they’re activating this idea of “go search for it yourself.”
They’re like, “You know, we’re talking so much about the impeachment, but we should really be talking about XYZ. Why is nobody talking about XYZ? If I were you, I would google XYZ.” I refer to this as the Ikea effect of misinformation. People have found that when they are activated to put furniture together, they value low-quality furniture more than if it’s just sold to them. So creating this tangible, do-it-yourself quality when it comes to information-seeking is also part of this process.
Ask them anything
These future Ask Me Anything webinars are all offered at noon on Fridays. Click on the links to register and submit questions.
- Aug. 26: Melanie Feinberg and Matt Perault
- Sept. 2: Megan Winget, Ron Bergquist and Helen Tibbo
- Sept. 9: Gary Marchionini
- Sept. 23: Elliott Kuecker and Maggie Melo
- Sept. 30: Mohammad Jarrahi, Arcot Rajasekar and Rob Capra
- Oct. 7: Javed Mostafa, Ray Wang and Lukasz Mazur
Brad Hemminger
Brad Hemminger
associate professor, School of Information and Library Science; joint appointment in Carolina Center for Genome Sciences; adjunct appointments, radiology and Biomedical Research Imaging Center.
Faculty expertise:
Scholarly communications, medical and bioinformatics, computer-human interfaces, digital libraries and open access/publishing/data, information visualization, augmented/virtual reality, interactive information searching, databases.
Upcoming publication:
“Breaking Up Isn’t Hard to Do,” about academic libraries and big journal subscription deals.
Why are you studying virtual reality?
Virtual reality may not be the kind of thing that you think of when you talk about library and information science, but I got drawn into it by my computer science background. This ability to put yourself into an entirely different world is what excited me about it.
I’m more excited about the mixed reality or augmented reality. That’s where you have not just this virtual space that’s imagined, but it’s overlaid on top of your world. We can really change how we view the world and how we experience the world by having these virtual things added to real life. It’s important for us to be in this field. We can provide a lot of good policy-making thinking about it.
Jaime Arguello
Jaime Arguello
associate professor, School of Information and Library Science
Faculty expertise:
Information retrieval, aggregated search systems and evaluation, search behavior, text data mining, machine learning, task-based search, search assistance.
Current project:
“Search as learning” or how learning happens during search.
What is aggregated search?
It’s basically developing search systems that search other search systems. Google is an example of aggregated search. It’s not just one search engine. It’s many different search engines. There’s one for web documents, one for news, one for video, one for images, one for local businesses. There’s even one for advertisements.
The goal of the search engine is to put the most relevant things in places where you’re most likely to see them and most likely to engage with them. But it turns out that that visual attention to something is influenced by lots of different factors — where the results are positioned, how they’re positioned, the individual and their mental model of how the system works.
