Week 12

Generally, I have a hard time narrowing my focus. I appreciate knowing the big picture, the grand scheme of things, the overarching goal. However, sometimes it gets difficult to focus on the smaller individual tasks that are needed to achieve the larger goal. I would argue that as a society, we all share in this problem. At the intersection of social media and social justice, you'll often find folks pointing out large systemic issues (racism, ableism, sexism). Yet I find it much less common to see posts about the smaller tasks that need to be taken to try and combat these issues.

My tendency to make my focus too broad is one that was apparent in my original research question. I want to know about information seeking behaviour in university students - I want to know why they look for answers in certain places, why websites are hard to use, and I want to know how to fix it. What I've realized over the course of this semester is that I can't answer all of these questions with one study. As a result, my research question has become increasingly narrow. I've chosen less methods to use, I've specified a location for the study to be conducted (at a specific university campus), and I've limited what data I'm hoping to collect from the study. For this preliminary study, I'm focusing on figuring out why students under-utilize official university websites when they're looking for academic information. And even though this scope feels too small, I know that it has to be done this way - one step at a time.

Week 11

What struck me about this week's blog post is the "theoretical tension here between experience, memory, and the sharing of knowledge". Too often, research places the greatest value on data - anything that is measurable and quantifiable. However, this is often done at the expense of preserving stories, and the breadth of knowledge that can be derived from them. I very strongly believe that there is invaluable knowledge that can be derived from experiences. Experiences, taken holistically, provide insight and information that no amount of quantitative data, surveys, or charts, could ever hope to provide.

While some research methods,  ethnography in particular, do leave space for stories, there is more often than not a reduction of the knowledge that is truly available. There are, as always, challenges that come from studies that produce stories as their results, and use these stories to communicate messages. A recent example that comes to mind is a study that was run by a university - the intention was to gather stories from folks who live in the surrounding neighborhood. However, only clips of long interviews were made available, and it is arguable that specific snippets were chosen to paint the university in a positive light. In this case, the stories are data that are preserved digitally, yet this does not protect them from targeted editing. This may lead to folks in 2112 receiving an inaccurate perception of what the research was actually about, and what the stories were actually trying to say. I suppose this reason, the vulnerability that collections of stories/data face when digitized, is why I still have a soft spot for also storing things in hard copy (however problematic this may be!).

Week 10

The study that I'm proposing for this course's final assignment would be considered an information experiment. The purpose of my proposed study is to gain insight into how post secondary students engage with academic information resources. In particular, I'm interested in how efficient students are at navigating institution produced websites to locate certain pieces of academic information. My experiment would consist of a series of one on one interviews where a student is asked a series of questions about their information seeking behaviour. Observation sessions would also be set up for these students, where they would be asked to perform certain tasks with an information resource (e.g. find a course timetable on the Registrar's Office's website) while their clicks are measured quantitatively and qualitatively.

My proposed study would be considered a traditional experiment as it would occur in a controlled setting. There are many variables that would need to be controlled for when recruiting participants for the study. Some of these include: student's year of study, familiarity with the information resource, comfort level with technology. Some of the independent variables of this study include: the list of tasks that the participant is asked to complete, the information resource (e.g. which website) that is used, the technological resources available to the participant (e.g. no use of google). Some of the dependent variables include: how many clicks it takes the participant to complete the task, whether or not the participant is able to complete the tasks successfully.

Armed with the results and information learned from this first experiment, changes could be made to the information resource in question, and a second round of this experiment could be held to see if these improvements made an impact. Essentially, I want to learn information through an experiment, that will help facilitate better access to information.

Week 9

Given the past two blogs and a few recent assignments, I've come to realize how bad I am at choosing a topic when given free reign and no parameters. I suppose I'm so used to thinking of ideas that fit within strict criteria that I've loosened my grip on what actually captures my interest. Isn't that worrisome? Here's hoping our interests continue to be developed within, and outside of, academia.

With that being said, I think the text(s) that I'd like to study would be a religious text, of any religion really. The reason this interests me is because I was raised without the presence of religion - very few members of my family practice Buddhism, and those that do experience it subjectively. Give this fact, I think it would be interesting to study the origin and prevalence of different texts, without any personal investment in the writings and teachings of the text. Particularly, an objective view would lend itself to research into any chances that have occurred to the texts over time. I'd like to look at how these texts came to be, how they were duplicated, how they were distributed, and what their migration patterns look like. I think this research would have to cover a very long span of time. More interesting is the range of technological advances that would need to be taken into consideration. Presumably, the duplication and distribution of various religious texts would have been done through methods such as transcription by hand, to printing presses, to current day digital platforms.

Week 8

Let me start by saying that I understand the necessity of ethics review boards, and different policies at play to ensure the safety/fair treatment of participants and researchers. While I won't argue with the importance of ERBs, I will say that it saddens me that many, many research initiatives will never come to fruition simply because they don't receive funding, or they don't align with various institutional/political goals.

With all of that being said, I'm often overwhelmed with the notion that a lot of really interesting research projects will never be done because of these rules and policies. As part of my undergrad, I completed a major in psychology. Needless to say, psychology is a field full of incredibly interesting experiments and research involving humans as participants. ERBs are particularly important in this field, as there is a history of experiments that have been done that would never pass ethics approval. However, there are some studies that I wish could be done, that I know never will be. As a long standing example, I've always been intrigued by the fact that babies a have the ability to perceive and discriminate between every human speech sound. They quickly lose this ability as there is repeated exposure to certain phonemes present in the languages spoken around them. Every since I learned these facts, I've wished that there was an experiment that could be conducted to see what would happen if a newborn was consistently exposed to many different languages (I'm thinking like, 50 languages) - how much of their ability to perceive and discriminate would be retained over time? Alas, I know that this type of experiment would never be approved, so I'm left to merely wonder.

Week 7

In the realm of information studies, I think we need to expand the definition of "field research". With so much information is housed, used, and exchanged digitally, field research needs to occur in spaces that aren't literally/physically "in the field". With that being said, there are still opportunities for field research to take place, especially when we are looking at aspects such as user design and user experience. In my research, field research comes into play through the use of focus groups. The role of using focus groups is to gather students who are trying to locate information on academic websites, and analyzing how they actually use these websites, and whether or not their attempts at information retrieval is successful. Organizing focus groups involves the recruitment of participants, as well as being with them in the same space, to observe as they navigate their way through online information.

Food for thought: typically with ethnographic research, we expect researchers to immerse themselves into an environment so they can observe their surroundings. However, with information, aren't we all already immersed in it? Aren't we all participating in the information realm on a daily basis? And if we are, are we able to enter the field without any already existing bias?

Week 6

Often times, numbers and statistics are a necessary tool in driving a story home. We exist in a world that's filled with over seven billion people. I don't know about you, but I find this number impossible to envision. In cases like these, I find that statistics, while often eye opening, can be incredibly intangible. This is why I find it so powerful when numbers are boiled down to something easily imagined. A fellow blogger posted this link in a comment: http://www.100people.org/statistics_detailed_statistics.php. In taking statistics that are true for the entire world's population, but framing it in regards to 100 people, these statistics become more meaningful because they're more easily understood.

I think it's easy to become consumed in one's own existence. By this I mean that we get comfortable with our immediate surroundings, and we believe things that are true in our context. If there's anything that can bring us out of this bubble and shift our perspective, it's numbers. As an example, living in Toronto, I'd argue that we are aware of multiculturalism. However, I'd also argue that most of us think of English as a dominant language in the world. Taken from the website posted above, only 5 out of 100 people (so 5%) of the world speaks English as a first language. This type of statistic has the power to shift our perspective - it makes me hyper aware that there is a giant world out there.

Week 4

I appreciate (and almost always use) visual representations when mapping out an essay, a topic, or an argument. As I understand it, creating this bedraggled daisy should help folks organize and explore their research. However, for these purposes, I feel as though it's an ineffective activity.   My personal preference for visual representation of ideas is a mind map, where I can organize ideas in relation to each other. A mind map allows you to connect ideas to one another so that you can see common and overlapping connections. In contrast, the daisy forces you to try and fit all of your ideas into a daisy - it would be really difficult to add petals after the fact! For this reason, I found this daisy activity more limiting than anything.

In any case, here's my bedraggled daisy: 

Week 3

My result: Foucault

This result makes sense to me. All of the answers that stood out to be all concerned power relations and society. I think the role power, especially when it comes to knowledge, is an incredibly important factor. It is important that we consider issues like who controls knowledge, who decides what knowledge is disseminated widely, and who creates knowledge? It is also important to recognize that no matter what issue we are researching, it will affect groups of people differently depending on their status and position in society.

This survey is definitely far from perfect. If someone knew all of the possible results of this survey, they could definitely spoof it to get an answer that they want. The answers follow consistent themes. As an example, most of the answers leading to Foucault were related to power relations and taking into consideration a person's status in society. There is also a set of answers that lends itself to objective science (these answers lead to Francis Bacon, who "has a bit of a thing for scientific method", and enjoys empirical research). However, since the results of this survey don't hold serious statistical consequences, it does serve it's purpose.

Week 2

Information overload is an interesting concept, and incredibly relevant as we embark careers as information professionals. I think we will be tasked with combating issues like how to reduce information overload, and how do we teach people to navigate in nets and tangles of difference pieces of information. Perhaps more importantly, how do we ensure that the right information is communicated effectively to people? What I find especially interesting is how the prevalence of the Internet, search engines, and social media influencing the ability of people to seek information effectively, and not get bogged down by the overabundance. Social media, in particular, provides a constant stream of new information.  Most social media platforms provide a feed or discovery function, where users can scroll through different posts. With the rise of digital protesting, and general awareness around various social justice issues, these feeds can become endless posts of news articles and coverage of different hot topics. The question then becomes, does this endless stream contribute to information overload? Or, does the built in necessity to condense articles into quick and witty posts actually allow users to get more pieces of unique information?

Research Question:

Does the prevalent use of new technologies (e.g. social media, Internet, search engines) aid people in navigating the information realm, or do they increase the scope of information overload?