25 minute read
Research
from iNews 2021
by UWiSchool
Fighting the tide
Two years in, CIP is a leading voice against misinformation
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By Michael Grass
In September, iSchool Associate Professor Jevin West’s twoyear term as the Center for an Informed Public’s faculty director came to a close when the center’s directorship transitioned to co-founder Kate Starbird, a UW Human Centered Design & Engineering associate professor and iSchool adjunct associate professor.
In two years of research, public programming and educational outreach, the CIP saw significant achievements during West’s term as director. It secured major federal research funding, including the National Science Foundation’s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program awarding a $3 million collaborative grant to a CIP-led team, with support from Stanford University, to study multi-stakeholder models for rapid-response research of mis- and disinformation. That funding, along with a $1 million gift from Craig Newmark Philanthropies and other philanthropic support, has helped lay a strong foundation as the CIP heads into its third year.
“Jevin’s leadership has helped establish the CIP as an important research organization that’s helping to guide multidisciplinary efforts that will help us better understand the dynamics of misinformation and can empower all of us to become healthier — and savvier — participants in online information spaces,” Starbird said.
Since the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation awarded $5 million to a UW team to establish the CIP in 2019, West, as founding director, has worked at an energetic pace with an iSchool-based team to jump-start the center’s early operations while pursuing important research collaborations and developing educational programming.
“Sometimes I feel like I am running after something that is moving faster and further away from me. Spending my days and nights chasing misinformation sometimes seems futile, but fortunately I work with a team at the CIP across the disciplinary landscape that is as committed as I am to slowing the spread of misinformation and its negative impacts on society,” West said.
As director, West appeared in scores of public-facing events, academic presentations, panel discussions and educational workshops, including speaking to dozens of local Rotary Clubs and community groups about how to spot misinformation; facilitating a popular AARP “factcheck ambassador” training program series in Washington state that was picked up by other AARP state chapters; and participating in book talks and workshops featuring Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World, the 2020 book he co-wrote with UW biology professor and CIP faculty member Carl Bergstrom.
In the CIP’s second year, CIP-affiliated researchers — including its co-founders, faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, Ph.D. students, graduate and undergraduate research assistants — have published more than 20 articles in academic journals and have been featured in more than 200 news interviews, including prominent coverage of the CIP’s work by outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Seattle Times, National Public Radio, the Associated Press and NBC News.
As one of the center’s co-founders, West’s contributions will continue as a member of the CIP’s Executive Council and he’ll co-lead the CIP’s education and engagement work with iSchool senior principal research scientist and CIP co-founder Chris Coward.
Jevin West’s term as the Center for an Informed Public’s first faculty director ended in September.
WAITING TO BE FOUND
iSchool faculty and students help cut through a mountain of data to reveal evidence of police violations of state sanctuary law
By Doug Parry
The evidence was there, buried in tens of thousands of pages of documents: Local law enforcement agencies were failing to comply with Washington state law protecting immigrant rights. To prove it, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) needed to find the signal in the noise.
That was right in the wheelhouse of Information School faculty and students. Several of them were part of a campus-wide research collaboration that produced a recent report showing that, contrary to the law’s stated purpose, local police and jails remain a pipeline to immigration enforcement and deportation.
The rights of undocumented immigrants are supposed to be shielded under 2019’s Keep Washington Working law, which prohibits law enforcement agencies from detaining people based on their immigration status or sharing information about them with federal authorities unless required by a court order. In practice, the law has so far been applied inconsistently, the UWCHR report stated. While some local agencies have quickly adapted, others continue to alert federal agents when they encounter someone they suspect is undocumented. Information continues to flow passively, as well, through databases that are shared between local law enforcement and agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
After receiving anecdotal reports of deportations originating from routine interactions such as traffic stops, the UWCHR requested thousands of emails and arrest records under the Freedom of Information Act. Researchers dug into the records in 13 of the state’s 39 counties to see if they could detect patterns of practices that circumvent the law, UWCHR Director Angelina Godoy said. Even in limiting their research to those counties, they faced a massive undertaking.
“We immediately realized the research was important, but the question was, how do you do research on such a broad scope?” Godoy said. iSchool researchers, led by Associate Professor Ricardo Gomez, brought their ideas to the project about how to parse the data that the UWCHR was able to pull from the records. Once they cleaned up and organized the text, they analyzed it for trends. They looked at who was seeking information from whom, who was sharing information with whom, and the mechanisms for information sharing between local officials and immigration officials. “There’s a lot of noise, there’s a lot of repetition, there’s a lot of redundancy, and it’s not necessarily in any particular order,” Gomez said. “So you need an information management process to deal with the large volume of information to make any meaning of it.”
What they found was sometimes surprisingly brazen disregard for the law, Gomez said. Some sheriffs in rural counties have even stated their unwillingness to comply.
“There is abundant evidence of continuing collaboration between local law enforcement and immigration enforcement,” he said. “It’s amazing that there is such a strong paper trail left behind in emails. I’m sure now that the report is published, agencies will say they are changing their policies, but it’s also possible they will continue to collaborate and hide their tracks better.” iSchool doctoral student Yubing Tian focused her work on Grant County, doing a deep dive into more than 8,000 pages of emails and several hundred arrest records. Tian said she was surprised by how often local officials would proactively refer people to immigration authorities, sharing personal information in a way that the law now forbids.
“We found multiple instances where a local official would say,
Ricardo Gomez
Updates
Assistant Professor Alexis Hiniker and Associate Professor Jason Yip are among the collaborators in a new network called Connecting the EdTech Research Ecosystem (CERES) . Based at the University of California, Irvine, CERES was launched in September with an $11 million grant from the Jacobs Foundation . Network researchers will study and design learning technologies with the goal of reducing the growing inequalities in children’s learning and development . Hiniker also received a Jacobs Foundation grant to investigate the influence of conversational agents
such as Siri and Alexa on children . Associate Professor Ricardo Gomez has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar Fellowship for research intended to help protect the culture and rainforest of the Alexis Colombian Vaupés . The mountainous Hiniker rainforest is home to the Cubeo Indigenous people . Gomez will use participatory photography to learn about Cubeo life and culture .
Jason Yip
‘Hey I came across this person. You should look into them. Here’s their date of birth and screen shots from the Department of Licensing database,’ ” Tian said.
Gomez’s and Tian’s work was part of a broad effort involving community partners with the UWCHR’s Immigrant Rights Observatory and faculty and students from across the university, including the center’s project coordinator, Phil Neff; the School of Law; the Department of Sociology; UW Bothell; the Department of Law, Societies & Justice; and the Jackson School of International Studies. iSchool faculty members Bob Boiko, Marika Cifor and Megan Finn consulted on the project, and doctoral student Ana Bennett helped analyze email and arrest
records. Numerous iSchool Master of Library and Information Science students participated in analyzing the data and looking for trends, earning credit in Gomez’s course on information and social justice. “It’s a valuable learning opportunity for them to do social Yubing Tian justice work with an information angle, to apply information science skills and library science skills to real-world problems that further and support social justice,” Gomez said. Researchers will continue to monitor and defend the rights of the estimated 240,000 undocumented immigrants in Washington, Godoy said. “Hopefully a year or two after the law has passed, we’d start to see more institutionalization of compliance,” she said. “We’re excited to do more research and see if the trend lines of that first report continue.”
Alexia Lozano
The Center for an Informed Public and partners in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) released their report, “The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election .” A nonpartisan coalition of researchers, the EIP worked to understand and counteract mis- and disinformation during the 2020 U .S . election and its aftermath . Begay and collaborators with the UW School of Social Work and Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians received a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation award for A Holistic Environmental Health Approach to Promoting Health, Equity, and Water Security in One
Alaskan Native Village . Bill Howe and the EquiTensors project team received the July 2021 “Innovation of the Month” award from the Clarita Lefthand- MetroLab Network . EquiTensors aims to
Begay learn fair, reusable, integrated representations of heterogeneous city data to improve performance of mobility prediction tasks while guarding against discriminatory effects .
Top: BTS at the 2019 Billboard Music Awards. (via Wikimedia Commons) Right: Associate Professor and BTS fan Jin Ha Lee with her dog, Bomi, and her BTS memorabilia. (Photo by Doug Parry)
Music services often out of sync with avid fans
By studying the experiences of BTS fans, Jin Ha Lee explores how streaming services can better serve thriving fan communities
By Doug Parry
With more than 20 million albums sold, a string of No. 1 hits memory is gone. How are people going to remember BTS and and a dedicated fanbase known as “ARMY,” BTS is a worldwide ARMY and find information and talk about it?” she asked. phenomenon. To Jin Ha Lee, it’s also an important area for “That’s really important for me, not only because I’m an ARMY research. and they’re Korean artists, but also because this is a once-in-
Lee, an associate professor at the Information School and a-lifetime global cultural phenomenon. I’d love for this to be a proud BTS fan, wants to know how well music streaming accurately documented and discussed and remembered.” services are serving the band’s fans and what they could do To that end, Lee has co-authored three papers on the BTS better to support fan communities. She also wants to contribute phenomenon over the past year. One looks at BTS as an example to documenting a moment in history she doesn’t expect to see of how avid fans of particular artists use streaming services. Anrepeated in her lifetime. other takes an in-depth look at how ARMY followers on Twitter
“That time will come when BTS is not here, when the living raised more than $1 million in one day to support Black Lives
Updates
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded more than $1 .6 million in funding for four projects supported by the iSchool: • A grant will support further work on misinformation escape rooms . Senior Principal Research Scientist Chris Coward and Associate Professor Jin Ha Lee will help lead a project in 10 public libraries to create a design kit for libraries to develop escape rooms modeled after “the Euphorigen Investigation .” Developed by the iSchool’s Technology & Social Change Group, the escape room is designed as a fun, collaborative way to prompt people to use critical reasoning skills when they encounter misinformation . • The iSchool will participate in Project Spectrum, an IMLS grant awarded to the American Library Association to build a cross-university cohort of 8-10 racially and ethnically diverse doctoral students focused on advancing racial equity and social justice in the LIS curriculum .
• Assistant Professor Nicholas Weber is a co-investigator on an IMLS-
Matter, and whether social media are designed to accommodate such efforts. And a forthcoming paper, using BTS as a case study, examines how streaming services can support bands’ efforts to promote mental health among fans.
In the first paper, on music fans’ use of streaming services such as Spotify, Lee and then-Informatics student Anh Nguyen found that the way music from multi-genre artists such as BTS is categorized often doesn’t serve fans well because the services’ recommendations are off-target. They also found that the streaming platforms lack support for fan participation and interactions between artists and fans, that fans would like more visual content to enrich their listening experience, and that users want more transparency in how artists’ popularity is measured and stronger “The agency in how they listen traditional to music. “Fans are now much more gatekeepers knowledgeable about the of music music ecosystem and savvy about how they can maximize now have to the support for their artists acknowledge through these services,” Lee said. The power structure the power is disrupted and changed. of fans.” The traditional gatekeepers of music like radio DJs and more recently, streaming platform designers now have to acknowledge the power of fans.” The paper was accepted to last year’s International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) conference.
“You need to think about different kinds of needs that people have when they come into this space, and oftentimes that’s not reflected in the system design. Not everyone coming to the services are passive listeners who just want to listen to recommended playlists,” Lee said.
In studying the fundraising campaign, dubbed #MatchAMillion, Lee and co-authors from Stanford University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, sought to gain insights on how a decentralized fanbase used social media to work rapidly toward a goal of its own making.
FANS, continued on Page 33
New research group explores not the crisis, but the aftermath
As people scramble to respond to an unfolding disaster, public-health emergency or other crisis, there tends to be a lot of confusion and seemingly little room for analysis. But when the dust settles, how do we document and what do we become?
AfterLab, a new research group at the iSchool, is dedicated to thinking about what happens after — the aftermath of disasters, afterlives of personal data, after careful attempts at ethical governance of technologies fail, and even what happens to our digital artifacts after we’re gone. Rather than cranking out prototypes and papers, Anna Lauren the lab takes a longer view, looking at informa- Hoffmann tion science from critical and social science perspectives to learn how the uses of information urgently affect different people, especially people who have long been marginalized or oppressed.
“We want to make space for zooming out and asking these big, thorny questions that have pres- Marika Cifor ervation, epistemological and political implications,” said Anna Lauren Hoffmann, one of three iSchool faculty members collaborating on the lab.
Hoffmann is starting the lab with fellow iSchool Assistant Professor Marika Cifor; iSchool Associate Professor Megan Finn; and Tonia Megan Finn Sutherland, an assistant professor at the University of Hawai’i. The team shares a common interest in the ways in which upheaval creates avenues to study social structures. For each of them, the aftermath of a crisis brings fresh perspective to Tonia issues such as ethical data practices, equity and Sutherland justice in archiving, and how the information infrastructure helps or harms people.
Hoffmann’s work focuses on how the ethical debates surrounding information technology allow people to articulate and contest
AFTERLAB, continued on Page 37
funded project to study the sharing, reuse and preservation of research objects produced by qualitative data analysis software . • IMLS funding will support a partnership between the iSchool and the Tacoma Public Library to produce a model for implementing more diverse archives in collaboration with community groups that have been historically underrepresented . Senior Research Scientist Jason Young is leading the UW’s involvement, and Assistant Professor Marika Cifor and Senior Research Scientist Chris Jowaisas are part of the team involved .
Karen Fisher’s longstanding iSchool-supported, UNHCR Jordan mission, “Za’atari Camp Libraries,” won the 2021 International Joy of Reading award from Systematic, announced at Next Library in Aarhus, Denmark . More than 40 libraries applied for the $10,000 award, and this was the first time it was won by war refugees and from a library in the Arab world .
Karen Fisher
The philosophy of TRACIE HALL
In her twin passions of art and librarianship, the executive director of ALA found all the tools to put the power of information in everyone’s hands
BY DOUG PARRY
It was March 2020, early in the pandem- To Hall, broadband access is a human ic, and the rideshare driver was taking right and one of the things that motivate a risk with every fare. He picked up a her as she leads the 55,000-member ALA. woman whose face was covered in a mask. Digital equity is a matter of justice, she
“Where did you get that?” asked the says, as are her other top priorities for the driver, an older fellow who wasn’t exactly a organization — diversifying the field of digital native. librarianship and advocating for resources
“I ordered it online,” she answered. to allow libraries to fulfill their central role
“Online? How would I get that?” he asked. in the life of their communities.
He was in luck. His passenger was Tracie Hall took the helm of the 145-year-old D. Hall, MLIS ’00, executive director of the organization in February 2020, barely American Library Association (ALA), and getting time to settle into her chair before she wasn’t going to get out of the car with- COVID-19 hit. Far from making her change out helping him find the information he course, the pandemic only reinforced her needed. She gave him a quick course in in- mission. At a time when many basic services formation-seeking, showing him how to use went online, the lack of broadband access — his phone for more than, as he described it, especially among lower-income, rural and just navigating the streets of Chicago and senior populations — came into sharp focus. calling his wife. She pointed him to a nearby Parents looked to libraries to help educate church that was handing out PPE. and entertain their children. Adults who
“We’re talking about an issue of life and were suddenly jobless turned to libraries for death, and the thing that can change the help filing for unemployment and searching game for him in terms of possible COVID-19 for new jobs. All of this at a time when a exposure is digital information,” Hall says. recession was hitting and libraries, already
That’s Hall. Energetic, dynamic, passion- underfunded for years, were forced to move ate about putting the power of information their staffs and services online. into everyone’s hands. “I knew that we needed to reclaim the
national satellite space and public perception about what libraries do. That’s what I was fixated on,” Hall says. “Then comes the pandemic and whatever I have been thinking there, we have to do that times three!
“Everything now is about how we support online access to education, employment information, and even key services; who’s going to play that role? For people in communities where they don’t have digital access, who’s going to provide that? The answer often comes back to libraries. I think that rather than the pandemic taking me completely off my square, it actually has lent more urgency and more immediacy.”
Libraries became Hall’s passion, but they weren’t her first career choice. After growing up in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles, she went to UC-Santa Barbara to earn bachelor’s degrees in law and society and African American studies. She went on to Yale University to earn her master’s in international studies, with hopes of working in Sub-Saharan Africa. While she was at Yale in 1992, though, a jury acquitted four police officers accused of using excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King. The acquittals set off a weeklong uprising in the south-central Los Angeles neighborhood where Hall grew up. The episode set her life on a different course.
“In my mind, I felt like I could make the most difference in communities where there were these huge resource and infrastructure gaps,” she says. “I had been looking at working in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet in my own community there was this need for care and commitment.”
After graduation, Hall returned to L.A. to direct a youth homeless shelter. As she introduced clients to resources and services, she discovered libraries in a new way. She became enamored with the power of libraries to give people a sense of agency. At the shelter, she had only a few tools to help people, but the library had a whole toolbox.
Hall saw a job listing at the Seattle Public Library (SPL), looking for someone who could blend reference services and social services, mostly focused on at-risk youth. She jumped at the chance to work at SPL and soon learned that many of her colleagues were UW graduates who encouraged her to pursue her master’s in library science there. Meanwhile, ALA was starting its Spectrum Scholarship program to increase diversity in the librarianship profession. In 1998, she applied and was accepted to both.
At the UW, where the Graduate School of Library and Information Science was transforming into the iSchool, Hall studied under faculty who would have a lasting influence on her. Spencer Shaw treated storytelling as an art and children as an audience that deserved high standards. Efthi Efthimiadis encouraged her to think about how technology could help people not only find information, but help them discover things that surprise them. Allyson Carlyle’s concepts on cataloging shaped her thinking on how to organize information, inside and outside of libraries.
“I can connect a lot of the thinking that I draw on today to those courses,” she says. “I really feel that I got a multipurpose master’s degree and exposure to ways of thinking about how ideas and resources can be organized that I have called on again and again.”
Along with the iSchool, SPL was a formative experience, Hall says. In the late ’90s, Seattle was taking off as a hub for technology, and she saw the workforce changing along with the city. Blue-collar workers were coming to the library because they needed to apply online for jobs for the first time. Students were coming in to submit homework assignments online. The experience convinced her that everyone needs digital literacy skills and connectivity — beliefs at the core of her work at ALA now.
“I cut those ideological teeth at Seattle Public Library,” she says. “We are all dependent to some degree on information access and on digital platforms. We have to begin to think about broadband as an essential resource for everyone.”
After earning her MLIS, Hall wanted to return to the East Coast, so she relocated to Connecticut, working at the New Haven and Hartford Free Public Libraries. In 2003, she moved to ALA to head its Office of Diversity and administer the Spectrum program. Since leaving that post in 2006, she’s made numerous stops in the academic, corporate, government and nonprofit worlds. From 2014-16, she served as deputy commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, overseeing visual and performing arts. Most recently, before rejoining ALA, she directed arts and culture grant-making for the Joyce Foundation, a Chicago-based philanthropic organization.
Hall faced a raft of challenges when she took over as executive director at ALA: an office relocation, the onset of the pandemic, and an unexpectedly daunting financial picture.
“She’s been very disciplined,” says Mary Mackay, ALA’s interim senior associate executive director. “No excuses — we just have to implement some things to make sure we position ourselves strongly for the future, with a big focus on membership and getting people engaged.”
Mackay says the current challenges haven’t restrained
Hall’s ambitions on initiatives such as universal broadband and diversification of the field. Since her arrival, Hall has worked to get the sprawling association working toward those same goals. Hall has her “eyes on the prize” and an inspirational leadership style.
“It’s hard not to feel more motivated to adhere to your own personal values when you’ve got someone leading you whose personal values are so much the bedrock of what she’s trying to do,” Mackay says.
Veronda Pitchford has seen Hall’s leadership from several perspectives, inside and outside of libraries and now as assistant director at Califa, a nonprofit consortium representing 230 California libraries. She describes Hall as “really fun” and “very intense.”
“She’s always thinking about the next step. Even if we’re talking socially, it’s like, ‘Oh, that reminds me how we should do this.’ I’m here to drink my latte and we’re having this deep conversation,” she says with a laugh.
Hall brings that same intensity whether she’s in a boardroom, at a breakfast table, or helping a young person get their foot in the door, Pitchford says.
“I have personally witnessed her in this current role give the same care and feeding to library school applicants as she would the biggest funder of ALA,” she says. “It is the same kind of energy, time, precision and professionalism.”
Joslyn Bowling Dixon was working in libraries when she met Hall at an ALA Annual Conference in Chicago in the early 2000s. At the time, she said, it was unusual to spot another Black attendee at a national conference, so when she saw the striking-looking woman with a shaved head, she decided she had to introduce herself. “She didn’t have to talk to me. She didn’t have to be nice. She was an officer, and I didn’t even have my MLIS yet,” Bowling Dixon says.
Yet Hall became a fast friend and mentor, introducing Bowling Dixon to her network and encouraging her to get her master’s in library and information science. Bowling Dixon was working and raising a child as a single, divorced parent at the time, but Hall convinced her the investment in herself was worth making. Now, as director of the Newark Public Library in New Jersey, Bowling Dixon still looks to Hall as an inspiration, particularly for women of color in the library world.
“When I started in librarianship in the late ’90s, I always felt othered,” Dixon says. “If there was something for people of color included in any kind of mainstream training, conversation, display or purchase, it was either accidental or non-existent. As a profession we’re not done, but we’ve made strides. Now I can see a person who looks like me at the top. That means everything.
“It’s hard to describe how affirming it is to see somebody who looks like you in the decision-making seat and know that your concerns and interests will be there.”
In describing Hall, Pitchford looks to a line from a Derek Walcott poem: “Feast on your life.”
“She really does that in her work and in her personal life. In her work, it’s total drive and energy to get things done on behalf of the organization. That same joie de vivre, zest and fire is in her personal life as well,” she says.
That’s evident in Hall’s other passions, which include creative writing and visual art. In recent years, she has gravitated toward the art world, and she stays connected as a member of Chicago’s Cultural Advisory Council. In 2016, she fulfilled a dream of founding her own art space, Rootwork Gallery, dedicated to showing art from folk and Indigenous traditions. Along the way, she’s returned to her own art practice.
In art exhibitions, she frequently connects the works on display to text from writers she feels have been underread or forgotten. She tries to connect the dots for visitors so they can immediately understand the point she’s trying to convey. The skills are right out of her librarianship toolbox.
“When I leave this place, I want my tombstone to read, ‘artist and librarian,’ ” she says. “I think those are the two main definers of the kind of work I’ve tried to do. In both of those places, that’s where I have found my greatest meaning and freedom.”
Friends say Hall’s other talents include interior decorating and cooking. Not surprisingly, she throws an excellent party. You just have to be prepared; an intense conversation about how to improve community infrastructure or how to address generational poverty could break out at any moment.
While Hall has her other passions, the librarian wheels in her brain are always turning.
“Ever since I became a librarian, I have walked with a sense of purpose about my work. I absolutely cannot imagine working in a field or a space or profession where I don’t feel that,” she says. “I feel that every day.”
One of a series of photographs by Tracie Hall called “A Familiar” (2020). In art and librarianship, Hall says, “I have found my greatest meaning and freedom.”
