This week, CITAP folks appeared on podcasts and launched Substacks, published articles and gave interviews. It’s a lot! In lieu of a regular newsletter, I’ll leave you to explore the many excellent contributions the CITAP community made elsewhere in recent days, along with a meme I hope doesn’t cause any data-science-inclined readers harm:
Recent publications and appearances
“In this conversation, Deen tells us why it is so important to incorporate identity into web science research, and how that has influenced his own work. That includes his recent article on Black-presenting trolls, and why disaggregating ideology from race was crucial to his insights.” Deen Freelon appeared on Northwestern University’s Untangling the Web podcast.
“There’s this ambiguity of whether or not particular incidents of violence or assault are racially motivated... People are worried when they’re going out to do daily errands... worrying about their parents, relatives, and loved ones. At the same time as this worry is happening there’s also this simultaenous second-guessing and doubting that these worries are legitimate.” Postdoctoral researcher Rachel Kuo discussed the rise in attacks on Asian Americans during the Covid-19 pandemic with NPR-WBEZ Chicago.
“In her research on conservative evangelical groups, Francesca Tripodi shows that people fall into disinformation rabbit holes not through a lack of research, but rather an abundance of research — routed through alternative sources or mediators. Just this month, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon believer who once suggested that Jewish space lasers were behind the 2018 California wildfires, attempted to excuse herself by saying she was just “looking at things on the internet, asking questions like most people do every day, us[ing] Google.” The problem lies not with the lack of information but with how we process that information.” Sun-Ha Hong cited Francesca Tripodi’s work in an exploration of the limitations and complexities of transparency for CIGI.
“Much of the mythos of modern American librarianship is grounded in its connections to grand ideas about community, citizenship, rights, common ownership, and, in many cases, stewardship of public goods and information. Despite these ostensibly community-oriented ideals, much of the current practice of librarianship and information science (LIS) in the U.S. is also embedded with and within neoliberal social and political institutions and norms that often tie library and information access to selective membership and “productive citizenship”, and marginalize disabled people who are considered “unproductive.”” CITAP graduate affiliate Kristen Bowen co-authored “We Need to Talk About How We Talk About Disability” with Amelia Gibson and Dana Hanson.
“Oral culture is not suited to certain kinds of knowledge accumulation and legibility of the world, some of which is necessary to hold our institutions together. And this underappreciated transition is certainly one big reason for the current tension in this historic transition: because of technology, oral psychodynamics have broken through at scale, and we are trying to manage them with institutions that operate solely through an within print/written culture. And that cannot, will not, hold without adjustment.” Zeynep Tufekci contemplates Clubhouse.
“All of my reading also revealed this: Dolly Parton is one of very few living texts that could survive projections of America’s soul without buckling beneath its contradictions. It is treasonous to do so but if one strips away all the adulation, they are left with an odd totem for our socio-political times.” Tressie McMillan Cottom launches a new Substack publication, “Essaying,” with “The Dolly Moment: Why We Stan A Post-Racism Queen.”
“I learned a lot from scholars who specialized in sociology (the University of North Carolina’s Tressie McMillan Cottom, for example) and history (there’s New York University’s Ruth Ben-Ghait and the University of Pittsburgh’s Lara Putnam), and from writers who had studied governments and leaders abroad (author Sarah Kendzior, for example). I also gain new insights from opinion writers on the left (The New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie) and the right (The Atlantic’s David Frum and Peter Wehner, who also writes for The New York Times).” FiveThirtyEight’s Perry Bacon Jr. summarized his lessons learned from the Trump era, including “Mix up my media diet” with non-journalistic writers.
“I did worry I would get canceled. I worried I was taking a major risk and so would my reputation. But, I’m lucky. I have tenure. And this is what we’re supposed to do with that privilege. We’re supposed to speak up for others.” Zeynep Tufekci talked with UNC’s The Well about how her work prepared her to “get the big things right” during the Covid-19 epidemic.
Coming soon
On March 2, Daniel Kreiss will speak on a panel at the Fordham University School of Law to discuss the book #Hashtag Activism.
On March 11, Deen Freelon will be giving a DS/CSS seminar at the University of Michigan School of Information.
On March 17, Tressie McMillan Cottom will give a policy talk at the University of Michigan on modern discourse. Dr. Cottom will also be giving this year’s Ed Mignon Distinguished Lecture at the University of Washington Information School on April 13, and the keynote address for the Association of College & Research Libraries 2021 Conference, taking place April 13-16.
…and if you’ve made it this far, a bonus “offend in one tweet” meme: