I was invited to speak to librarians at the Lake Superior Library Symposium, a gathering of professionals from all kinds of libraries Up North. Since visiting Duluth is always a good idea, I was happy to be part of the conference program. The theme of the conference was Matter of Fact: Promoting Information Literacy in an Age of Fake News, so I glommed together a lot of thoughts I’ve had about the topic, speaking in particular about the place of libraries in the public sphere, why our values matter, and why it matters that those values haven’t been adopted by Big Tech. (Photo by Garrett Cumber on Unsplash.)
Author: barbara
writer, librarian, curmudgeon-at-large
information literacy, writing instruction, and the problem of stochastic parrots
I was invited to speak to writing instructors at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, who are in the process of thinking through the information literacy portion of their learning outcomes. Always a pleasure to connect with a discipline that seems so closely aligned with academic library work.
Abstract: For more than three decades, my job was to help students learn how information works. Though information literacy, as we call it, matters to me because inquiry is ideally a form of education that Paolo Freire called “the practice of freedom,” the students I worked with were understandably focused on formulating questions and selecting the kinds of sources that would satisfy their teacher rather than engaging in genuine curiosity. Tellingly, a Project Information Literacy study of recent college graduates found less than a third felt that college prepared them to ask questions of their own. Librarians and writing instructors both face a fundamental tension between our higher goals and the reality of our service roles to other disciplines. Two concepts that seem important but are too often overlooked are first, understanding the underlying ethical moves and commitments that characterize good honest work, whether it’s science, journalism, or an informative TikTok, and second, understanding how information systems shape our experiences, especially now that we no longer simply seek information, it seeks us. Today we’ll explore ways these concepts could be addressed without losing sight of the practical needs of writing instructors and their students to satisfy disciplinary expectations. Continue reading “information literacy, writing instruction, and the problem of stochastic parrots”
bye bye birdie
I left Twitter today. I can’t stay when it will be controlled by a billionaire reactionary who wants to restore “free speech” (meaning Trump and his fellow travelers). He’s popular on Twitter because he’s rich and he’s a mega-shitposter, and it will be his personal plaything, like Mars. I’ve had an emotional go-bag ready for years, but things seemed to be getting a little better. Today was the time to grab that bag and go.
cost per conversion
For some reason the phrase “cost per conversion” came into my head the other day. There’s a whole lexicon of internet marketing lingo that is gibberish to me, speaking in tongues while praising the pursuit of wealth. This phrase has to do with how much it costs to place a digital ad that actually results in someone doing what you want them to do, like buy a thing or do a thing. It’s built into the everyday experience of social media, where all of our interactions are measured and rewarded in terms of whether people looked at what we post or share, whether they clicked or shared or commented. And it’s very much shapes our political discourse online.
my year in reading
As usual, my online mystery reading group collects our top ten crime fiction reads of the year. I’ll note them here out of a sense of tradition, along with some notes on other books I read and enjoyed in 2021. Someday I’ll look back on all of these and map out how my tastes have changed (and/or how the genre has changed). My impression is that I’m reading more women and BIPOC authors and have mellowed from my more hard-boiled days. I even read a cozy this year – it didn’t make my top ten, but I did finish it.
the answer is … Minitex
Minitex, our local library cooperative (consortium? collaboration?) is fifty years old, and I got to speak at a virtual party, where there were videos submitted by member libraries, some speakers, and a fun breakout Jeopardy game where I got a couple right but otherwise made a fool of myself. All in a good cause – cheers for fifty years! And cheers for a well-organized Zoom gathering. Here’s the text of what I said.
Fifty/Fifty: Drawing on the Past to Envision the Future of Minitex
I’m delighted to be part of this wonderful anniversary celebration. Like all of you, I’ve benefitted immeasurably from Minitex, both as a librarian and as a citizen. My relatively small college library couldn’t possibly afford to provide all the information our students and faculty want. Interlibrary loan is the most public-facing Minitex service our community enjoys, but we also benefit behind the scenes from cataloging training and development, cooperative purchasing of things like tattletape, licensing of databases, ELM (now eLibrary), and recently the Minnesota Library Publishing Project, which several of our faculty embraced for publishing local histories or creating class projects, and so on.
a global look at the social life of misinformation
Updated: What a fun conversation! Under the able moderation by Gus Andrews, we started out with a big-picture discussion of the problem – it’s not just the fault of technology, it’s social, with social media amplifying messages and those tools being used deliberately by political actors. Then we heard from Christopher Tuckwood about how the Sentinel Project uses trusted local figures to squelch false rumors circulating in Burma and East African nations where sectarian or political violence is a risk and from Ashley Westpheling, who works with girls in Dublin to develop information for peers (and in this case, the girls decided to focus on misinformation around reproductive health). It was refreshing to hear about work being done at the grassroots level outside the place we pay so much attention to, the U.S.
Lateral Reading and Information Systems in the Age of Distrust
This is a talk I prepared for ChALS, a Swedish information literacy conference hosted at Chalmers University. Avancez!
Thank you for inviting me to be part of this conference, and I appreciate your willingness to listen to an American who has not learned Swedish; my apologies.
I am speaking to you from southern Minnesota, in the north-central United States on land that was taken from the Dakota people of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ. Following a broken treaty and exile, it was settled by Europeans like my Norwegian grandfather as well as Irish, Germans, Finns, and Swedes. When I grew up I heard stories about pioneers, but not much about what happened to the people whose land was taken. Pioneer stories had a purpose: at best, they taught us the United States was a place many people from different backgrounds could call home. It also was a story about how we took something wild and turned it into farms and cities. Indians were part of a romantic, mythic past, not part of our modern history, or our present society. (Of course, the Indians didn’t disappear. They are still here, like the Sami people.)
Continue reading “Lateral Reading and Information Systems in the Age of Distrust”
Why the Occupy Wall Street Movement Had Libraries
In honor of the tenth anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, I’m reposting a piece from Library Journal from when I wrote a weekly column that was open access but is now a bunch of 404: Not Founds. Thank you, Internet Archive, for saving it! And congratulations on your 25th anniversary.
Why the Occupy Wall Street Movement Has Libraries | Peer to Peer Review
Oct 27, 2011
In the first news stories, the fact that Occupy Wall Street had a library seemed a bit whimsical, sort of like that iconic photo of a dancer perched on the back of the equally iconic statue of a charging bull. How funny! A library for a group that has no leaders and no rules? It seemed to some a contradiction in terms. Aren’t libraries all about rules and organization?
Well . . . no. Libraries are fundamentally about something quite different. It seems natural to me that a social movement that springs up locally and without any centralized organizing body or criteria for membership would create a library. This is an impulse so ingrained in the idea of books that people are creating tiny lending libraries to put in public places as signals that sharing books is an important act, something that creates community.
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reimagining information literacy in the QAnon era
I’ve thought for years that we need to help students do more than find and use information, we need to help them know where it comes from and what traditions and practices influence it. (I published an article making this argument the year before Mark Zuckerberg scraped the Harvard student directory and made a “hot or not” app that eventually became Facebook, and designed and taught a seminar starting in 2005 that tried to address this notion.) So it’s not a new burr under my saddle, but it has been aggravated by the flourishing of our epistemological crisis. It was honestly kind of exhilarating to draft the first PIL Provocation essay on this theme, using the meta-conspiracy theory QAnon as an example. It fascinates me that “doing the research” and “thinking critically” can lead to … where QAnoners have gone.
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