Subjectivity Filtering: Finding Cognitive Authority in Online Social Media Opinion Posts

The technological explosion of information ushered in by the Internet, and more so with online social media (OSM), has provided a forest of personal opinions from which hunters forage. Personal opinions abound in OSM, serving as secondhand knowledge sources that inform everyday decisions. This research proposes a new lens, Cognitive Authority Framework – Quality Information Source (CAF-QIS), to explore the nature, tone, intentions, and believability of OSM postings. The conceptual framework is informed by Wilson’s four dimensions of cognitive authority (CA) combined with the five traditional criteria used as a common (unnamed) model for the identification of information quality in websites, and the added notion of glyphicality. Combined, these criteria serve as a framework for the analysis of opinion documents to determine elements and features that insinuate CA in OSM opinion posts. Content analysis of reviews of veterinarians posted to Yelp! are analyzed using the CAF-QIS model to identify cognitive authority within OSM posts. Findings inform structural and functional development of the nascent framework

Promoting Trustworthiness and Discoverability in an S-town of OSN Documents

The realm of online social networks (OSN) has evolved rapidly over the last decade. While literature has primarily focused on Twitter, Facebook presents a unique forum for seeking secondhand knowledge on highly specialized topics including life-threatening medical conditions. Cognitive authority expressed through accounts of personal experiences augments authoritative resources that often are inaccessible or non-existent. OSN posts in Facebook groups appear as a plethora of documents thrown upon the virtual floor, disorganized and unsearchable. This paper offers ideas of what could be possible when interaction design (Ixd) is applied to Facebook groups to promote trustworthiness and discoverability for the information seeker. Design features are presented as witness marks that leave explicit clues to mitigate stress when manually mining secondhand knowledge in OSN. Examples are offered from an examination of an open Facebook forum centered on a canine chronic life-threatening disease where a lack of or confusing information provided by authority figures contributes to confusion in information-seeking and decision making

Embracing Monsters

We propose monsters are documents. Monsters show us, make evident to us, teach us. An exploration of five monsters, both popular and unknown, reveals they fit within a standard model of message making; the binary nature of that model separates meaning from message enabling explanation of evolving interpretations of a monster. We examine the coding and decoding of monster documents through a functional ontology lens. We posit that monsters defy protype and thus serve as attempts at documenting the undocumented. Simultaneously monsters present clues to understanding through imagery that spans the unfamiliar and the familiar allowing the recipient to engage in sense-making suggesting clues to new information

More Than Meets the Eye: Proximity to Crises through Presidential Photographs

We look at three photographs, each made at a time of profound crisis, in order to tease out notions of proximity. Vision gives us proximity at a distance. Photographs may give us a similar proximity. Human vision depends on experience built up from individual events of seeing. Can a photograph made in a fraction of a second by someone else at some other time and some other place provide anything more than data about some surfaces in front of the lens? Can words and other images from the photographers enhance the viewer’s proximity to the original? Can we make use of the photographers’ accounts of their proximities for enhancing the understanding of individual viewers? We examine various aspects of proximity and photography in the context of images of U.S. presidents in times of crises – mechanical and conceptual restraints on photographic representation, external sources of contextualizing information, forms of proximity of the photographers to the presidents, and the strengths and weaknesses of existing metadata

Translation Disease: Proximity Gone Awry

We present here considerations of three trans-medial translations that have caused dis-ease. We look at novel to film, poem to cantata, and novel to film to television series translations to examine various strains of dis-ease. Upon early consideration, we realized Wilson’s call for a “turn to the functional” provides a means of determining whether a translation is “inadequate” – has gone awry. We then fit the concept of translation into our model of proximity as a way to consider whether a “putative translation really [is] a translation of some text.” Ultimately, we argue that one person’s disease may be another’s may be another’s cure

More Than Meets The Eye: Toward an Ontology of Proximity

Words cannot describe photographs in the same sense that key words or subject headings can describe verbal documents because words are not native elements of photographs. Words can describe anecdata – reactions and associations that might be functional. Some form of data is coded in some medium, transmitted, received, and decoded. Some forms of coding and circumstances of message making and decoding require little proximity of the recipient to the message maker, while some forms utterly depend on proximity. We explore 10 photographs and interactive data accumulated through interactive exhibition to explore proximity and functional meaning. These examples demonstrate three levels of generality: any image with a particular object or characteristic will do; an image with certain qualities and intriguing connections is wanted; the photograph must show particular qualities or have a backstory that is explicit as to why this is the most useful image. We suggest that a first order taxonomy of proximity comes into play. We expand the idea of a taxonomy of proximity into the more inclusive, environmental notion of an ontology of proximities – referring to types of connections, types of uses, and circumstances of discovering the threads

Storm Warnings: Time Sensitive Proximity

Weather-predictive tasks during high risk severe weather events are carried out for the common good of the community by virtual teams of weather professionals. Severe weather predictors are responsible for producing the early warnings that inform people in harms way and potentially save lives. Should we be concerned with the use of “other-generated” information from social media used by these professionals? Teams extend understanding of an event by looking to external sources of situationally relevant information such as storm spotters, publicly generated photos and comments posted to online social media (OSM), and communication with community partners. Situationally relevant OSM, specifically Twitter, provides insight to the information behavior of the team. Here we examine the role of proximity and how it impacts decisions on potentially life-saving information sharing in time sensitive information environments: proximity within the team (shared knowledge state) and proximity to the event (hashtag) specifically are addressed

Webs of Proximity and Just-in-Time Information

Disciplinary webs of proximity frequently overlap at the periphery of a topic where interests intersect for problem-solving. Failure to account for disciplinary differences can result in dis-ease – tension that interferes with meaning-making. This can be especially problematic in just-in-time information settings. An unexpected social media case study involving severe weather reporting and algorithm-driven system censorship makes evident the role of a constellation of pragmatic factors that can enhance or hinder just-in-time information delivery. Employing webs of proximity, we probe the severe weather censorship event with complementary bodies of knowledge and disciplinary perspectives. Intersectionalities are discussed through lenses of proximity and epidata. Entanglements of commonality between differing web plots are represented in a negotiation vestibule. The possibility of the communication channel itself being noise is presented. The vestibule highlights opportunities for negotiation points to attempt functional meaning-making

Grey and white matter correlates of recent and remote autobiographical memory retrieval:Insights from the dementias

The capacity to remember self-referential past events relies on the integrity of a distributed neural network. Controversy exists, however, regarding the involvement of specific brain structures for the retrieval of recently experienced versus more distant events. Here, we explored how characteristic patterns of atrophy in neurodegenerative disorders differentially disrupt remote versus recent autobiographical memory. Eleven behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia, 10 semantic dementia, 15 Alzheimer's disease patients and 14 healthy older Controls completed the Autobiographical Interview. All patient groups displayed significant remote memory impairments relative to Controls. Similarly, recent period retrieval was significantly compromised in behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease, yet semantic dementia patients scored in line with Controls. Voxel-based morphometry and diffusion tensor imaging analyses, for all participants combined, were conducted to investigate grey and white matter correlates of remote and recent autobiographical memory retrieval. Neural correlates common to both recent and remote time periods were identified, including the hippocampus, medial prefrontal, and frontopolar cortices, and the forceps minor and left hippocampal portion of the cingulum bundle. Regions exclusively implicated in each time period were also identified. The integrity of the anterior temporal cortices was related to the retrieval of remote memories, whereas the posterior cingulate cortex emerged as a structure significantly associated with recent autobiographical memory retrieval. This study represents the first investigation of the grey and white matter correlates of remote and recent autobiographical memory retrieval in neurodegenerative disorders. Our findings demonstrate the importance of core brain structures, including the medial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, irrespective of time period, and point towards the contribution of discrete regions in mediating successful retrieval of distant versus recently experienced events

The Study of Information Revisited: Chaos in the Emergence of Disciplinary Identity

This research will develop time-series fractal maps of LIS and CIS. The maps will be used to trace the trajectory of Information Science from its beginnings in 1965 into the future. Following Machlup and Mansfield (1983), we plan to analyze the logical, methodological, and pragmatic relations among and between these two areas of study centered on information creation, access, distribution and use. Our goal is to facilitate understanding of the future trajectories of the discipline of Information Science, and thereby, those of LIS and CIS through systematic examination of past and present trends. Because these trends are neither linear in their progression nor take place in a vacuum, our analysis will be guided by the fractal theory developed by Andrew Abbott in Chaos of Disciplines