P21. Knowing Institutions or Knowing Co-Citizens: Two Understandings of Information Literacy and Citizenship

Background: Bernard Manin’s horizontal and Andrew Kuper’s vertical models of citizenship exemplify two prominent understandings of citizenship that incorporate access to and mediation of information. By bringing information’s role in citizenship into focus, both models imply that citizens must be information literate in order to practice good citizenship. Without such literacy, citizens are limited in their ability to engage in informed democratic participation. The difference between the models, however, changes the required nature of citizens’ information literacy. The 2003, 2005, and 2014 declarations on information literacy provide the guiding framework for international recommendations. Each links information literacy with good citizenship. Yet with each new statement, the rhetoric surrounding this link shifts in noticeable ways. Methods: The poster maps the rhetoric of the three international statements on information literacy and a UNESCO information literacy primer onto Manin’s and Kuper’s models. Results: The picture that emerges is a gradual shift within information literacy concerning models of citizenship. Discussion & Conclusion: The comparison indicates a pattern of the horizontal model’s displacement by the vertical model in information literacy rhetoric. This previously unexamined pattern raises further questions about the connections between citizenship and information literacy and about the nature of information literacy itself. Interdisciplinary Reflection: The study of information literacy is typically library-centric, but this poster demonstrates wider social implications and influences. At the same time, the poster indicates that citizenship theory can benefit from a Library and Information Science (LIS) perspective

The Challenges and Opportunities of Interdisciplinary Research: When LIS Meets Genocide Studies

As ALISE recognizes in this year’s theme, the positioning of LIS as an increasingly interdisciplinary field represents both a challenge and an opportunity. This is true in my own research. The questions I ask are only apparent by stepping outside of the confines of LIS’s usual concerns and yet those same questions can only be answered through the insights developed in LIS. This is the strength of interdisciplinary research. In my poster, even as I acknowledge this opportunity, I also focus on two challenges I face. Sometimes, as with a discipline like genocide studies, perspectives from outside the field seem jarring and evoke negative reactions. This is true with my research. The second challenge is a chicken-and-egg problem: my work raises questions within genocide studies that few others have addressed. Even as the answers to these questions impact my study, they are outside the scope of my research. To explore these opportunities and challenges as I have experienced them, I provide background on the key concepts I bring from each field, how they relate to one another, and the questions to which this convergence of concepts has given rise. I concentrate on the critiques of my research from within LIS, the problem of questions that need to be left unanswered, and how I have used each challenge to further my research. Finally, I use this poster to reflect on how interdisciplinarity affects LIS approaches to research and pedagogy

Ishi, Briet\u27s Antelope, and the Documentality of Human Documents

Ishi, the “last wild Indian in North America,” was “discovered” in 1911 and spent the last years of his life living in an anthropology museum. There he was studied by anthropologists and viewed by the public as a living exhibit. In this paper, I take some initial steps in arguing that Ishi, the person, became a document to most people. The similarities between Ishi and Suzanne Briet’s hypothetical antelope, newly discovered and placed in a zoo, are eerie. Ishi, like the antelope, is brought into public knowledge as both an initial document and a wide variety of secondary documents derived from the original. Ishi, however, is also not a document, making the comparison to the antelope eerie. Bernd Frohmann’s concept of “documentality” helps us make sense of this fluctuation in Ishi’s status as a document. Ishi’s story, in turn, sheds light on the ethical implications of documentality for all humans

Metaphors for Meaningful Documents

The ever-increasing speed and reach of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are often lauded for the beneficial social effects we are told they have. This raises questions about the connection between knowledge and social relationships, especially concerning meaningful relationships in a world where people are increasingly represented as data. To answer this question, one approach is to consider the role of documents in communicating “meaningful” content in pursuit of understanding. Because this is difficult to articulate, this paper takes the approach of using metaphors—specifically of the document as a bridge, a window, a painting, a briefcase, and a mirror—to consider the possibilities for documents to aid or impede relationships. To provide something concrete upon which to reflect, this paper applies the metaphors to documents that are explicitly tied to meaning about individuals: those created by the United Church of Canada as part of its process of reconciliation with Canada’s Indigenous people. Thinking about the church’s documents through the lens of metaphors is an initial conceptual step in thinking about the meaning in these documents. Through the metaphors, we gain important insights into the extent to which documents connect individuals as they are called to in the ICT environment

Observations of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect towards Clusters of Galaxies with the APEX Telescope

Results of 150 GHz continuum observations of several X-ray bright clusters of galaxies in the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect, carried out using the APEX-SZ bolometer array on the APEX telescope, are presented. Follow-up observations of the cluster A2163 with the Large APEX Bolometer Camera (LABOCA) at 345 GHz on the same telescope have been carried out, yielding the largest map of a cluster of galaxies in the SZ increment to date. Details of possible contaminants affecting the SZ signal are outlined, and a simulated galaxy cluster survey is used to estimate levels of contamination from each source of emission. Radio point sources are found to be of possible concern, but more information on spectral slopes in the millimeter regime is needed before any decisive conclusions can be made. It is found that treating unresolved thermal sources as a source of excess noise yields an excellent approximation of this contaminant, which sets a fundamental confusion limit on single-frequency SZ measurements. The 1.4 GHz volume averaged radio source luminosity function is constructed from a large sample of galaxy clusters. In contrast to previous studies, an adaptive cluster volume is used to construct the luminosity function. This is shown to yield more robust results on volume averaged source counts, and for the first time a redshift evolution in this luminosity function is found, taking into account the variable effect on radio source confusion with redshift. Due to the large sample size, luminosity evolution and number density evolution can be separated. The APEX-SZ and LABOCA instruments are described from an observer's perspective. The analyses of pointing and calibration data are described, and the data quality of each instrument is assessed. The reduction of galaxy cluster data is described in detail. Losses in source brightness due to the removal of correlated noise are modeled with a transfer function based on the reduction of a point source convolved with the instrument beam. It is shown that this approach is valid for a wide range of source morphologies. Significant detections of 9 clusters of galaxies with APEX-SZ are presented. The clusters are modeled using the well-known isothermal beta-model. The SZ signals are found to be in overall agreement with predictions from X-ray measurements. The possibility of simultaneously extracting gas temperatures and bulk velocities from SZ measurements is briefly discussed. It is found that current data have poor leverage on the problem; reasonable constraints require accurate measurements both at high frequencies, where confusion due to dust emission becomes increasingly more of a problem, and at low frequencies, where radio point sources can contaminate the signal. A non-isothermal model of the galaxy cluster A2163 is presented, based on APEX-SZ and XMM-Newton X-ray data. Under the assumption of spherical symmetry, the two data sets are used to de-project the structure of the cluster in terms of temperature and density, and the results are used to derive the gas mass profile. The total mass profile is derived under the assumption of hydrostatic equilibrium, to allow for an estimate of the gas mass fraction. It is shown that the isothermal approximation well approximates the non-isothermal model inside the X-ray core radius. The mass profile from the non-isothermal analysis is in agreement with weak-lensing measurements. The APEX-SZ data is also used, in conjunction with LABOCA data at 345 GHz and previously published SZ data at other frequencies, to constrain the central Comptonization and bulk velocity of the cluster