Information Privilege 2.0
so we can go ahead and get started um so welcome everybody to our information privilege 2.0 workshop. hopefully you watched our information privilege workshop from last semester before attending this session um but if you didn't have a chance to do that, don't worry, i'm sure you will still be able to get a lot of useful things from our session that we have planned today so if you want to go to the next slide Brittany we'll go ahead and introduce ourselves okay so i am Brittany Norwood, i go by the pronoun she, hers, and hers i'm a commons librarian so you'll often see me at the public services desk or i might be helping you out on chat and my email is norwoodbr [at] utk.edu awesome and my name is Leah Valletta, i use she/her pronouns as well and i am the GTA in the teaching and learning programs department over in the Hodges library and my email is also listed if you have any questions after today so today we will be covering um how information privilege impacts scholarship and academia and how it impacts your life as a student um how information privilege is tied to information poverty so kind of the other side of the coin there and then how you can address information privilege and so we're just gonna do a quick refresher from last semester's session and i just wanted to add to if anyone has anything that they want to say any comments, questions, anything like that feel free to throw it into the chat and we would be happy to address it; we know that information privilege has a lot of different applications in people's lives so we're always happy to hear people's thoughts um but today we're going to just kind of quickly go over the concept of privilege generally. so i know that in our last session we went a bit deeper into this and
we talked about intersectionality and sort of how different aspects of your privilege come together but we're just going to review with a couple of quotes that we presented in the last session; so the first one is about privilege. so "privilege is the advantages, opportunities, rights, and affordances granted by status and positionality via class, gender, race, culture, sexuality, occupation, institutional affiliation, and political perspective" and that's coming from Char Booth and she's written extensively on information privilege and then we've also got a quote from the activist Janaya Khan who says "privilege isn't about what you've gone through, it's about what you haven't had to go through" if we want to go on to the next slide. so how does that concept of privilege relate to information privilege? so information privilege is the idea that geography, social class, and other parts of a person's unique identity will impact their ability to access quality information. all right so what does this mean for you as a college student? so while all students at UT are coming from various backgrounds and various places of information privilege uh for example some students might have grown up without access to the internet so that would be a huge barrier; some might have come from schools with huge, extensive libraries within their high school... so everyone's kind of coming to college from different backgrounds and different levels of privilege but all students at UT are granted some degree of information privilege as students at a big research institution. so before we get
into what those privileges are i'm just going to pose a question for you to think about - if anyone wants to wager a guess you're welcome to pop it in the chat um but i'm just going to pose the question to you of how much money do you think is spent at UT libraries - actually specifically UTK - each year on information? so this would just be books, database access, we're not including building operations and salaries so we'll just let everyone think about that for a couple seconds so we've got a guess of 2 million that's a good guess we're gonna just have a drumroll for the grand reveal if you want to click the next button Brittany. so it is 12 million approximately; we've got the full number here and a breakdown of how of each type of information that we spend money on. so 12 million might go without saying is a lot of money and um that is just providing access to this information so um it is a huge privilege to be a college student here at UT and to be able to access these materials, to interact with them, to look through them, all of that is really great um why these materials cost so much money would take up an entire workshop of its own so we're not gonna get too into that; feel free to reach out to anyone at the library though if you're curious um but the basics of it is that this information has a lot of value and we're paying a lot of money to be able to provide access to it for people who are part of our community um and besides this huge amount of money that's spent on materials, there are also a lot of other elements at play so part of academic privilege is also the fact that your professors are available to answer questions for you, that you have sort of um experts at your disposal on a variety of topics also um your email address is part of your academic privilege. being able to send an email
from a edu account kind of will allow you access to certain things that you might miss if you didn't have the same institutional credentials. if you want to go on to the next slide Brittany. okay so why are we bringing this up? we just want you to be aware of this privilege so you can properly appreciate it and take advantage of these resources that are available to you while you're here um i definitely do not mean to imply that you know this is some magically granted um privilege that you have, it's not luck, you're not somehow spoiled by these academic um access you pay a lot of money to access these resources and so i just think it's important that we have a clear understanding of what you have access to and what you're paying for as a student and kind of the opportunities that you have while you're here um and so we thought we'd add in that as a student you have access to these materials but you will lose access after graduation um six months after graduation you will no longer be able to use the online databases that you enjoy while you're a student; you will have people who don't go to the university do have limited access while they're on campus but all of your off-campus access and a lot of your database access will not be available to you after graduation, so it's just something we want to let students know. another thing that we just wanted to bring up is you might be thinking like, what about google scholar? google scholar provides tons of access to academic materials for anybody who has an internet connection um and it is a good way for access but a lot of a lot of what you can find on google scholar is just letting you know that an article exists and won't necessarily provide you the full text without connecting your google scholar account to the library account at the university. i've provided a link here just so that you can see
we have like a little tutorial on how to do that in case you haven't done that before but that can be really helpful but it's still um only granting you that access because you're a student; you would hit paywalls otherwise and so i will leave you with this question um before Brittany goes into the flip side of information privilege is and she's going to get into this a little bit more but if you're given a research assignment at your job after you've left UTK i just ask you to think like where would you go to find information for that research project, where would you go to find quality information for that research project or peer reviewed information, and how would you know if it was quality information? so on that note i will pass it over to Brittany and she is going to tell us a little bit more about information poverty thank you Leah that is an excellent introduction so yeah now i'm going to start talking about the other side of the coin, so to speak, which is information poverty so Britz defines information poverty "as that situation in which individuals and communities within a given context do not have the requisite skills, abilities, or material names to obtain efficient access to information, interpret it, and apply it appropriately". so i know that's a lot to throw at you at once so let's break this down. now there are several different aspects information poverty, several different systematic and structural um issues that tie into it um unfortunately we don't have the time to go into as much stuff as that as i would like so i'm focusing on three of the most common tenets that work together and although not all of these things have to be present for you to be information poor, they often work together in a type of system to keep people information poor so first of all people who are in information poverty are unable to access information communication technologies or ICTs or they don't understand how to use the ones available to them. so an ICT in its most basic sense is the technology that you use to communicate with others, so it can be your laptop, your phone, it could even be things like the tv or the media or the newspaper. in the information sciences literature though ICT also refers to places where you can go to access information or to share it, so this can also mean that your public library would be considered an ICT. and inability to access that can be considered contributed several factors can contribute to this so not only is there maybe an economic standpoint to it - everyone can afford a phone or a laptop um there can be geographic barriers: where you live you might not be able to get internet, even if you could afford it; but there's also other potential barriers in place so it might be the case that a person only has two days off a week and those days are days in which their local library is closed so even though they technically have access to a library in their area they aren't able to use it.
also people might not understand how to use the ICTs that are available to them so you know this is the obvious example is you can have a computer if you don't know how to use a computer, how to connect it to the internet, and where to go to start searching for your information then you're not going to have much luck getting the information you need from that but there's also a different definition of understanding how to use ICTs. so most people understand that your public library is a place where you can go to grab [indistinct] reading materials. everyone knows though that they can also have a lot of good information to help you with your everyday life or problems like how um books on how to fill out your taxes or maybe some local city planning documents. if you're wanting to put up solar panels and you're needing to know about the codes. and if you don't know that this is a feature that your ICTs have then you don't fully understand how you can apply them to your everyday life. secondly information poverty can be defined as having a scarcity to quality information and that's combined with having a surplus of low quality information. so if any of you have ever
tried to access articles off campus or you've run into across an article that we don't have here at the library, you may have seen a screen that looks like this so this is called a pay wall. and we can consider that a lot of money to access an article. this is one of the cheaper ones that i've seen and also the 24 hour period to download the article after you've bought it is a lot more than i've seen other other journalists use so even though this one i don't think that this is a fair price i also know that there's a lot worse out there. now part of your privilege of being a part of our library system is if you weren't able to access this and we didn't own it in our subscriptions, you could go through our interlibrary services program and request it from another library. more than likely they would be able to get it, and send to you and you would be fine, you could use this article. if you need to in your project and if
you got it, you realize that you didn't need it then you didn't pay the 37.50 for it; however not everyone has that privilege. a lot of people who only have access to their local public libraries might not be able to do this because the library might not to interlibrary services program or the libraries that they do share books with might not have access to these journals, or might be in a contract where they can't share or digitize these sort of articles and send them to other places, so that can make it significantly harder for people to get access to the information they need, especially if they can't pay the price. and remember this is for one article; think
about how many sources you use in your typical research paper. that can add up really quickly and that's also assuming that you're buying bare minimum and you're able to use every single one. think about how many articles you've downloaded that after looking into them you realize oh this doesn't fit with my project at all. if that happens to somebody who's having to pay for these articles, that can be a lot more painful honestly for what they're needing to work toward so in addition to having um quality information that's more difficult to access potentially through a paywall or because people don't know where to go to find it or it could be written using jargon that they're not familiar with, people are also surrounded by a surplus of low quality information. now this is what we pretty
much deal with in our everyday life. you probably have a few people on social media you know who share whatever they found on whatever random corner internet and they believe it to be true um that is an example of low quality information; it's free or cheap, it's easily accessible, if you google something it's probably going to come pretty close to one of the top of the list, and often these are- they can they play on your emotions, so they can be very upsetting or they can make you enraged or scared and sometimes these are clickbait articles or they don't accurately depict the nuance of a topic so while you can't access quality information that you would need to be able to make decisions you're also being inundated with misinformation or disinformation and when you combine those together that can create a really scary situation. and a third concept tied into information poverty is low information literacy so not only does this mean that perhaps somebody doesn't know how to assess the credibility of what they're looking at; so you know they might not know to go through the references or to check for references, they might not know how to fact-check what the article has said. they might not know to look at other sources to see if there's a consensus or at least a pattern of similarities but it can also mean that people can read something or access something and not know how to apply it to their everyday life. so here is a really overly simplified example of that: think about a time that you've accessed an article for a paper. you started reading it and you realize the information is flying straight over your head, it's not something that you understand since you're a student here at UTK there's a pretty good chance that that's not going to be too detrimental; you can go forth, find other articles, maybe they can help you build up your skills enough so that you can read that one eventually that's not always the case that everybody else obviously as i've talked before about paywalls but this situation of having information and not understanding how to apply it or not understanding it um when it comes to low information literacy and how that ties into information poverty, that can mean that this is something that is chronic and it happens systematically and here is kind of a real life example that was sent to us when we were working on this presentation. so as you may or may not be aware a lot of articles about covid19
and the different vaccines that are being developed are being placed behind pay walls so that's obviously a significant barrier to access for the average person. they if it comes between having to pay for your rent or food or learning about the COVID vaccine, there are other needs that are more pressing than paying for this article on top of that there is so much low quality information including straight up disinformation out there about these vaccines and if you can't pay for the higher quality, trustworthy, reliable information and you only have access to stuff that is really heavily skewed one way or another then you're not going to be able to make educated, informed decisions about what's going to be best for you and in fact you may be deceived into making a decision that could be extremely detrimental to your health. so that is one of the big, real life consequences of information poverty. so now that i've probably depressed you a little bit we're going to talk about what you can do to help address information privilege and poverty first of all remember to be aware of your own privilege. right now you have access to a ton of information and people who are willing to help understand it. this doesn't mean that you're going to be able to know how to do everything, it doesn't mean that you have to work hard to understand it, but it does mean that you already have a leg up on a lot of other people. you already have privilege and the more
you become aware of this and the more that you understand that you are in a situation that is completely abnormal for a lot of other people then the more likely you are going to be aware when you notice some you more likely are to be aware that there are some policies and procedures out there that do keep people in information poverty while they also keep you an information privilege. something you can do first of all is to be mindful of your publishing, so consider where you're publishing, does this journal charge exorbitant rates for articles? is it at least partially open access, will let you keep the ownership of your work, are you going to be allowed to deposit in a repository. on top of that, consider publishing in an open access journal if that's a possibility for you at all because these journals still are often committed to providing high quality, reliable information that can be peer reviewed. they're trying to do so without pay walls which means that people who are able to access the internet in some way should be able to read them for free and there are some negatives of course to open access um you can read about those yourself but it's right now a really great opportunity for you, it's a really great option to help mitigate some of this inequity. and lastly work towards raising awareness and advocating for change if you notice that there is a policy in place or a system that is keeping important information away from people, talk about it, ask other people if they know. it
it could be the case that this is something that in your organization has always been done and when you bring it up the light bulb might click and the person who's in charge of the situation and they say oh you're right, let's work on changing this. if that doesn't happen, keep talking to more people. see if you can get enough people on board to start addressing the issue because the more people that you have on your side the more likely you are to be able to come up with actionable plans where you can legitimately change things and address these systems. so i want to talk to you now about a real life example of this
in Baltimore um during the pandemic a lot of students had to start taking classes completely at home over zoom and many of these students who were from low-income families were using the Comcast internet assembly plan and although this plan claimed that it provided students with the internet access they needed to be able to do their classes, students often found that this was not the case for doing zoom or video calls and um they also found out that if there is more than one person in the household who is having to use the internet, so maybe you have a couple of brothers and sisters who are needing to do their classes at the same time as you then none of you might have been able to attend your school work or attend school, do your work. so these students started talking to each other and they raised the issue with other people in their school and the administrators and this eventually started to get the um the attention of some high profile people in their community including local politicians and public figures who were even more prestigious and with all of this um all of this imp all of this together they were able to impact Comcast and [net base] Comcast significantly raised the bandwidth without increasing the price and while it's still not a perfect solution, the students still believe that they needed more, it ended up making things significantly better for people. so by first of all talking with each other, making other people aware of the issue and then working together to try and plan things out you can actually make these changes so here we have quite a few potential recommended readings, we wanted to give you plenty of choices that way if you started reading something and it didn't work for you then maybe you could have a couple other options and yeah feel free if you want to look in more into this topic to go through this list and this is the link to our survey if you want to go ahead and fill that out feel free and join us next Monday on March 22nd for algorithmic bias 2.0 and then there is the link to our full schedule now do we have any questions
2021-03-23 20:24
