Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology最新文献

Relations between terms in texts have long been studied in linguistics and specialized knowledge domains, especially when occurring in educational materials like textbooks, where they play a crucial role in guiding instructional design and learning. Prerequisite relations (PR), which determine the sequence of presentation of domain terms, are particularly crucial for effective learning. Therefore, the authors consider them carefully when writing instructional texts. The reverse process of identifying PR within texts aims to extract the inherent knowledge structure they are based on and is a key task in the field of corpora annotation for educational knowledge modeling. Although there are tools for manual annotation, there is a need for specialized tools tailored to the unique properties of PR, enabling easy creation, analysis, and sharing of annotated datasets. In this paper, we introduce Prerequisite Relations Annotation Tool (PRAT), a novel tool designed for annotating PR based on a validated protocol. PRAT simplifies the process of capturing, analyzing, and visualizing prerequisite structures in educational texts. We outline PRAT's architecture and functionalities, emphasizing its unique features compared to existing corpora annotation tools. Through a user study involving users with diverse backgrounds, we show PRAT's effectiveness in real-world scenarios.

Hajj is the spiritual and religious journey of a lifetime for many Muslims around the world. In June 2022, the Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah decided to introduce a new travel booking system that mandated pilgrims from Europe, America, Australia, and New Zealand to reserve directly their pilgrimage travels, thus bypassing the local Hajj travel operators. Additionally, Motawif was deployed just a few weeks before the 2022 Hajj. This announcement triggered a wave of panic among would-be pilgrims and resulted in an intense social media conversation. This article examines the conversation that took place on Twitter (now X) for the period following the launch of Motawif and up until the completion of the 2022 Hajj. Using computational social science methods, we undertook several analyses of the Twitterspace to understand the perceptions of the would-be pilgrims with the Motawif system. The study illuminates how forms of community organizing in online spaces (and associated information practices and discursive strategies) have contributed to reconstituting the Hajj pilgrim's identity and agency in ways rarely seen before among this community. Our findings also point to various strategies and information practices of opposition that enable connective action through solidarity and recognition of shared grievances.

In combating filter bubbles, an undesirable consequence of personalized recommendations, prior research has focused on improving algorithms to increase the diversity of the content recommended. Following a user-centered approach firmly grounded in information science, this study is dedicated to optimizing interaction patterns with algorithmic affordances, aiming to augment the diversity of the content consumed and induce favorable attitude changes. A controlled experiment was conducted on a mock personalized recommender system that provided both information and interactivity affordances, exemplified by stance labels and stance-based filters, respectively. A total of 142 participants were recruited to browse recommendations generated by the system on a specific controversial topic, and the selectivity of their information consumption behavior and the change in their attitude extremity were measured. It was found that both types of affordances were effective in reducing users' behavioral selectivity. While stance labels inhibited the consumption of pro-attitudinal information, stance-based filters facilitated the consumption of counter-attitudinal information. Furthermore, the affordances could immediately mitigate the attitude extremity of those with a higher level of algorithmic literacy. The findings not only enrich the growing body of literature on filter bubbles but also offer valuable implications for the affordance design practices of personalized recommender systems.

Sanfilippo, M. R., Zhu, X. A., & Yang, S. (2025). Sociotechnical governance of misinformation: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 76(1), 289–325. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24953

The author's name “Shengan Yang” should be corrected to “Shengnan Yang.”

We apologize for this error.

Being diagnosed with a chronic illness can lead to a life transition that invokes new kinds of information behavior for an individual. This qualitative study focuses on information behavior—particularly information needs, use, and barriers—during the life transitions of people diagnosed with hypothyroidism. Ten interviews were conducted in 2022 with individuals who were diagnosed with hypothyroidism. The data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Based on the intermediate transitions theory by I. Ruthven, 2022 (An information behavior theory of transitions. Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, 73(4), 579–593), the process of transition includes phases of understanding, negotiating, and resolving, as well as processes of event, engaging, enacting, and establishing. Based on the findings, information needs, use, and barriers varied according to the stage of disease and in different stages of a life transition. Interviewees had a wide range of information needs related to disease and diagnosis, treatment balance, and disease monitoring. Information use included the promotion of personal well-being through physical activity and improvement of information-seeking skills. The most significant barriers to information acquisition included communication issues with health care providers and symptoms of hypothyroidism such as fatigue and brain fog. For information providers, the results provide important knowledge on information behavior during a life transition related to a chronic illness.

The BookSampo Linked Data portal was deployed in 2011 by the Finnish Public Libraries and has today nearly 2 million annual users. Its Linked Data covers virtually all Finnish fiction literature but the data has not been used for data analyses in Digital Humanities. This paper discusses how the Knowledge Graph can be used for literary research in two ways: First, a new BookSampo 2.0 Portal user interface is presented, based on faceted semantic search with seamlessly integrated data-analytic tools for Digital Humanities research as suggested in the Sampo Model. This application makes it possible to analyze the data without programming skills. Second, the BookSampo SPARQL endpoint API can be accessed directly by SPARQL querying and scripting, using tools such as Jupyter Notebooks. The analysis results presented suggest interesting spatial, temporal, and topical trends in how the Finnish fiction literature has evolved during the last decades. The approach and tools presented in this paper can be used for analyzing literary landscapes developments in other countries as well.

Throughout history, tattoos have served as a means of expressing identity, culture, and preserving information. Beyond their visual appeal, tattoos continue to be used in the modern world as a way for individuals to showcase their identity, honor and remember others, and mark significant events. In this paper, we explore the connection between tattoos and life transitions from an informational perspective. We view tattoos and the act of tattooing as a complex process that involves cognitive, physical, and emotional interactions with information on both an individual and societal level. The information experience approach aligns with this holistic and multifaceted nature of interacting with information, and we have employed this approach to structure our study. The study is based on interviews with 23 participants in Aotearoa New Zealand and highlights how tattoos serve as forms of information and mediums for comprehending and navigating life transitions. The findings reveal the role of tattoos as initiators, enablers, and resolvers of transitions, and explain how transition is experienced through tattoos. This study contributes to the understanding of tattoos as informational transitions and provides insights into their role in addressing the dissonance experienced in life transitions.

This chapter examines the contours of the religious and spiritual information experiences subfield through a review and content analysis of selected contributions from the past two decades in both information science and related fields. The research question that guides this review is: How have spirituality and religion been conceptualized in information science? Our focus has been on the LIS literature along with the fields of information behavior/practice/literacy, as well as related fields such as human–computer interaction (HCI), media and digital studies, religious studies (including sociology and anthropology of religion or religious tourism). Our aim was to highlight the ways in which the information science literature has contributed to advancing these conversations (using a collections/service/user experience or practice lens), but also how the discussions around the sacred, lived religion, contemplation, conversion or techno-spiritual practices (to name a few) have provided insights into information phenomena and processes. We also discuss the evolution of, and practices associated with, social media and digital practices as well as a discussion of representation (or the lack thereof) of less mainstream religious and spiritual traditions in the literature reviewed. We end with suggestions for future research directions.

Clarivate's Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier's Scopus have been for decades the main sources of bibliometric information. Although highly curated, these closed, proprietary databases are largely biased toward English-language publications, underestimating the use of other languages in research dissemination. Launched in 2022, OpenAlex promised comprehensive, inclusive, and open-source research information. While already in use by scholars and research institutions, the quality of its metadata is currently still being assessed. This paper contributes to this literature by assessing the completeness and accuracy of OpenAlex's metadata related to language, through a comparison with WoS, as well as an in-depth manual validation of a sample of 6836 articles. Results show that OpenAlex exhibits a far more balanced linguistic coverage than WoS. However, language metadata are not always accurate, which leads OpenAlex to overestimate the place of English while underestimating that of other languages. If used critically, OpenAlex can provide comprehensive and representative analyses of languages used for scholarly publishing, but more work is needed at infrastructural level to ensure the quality of metadata on language.

Fake news on social media spreads faster and has become a major societal concern, prompting numerous publications and knowledge sharing among researchers. This research aims to understand the shifting nature of fake news by investigating the citation relationships between significant publications using key route main path analysis (MPA). The process involves generating keywords, collecting and selecting relevant data, and conducting MPA on fake news in social media. The study analyzes 4.057 publications from 2010 to 2023, identifying 27 influential works shaping the knowledge diffusion in fake news research. Findings reveal two main phases: understanding fake news consumption patterns and analyzing its dissemination and detection mechanisms. Through multiple-global MPA, five research trends are identified: health misinformation, fact-checking, sharing behavior, fake news recognition, and physiological interventions. The study shows a continuous rise in publications and citations, with current trends focusing on health-related misinformation. This analysis offers insights into the development and diffusion of fake news topics on social media, emphasizing the importance of historical development in guiding future research by uncovering current trends. Highlighting the historical progression of research provides valuable context, enabling a more nuanced understanding of the field.