Information seeking practices of conspiracists are examined by introducing the new archival user group of “conspiracist researchers.” The epistemic commitments of archival knowledge organization ...(AKO), rooted in provenance and access/secrecy, fundamentally conflict with the epistemic features of conspiracism, namely: mistrust of authority figures and institutions, accompanying overreliance on firsthand inquiry, and a tendency towards indicative mood/confirmation bias. Through interviews with reference personnel working at two state archives in the American west, I illustrate that the reference interaction is a vital turning point for the conspiracist researcher. Reference personnel can build trust with conspiracist researchers by displaying epistemic empathy and subverting hegemonic archival logics. The burden of bridging the epistemic gap through archival user education thus falls almost exclusively onto reference personnel. Domain analysis is presented as one possible starting point for developing an archival knowledge organization system (AKOS) that could be more epistemically flexible.
Rumors about Taylor Swift’s sexuality have persisted since the early days of her career. They have coalesced into an online subculture known as “Gaylor.” Gaylor is a novel kind of conspiracy theory ...known as a “Closeting Conspiracy Theory” (CCT). CCTs involve speculating about a public figure’s sexuality, gathering pertinent evidence, and producing fan knowledges, often informally, on social media. Like shipping and slash fiction (which they often involve) CCTs are largely feminized. Through a qualitative content analysis of 200 TikTok videos, this article situates Gaylor as a CCT that has developed into a kind of knowledge culture. Analyzing this knowledge culture using Emily Coccia’s notion of too-close reading and José Muñoz’s queer utopianism reveals specialized practices of knowledge production, including informal boundary work. As Gaylors get “too close” to Swift’s star text, triangulating lyrics and music videos with images and videos from Swift’s life, they produce folk literary criticism. Muñoz’s queer utopianism saturates Gaylor discourses, with many Gaylors engaging in a specific type of conspiracy-inflected queer utopianism: the doomsday coming-out. The doomsday coming-out pushes the date of the Swift’s purported coming out back further and further after each anticipated album or music video release, not unlike the date of the apocalypse in a doomsday cult. Ultimately, the function of producing CCT knowledge in the Gaylor community is propelled forward by imagining queer futures, reflecting on personal identity, building community, and pushing back against heterosexist consensus.
The controversies, beliefs, and arguments surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 are classics in the canon of conspiracy theories. In October and November 2017, a large ...cache of documents was declassified and made available to the public through the National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) website. A small community of researchers coalesced soon after on reddit.com. When these users encounter silences, they often react to them with a certain level of suspicion towards NARA, its archivists, or the originating institution. I call this suspicion of mediated information. It is entangled with, and comes about as a result of, the notoriety and contested nature of the JFK assassination and its aftermath, the strength of the impossible archival imaginary and the imagined records associated with the JFK Assassination collection, and the nature of the archival silences in the online JFK Assassination Collection. Archivists, particularly those working with collections of conspiratorial significance (the MK-ULTRA documents, collections having to do with UFOs, etc.), should be aware of these sorts of reasoning patterns and how they affect use of the collection and user attitudes towards the collecting institution. The first section of this paper introduces the JFK Assassination Collection, the second goes through the canon of scholarship on conspiracy theories, outlining the new notion of suspicion of mediated information. In section three, I present my theoretical framework—rooted in the notion of Michel-Rolphe Trouillot’s “archival silences,” and Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell’s imagined records and impossible archival imaginaries. Section four outlines method, and section five consists of data and discussion. This paper constitutes preliminary research into the area, and will be built upon in later research.
In recent years, government agencies, information institutions, educators and researchers have paid increasing attention to issues of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theorizing. This ...has prompted a seemingly endless supply of guides, frameworks and approaches to ‘combating’ the problem. In studies of mis- and disinformation, a constellation of analogous concepts are defined in multiple ways across multidisciplinary literatures and institutional contexts. Misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theory are often conflated, lacking specific, portable definitions across fields of study. Linguistic metaphors are often leveraged in place of this definitional work. The larger conceptual metaphors that they connote contain normative assumptions that often impose values and moral imperatives, imply deficiencies, assume intent, and foreground individual agency or lack thereof. Metaphors are as restrictive as they are illuminating; once used, a metaphor also applies constraints to the way in which a phenomenon can be understood. Metaphors not only shape the ways in which science is communicated to the public, but also the kinds of questions that are asked, the theories and methods used, and the parameters of the research design. By analyzing instances of linguistic metaphor, this exploratory study identifies and develops two conceptual metaphors that are frequently evoked to discuss mis- and disinformation: embodied health metaphors and environmental health metaphors. The former includes linguistic metaphors like viral/virality, infodemic, infobesity, information hygiene, information dysfunction, and information pathology. The latter includes linguistic metaphors like information pollution, infollution, and digital wildfires. Uncritically invoking such metaphors adopts tacit arguments deriving from the original field of study (e.g., public health’s tendency to equate individual embodied health with virtue), or the image of the metaphor itself ( digital wildfires implies quick spread and immediate danger), or both. Widespread and uncritical use of such metaphors, we argue, rewards speed and epistemic homogeneity in mis- and disinformation research – ultimately discouraging in-depth inquiry.
Rumors about Taylor Swift’s sexuality have persisted since the early days of her career. They have coalesced into an online subculture known as “Gaylor.” Gaylor is a novel kind of conspiracy theory ...known as a “Closeting Conspiracy Theory” (CCT). CCTs involve speculating about a public figure’s sexuality, gathering pertinent evidence, and producing fan knowledges, often informally, on social media. Like shipping and slash fiction (which they often involve) CCTs are largely feminized. Through a qualitative content analysis of 200 TikTok videos, this article situates Gaylor as a CCT that has developed into a kind of knowledge culture. Analyzing this knowledge culture using Emily Coccia’s notion of too-close reading and José Muñoz’s queer utopianism reveals specialized practices of knowledge production, including informal boundary work . As Gaylors get “too close” to Swift’s star text, triangulating lyrics and music videos with images and videos from Swift’s life, they produce folk literary criticism . Muñoz’s queer utopianism saturates Gaylor discourses, with many Gaylors engaging in a specific type of conspiracy-inflected queer utopianism: the doomsday coming-out . The doomsday coming-out pushes the date of the Swift’s purported coming out back further and further after each anticipated album or music video release, not unlike the date of the apocalypse in a doomsday cult. Ultimately, the function of producing CCT knowledge in the Gaylor community is propelled forward by imagining queer futures, reflecting on personal identity, building community, and pushing back against heterosexist consensus.
Searching for Self Eadon, Yvonne
Proceedings of the ALISE Annual Conference,
09/2023
Journal Article
A significant corpus of work exists exploring the information seeking practices of researchers, including academic scientists (Ellis et al., 1993; Hemminger et al., 2007), social ...scientists (Ellis, 1993; Meho and Tibbo, 2003), historians (Duff and Johnson, 2002; Rhee, 2011), and humanities scholars more broadly (Buchanan et al., 2005; Given & Wilson, 2015). However, very little work has been done on research-as-information seeking. An activity that can be done by laypeople as well as students and academics, research differentiates itself from other kinds of information seeking in several ways: the information sought is often used to produce outputs, the duration of the activity is often longer (ranging from days to decades) than more casual information seeking, and the methods employed in research are diverse and systematic. This paper introduces the new framework of the Research Self. The Research Self is a holistic and flexible model, with seven interrelated dimensions, designed to deepen our understanding of research practice.
PDF
