Public scholarship at the UW Center for an Informed Public and Technology & Social Change Group

This is a talk I gave on public scholarship and community engaged research at the UW Going Public event on March 26, 2020 put on by UW Libraries. Edited for brevity and clarity. The full recorded talk with slides is here.

I’m Chris Coward, senior principal research scientist in the Information School. For this talk I will also be joined by Jason Young, a senior research scientist. We both are part of the Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA), and the Center for an Informed Public (CIP). Both TASCHA and CIP have applied research missions with strong commitments to public scholarship. My portion will focus on CIP.

The Center for an Informed Public is a university-wide multidisciplinary research center housed at the Information School. Our mission is “to marshal the collective resources of a world-class, public research university, embedded within local communities, to resist strategic misinformation, promote an informed society, and strengthen democratic discourse.” We thank the Knight Foundation for providing the core funding to establish the center.

One dimension of public scholarship that may not be so obvious is multidisciplinarity. When connecting with external constituencies and the broader public, they don’t see the world in terms of our academic silos. Whether it be homelessness or food deserts, folks involved in these issues know through experience that they require a wide range of expertise to address.

Misinformation is no different. We have 5 founders, representing three departments — the Information School, Human Centered Design & Engineering, and Law. We are also in the process of establishing a group of faculty affiliates, which will bring in expertise from a number of other disciplines — engineering, social sciences, the humanities, and professional schools. In any given week we may be speaking with a philosopher or an epidemiologist. And, we just announced our first group of postdoctoral fellows. In addition to another information scientist, one hails from Communication and Journalism, and the other from Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Why are we assembling such a diverse group? Because at its core, misinformation is a wicked problem that requires all of these disciplinary tools to address. Misinformation is also a foundational problem. Misinformation goes to the heart of how people in society communicate with each other, and solve problems together. If we can’t agree on certain facts and other types of objective information, it becomes nearly impossible to make progress on anything.

And misinformation is an applied problem that should not be studied strictly from inside the academy. To be sure, it can be, and certainly much of our research will involve analyzing millions of tweets. But in our vision, we believe genuine engagement in the fullest sense of the word is essential — both to have real world impact, but just as importantly to produce high quality research. Engagement is one of the core pillars of the CIP, along with research, education, and policy. In practice, engagement is infused throughout all CIP’s activities. It’s not a stand-alone set of activities.

Let me give you some examples from our first few months of operation. I divide our engagement work into two categories of activity.

The first is partnerships. These are the collaborations with key organizations that have an important stake in misinformation. The second is the public. Here I’ll discuss a range of activities that are intended to both inform and educate the public, and bring their issues and concerns into the research itself.

There are many types of organizations that we are in the process of developing partnerships with. This includes tech companies, especially the social media platforms. Unless some of our research turns into tools that tech companies deploy to stem the tide of misinformation, we’ll have little to show for our work. The trick here is in crafting these partnerships in such a way that it not only preserves our independence, but also does not create even the slightest appearance of corporate influence in our research. It’s a particularly sensitive topic when we’re dealing with misinformation and its political overtones. But ensuring a clear dividing line with corporate sponsors is important for any research endeavor.

Another category is information institutions. We are already actively working with two sectors — journalism (Seattle Times, KUOW and others) and public libraries.

Public libraries have been a focus of mine, and TASCHA, the center I run, for 10 years. So I’m going to delve deeper here with some examples of how we are working with libraries and librarians in ways that are both good for the research and good for the library field.

Public libraries are often overlooked in today’s digital world, but their importance and reach cannot be overstated.

First, they are ubiquitous. They are located in over 16,000 communities across the US (and over 400,000 communities around the world, most of them in developing countries).

Second, they continue to be extremely popular. Nearly 1.4 billion visits in 2015 in the U.S. In fact, it’s millennials — the first generation to grow up online — who use the public library more than other older adults.

And third, they enjoy high levels of trust. According to Pew research, public libraries top the list of sources people trust the most. Even more than family and friends! Much more than government or news organizations. This is particularly important for combating misinformation where trust is a key factor.

Fourth, they have trained information professionals — librarians — who have professional training in information literacy, finding and evaluating information, and developing educational and other programs to meet community needs.

For these and other reasons, we featured a strong partnership with public libraries in our CIP proposal. The way we did this was by developing the concept of the community lab. For us, the community lab is an extension of our lab space for learning, experimentation, co-creating research-based interventions, and developing promising approaches that can be scaled. Let me share how we’re operationalizing this concept in our work with public libraries

We’ve begun in Washington State, and with the King County Library System specifically. KCLS was attractive because it is close, and spans a diverse geography of urban and rural areas representing the full spectrum of ideological and political identity — important for misinformation — not to mention other measures of diversity (ethnicity, race, income, etc.)

The first step is to build a relationship. You can’t do anything without having a relationship first, and I’m surprised how often this step is skipped. I’ve witnessed many times researchers approaching organizations asking them to “partner” on a research study when the study is already fully baked. These often end up being transactional relationships (not partnerships) that benefit the researchers more than the external organizations.

Once the relationship is built and there’s a desire to work together, you have to align goals. Through discussions, we developed a set of common goals. First,to learn about the current state of libraries and misinformation. Second, to develop 1–2 new programs that the libraries could implement in their communities. And third, to measure the impact of these interventions so that we could refine and eventually scale the programs to the rest of KCLS and beyond.

Part of this alignment is familiarizing each other with work norms. For us, this often means doing a research 101 with our partners. This is because research in the scientific sense usually differs from how a practitioner thinks of research. We have IRB processes, need to develop very specific research questions and data collection protocols, it’s intensive and exacting, and it’s slow! I’ve learned from experience this is super important as we often get pressed from partners, as well as donors who primarily fund practitioners, to go faster, produce things that work and can be scaled, and worry about publications later. For our part, we can’t produce new knowledge unless we proceed systematically, rigorously, and with our other standards of high quality research.

Next, we fully embrace and operationalize the concept of knowledge co-production. Here’s how we pursued this with KCLS.

First, we drafted an interview survey to be administered to librarians. KCLS helped along the way, refining our questions, adding questions they wanted answers to, and testing it.

Next, KCLS helped with the recruitment of librarians to participate in our interviews.

After we had a chance to analyze the responses we held a workshop that gathered about 20 librarians, including those who participated in the interviews, and our 5-person research team. At this workshop we played back what we heard from our interviews, and asked the broader group of participants to reflect and build on the initial responses.

This is an important principle of community engaged research — to not treat research as an extractive process where participants never learn what contribution they made to the project.

From the interviews and workshop, some of the things we learned include:

• Librarians are quite familiar with misinformation at a high level
• However, they are not fully confident of their skills or equipped to help patrons with misinformation problems. In short, conventional information literacy skills fall short of addressing the problem given the sophistication of technologies and tactics being deployed to confuse people and undermine people’s trust in authoritative sources.
• They yearn for learning resources — both for themselves and their patrons.
• They also pointed out the need for programs (events or other activities held at the library) that will engage a broader swath of people in their communities. As an example, when they hold a course on detecting fake news for instance, the people who come are typically those who lean a particular way politically and genuinely want to learn how to not fall prey to misinformation tactics.
• This led to a conversation about developing programs that (1) are focused on a particular topic of interest — say Coronavirus — and then embedding misinformation in the program. And (2) developing programs that are fun.

In the next phase we will be conducting a co-design workshop to begin prototyping some actual library misinformation programs. On our side, to prepare for this we are currently doing research on two of the needs that surfaced — curating and evaluating misinformation learning resources, and designing an activity that teaches about misinformation in a fun and engaging way. I’ll illustrate with the engaging/fun activity — an escape room.

I suspect many of you have been to an escape room, or know what one is. In short, escape rooms are a cooperative game experience where groups of people enter a physical room and unlock clues and solve a series of puzzles. You typically have one hour to “escape” and they range in difficulty level. There are numerous commercial spaces throughout Seattle and the world, and they are also popular in libraries, museums and other places.

The design challenge I’m putting to my students is: design an escape room that educates people about misinformation. Escape from misinformation if you will. The puzzles will expose people to different forms of misinformation — false rumors, fake twitter accounts, manipulated media, doctored photos, deepfake videos. Participants will have to access clues (like how to detect a fake account) to solve the puzzles. Students in Jinha Lee’s design class produced the first concept.

How does research come into play? In two ways. For one, all of the puzzles will be researched based, taking what we know about how people are vulnerable to misinformation, and turning this into a game format. Secondly, I want to instrument the escape room itself so that we can get data on its use. How long does it take people to solve a particular puzzle? How many errors do they make before getting a correct answer? What types of misinformation problems do people do well at? Poorly at? We could also have participants input their age and other information so that we can measure effects demographically. In this way, it really does fulfill our vision of a community lab.

My final comment has to do with how we’re engaging the public in our work. In many respects, this is a much harder task given the sheer number of people. How do you engage in a genuine way where you are listening as much as speaking?

The approach we’ve taken at CIP is twofold. First, we are holding a series of town halls across the state. The first one was in Seattle in January. What made this event unique was our use of technology. We had the audience, about 400 people, participate through a technology called Thought Exchange. Thought Exchange allowed people to ask questions, upvote other people’s questions, and cluster ideas. In real time we responded to the issues that rose to the top, and we have an archive of all submissions that we’ve gone through to learn more deeply what issues the public cares about.

The other approach is to be active on both social media and popular media on topics that are of current interest to people. Our center sprung into action when Covid-19 hit to track the spread of misinformation, and almost daily you can find our faculty in the news on this topic.

Thank you.