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ALA and the Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians

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So ALA sent out their email to invite members to come to ALA Annual in Chicago this year, and they selected five sessions to highlight. Ours is one of them!   As the US struggles with an onslaught of book banning like we have not seen in my lifetime, our project, the Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians , aims to get ahead of what we expect to come next: local battles over the existence of public and community college libraries. In fact, this battle has already begun, with some community college libraries in my state losing up to 2/3rds of their former staffing levels since the Covid-19 pandemic. We are right on time. This concern about defending libraries launched my research on understanding data storytelling in librarianship, with a pilot project in 2019 funded by the Center for Social & Behavioral Science at the University of Illinois--an article on obstacles to library data storytelling is in press with Public Library Quarterly, likely to be published in summer 2023. ...
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Data Storytelling for Librarians, Augusta Baker Series 2023

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  I was so honored this week to give a lecture on Data Storytelling for Librarians as part of the Augusta Baker Lecture Series, organized and led by Dr. Nicole Cooke at the University of South Carolina. It was a talk to support library advocacy with data. You can learn more about this talk and the whole series here: https://sites.google.com/view/bakerlectures/baker-diversity-series/dr-kate-mcdowell The main Augusta Baker lecture is today, don't miss it!
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Bad Information: What's wrong with the story?

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New article in Information Matters is out! Here's a brief excerpt: "We all love a good story, and storytelling is a central way that human share experiences, from what happened at work or school today to the most meaningful moments of our lives. We tell stories about everything, from what we know to be true to what we fear might happen someday, and stories always involve emotional engagement. How do we know if a story is accurate or inaccurate, rational or exaggerated, correct or misleading, especially when an untrue story may be more gripping than the truth? When misinformation is spreading as people retell fake stories, stopping it requires a better understanding of how stories work and what specific information errors lead to the crafting—deliberate or accidental—of compelling misinformation stories."  https://informationmatters.org/2023/04/storytelling-dynamics-and-misinformation-the-bad-s-dikw-framework/
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AIVCA, the Anti-Infodemic Virtual Center for the Americas

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  New article out today! Grateful to share the development of this Anti-Infodemic Virtual Center with Ian Brooks at the Center for Health Informatics. DOI https://doi.org/10.26633/RPSP.2023.5 After a two-hour WHO workshop on how to understand and use storytelling today, I'm reminded again of how much colleagues have helped support my well being simply by sharing the work of try to establish stories based on accurate data and information. The workshop was led by a UK organization focusing on qualitative research, and it was based on 68 interviews with frontlines health care providers about storytelling in their word during the Covid-19 pandemic and accompanying infodemic. The infodemic is the accompanying disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, and flood of information that accompanies major disruptive events in a digitally networked world. Here's the WHO overview of the topic . For my part, colleagues like these were an absolutely foundational part of my sustaining not ...
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Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians, early demo!

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 Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians, early demo is available! This is more of a conceptual mapping than a completed product or project, in alignment with our two-year planning grant. But you can walk through a demo mockup here: https://uiucdstl.wixsite.com/uiucdstl This work is a product of a year of collaboration with the Core Design Team, a team of 40 volunteer librarians, library data experts, and researchers who have contributed their knowledge and experience throughout this first year of the project. Next year, we'll be refining the toolkit and offering larger public workshops for broad participation and feedback from the library community. Stay tuned!
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Data Storytelling for Librarians and the Data Storytelling Toolkit

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 This fall, with Dr. Matt Turk and RA Xinhui Hu, we launched the Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians project ( https://imls.gov/grants/awarded/re-250094-ols-21 ) with a free webinar on 9/30 (recording publicly available at  https://mediaspace.illinois.edu/media/t/1_69ag1gj0 ) and 675 registrants!  The Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians (DSTL project website:  https://uiucdstl.wixsite.com/uiucdstl ) will connect real-world examples of data use with data stories (including narrative strategies and data visualizations) as adaptable templates for communicating and related online free resources for data exploration and visualization. The long-term vision is to cultivating data storytelling expertise as a signature expertise of our field, so that when communities have data storytelling needs, they are met at libraries and by librarians. As of 11/15/22, we have collected 11 data use scenarios, which we're now calling "common storytelling needs." The goal is to de...
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Storytelling as Information

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We have loads of theories about the production of misinformation that focus on those generating it (manipulators, liars, propagandists), but so little that centers the audience. Such an exploration would point us toward its voluntary rapid circulation and the collective behaviors of sharing. The closest thing we've got is storytelling in terms of how gossip and rumors blaze across communities, now and historically. But of course the spread of stories, true or false, is enabled by the internet and platforms for information sharing that amplify polarizing information. A key model for qualitative research in these areas is storytelling, but until recently storytelling has been more practice than theory in library and information science (LIS) and the information sciences (IS). So I'm working on theorizing storytelling as information for multiple reasons, and the rapid spread of misinformation is one of them. Another is that indigenous knowledge is routinely shut out of (settler co...
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