Papers by Anabel Quan-Haase
Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society
This paper provides an introduction to the 2018 Proceedings of the International Conference on So... more This paper provides an introduction to the 2018 Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Media and Society (#SMSociety). The conference is an annual gathering of leading social media researchers, policy makers, and practitioners from around the world. Now in its 9th year, the 2018 conference is hosted by the Centre for Business Data Analytics at the Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark. The Proceedings features a total of 60 papers, including both full and work-in-progress papers (the acceptance rate for 2018 is 43%).
Proceedings of the 7th 2016 International Conference on Social Media & Society - SMSociety '16, 2016
Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2020
In recent years, there has been an increased focus on information encountering and serendipity wi... more In recent years, there has been an increased focus on information encountering and serendipity within information behavior research and practice. Serendipity has the potential to facilitate creativity and innovation in various spheres, including in libraries, archives and museums. However, do we wait for chance to occur, or can serendipity be designed and facilitated? What are the characteristics of systems that support serendipitous discovery, and what methods can be used to study its occurrence? Extending and building on the concepts and definitions introduced at a 2016 ASIS&T Annual Meeting panel led by Erdelez, we feature in this 40‐min panel innovative work that creates opportunities for discovery within research spaces. Attendees engage through an interactive two‐part discussion and a hands‐on ideation session on impacts and guidelines for systems designed to facilitate serendipity, emphasizing sustainable, accessible researcher and user experiences. Presenters focus on the ro...
Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society, 2019
This paper provides an introduction to the Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on So... more This paper provides an introduction to the Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Social Media and Society (#SMSociety). The conference is an annual gathering of leading social media researchers, policy makers, and practitioners from around the world. Now in its 10th year, the 2019 conference is hosted by the Social Media Lab at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. The Proceedings features a total of 26 papers (the acceptance rate is 42%).
TripleC, May 25, 2012
In this paper, we propose a new ethnographic method for the study of produsage (Bruns 2008) in so... more In this paper, we propose a new ethnographic method for the study of produsage (Bruns 2008) in social media contexts. The proposed method is based on three lines of thought: Marx's method of 'A Workers' Inquiry', the autonomists' method of co-research, and recent critical theory of Web 2.0. To show the applicability and usefulness of the proposed method, we first compare it to other Marxist inspired methodological approaches and then we describe a case study to illustrate the method's diversity and its potential for providing new insights into the processes of produsage and the commodification of audiences as described in previous work by Smythe (1977), Bruns (2008), Cohen (2008), and Fuchs (2011). The case study consists of a critical examination of the mode of produsage as it takes place in Flickr, one of the largest photo-sharing communities on the Internet.
Big Data & Society, May 1, 2015
Big Data research is currently split on whether and to what extent Twitter can be characterized a... more Big Data research is currently split on whether and to what extent Twitter can be characterized as an informational or social network. We contribute to this line of inquiry through an investigation of digital humanities (DH) scholars' uses and gratifications of Twitter. We conducted a thematic analysis of 25 semi-structured interview transcripts to learn about these scholars' professional use of Twitter. Our findings show that Twitter is considered a critical tool for informal communication within DH invisible colleges, functioning at varying levels as both an information network (learning to 'Twitter' and maintaining awareness) and a social network (imagining audiences and engaging other digital humanists). We find that Twitter follow relationships reflect common academic interests and are closely tied to scholars' pre-existing social ties and conference or event co-attendance. The concept of the invisible college continues to be relevant but requires revisiting. The invisible college formed on Twitter is messy, consisting of overlapping social contexts (professional, personal and public), scholars with different habits of engagement, and both formal and informal ties. Our research illustrates the value of using multiple methods to explore the complex questions arising from Big Data studies and points toward future research that could implement Big Data techniques on a small scale, focusing on subtopics or emerging fields, to expose the nature of scholars' invisible colleges made visible on Twitter.
Information, Communication & Society, May 1, 2013
ABSTRACT The privacy paradox describes people's willingness to disclose personal informat... more ABSTRACT The privacy paradox describes people's willingness to disclose personal information on social network sites despite expressing high levels of concern. In this study, we employ the distinction between institutional and social privacy to examine this phenomenon. We investigate what strategies undergraduate students have developed, and their motivations for using specific strategies. We employed a mixed-methods approach that included 77 surveys and 21 in-depth interviews. The results suggest that, in addition to using the default privacy settings, students have developed a number of strategies to address their privacy needs. These strategies are used primarily to guard against social privacy threats and consist of excluding contact information, using the limited profile option, untagging and removing photographs, and limiting Friendship requests from strangers. Privacy strategies are geared toward managing the Facebook profile, which we argue functions as a front stage. This active profile management allows users to negotiate the need for connecting on Facebook with the desire for increased privacy. Thus, users disclose information, because they have made a conscious effort to protect themselves against potential violations. We conclude that there is a tilt toward social privacy concerns. Little concern was raised about institutional privacy and no strategies were in place to protect against threats from the use of personal data by institutions. This is relevant for policy discussions, because it suggests that the collection, aggregation, and utilization of personal data for targeted advertisement have become an accepted social norm.
Journal of Documentation, Oct 10, 2016
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the changing research practices of historians... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the changing research practices of historians, and to contrast their experiences of serendipity in physical and digital information environments. Design/methodology/approach In total, 20 historians in Southwestern Ontario participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed employing grounded theory. The analytical approach included memoing, the constant comparative method, and three phases of coding. Findings Four main themes were identified: agency, the importance of the physical library experience, digital information environments, and novel heuristic forms of serendipity. The authors found that scholars frequently used active verbs to describe their experience with serendipity. This suggests that agency is more involved in the experience than previous conceptualizations of serendipity have suggested, and led us to coin the term “incidental serendipity.” Other key findings include the need for digital tools to incorporate the context surrounding primary sources, and also to provide an organizational context much like what is encountered by patrons in library stacks. Originality/value The increased emphasis on digital materials should not come at the expense of the physical information environment, where historians often encounter serendipitous finds. A fine balance and a greater integration between digital and physical resources is needed in order to support scholars’ continued ability to make connections between materials. By showing the active role that historians take in their serendipitous encounters, this paper suggests that historical training is critical for eliciting incidental serendipitous encounters. The authors propose a novel approach, one that examines verbs in serendipity accounts.
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Mar 14, 2013
Objective-To understand academic historians' attitudes towards, and perceptions of, e-books for u... more Objective-To understand academic historians' attitudes towards, and perceptions of, e-books for use in teaching and research. Design-Qualitative analysis of semistructured interviews using a grounded theory approach. Subjects-Ten faculty members in departments of history at academic institutions in Southwestern Ontario participated.
Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Sep 14, 2010
Information and Media Studies and Sociology at the University of Western Ontario. Her research in... more Information and Media Studies and Sociology at the University of Western Ontario. Her research investigates the interplay of the social and technological with a specific focus on social networks, social capital, and community.
Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Sep 14, 2010
The move towards the digital humanities will see a growing interest in tools such as Ebooks. This... more The move towards the digital humanities will see a growing interest in tools such as Ebooks. This study examines how historians perceive Ebooks and other technologies as impacting their research process. Findings indicate that historians are concerned that the digital environment reduces the possibility of chance encounters with a text. They continue to recreate the environment that encourages serendipity to occur within their field, and would readily welcome tools that facilitate this. BACKGROUND: The importance of serendipity to the research process has been studied by numerous computer scientists and information professionals. The role that the chance encounter plays in historian's research has been documented by several authors (Hoeflich, 2007;McClellan, 2005). Libraries and archives are the setting for many of these chance encounters or 'A-Ha' moments which can take a scholars work in to an entirely new area, provide the missing piece to a puzzle or, for historians, fill in a missing gap in their understanding of the past. The "planned chaos" of the library shelves seem to provide a perfect setting for serendipity (Hoeflich, 2007). Recent research has shown that it is not simply the setting, or even the 'A-HA' moment itself that is remembered when a serendipitous encounter is recalled. A prepared mind, the act of noticing and chance all play a role in the development of a fortuitous outcome, and each of these aspects must be explored in order to understand how serendipity is experienced (Rubin, Burkell, & Quan-Haase, 2011). In a series of interviews on the use of digital tools by historians (Martin and Quan-Haase, 2011) a link was found between hesitation to use new tools and the fear over a loss of serendipity during their information-seeking process. In the current study we examine ways in which historians believe new digital tools for research might affect the possilibty of a chance encounter with information.
The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory
New Media & Society, 2021
A tweet by Hollywood actress Alyssa Milano using Tarana Burke’s phrase “me too” sparked a global ... more A tweet by Hollywood actress Alyssa Milano using Tarana Burke’s phrase “me too” sparked a global movement. Despite the media attention #MeToo has garnered, little is known about how scholars have studied the movement. Through a synthesis review covering sources from 2006 to 2019, we learned that in this time period only 22 studies examined participation on social media such as Twitter and Facebook. We conclude that more research needs to be conducted, particularly to fill a gap in qualitative studies that directly engage individuals, to learn about their experiences with the movement. While #MeToo is a global movement, the omission of any reference to geography or a lack of geographic diversity suggests a narrow focus on scholarship based in the Global North. There is a need for more cross-cultural analysis to gain a better understanding of the movement as it evolves over time and moves into different spaces.
Handbook of Cities and Networks, 2021
By 2050, three-quarters of the world’s population will live in large urban centers comprised of... more By 2050, three-quarters of the world’s population will live in large urban centers comprised of many municipalities of varying sizes (Castells 2002), such as the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) in Canada, with a population in 2016 of almost 7 million (City of Toronto 2017) and the Pearl River delta region of China, with a population in 2010 of approximately 42 million (World Bank Group 2015). Many of the people living in these urban centers were not born there, and so will not have any historical ties to them. In the GTHA, for example, approximately 40 percent of the population was born outside Canada (City of Toronto 2013). Within these urban conurbations, people may live in one city, work in another and play in yet another, resulting in considerable mobility throughout (Castells 2002). Within this context, we see the rise of locative media, mobile technologies that capture and deliver location- and time-specific content and connections to their users. Since locative med...
Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2021
This paper builds on a body of work over the decades that examines how East Yorkers give and rece... more This paper builds on a body of work over the decades that examines how East Yorkers give and receive support. We go beyond the earlier work taking into consideration communication technologies and how they play a role in the ways people exchange social support across the life course. We draw on 101 in-depth interviews conducted in 2013–2014 to shed light on the support networks of a sample of East York residents and discern the role of communication technologies in the exchange of different types of social support across age groups. Our findings show that not much has changed since the 1960s in terms of the social ties that our sample of East Yorkers have, and the types of support mobilized via social networks: companionship, small and large services, emotional aid, and financial support. What has changed is how communication technologies interweave in complex ways with different types of social ties (partners, siblings, friends, etc.) to mobilize social support. We found that commu...
First Monday, 2020
2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the “digital divide.” Although a quarter century has passed, l... more 2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the “digital divide.” Although a quarter century has passed, legacy digital inequalities continue, and emergent digital inequalities are proliferating. Many of the initial schisms identified in 1995 are still relevant today. Twenty-five years later, foundational access inequalities continue to separate the digital haves and the digital have-nots within and across countries. In addition, even ubiquitous-access populations are riven with skill inequalities and differentiated usage. Indeed, legacy digital inequalities persist vis-à-vis economic class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, aging, disability, healthcare, education, rural residency, networks, and global geographies. At the same time, emergent forms of inequality now appear alongside legacy inequalities such that notions of digital inequalities must be continually expanded to become more nuanced. We capture the increasingly complex and interrelated nature of digital inequalities by intro...
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Papers by Anabel Quan-Haase
information on social network sites, research has demonstrated
that users continue to disclose personal information. The present
study employs surveys and interviews to examine the factors that
influence university students to disclose personal information on
Facebook. Moreover, we study the strategies students have
developed to protect themselves against privacy threats. The
results show that personal network size was positively associated
with information revelation, no association was found between
concern about unwanted audiences and information revelation and finally, students’ Internet privacy concerns and information
revelation were negatively associated. The privacy protection
strategies employed most often were the exclusion of personal
information, the use of private email messages, and altering the
default privacy settings. Based on our findings, we propose a
model of information revelation and draw conclusions for theories
of identity expression.
involved about the extent to which the Internet is transforming or enhancing
community. The studies show that the Internet is used for connectivity locally as
well as globally, although the nature of its use varies in different countries. Internet
use is adding on to other forms of communication, rather than replacing them.
Internet use is reinforcing the pre-existing turn to societies in the developed world
that are organized around networked individualism rather than group or local
solidarities. The result has important implications for civic involvement.