Information Literacy

Information Literacy has been defined by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) as “the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning” (Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, 2016).

According to the ACRL, there are six core concepts:

  1. Authority is constructed and contextual
  2. Information creation as a process
  3. Information has value
  4. Research as enquiry
  5. Scholarship as conversation
  6. Searching as strategic exploration

Below are are series of resources that humanities-based instructors can use to help students understand how to be effective creators and consumers of information for the 21st century.

I have a variety of assignments using the resources below. If you are interested in seeing my assignments, just email me. I am always happy to share my pedagogy, asking only that, if you improve any of my assignments, you send me back a copy.

MLA International Bibliography Online Course

The MLA has developed an online course, Understanding the MLA International Bibliography: An Online Course, to teach students how to use the MLA International Bibliography for college-level research.

Each of the five units in the course presents a lesson, followed by progression questions to reinforce the lesson through active engagement with the bibliography, and a quiz. The entire course takes approximately 90 minutes to complete and grades itself online. Students receive a digital badge upon passing each quiz and a digital course-completion badge indicating they are a “Searcher” after completing all the lessons and passing all five quizzes. If students do exceptionally well in the course, their digital course-completion badge will indicate they are a “Skilled Searcher,” an accolade for which I give them extra credit.

I typically have students upload their digital course-completion badge to the learning module system in order to earn full credit for the assignment. After taking the general online course, students may complete 20-minute Subject Area course modules on searching in one or more of the following subjects:
• Folklore
• Film, Television, and Radio
• Linguistics
• Rhetoric and Composition

I often follow this self-grading online course with a Scholarly Question assignment that students complete in groups. This assignment requires students to explore trends in the MLA International Bibliography across journals and across decades. If you would like a copy of this assignment (I currently have versions for general English Studies, critical theory, medieval literature, and HEL), just email me and ask.

Search Engines: Gender and Racial Inequality

Without question, Google is the most popular search engine around the world, holding over 90% of the search engine market (Statcounter). And yet few people recognize that search engines, such as Google, are inherently discriminatory in terms of the results they provide. Why? Well, search engine algorithms favor the groups that design them and the companies that fund them — both of which are predominantly white males with a Western-centric perspective.

Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble (UCLA) has conducted research on the issue of gender and racial inequality when using search engines. When she began her research, she discovered that, when an individual search for “black girls” or “asian girls” or “latina girls” on Google, the top hits were all pornographic. When Dr. Noble first brought the issue to the attention of Google, the company claimed that they could not change the search engine algorithm. Dr. Noble eventually gave enough conference presentations and published enough scholarly and popular articles that, in 2012, Google was suddenly able to change their algorithm for searches on “black girls” so that pornographic images and websites were not the primary search results. However, they have yet to do same for the search terms “asian girls” or “latina girls.” Don’t believe me? Just give a search a try. You will discover that racial inequality trumps information.

Since 2014, I have given an assignment on this topic in every course I teach — both f2f and online. Just email me if you would like a copy.

June 2020 Update: Do you really want to see white privilege in digital action? Use Google or another search engine, such as DuckDuckGo, to search for “professional hairstyles women” and “unprofessional hairstyles women.” Now try searching “professional hairstyles men” and “unprofessional hairstyles men.” You will immediately discover that not even being male makes a difference in terms of the search results. Racial inequality trumps gender privilege every time.

  • Safiya Umoja Noble, “Missed Connections: What Search Engines Say About Women,” Bitch (Spring 2012): ideal article to assign to undergraduate students
  • Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (NYU Press, 2018): if you want to initiate change in terms of how you and your students understand gender and racial bias in research with the goal of minimizing such bias in the research strategies you and your students use, read this book.

It this topic interests you or you simply wish to know more, I also recommend reading Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity, 2019) and Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (Picador, 2019).

Alternative Search Engines

Magnifying glass with Google, Yahoo!, and bing
Source: Online Learning Consortium

According to Internet Live Stats, there are over 5.5 billion searches conducted using Google each day in 2021 and around 63,000 each second. In fact, Google holds over 90% of the search engine market, with Bing and Yahoo! at a very distant 2.75% and 1.5% respectively (Statcounter).

Although most searches in the western world are distributed among what we like to call the “Big Three” search engines, few people know any search engines other than the Google, Bing, and Yahoo!…and even fewer use them. Nevertheless, alternative search engines can often provide better results.

The Deep (or Invisible) Web

Most of us, whether we realize it or not, are only familiar with the visible or “surface” web—the portion of the internet that is readily available to the general public and searchable with standard web search engines. However, the visible web accounts for only 4% of the information on the WWW. The other 96% is found on the invisible or “deep” web.

Source: Abe Lederman, “Google Just Gets to the Tip of the Iceberg: How to Get to the Gems in the Deep Web,” Referisg, 32(2) Summer 2016.

Students should be knowledgeable of the deep web and how to find it. A good place to start is the Wikipedia entry on the Deep Web as well as The Ultimate Guide to the Invisible Web (OEDb.org). These two resources provide a general understanding of the deep web and why you might want to search it.

For example, I am an English professor whose area of specialty is medieval literature. I often want to show my students medieval manuscript pages so that they understand how the literary work actually looked in the Middle Ages. Being able to search and get results from rare book libraries that provide digital images of medieval manuscripts would be of great help to me; however, searching the visible web does not yield results from all image collections in library databases. I often have to know what rare book library would likely have the medieval manuscripts that interest me, go to the library website, and then find their search engine for searching their database of digital images. A standard search engine cannot typically search library databases.

Internet Archive & Wayback Machine

Another concern about searching on the web is the fact that websites, unlike books on the shelves of a library, can disappear from one moment to the next. The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library that is trying to provide permanent storage and access to a wide range of digitized material, including websites, music, movies, and books. 

Source: Wikipedia

A particularly useful tool provided by the Internet Archive is the Wayback Machine, a digital “time capsule” search engine that allows users to see archived versions of webpages across time. You will find it at the top of the opening page to the Internet Archive.

The tool gets its name from the fictional time machine used by Mr. Peabody and Sherman in the 1960s cartoon series The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. And for a really amazing short documentary on the Internet Archive, its origins, and its mission, see the following:

Understanding Plagiarism

All students need to understand academic integrity (aka “academic honesty”) and its importance to their learning. The goal is to teach them the work ethic and responsibility needed to complete their academic studies successfully and expected in their future careers. Plagiarism is a violation of academic integrity that can show up in humanities-based writing-intensive courses.

Source: Shutterstock

However, such plagiarism is often unintentional because students do not fully understand what exactly constitutes plagiarism, especially in relation to paraphrasing sources in their writing assignments. Indiana University’s School of Education has developed an excellent set of free online tutorials — five levels from basic to expert — that help students recognize plagiarism: