This study examines the background and qualifications of plaintiff and defense experts using the H-Index score as quantification of expert background and qualifications. The goal is to better understand the similarities and differences among the professionals offering paid expert witness testimony in mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) civil litigation. In this quantitative study, descriptive statistics include the mean and standard deviation scores for the data to support examining measures of central tendency and variance, respectively. The study includes the use of logistic regression and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, and their statistical assumptions were tested to determine whether they would be used or if it was more appropriate to use a non-parametric test. The study included two research questions: How do the qualifications of plaintiff and defense expert witnesses in mild traumatic brain injury civil litigation compare? and to what extent does a higher h-index correlate with a favorable litigation outcome in a mild traumatic brain injury case? The findings for the hypothesis tests associated with the research questions led to the acceptance of the null hypothesis in each test. There was a lack of asymptotic significance in Hypothesis 1 and a lack of significance in Hypothesis 2. The findings from …

This study explores information seeking behavior of second-generation Muslim immigrants utilizing factors such as critical, cultural, and religious literacy skills. The study examined the second-generation immigrants' ability to balance their parents' and grandparents' native culture and traditions with the culture and traditions of their country. The interview questions were designed using the cognitive authority theory and the figured worlds theory that provides an explanation for the mentality of those who are in environments influenced by culture or religion. An interesting main finding of the study is that participants sought more religious-based rather than culturally-based information. Participants seek information from their parents, communities, and religious leaders, but are particular with who they consider credible and reliable; if the person providing the information follows a similar lifestyle to the participants, they are more likely to hold cognitive authority. Four different themes emerged from the study. The first is "religious focus" where many participants stated that religion is rather static whereas culture can evolve and change with time, location, and events. The second theme emerged is the reliance on family members for religious literacy given the close upbringing of Muslim extended family system. The third theme indicated that although information seeking behavior relied …

The goal of this work is to improve the robustness and generalization of deep learning models, using a similar approach to the unsupervised "innate learning" strategy in visual development. A series of research studies are presented to demonstrate how an unsupervised machine learning efficient coding approach can create filters similar to the receptive fields of the primary visual cortex (V1) in the brain, and these filters are capable of pretraining convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to enable faster training times and higher accuracy with less dependency on the source data. Independent component analysis (ICA) is used for unsupervised feature extraction as it has shown success in both applied machine learning and modeling biological neural receptive fields. This pretraining applies equally well to various forms of visual input, including natural color images, black and white, binocular, and video to drive the V1-like Gabor filters in the brain. For efficient processing of typical visual scenes, the filters that ICA produces are developed by encoding natural images. These filters are then used to initialize the kernels in the first layer of a CNN to train on the CIFAR-10 dataset to perform image classification. Results show that the ICA initialization for a custom made CNN …

This dissertation examines the impact of trauma on information-seeking behaviors and decision-making processes. Essay 1 includes a qualitative analysis of the transcripts obtained from interviews with four military service members diagnosed with PTSD. The results showed that 75% of this small sample population exhibited addictive behavior that was presented in their information behaviors. All four members indicated that the excessive extent to which they seek information is related to the perceived importance of the information and their level of trust in the sources. Low trust in information sources increases the number of sources searched for validation in this population. Essay 2 involved the collection and analysis of survey data. The results of the stepwise backward regression show that two trauma variables (adult sexual assault, sudden fear) have a significant combined negative effect on decision-making in this population. The analysis and results of a different survey are presented in Essay 3. The stepwise logistic regression analysis results conducted on the summated scales developed showed a strong positive link between trust in scientific experts for scientific information and the dichotomous dependent variable trust in social media for news. The research conducted in this dissertation extends the understanding of how trauma affects people's …

The traditional definition of tourism has been transformed by significant advancements in communication and information technology. The concept of Metaverse, derived from the words "meta" (meaning beyond) and "verse" (meaning universe), has redefined how people experience travel. This innovative concept combines virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence to create virtually augmented spaces. However, the tourism industry should clarify and narrow down the definition of Metaverse and its intriguing concept for its successful adoption in the future. Thus, it is crucial to define Metaverse tourism and understand how users will accept it in the near future. This study aims to comprehend the technology behind Metaverse tourism, review current research on the topic, and identify the critical factors related to experiential Metaverse tourism. The paper also examines how computer self-efficacy, novelty seeking, subjective norm, job relevance, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived enjoyment can influence expected user satisfaction and behavioral intention, given the context of situational motivation. The findings have significant implications for theory and management, addressing various questions related to users' perceptions, expectations, design considerations, stakeholder preparations, and performance assessment of metaverse technology in tourism applications.

Social media is considered a particularly conducive arena for hate speech. Counter speech, which is a "direct response that counters hate speech" is a remedy to address hate speech. Unlike content moderation, counter speech does not interfere with the principle of free and open public spaces for debate. This dissertation focuses on the (a) automatic detection and (b) analyses of the effectiveness of counter speech and its fine-grained strategies in user-generated web content. The first goal is to identify counter speech. We create a corpus with 6,846 instances through crowdsourcing. We specifically investigate the role of conversational context in the annotation and detection of counter speech. The second goal is to assess and predict conversational outcomes of counter speech. We propose a new metric to measure conversation incivility based on the number of uncivil and civil comments as well as the unique authors involved in the discourse. We then use the metric to evaluate the outcomes of replies to hate speech. The third goal is to establish a fine-grained taxonomy of counter speech. We present a theoretically grounded taxonomy that differentiates counter speech addressing the author of hate speech from addressing the content. We further compare the conversational outcomes of …

This study aims to find out the impact of the credibility and content quality of social media influencers on the various stages of the customer's journey and the intention to choose a destination for the Saudi tourist. The target segment was Saudis in general, who are 18 years or above. To conduct this study, 618 usable questionnaires were collected. This study tested twenty-two hypotheses. The result of this study showed that the relationship between content quality, expertise, and similarity was significantly positive with the tourist's desire and information searching. As well, the relationship between the tourist's desire and information searching was significantly positive with the intention of choosing a destination. Conservatism, engagement, and gender were tested as moderators. Conservatism was not significant while the engagement was significant. Gender was only significant in the relationship between content quality and the tourist's desire. This study contributes to information and knowledge in the fields of tourism, hospitality, travel, marketing, tourist behavior, information science, and social media. Researchers and those interested in tourist and customer behavior can benefit from the results of this study. In the industrial field, this study will be very useful to the Saudi government, which has recently begun to rely …

When the need arises to transmute complex and theoretical ideas into practice or communicate them to the uninitiated, there often exists a gap in the levels of understanding between the parties involved. This research examined knowledge transfer between practitioners within the information technology (IT) domain of interest by asking the following questions: what is the relationship between knowledge spaces for IT experts and novices; and what factors impact knowledge transfer among knowledge spaces for IT experts and novices? This study conducted interviews with a range of IT professionals to identify knowledge states that resulted in knowledge spaces for both experts and novice practitioners. A conceptual model was developed to examine the knowledge transfer process between expert and novice practitioners and identify factors affecting both the knowledge space and the knowledge states. The model also takes in consideration external factors such as organization and culture and organizational environment. The results from the study show that leadership and executive skillsets play a major role in characterizing the expert knowledge state. The results also show that knowledge transfer between and among groups was primarily impacted by interest and awareness factors among experts. Among novices, the largest barriers were cultural in nature (e.g., no …

Technological advances such as mobile technology, big data, and machine learning allow businesses to associate advertisements with consumer behaviors to maximize sales. Thus, information about consumer behavior became the central resource of businesses. Recent discussions and concerns about the emerging economic order centered around capturing consumers' data suggest that more research efforts be allocated to address new challenges in different domains, such as health, education, smart cities, and communication. Research on individual cybersecurity behavior is relatively new and requires more attention in academic research. This study has proposed and validated a cybersecurity behavioral model to enrich our understanding of users' behavioral intention (BI) to use cybersecurity controls. An online survey was used to collect information from University of North Texas (UNT) students to explore various technology usage determinants and specific computer security practices. The instrument measured the actual cybersecurity controls behaviors (ACB) by incorporating technical and social factors. Accordingly, the construct of ACB was created and validated to test how it relates to the participants' behavioral intentions. The findings confirm a large number of the proposed relationships. Additionally, the results show that the model explained a significant amount of variance in the proposed dependent variables BI and ACB. Within the …

This study aims to investigate college students' security awareness of using social media in sharing information. The two theories that have guided this study are the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the technology acceptance model (TAM). Data was collected from both undergraduate and graduate students from the University of North Texas (UNT) in Denton. The total responses included 380 students from different majors with 291 valid responses for data analysis; The structural equation model (SEM) Lavaan package was used to find out the best fit of the model. A diagonally weighted least squares (DWLS) was used to model the variables as ordinal in this study's analysis as ordinal data made the model fit substantially. The study found that 6 factors: attitude (AB), subjective norm (SN), perceived behavior control (PBC), perceived usefulness (PU), perceived risks (PR), and security awareness (SA) influenced behavior intention (BI). Also, I found that AB was influenced by PR and SA, as well as SN influenced by SA. Self-efficacy (SE) influenced PBC. On the other hand, the study found that controllability (C) did not influence PBC; perhaps, an individual's skills do not interact with social media security settings. Perceived ease of use (PEOU) did not influence …

Enterprises have focused on mechanisms to track insiders who may intentionally exceed and misuse their authorized access. However, there is an opportunity to understand why a trusted individual would want to exploit the trust and seek information with the intent of a malicious outcome. The detection of insider rogue or nefarious activities with information to which a user is already authorized is extremely difficult. Such insider threats require more deliberation than just considering it to be a problem that can be mitigated only by software or hardware enhancements. This research expects to help gain an early understanding of antecedents to such information behavior and provide an opportunity to develop approaches to address relevant character traits which could lead to a higher propensity of information misuse. This research proposes a theoretical framework and a conceptual research model to understand the antecedent factors to opportunistic information-seeking behavior of individuals. The study follows the three-essay format. Essay 1 explores the scholarly literature published about insider behavior to understand information behavior and proposes the theoretical framework for the study. PRISMA methodology was used for the thematic literature review. Essay 2 is a quantitative study of 424 university students surveyed using an online instrument for …

Indigenous communities around the world are losing their languages at accelerating rates to the effects of the climate crisis and global capitalism. To preserve samples of these languages facing endangerment and extinction, samples of language use (e.g., audio-video recordings, photographs, textual transcriptions, translations, and analyses) are created and stored in language archives: repositories intended to provide long-term preservation of and access to language materials. In recent years, archives of all kinds are considering their origins and audiences. With the emergence of the community paradigm of archiving framework, the roles of archivists, communities, and institutions are under re-examination. Language archives too are reflecting this trend, as it becomes more common for speakers of Indigenous languages (also known as language communities) to document and archive their own languages and histories. As the landscape of language archiving expands, we now see increased emphasis on the re-use of archival material, particularly to support language revitalization—efforts to increase and maintain the use of the language. There are calls for language documentation (and, by extension, language archiving) to prioritize revitalization efforts. This dissertation is a case study of one language archive collection: the Boro Language Resource in the Computational Resource for South Asian Languages (CoRSAL) archive. …

Accurately predicting the deck condition rating of a bridge is crucial for effective maintenance and repair planning. Despite significant research efforts to develop deterioration models, a nationwide model has not been developed. This study aims to identify an appropriate machine learning (ML) algorithm that can accurately predict the deck condition ratings of the nation's bridges. To achieve this, the study collected big bridge data (BBD), which includes NBI, traffic, climate, and hazard data gathered using geospatial information science (GIS) and remote sensing techniques. Two sets of data were collected: a BBD for a single year of 2020 and a historical BBD covering a five-year period from 2016 to 2020. Three ML algorithms, including random forest, eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Artificial Neural Network (ANN), were trained using 319,404 and 1,246,261 bridge decks in the BBD and the historical BBD, respectively. Results showed that the use of historical BBD significantly improved the performance of the models compared to BBD. Additionally, random forest and XGBoost, trained using the historical BBD, demonstrated higher overall accuracies and average F1 scores than the ANN model. Specifically, the random forest and XGBoost models achieved overall accuracies of 83.4% and 79.4%, respectively, and average F1 scores of …

When it comes to hospice care, patients and their families residing in rural counties need competent rural community-based hospice social workers on their team. The study of information seeking behaviors of rural community-based hospice social workers during the global COVID-19 pandemic is significant as there is a need to fill gaps regarding how this specific medical discipline performs their job responsibilities when duties become more complicated due to evolving infection control protocols, decreased direct access to patients, and poor internet services. Community-based rural hospice social workers rely on up-to-date information and resources when providing support services to patients and their families. This has become particularly important during the global pandemic COVID-19. Utilizing Chatman's small world theory, this research lends itself to community-based hospice social workers identifying solutions to the challenges of finding timely and accurate COVID-19 information and resources for hospice patients and their families. Purposive sampling, semi-structured interviews, and qualitative social network analysis (SNA) with ATLAS.ti comprise the methodology for this research. The purpose of this study is to investigate the information seeking behaviors of community-based hospice rural social workers in order to understand how they select their COVID-19 information resources.

Relevance is a core concept in the field of Information Science and a common term in everyday vernacular that generally refers to the usefulness of information. However, relevance has not been sufficiently or consistently defined or explored in the information science literature. Relevance criteria are the factors that information users employ when determining whether information they encounter is relevant. Identifying relevance criteria is a crucial step to understanding relevance. Relevance criteria employed with newer information formats like online video are especially important to study. Online video is now widespread, and people are increasingly likely to rely on video for information. This study identifies relevance criteria employed during relevance assessments of online video through a explanatory sequential mixed-methods study of frequent online video users including students, faculty, librarians, and video professionals. Methods included an online survey and interviews.

School librarians create an atmosphere where learners feel empowered. Moreover, school library programming should support diversity, equity, and inclusive learning opportunities to facilitate student success. Thus, school librarians are expected to model and advocate for equitable learning spaces while considering the universal design for learning approach to improving accessibility, utilization, and relevance for all library patrons. Although it has been established that school library standards support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), more is needed to know about the impact of a crisis on school library programming and services. In addition, extensive research has not been conducted to determine school librarians' responsiveness and strategies to provide services for their school communities during disruptive times. This study examines school librarians' perceptions of the opportunities and challenges encountered while endeavoring to engage in DEI practices during crises.

This study identified the information seeking behavior and networking practices used by members of a specific marginalized population, that of adult female probationers (AFPs) in a rural county in Texas. The study focused on how they seek out information when faced with a self-identified need in their lives. Beyond the basic "food, shelter and clothing" that comes to mind, the respondents find themselves faced with questions not only about the judicial system but also ones involving health care, employment, transportation, child-care, and other. The study utilized a qualitative research approach to gather data about the AFPs' information behavior and networking activities. The AFPs were asked about their information behavior during their time in the judicial system and after that involvement ended, and about their use of three points of information access: personal social network, physical resources, and electronic resources. Data was also gathered from community members (CMs) who have a role either within the judicial system or external to the judicial system. In its findings, the study determined there is no single point of access to a comprehensive listing of resources for the AFPs to utilize, and that AFPs reported seeking information via two ways as based on the type …

No published studies to date examined the practices in creation or adoption of metadata in cultural heritage institutions or evaluated metadata in bibliographic databases in the Arabian Gulf counties and assessed its potential interoperability in the aggregation that would provide a central point of access to bibliographic databases of cultural heritage institutions. This exploratory study aimed to address this gap with the goal of: (1) developing understanding of the current state of information representation and knowledge organization in cultural heritage collections in Arabian Gulf countries, and (2) exploring perspectives for future developments such as creating regional large-scale portals similar to Digital Public Library of America, Europeana etc. that facilitate discovery by aggregating metadata and possible barriers to these developments.. The study is focused on a Kuwaiti, Qatari, and Omani libraries, museums, and archives. The mixed-methods research combined semi-structured interviews of the bibliographic database managers at 15 cultural heritage institutions and in-depth content analysis of a sample of 412 metadata records that represent items in these bibliographic databases for accuracy, completeness, consistency, use of knowledge organization systems, etc. This study findings make a research contribution important for evaluating the feasibility and planning of future aggregations of cultural heritage bibliographic databases. Results …

Cloud-based assistants like the Google Home and the Amazon Alexa have become ubiquitous in our homes. Users can simply communicate with the devices using a smartphone application. There are privacy concerns associated with cloud-based assistants. For example, users do not know what type of information is being sent to the device manufacturer, if the device is stealthily listening to conversations, data retention, or who else has access to the data. Privacy is about perception. The goal of this study is to determine user privacy concerns regarding cloud-based assistants by adopting a quantitative research method. The study used a privacy decision framework that lists three core components, which are technology controls, understanding user privacy preference, and government regulations. The research used Dervin's sensemaking model to describe users' privacy perception using the privacy decision framework and improved on a privacy perception survey instrument from previous dissertations. An understanding of user privacy concerns with cloud-based assistants is required to provide a comprehensive privacy guidance to stakeholders. The significance of this study is in the identification of the privacy perception of users of cloud-based assistants and the extent to which the components of the theoretical framework can impact user privacy perception. The results of …

Social media information behavior is increasingly critical, impacting not only individuals and groups but the beliefs, values, and direction of society and culture. The purpose of this study was to investigate how persistent observation by members of the online network influences social media users' information behavior, resulting in the phenomenon of social noise. Data analytics, including LDA, LSA, and clustering methodologies, were performed but could not provide information about the users' motivations. Using an ethnographic approach, participant observations and interviews were conducted with Facebook users as they interacted with informational posts, and the data collected was coded using a recursive method. Four key constructs of social noise were identified, and sub-codes were assigned within each construct as patterns emerged, providing insight into the different facets of social noise. Additionally, in most instances more than one of the four constructs were present, layering their influence on the information behavior. Based on these findings, social media users are not always interacting with information based on true personal beliefs or desires; instead, concerns surrounding their personal image, relationships with others, core beliefs, and online conflict are influencing their observable information behavior. The results of this exploratory study provide a basis to further develop …

Subject of information entity is one of the fundamental concepts in the field of information science. Subject of any document represents its intellectual potential -- 'aboutness' of the document. Traditionally, subject (along with title and author) is the one of three major ways to access information, so subject metadata plays a central role in this process and the role is constantly growing. Previous research concluded that the larger bibliographic database is, the richer subject vocabularies and classification schemes are needed to support information discovery. Further, a high proportion of information objects are unretrievable without subject headings in metadata records. This exploratory study provides the analysis of the subject metadata in MARC 21 bibliographic records created in 2020; and develops understanding of the level and patterns of 'aboutness' representation in the MARC 21 bibliographic records. Study also examines how these records apply the recent RDA and MARC21 guidelines and features intended to support functionality in a Linked Data environment. Methods of Social Network Analysis were applied along with content analysis, to answer research questions of this study. Suggestions for future research, implications for education, and practical recommendations for library metadata creation and management are discussed.

This study applies the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) framework for eScience professionals to data service positions in academic libraries. Understanding the KSAs needed to provide data services is of crucial concern. The current study looks at KSAs of data professionals working in the United States academic libraries. An exploratory sequential mixed method design was adopted to discover the KSAs. The study was divided into two phases, a qualitative content analysis of 260 job advertisements for data professionals for Phase 1, and distribution of a self-administered online survey to data professionals working in academic libraries research data services (RDS) for Phase 2. The discovery of the KSAs from the content analysis of 260 job ads and the survey results from 167 data professionals were analyzed separately, and then Spearman rank order correlation was conducted in order to triangulate the data and compare results. The results from the study provide evidence on what hiring managers seek through job advertisements in terms of KSAs and which KSAs data professionals find to be important for working in RDS. The Spearman rank order correlation found strong agreement between job advertisement KSAs and data professionals perceptions of the KSAs.

Event-based mediated participatory archives, in which communities of ordinary people contribute their records to archives during collection day events represent a paradigm shift within the archival field. Applying a qualitative approach, this study investigates event-based mediated participatory archives using Bastian's communities of records and memory as a guiding framework. Using the Mass. Memories Road Show as a case study, data collection and analysis took place over three phases. In Phase I, archive supporting documents were collected and analyzed using "against the grain" historical analysis methods. In Phase II, data from the Mass. Memories Road Show digital collections were collected and analyzed using grounded theory analysis methods. In Phase III, ethnographic research data, including a direct observation and semi-structured interviews, was collected and analyzed using ethnographic analysis methods. The results of this study suggest that community participants' motivations to contribute to participatory archives are rooted in self-fulfillment while institutional archives personnel members' intentions are based in inclusive community-building. Furthermore, the contribution of records to the archives allows community participants to share personal stories that serve as evidence of their historical legacies and as affirmation of their roles in their communities. Throughout the findings, moments of connection which enable the sharing of …

Most training performance measurement tools rely heavily on quantitative metrics that do not consider factors impacting knowledge transfer and behavioral change such as social relationships and company culture. This study observed a training performance measurement tool for a major U.S.-based airline. Analysis of the measurement tool consists of: a pilot study providing a baseline for the current gaps in training performance measurement, a survey of flight attendants to understand how company cultural and social factors impact learning and knowledge transfer, and focus groups to provide an in-depth analysis of what the underlying company cultural and social factors are. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis were utilized to identify the impact of cultural factors and social relationships on performance measurement to provide in-depth understanding of the role of tacit knowledge transfer in the training environment. Results show that cultural factors such as empathy, coaching, and on-the-job training, negatively impact the accuracy of flight attendants' ability to measure learning and knowledge transfer. A second finding shows social factors, personality, and agreement, show a strong trend towards negatively affecting the ability to accurately measure learning and knowledge transfer. The proposed knowledge transfer measurement model was further modified to reflect the findings and the results …