In retrospect, this semester, I have learned so much about the diverse communities on the frontlines of climate change and how they engage in information seeking and sharing.
I have also, quite unexpectedly, become more aware of my own heuristic versus systematic processing, some of the cues I use as shortcuts to understanding, and insight into my own biases. I keep returning to Bates's notion of an invisible substrate to information science, which I think of as an epistemological unknown-known. It is becoming aware of the water we swim in, and I am still adjusting to the shift in perspective.
I learned about practical tools and methods in academic writing. This was the first time I made extensive use of a citation manager, in this case, Zotero. It motivates me to explore other citations managers to see what features might better streamline the writing process. Simply as an organizational matter, authors with similar names who publish multiple articles per year on the same topic can become a bit unwieldy.
This was my first use of a matrix for literature reviews, which proved to be immensely helpful. The Risk Information and Processing (RISP) model is a bit complex, so being able to summarize which features were tested in each paper was essential. Little did I know when I started INFO 200 that I would be doing a deep dive into psychological models for health and environmental risk communicators.
It's also given me a new appreciation for libraries, their role in the local community, and the multitude of opportunities we have to engage, from supporting the gathering of local environmental data to participatory mapping to helping people navigate bureaucracy in order to meet their needs.
While I am still getting comfortable with blogging as a medium, it was a delight to read my fellow students' work over the semester as they researched their information communities. They are so varied and fascinating!