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User Expectations and Preferences Regarding Library Chat Widgets
No full textIn 2019, the Pratt Institute Libraries redesigned their website and launched a new chat service. In the following three years, we explored the user experience of our chat services to determine the placement, label, and functionality of chat widgets on library web pages. We conducted two usability studies in collaboration with a graduate-level course taught at Pratt\u27s School of Information. This paper presents a selection of findings from these studies and a discussion of our approach
Future Library: Hopepunk Heroism
Get PDFFuture Library (Paterson, 2014-2114) is viewed through the lens of the heroic imagination and heroism in community. The heroic vision includes an artist, writers, a forest, public architecture, and the city of Oslo. As the project grows, so does its community, across the world, encouraging transformative thinking for all. Future Library is an art installation created by Katie Paterson, described thus: “A forest in Norway is growing. In 100 years it will become an anthology of books. Every year a writer is contributing a text that will be held in trust, unpublished, until the year 2114. The texts will be printed on paper made from the trees, only to be read a century from now (2014-2114).” A silent room in Oslo’s Deichman Library holds the texts as they wait for 2114, for saplings to become trees to publish the anthologised stories. Future Library (Paterson, 2014–2114) is hope in practice, a patient transformation, hopepunk heroism for the planet. The readers of these stories, future learners, are not yet born. Such interconnections between art, nature, humans, stories, and buildings exemplify a line of flight where despite the uncertainty of today we can join a social horizon of hope towards our future
SEO as Audience Analysis: Accounting for Algorithms in Content Strategy
No full textPurpose: This project contributes a rhetorical approach to search engine optimization (SEO) as algorithmic audience analysis. It positions SEO as an activity that requires strategists to compose website content that is optimized to both human search engine users and the algorithmic audience (Gallagher, 2017) of a search engine’s indexed content.
Method: Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2005), with its focus on the agency of non-human entities combined with human agency in social activity, provides the theoretical framework for this approach. The project combines usability testing with web development methods to trace rhetorical agency during online search activities (Hocutt, 2019). Doing so demonstrates the role search algorithms play as receptive audiences of SEO strategies.
Results: Approaches to teaching SEO within the framework of technical and professional communication (TPC) rhetorical foundations require understanding the algorithmic audiences of SEO practices. By matching timestamp data from videorecorded usability tests and HTTP archive (HAR) files produced during usability testing sessions, content strategists can overlay the chronological recordings with their SEO strategies to better understand how successfully SEO met human and algorithmic audience expectations. When SEO practice identifies human audience expectations effectively and develops content signals attractive to its technological audiences, both audiences succeed in an assembled meaning-making exercise. By applying existing methods of audience analysis to search algorithms, content strategists can improve SEO and help surface relevant content for their human users.
Conclusion: The results of this project provide a framework for practicing SEO as rhetorical activity built upon audience analysis of both human and non-human users.
Keywords: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Audience Analysis, Content Strategy, Algorithmic Audience, Web Conten
Paying for Performance? Attorneys\u27 Fees in Securities Fraud Class Actions
Get PDFThis Article studies whether plaintiffs’ lawyers matter in securities class actions. We use inverse propensity score weighting (IPW) to compare the results in cases led by top-tier firms against those brought by lower-tier firms. This technique addresses case selection effects by using all of the cases led by a top-tier firm and then weighting the cases led by lower-tier firms based on how similar these cases are to the cases led by top-tier firms. We do find that top-tier lawyers obtain better outcomes for shareholders in a subset of securities class actions, specifically the cases against the larger (although not the very largest) companies. Outside of these cases, we find that most of the difference in the results obtained by top-tier and lower-tier firms disappears when we balance observable characteristics using the IPW technique. Although the top-tier firms do not get better results in most cases, they do invest more hours and money into their cases
Promise and Progress: Assessing Achievements, New Directions, and Gaps in Leadership Studies
Get PDFLeadership is a relational process characterized by persuasion and context, but leadership studies programs sometimes fail to address what we mean by “good” leadership or the “greatest good.” We rarely ask students to study bad leadership or to examine the constraints—or lack of constraints—on leaders. We do our students a disservice if we fail to ask them first to investigate these thorny questions using historical, literary, and philosophical texts
Why Leadership needs History
Get PDFWhat contribution can a leadership focus make to arbitrating the catch-22s and wicked problems of the ongoing polycrisis? Not much, if you were to turn for advice to mainstream leadership studies (LS), a field of enquiry that continues to see itself, above all, as a tool for optimizing corporate performance and effectiveness. One way in which LS can escape its current tunnel vision and lack of relevancy is to return to its own roots and rehabilitate the historical approach. Historical LS can add value in several areas: it has the ability to deliver insightful case studies that provide useful analogies, which improves the description problem in LS; it can contribute to the empirical verification of leadership theory, which offers a response to the replication problem in LS and promotes the development of more robust models of leadership; it is an antidote to the crisis in LS, as it nurtures a culture of long-term and sustainable thinking, and serves as a corrective to short-termism and narrowing of vision; it contributes to the cultivation of new essential skills; and it adds a measure of sophistication to the framing and discussion of contextuality and complexity in LS. The piece ends with a description of the obstacles that exist to bringing history into LS, due to differences in scientific culture