Information Management

This study investigates how the relationships between cities are represented in local news by analyzing co-mentions of cities in 31,004 news articles from Alabama. Using a large language model, we extract geographic references and construct co-mention networks that reflect both spatial proximity and symbolic connections. To interpret these links, we develop a classification framework of relationships between cities, including common impacts and sequential dynamics. Our preliminary analysis reveals that different news categories produce distinct patterns of spatial association.

People with disabilities (PWD) and their family members often find it difficult to find information about available services. One of the approaches to address this information access problem is by understanding the ecology of available information sources. However, identifying the landscape of information sources is challenging due to the variety of sources and their varying visibility. This study proposes a computational approach to processing open-ended survey answers by constructing a hierarchical taxonomy of information sources.

Purpose: This study investigated the relationship among information awareness, access, and socioeconomic deprivation in the context of local health information. Drawing on theories of information poverty and the digital divide, this study examined how socio-economic deprivation influences individuals’ ability to become aware of and access local health information.

Access to disability services information depends on many factors, from an individual’s digital literacy, social connections and physical mobility to the interface design of websites. However, it is also true that the availability of disability services information (e.g., how to apply for a Medicaid Waiver) and how such information is managed and provided to end users in Virginia are also critical factors that shape people’s information access. This assessment focuses on understanding the latter, namely, the “information ecology” of disability services in Virginia.

Author keywords attached to academic papers are often used in intellectual structure analysis. However, the length and selection criteria for keywords vary across publications and, even some publishers do not require keywords for their articles. To explore the opportunity to overcome such keyword inconsistency issues, this study compared author keywords from papers focused on the digital divide with those extracted using the language models, BERT and ChatGPT.