Bryan Dosono

Military Masculinity and the Travails of Transitioning: Disclosure in Social Media

Research suggests that the disclosure of struggles and the connection with sympathetic others are critical during periods of transition. Whereas disclosure has been studied in various contexts, the disclosure strategies of USA (US) veterans transitioning back into civil society has not been explored. Through a qualitative study with 15 veterans re-integrating into civil society, we find that the culture of hyper-masculinity learned and performed during military service leads to challenges to disclosure, or non-disclosure, post-service, negatively impacting how military veterans navigate the transition back into civil society. We explore the disclosure issues and strategies of veterans in both offline and online contexts, finding that veterans used online platforms to navigate the challenges limiting disclosure and connect with supportive resources. We conclude by introducing the concept of delayed disclosure--when people postpone making their struggles known in transition--and provide implications for policy, design and future work to help veterans manage their transitions.

Exploring AAPI Identity Online: Political Ideology as a Factor Affecting Identity Work on Reddit

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) are often perceived as a monolithic group, despite their distinct composition of ethnic cultures, political ideologies, and socioeconomic backgrounds. AAPIs increasingly engage in online forums to disclose their experiences and opinions, and in doing so, take part in lengthy discussions that shape the views of their community. We retrieved over 72,000 Reddit comments posted between January to July 2016 for a mixed-methods study of AAPI identity work, analyzing discursive patterns of user-deleted and banned comments. We found that while conservative AAPIs tend to comment anonymously more frequently, progressive AAPIs are less likely to ban comments that did not fit the behavior and norms of their community. AAPI redditors engage differently between conservative and progressive online communities through a process of what we conceptualize as identity work as deliberation.

Thirty years of software problems in the news

How have the consequences of software problems changed over the past 30 years? To begin to answer this question, we analyzed 386,381 news articles reporting on software problems published between 1980 and 2012, spanning widely circulated newspapers to small trade magazines. Our results show that after an increase in reporting just prior to Y2K, news on software problems has declined in North America, but increased in the rest of the world. Most articles only report minor consequences such as frustration, confusion, anger, or at worst, having to delay some activity for a few hours, usually due to service outages in government, transportation, finance, and information services. However, about once per month, the news reports at least one death, injury, or threatened access to food or shelter due to software problems. Reports of these severe consequences are also increasing, due primarily to stories about transportation and government software.

Diversifying the Next Generation of Information Scientists: Six Years of Implementation and Outcomes for a Year-Long REU Program

The iSchool Inclusion Institute (i3) is a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program in the US designed to address underrepresentation in the information sciences. i3 is a year-long, cohort-based program that prepares undergraduate students for graduate school in information science and is rooted in a research and leadership development curriculum. Using data from six years of i3 cohorts, we present in this paper a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the program in terms of student learning, research production, and graduate school enrollment. We find that students who participate in i3 report significant learning gains in information-science- and graduate-school-related areas and that 52% of i3 participants enroll in graduate school, over 2\(\times \) the national average. Based on these and additional results, we distill recommendations for future implementations of similar programs to address underrepresentation in information science.

Regaining normalcy after war: ICT-enabled ‘transition resilience’ in veterans and refugees

Our research focuses broadly on the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enabled practices that people develop in response to disruption—an emergent phenomenon dubbed transition resilience. In our larger project, we seek to understand the ICT choices that people make, how ICT use changes, and how ICTs enable people to create a new sense of normalcy when undergoing periods of chronic disruption. Here, we explore the transition experiences of United States (US) veterans reintegrating into civil society and refugees integrating into the US social system. Veterans experience multiple transitions at once and institutional support to help them regain normalcy is often poor. Refugees also undergo multiple transitions when integrating into a new civil society. Both groups face unique identity crises in their respective transitions. Our work contributes to the development of new ICT-enabled tools to help people recover and regain normalcy in their lives.

Digital Inclusion for Migrant Millennials: Improving the ICT Landscape of Yakima Valley Schools

Digital inclusion seeks to bring the benefits of information and communication technologies (ICT) to vulnerable populations such as low-income families, residents of rural communities, seniors, disabled citizens, at-risk youth, immigrants, refugees and people of color. Despite its thriving agricultural industry, the Yakima Valley in Washington State is designated as an economically distressed area with low wages, significant unemployment and high poverty levels. The areas agricultural emphasis attracts a large population of migrant workers who are generally perceived to be information poor, meaning they face major challenges with finding and using greatly needed everyday information. Little research in ICT access for migrant populations exists because differences in language, culture and other factors make migrant workers and their youth a particularly difficult population to study. Using the Yakima Valley as a research site, this work examines current digital inclusion efforts towards migrant youth and how rising workers of the millennial generation can better participate in today’s digital economy. This research involves reviewing literature on the information ecosystem of the Yakima Valley, interviewing school district administrators for their insight into the current ICT landscape of their facilities and evaluating current educational technology access strategies within the region. The work provides recommendations aimed at influencing policy and awareness for digital inclusion within the school system.