Context: Check It Out!

Context. It is the crux of information literacy. In order to understand something, we need to understand the situation from which it springs, the perspective from which it is presented as well as the one from which we view it. This may be more true now than it has been for the last 100 years as our understanding of objectivity and subjectivity have grown and developed, fundamentally altering our sense of how simply by observing an event, we alter it; how by reporting on it, we participate in it.One of the results of knowledge is a growing tension within the news business about exactly what journalists should be doing. Paul Bradshaw offers a thoughtful analysis of this on the Open Journalism blog: Objectivity has Changed - Why Hasn't Journalism?  In the Christian Science Monitor, Josh Burek offers a contrasting position, defines it specifically as personal and offers plenty of reasons why the other side might be right. One of his concerns is that news outlets benefit from an implicit perception of objectivity, while they may in fact be very one-sided. This is certainly the concern raised by Guy Reel in his essay The New Partisan Press.

But this isn't just a problem for journalists. This awareness places greater demands on us to examine and contextualize what we read and hear, or even visit. For example, this year across the South several events are planned to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. But as this Time magazine article notes, many of the events sponsored by the Sons of Confederate Veterans erase or minimize the aspect of slavery, the South's "peculiar institution", from the events they are planning. Similarly readers need to know when editions of a book alter the original text, a process primarily done on the basis of scholarly decisions, but recently performed on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the explicit reason of making the book approachable to general readers, as described in the book's introduction. The editor of this edition removed the N-word  from the book, replacing it with "slave," and performed a similar function on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, replacing "Injun" with "Indian". While many writers and readers have raised objections to this approach (including a humorous one from the Daily Show's "Senior Black Correspondent" Larry Wilmore), the one raised by Marybeth Gasman in the Chronicle for Higher Education touches on the subject of this post most closely. Her concern is the erasure of critical markers of context.

Embracing the challenge of context as an individual, as an educator, and as a student demands additional work on our part. It means asking why things are being presented in a certain fashion and if everything is being told. Fortunately the internet has made asking such questions easier at the same time that it has made the need to ask them more pronounced.

Beginning with fundamental searching, a solid search tool targeting educators but suitable for use by anyone is Sweet Search, the selective directory search engine sponsored by findingDulcinea. The Sweet Search engine indexes sites recommended by librarians and teachers that meet specific quality criteria. FindingDulcinea is web site targeting K-12 educators (and their students), but the content is appropriate for 1st and 2nd year college students as well. Content changes daily, with birthdays and this day in history information, all of it contextualized with links to sources.

Another useful tool is zuula, a metasearch engine that gives users the option to easily compare results from various search tools, thereby increasing the likelihood of identifying contrasting perspectives and breaking out of patterns of search that lock us into set results. Zuula provides the added benefit of stripping sponsored results (a.k.a. ads) out of search results and so preventing them from fooling unwary users.

In order to test the validity of current political events, go to the Annenberg Center's FactCheck.org, which rates statements by various commentators, politicians and key newsmakers. Another resource is Politifact, run by the St. Petersburg Times, but which focuses most of its efforts on press reporting and politicians specifically.

And as a useful resource for checking information sources, or locating information sources, on a variety of topics, check out the Annenberg Center's FactCheckED.org web site. Targeting educators and students, this resource summarizes the perspective and quality of information on all different types of internet resources, from watchdog organizations to federal agencies and think tanks.