Written by: Jacqueline Fleming (Visual Literacy and Resources Librarian, Indiana University Bloomington [jkflemin@iu.edu]) & Theresa Quill (Map and Spatial Data Librarian, Indiana University Bloomington [theward@indiana.edu])
It is not an exaggeration to say that the evolving situation surrounding COVID-19 is changing the world. This change includes the response and mission of academic libraries. Information about COVID-19 is being published every day in both textual and visual formats. Some of this information is reliable while some of this information is biased and completely false. In some cases, factual information is displayed in confusing or misleading visualizations. One thing that all of this information has in common is that it is easily accessible to the public. The real danger with the infodemic surrounding COVID-19 is that not everyone is able to identify false information. A recent Pew Research Study reported, “about half of U.S. adults (48%) report having come across at least some news and information about the virus that seemed completely made up.”[1] This statistic from March of this year only reflects the number of U.S. Citizens who were able to identify the information as false. The real issue is that many people do not have the skills needed to assess the reliability of COVID-19 information.
As academic librarians, we believe it is our job to guide our community to reliable information and teach them how to receive and interpret this information. Literacies of all types are of primary concern to librarians, and we recognize that literacy is more complex than the typical definition of “the ability to read and write”. Librarians center teaching multiple literacies as the core of our profession, including, but not limited to digital literacy, information literacy, data literacy, visual literacy, and spatial literacy. As the Map & Spatial Data Librarian and Visual Literacy and Resources Librarian at Indiana University-Bloomington, we believed that it is our responsibility to address the surge of visual information being produced daily about COVID-19 cases.
There are currently many definitions of visual literacy. However, all the definitions share similarities. One widely respected definition comes from the Association of College and Research Libraries. According to the Association of College and Research Libraries, visual literacy is a skill set that allows an individual to, “effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use and create images and visual media.”[2] A visually literate individual is, “both a critical consumer of visual media and a competent contributor to a body of shared knowledge and culture.”[3] This is a significant aspect of being visually literate because of the ability to add to visual culture.
In addition to this definition, the Association of College and Research LIbraries published the ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards 2011. These Standards include the skills: being able to find, interpret, analyze, evaluate, create, and use a variety of visual media ethically and responsibly. These standards are considered a cornerstone in the practice and scholarship of visual literacy and are discussed at length in current academic librarian scholarship. Some questions that visually literate students might ask when analyzing a visual would include:
● Who created the visual?
● What purpose was the visual created for?
● What medium is the visual in?
● Who is the subject of the visual?
● What does the associated metadata reveal about the visual?
Because we live in a very visual society, visual literacy can seem like a self explanatory process. However, living in a visual society is not enough to gain visual literacy skills. It is important to realize that being active on social media, “does not translate into the ability to critically engage with, make meaning from, and communicate with visual materials in an academic context”[4]. It is the job of educators to instill visual literacy skills into their students by incorporating opportunities for visual and spatial instruction into their curriculum. It is the job of librarians to work with instructors to incorporate visual and spatial literacy concepts into their instruction as well as, promote the importance of these literacies across their campuses.
Closely related to visual literacy, spatial literacy is “the competent and confident use of maps, mapping, and spatial thinking to address ideas, situations, and problems within daily life, society, and the world around us.”[5] We are asked to employ spatial thinking skills on an almost daily basis, but these skills are learned over time. Similar to visual literacy, exposure to maps and spatial information does not automatically lead to spatial literacy. In addition, the way we use and read maps is constantly evolving. We use maps to navigate around our spaces, to play games, and to learn important information about current events, health, and safety. Just like any source of information, maps should be read critically. Among other things, spatial literacy describes the skill of critically reading and understanding spatial representations of data. Some important questions to consider when reading maps are:
● What data drives this map? Is it accurate and authoritative?
● How has the data been generalized or organized?
● Is the map projection appropriate for this type of map?
● Is the symbology clear and appropriate?
● Is it timely? When was it last updated?
● What is not being shown on this map?
● Who made this map? What are their biases?
The reason why misinformation surrounding COVID-19 and other global events is so prevalent, is because we live in a visual world that lacks an emphasis on the importance of having a visual education and continually overstimulates our senses with both true and false information. While there have been institution and national level efforts[6] to address this issue, the onslaught of continuous information concerning COVID-19 has complicated and progressed this concern. While this infodemic needs to be addressed by instructors, it cannot go on their shoulders alone. Addressing this onslaught of complicated information needs to be a collaborative effort between librarians and instructors. From an academic librarian perspective, we see this infodemic as a two pronged problem. First, the prevalence of free visualization tools on the internet has allowed those without visual and spatial literacy skills to create unreliable maps and visualizations. Secondly, students are not being taught the visual literacy and spatial literacy skills they need to analyze this information.
The democratization of data visualization and mapping tools over the past decade has meant that creating and sharing visualizations is no longer limited to the realm of experts. Participatory Geographic Information Systems (GIS) projects empower citizens to use and create spatial data to solve problems in their own communities, and projects like OpenStreetMap[7] have revolutionized free and open spatial data[8]. Where once making a map required specialized software and years of training, today myriad applications like Mapbox, Carto, QGIS, and even Google My Maps only require basic computer skills to create interactive maps. While this trend has been overall beneficial, it has also resulted in increased visibility for (mostly unintentionally) misleading or confusing maps and charts and places a greater burden of critically reading and evaluating visualizations on the reader.
Addressing the lack of visual and spatial literacy skills being taught in higher education is where the collaboration between librarians and instructors is crucial. But before this can happen, librarians need to gain the attention of instructors by promoting the importance of visual literacy and spatial literacy across their campuses. The amount of instruction time that professors get is always tight. If librarians want to work with instructors and possibly help teach their classes, they need to show value as collaborators and the importance of including visual literacy and spatial literacy into instruction. Campus-wide promotion of literacies can be done in a variety of ways, including: creating library guides that cover relevant topics, holding workshops that teach visual tools, and speaking at faculty attended meetings and events to express how you can help incorporate visual and spatial literacy into their instruction[9]. Once connections with faculty are established, the individual work can begin.
As librarians, we have the knowledge and tools to help instructors, “include in their lessons visual literacy opportunities for students to express ideas and think in multimodal ways.”[10] This can be anything from working with the instructor in creating their syllabus, lesson plans, or coming into the class to teach a one-shot instruction session. In the respected, “The Visual Literacy White Paper,” Bamford discusses specific teaching implications for visual literacy. Some of the teaching implications for visual literacy are: developing critical thinking in relation to visuals, lecturing on semiotics and visual syntax, asking students questions about visuals, and teaching students about image manipulation and production techniques[11]. All of these teaching strategies will give students the opportunity to develop and hone their visual literacy skills throughout their education.
In an effort to increase visual and spatial literacy skills in regards to COVID-19 information, we created a Visual Literacy & Map research guide that specifically addressed data visualizations tracking COVID-19 cases. This guide lists reliable data visualizations to follow, tips for reading these visualizations, and general resources for spatial and visual literacy as well as, articles addressing COVID-19 data visualizations. Because COVID-19 is a rapidly evolving situation, we have been periodically adding information to this guide as we find it. We felt that creating this guide was a good first step in developing our campus community’s visual literacy skills in the COVID-19 crisis. However, we recognize the irony in creating a digital resource to address issues with reading and interpreting digital media. In a pre-pandemic world, we would have paired this research guide with in-class presentations, workshops, and discussions. Instead, we plan to continue to expand our guide to include short instructional videos discussing specific examples. We will also encourage instructors to integrate this guide into their courses for the fall semester, and we plan to offer one-on-one and classroom Zoom presentations for those in our campus community wanting to learn more.
We believe that our research guide and interest in promoting visual and spatial literacy fits into the reality of COVID-19 changing academia permanently. We do not think that these data visualizations are going to go away and we believe that the information needs of our patrons will become more visual as more COVID-19 information is published. As the “ambassadors of information,” we believe that it is our number one responsibility to guide our patrons to reliable and relevant information during this infodemic. While this is no easy task, we believe that creating this research guide was a great first step.
[1] Mitchell,A. And Baxter Oliphant,J. (2020). “Americans Immersed in COVID-19 News: Most Think Media Are Doing Fairly Well Covering It.” Pew Research Center. https://www.journalism.org/2020/03/18/americans-immersed-in-covid-19-news-most-think-media-are-doing-fairly-well-covering-it/
[2] American Library Association. (2011). ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/visualliteracy
[3] American Library Association.(2011).
[4] “Keeping Up With...Visual Literacy”, American Library Association, October 21, 2013, http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/keeping_Up_with/Visual_literacy
[5] Sinton, D. (2012, July 25). How would you define spatial literacy? Retrieved June 25, 2020, from https://dianamaps.com/2012/07/25/how-would-you-define-spatial-literacy/
[6] See Metros (2008) and Sperry and Scheibe (2020) for specific examples.
[7] OpenStreetMap. (n.d.). Retrieved June 25, 2020, from https://www.openstreetmap.org/about
[8] Quill, T. M. (2018). Humanitarian Mapping as Library Outreach: A Case for Community-Oriented Mapathons. Journal of Web Librarianship, 12(3), 160-168. doi:10.1080/19322909.2018.1463585
[9] Bamford,A. (2003) “The Visual Literacy White Paper”. Adobe Systems Pty Ltd Australia.
[10] Metros 2008
[11] Bamford, A. (2003).