Reading Laterally

Laura PerdewWhen I’m reading a book that’s properly cited and I flip to the back to find that there are indeed a number of sources in the bibliography (sometimes even annotated!), I guess I’m a little remiss to admit that I usually stop there and trust that the author did their homework so that I won’t have to. But with the times as they are and the influx of articles appearing discussing information literacy (see, for example:  How to Teach Information Literacy in an Era of Lies), as well as the need to look at open access sources more critically because there exist some predatory journals* (although it’s Open Access Week right now, and I’ve written before on the importance of open, free access to information), I figured it was maybe a good time to open up some discussion about information literacy. (Of course, now you have to wonder whether or not I fact-checked the articles linked. And the articles they link.) So according to that first link about teaching information literacy, what are professional fact-checkers doing really well that undergrads and history professors aren’t? Reading laterally.

*What are predatory open-access journals? You pay to have your article included in this academic journal that doesn’t provide the peer-reviewing that it promises, as a legitimate journal would. There do exist open-access academic journals that are legitimate though, so it’s not as though this is an attack on the open-access model. The idea here is that researchers are duped into submitting to these journals, but you could also count the success of predatory journals as a statement on the way academia judges their professors and professor-aspirants.

 

What does it mean to read laterally? Well, instead of checking how trustworthy one source is, you check that other sources say the same thing (but, critically, that they aren’t all linking it back to the same article, because if they are, then that’s when you’ll want to verify how legit that source is). It’s like looking within the literature for more studies that replicate a certain result to corroborate the study. This means that those quick checklists we’re taught in elementary school & high school about checking your source (independently of what other sources are saying) might be putting too much emphasis on source-checking. Not that it’s unimportant, but it’s also important to check for corroborating information from sites that aren’t all linking what they say to the same source. Then there’s also actually clicking on those citation links in your source, in an attempt to get as close to a primary source as possible. A beautifully cited paper could still be citing garbage for all you know, so best to look at their citations in a bit more detail.

On top of this, there are a couple of common pitfalls: confirmation bias and selective attention are two of them. Confirmation bias first. It’s the tendency to look for, see, and retain only the information that confirms your existing beliefs, therefore, confirming your bias. It’s not hard to see why confirmation bias might be a really easy mistake to make, when everything that comes up in your feeds or in ads on Facebook or Google are targeted at you and seem to confirm your worldview. Which is why you need to put in a bit more work to figure out whether the fact that everything you see is telling you you’re right, is because ads are configured that way to maximize the number of clicks they get or because you’re subscribed exclusively to feeds that have the same stand, or if it’s because something is actually the truth.**

As for selective attention, we only have so much attention to give to the world around us, so we’re really good at tuning out unimportant information when we’re focused on something. Which means that if we’re actively looking for things that confirm our worldview (due to confirmation bias), we will also be tuning out conflicting information as a matter of course. The gorilla experiment is great at illustrating this concept – give it a try.

So what can we do to combat the onslaught of information? How do we sift through everything and verify that what we’re consuming isn’t either complete garbage or misrepresented information? I’m afraid I can’t give you a quick solution; it really just comes down to doing a bit of research. Read laterally. Check your confirmation & selection bias. But I can point you to some resources we offer or found online that you can use to get your bearings:

  • VPL offers free access to Lynda.com using your library card number & 4-digit PIN number: Information Literacy course
  • Under General Research databases,we offer, among other databases: Academic Onefile and Issues & Controversies, so that you can do your own research
  • University of Toronto’s quick guide on spotting fake news takes you to three different news fact-checking sites: FactCheck.org (U.S. political news), Politifact (political news stories), and Snopes (mythbusters for the internet)
  • This one’s interesting: Hoaxy. It won’t tell you what’s true and what’s false, but you can see how stories are shared through social media, and it will also let you see whether the sites that share it are considered trustworthy or not (credible sources are denoted by a yellow line in the visualization). Here’s an example: I chose one of the popular claims, “Nation Urged To Be Extra Sensitive To Men Reliving Trauma Of Not Getting Something” and got this visualization, which really quickly tells me that The Onion is the source of this claim. More about Hoaxy in this article.

 

Do you have any other tips & advice?

 

**If you’d like to get into a discussion of whether there is such a thing as truth, I’m game.

About Karen

Karen (she/hers) is a Culinary Literacies Specialist at the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre library. When not in the kitchen, she can be found knitting, reading, and repeating.  |  Meet the team