Reflections on Inclusion: Allen Renear

Allen Renear
Allen Renear, Professor

GSLIS Interim Dean and Professor Allen Renear recently discussed the value of inclusion in his teaching and research with Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre. His remarks are part of a new interview series exploring the School’s efforts to respect varied perspectives and diversity of experiences.

Renear teaches courses in information modeling, data curation, and digital publishing. His research focuses on issues in the development of formal ontologies for managing scientific and cultural objects, and the use of those ontologies in information system design, particularly information systems that support data curation, scholarly publishing, and the digital humanities.


I’d like to speak here primarily as a faculty member not as dean, and I’ll probably be talking mostly about my teaching in the master’s curriculum.

In my commitment statement, I described inclusion as being at the very heart of our mission at GSLIS. We are a professional school at a land-grant public university. As such, our overarching goal cannot be anything other than to advance the public good and meet the varied needs of all members of society. To achieve this, we must empower diverse communities and groups to achieve full participation in all aspects of our information institutions. And this is not just about equal benefits—it is equally about participation in the design, shaping, and operation of these institutions.

My courses, which usually focus on information modeling, are often described as fairly technical and abstract, and so it may not be clear at first glance how the content promotes inclusion. But I think the inclusion connection is profound. When information is poorly organized, or accessed through information systems and services that are poorly designed, then, of course, that information cannot be easily found or effectively used. But the consequences of poor organization and design do not affect all communities uniformly. The damage falls more heavily on those who lack just the right tools, expertise, financial resources, support, background, social connections, language or culture; or who have interests that fall outside the mainstream, or who have distinctive physical or perceptual needs. Groups or individuals without those resources or with needs some distance from the median are therefore disproportionately disadvantaged when systems fail. Moreover, this is not just about simple access, but about effective use and reuse. Poorly organized information cannot be easily adapted to unanticipated needs and applications in the future; it will tend to be used to support the same things in the same way. And even then it will be misunderstood and misused.

I have seen this dynamic over and over in the information industry. If you (or your family, community, company, country, organization) are in the right place at the right time with the right equipment, time, money, expertise, knowledge, craft practices, language, culture, physical and perceptual capabilities, etc., and your interests and objectives are anticipated, then you can often manage, at least somewhat, with poorly designed systems and poorly organized information. But without those advantages you cannot achieve the same access, at least not without much additional effort. I don’t want to minimize the complexity of the “digital divide,” or the potential of that notion to obfuscate realities, but I can’t resist saying that the digital divide is as wide as it is in part because the negative consequences of poorly organized systems and information are not uniformly distributed: they burden some more than others. And the cycle is vicious: Lack of access due to a disadvantaged position creates additional disadvantages.

For instance, creating systems that treat non-Western writing systems on a par with Western writing systems isn’t easy, and to some information system designers it may not seem worth the trouble. But if you don’t accomplish this, then not only will many individual users be at a disadvantage, but there are consequences for entire communities and cultures who will find their visibility diminished and their participation in the modern digital world hampered. During the 1990s, I worked on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), which was creating an encoding scheme for culturally significant texts. It was an international effort, and we were all committed to being culturally inclusive. So we were painfully aware that not only was our documentation in English, the TEI elements, attributes, and attribute values were also in English, and our examples were mostly Latin-based Western writing systems based on Latin characters. But accommodating multilingual content and non-Western writing systems was a TEI commitment. So, over the years the TEI and other communities committed to inclusive systems have made much progress.

Another example is competing proprietary data formats. In LIS our professional values encourage us to identify and analyze cases where market failures have damaging social effects, and then to look for solutions. In my electronic publishing class, I describe my own experience as chair of the working group developing a data format for ebooks (now in use as ePUB). There was a danger that commercial companies might deploy several different proprietary data formats in an effort to lock in users to their products, control third party tools, and erect high barriers to smaller or newer businesses wishing to enter in the market. These formats would not only have the obvious negative social effects of artificially discouraging competition, innovation, and new businesses, but also would establish as industry standards inflexible, non-interoperable, low-performance formats that would not support low-cost reading systems, non-Western textual content, readers for the blind, and such, and that would discourage innovative specialized tools and applications. Indeed it looked to us like this competition on format might actually doom the industry as a whole, benefitting no one in the end.

My group, which included other members from the LIS community, took on this threat and worked with industry partners to develop a single XML-based content specification that was built on top of existing nonproprietary standards and fundamental principles of information organization. We wanted to ensure broad access regardless of language, culture, and financial resources, and to shift industry competition away from wasteful format lock-in strategies to innovation in functionality and support the development of a wide range of useful third-party tools. In helping students see how well-defined (and well-defended!) standards can be used as instruments to maximize participation and long-term economic benefit, I hope I am preparing them to become agents of inclusion not just as individuals but also in support of collective efforts. Obviously good intentions aren’t enough. The LIS and nonprofit participants in this industry group had to work with industry representatives to carefully craft a format specification that met the very complex requirements of multiple stakeholders. And we had to find our way to the best compromise: Proprietary formats still exist, and can be socially damaging (unfortunately), but at least we have larger framework where an alternative principled nonproprietary format has a privileged position.

A complete account of the connection between inclusion and the principles of information modeling is a long story, but I think I can sum up the key ideas. At the heart of principled information system design is, of course, a needs analysis that considers all possible stakeholders, and involves all possible stakeholders, and that continues to respond to user experiences as systems and services are deployed and achievements and drawbacks emerge. Within the resulting information systems and services are information models that reflect the results of this initial and ongoing needs analysis. In constructing these models it is critical that the underlying assumptions be explicitly identified, documented, and, most importantly, capable of being easily changed—whether the change is an adaptation or a correction. Models of this sort not only support flexibility and responsiveness and remove barriers to adjustments, but they also make their commitments open to public inspection and provide opportunities for analysis and conversation.

At GSLIS, everything we teach about information organization not only improves effectiveness and efficiency of information access and management, but also levels the playing field, bringing more people to the table, both designers and users, right from the beginning. The inclusion of all stakeholders is about finding and mobilizing all the insight and understanding and ingenuity needed to make progress, and then making that case for good design clearly and forcefully.

Let me also say a little bit about how my approach to teaching my MS classes is inclusive. At the foundation of my approach to teaching here at GSLIS is the assumption that my students are all adults who are taking control of their own professional education. They come to my class from many different backgrounds and preparations, and they come for many different reasons. I want to accommodate this diversity and meet their needs. To do that I make as few restrictive assumptions as possible about backgrounds or interests. And I focus my courses directly on what I believe to be the most important content for twenty-first century information professionals, removing from the course curriculum anything that is unnecessary, that might a reduce participation and benefit without some compensating advantage. My courses are not contests optimized to discriminate relative performance at the end of the semester; that is something I have little interest in (beyond what it tells me about my own performance as an instructor). I structure my courses to maximize learning for diverse audiences, and I never trade off that objective for anything else. There are enough contests in the world; no need for me to add another.

This does not mean that I focus on the practical needs of the first job. Just the opposite, as all my students will attest (which is not to say they all approve). To optimize a course for the first year in the workplace only ensures that students will be at a relative disadvantage in the second year, and even more so in the tenth and twentieth. Few things are as damaging to an information professional’s career, or effectiveness, than a curriculum designed to prepare them for their first job. My courses are relentlessly and unapologetically theoretical precisely because that is what is empowering in the long run. Moreover, while a superficial and excessively vocational education is a disadvantage to everyone, this is yet another disadvantage that is not distributed uniformly: if you have modest resources or are situated away from the median in background and interests then you will suffer much more from not having acquired a solid theoretical foundation for lifelong vocational learning. And those you are trying to serve will also suffer for your missed opportunities.

I’ll end by saying that in the classroom I get an enormous benefit from diverse perspectives, either when I am being presented with unanticipated problems, or with innovative solutions. I welcome challenge and contradiction and find losing an argument more satisfying than winning one. I’d like to think that part of my expertise in the classroom lies in eliciting the often superior insights of others, insights based on different experiences, interests, and intellectual commitments. This is a collaborative dynamic that I think benefits everyone.

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