Transliteracy, Critical Information Literacy, Digital Literacy, oh my!

03/21/2011

It seems like I am frequently stumbling across “new” types of literacy. The other day I was reorganizing my magazine collection (like any good librarian on a Saturday) and I happened upon Tom Ipri’s piece, “Introducing transliteracy: what does it mean to academic libraries” in C&RL News. As Ipri explains “the essential idea here is the transliteracy is concerned with mapping meaning across different media” (532). “Okay, cool” I thought, but how is that any different than how I currently understand information literacy? I’ve always imagined the picture of an umbrella that was given to me in a library science classroom. Not unlike this picture I found on flickr:

Information comes in all sorts of forms and the brief ACRL definition of nformation Literacy is the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information” encompasses all of these. Okay maybe I’m missing something, and it is neat that this idea originated outside of libraryland. Reading further I found the differentiating component, “transliteracy is very concerned with the social meaning of literacy” (p 567). Hm this sounds familiar too… much like critical information literacy. I think that taking into account the influence of critical literacy and pedagogy from the field of education can/and does expand our current understanding of information literacy to be self-reflexive, conscious of authority, and suspect of the idea of neutral information environments. Do we really need another term in the mix? Especially one that according to the folks who coined the term doesn’t have the pedagogical and theoretical oompf behind it that critical information literacy does?
The only compelling argument I can find to use this term is by Lane Wilkinson, and it seems to be centered on the fact that we are stuck in an academic / public / rest of the world divide. I don’t think something new is the answer, I think incorporating critical literacy can help us with this struggle. I believe this term in redundant and is part of the desire to find something new. What we really need to focus on is enacting our umbrella in and outside of the library world. Call me a negative nancy but I’m with David Roth and Meredith Farkas when it comes to new terminology: “You could do the same thing with “media literacy,” or “financial literacy.” Sure, they’re specialized subsets, but it’s all information literacy. Are terms like electracy really useful in any way? I don’t think so” (Roth, emphasis removed).

What are your thoughts on the term transliteracy? Do you think it sounds like critical information literacy too?

References

davidrothman.net » Commensurable Nonsense (Transliteracy). (Dec 19, 2010). Retrieved March 20, 2011, from http://davidrothman.net/2010/12/19/commensurable-nonsense-transliteracy/
Ipri, T. (2010). Introducing transliteracy: what does it mean to academic libraries? College & research libraries news., 71(10), 532.
Thomas, S., Joseph, C., Laccetti, J., Mason, B., Mills, S., Perril, S., et al. (2007). Transliteracy: Crossing divides. First Monday, 12 (12).
Transliteracy from the perspective of an information literacy advocate | Information Wants To Be Free. (Dec 21, 2010). Retrieved March 20, 2011, from http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2010/12/21/transliteracy-from-the-perspective-of-an-information-literacy-advocate/
Why transliteracy? « Libraries and Transliteracy. (Dec 20, 2010). Retrieved March 20, 2011, from http://librariesandtransliteracy.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/why-transliteracy/

Comments

Brad Czerniak link

03/22/2011 09:12

Carolyn,

I can certainly appreciate the stance that many of the principles of IL and transliteracy are similar. However, it often appears to me that IL advocates cast a very wide net when talking about all the principles IL covers.

Also, transliteracy did not start as a library term, and was not originally intended to replace any library lingo.

Most importantly (to me), "Information Literacy" is a really bad name. I talk about it at length in my "IL Communication" post: http://hawidu.com/2010/12/30/il-communication/

Good post! I'm always happy to see more people talking about transliteracy

Carolyn link

03/26/2011 10:29

Hi Brad,

Thanks for the thought provoking response! I read through you IL Communication post and I definitely think that yes, "literacy" is not the best term for what we do as librarians. In the case of IL I think literacy has gone beyond the cut and dry dictionary terminology to become more of a concept. Perhaps even a meta-literacy? So it's not being literate (in the traditional sense) in the entire world of information but being able to seek, parse, and interact with information across mediums. I think information literacy as a concept includes tasks from citing a book to making a youtube video.

Granted, literacy is a hotly debated topic in the field of education. What is digital literacy for example? To be digitally literate would someone have to understand all of technology (practically)? And of course issues with adult literacy, and other educational concepts have moved far away from the traditional literacy concept. As a profession I think it is important to be critical of the language we use, but language is also living and changing. In our case I'm just not ready to give up the term information literacy yet, because I think it's changed drastically from it's bibliographic instruction roots to really signify a learning goal that extend out of the library.

Carrie

03/27/2011 13:57

Hi Carolyn,

I've been thinking about transliteracy a lot, too! Usually, I'm IN LOVE with any new topic or idea that gets librarians interested in and talking about teaching, so at first I was all excited. But the more I read about transliteracy, the more I began to realize (as you did) that it was more a term of convenience for those of us that may be tired of our old terminology. I am also not as enthusiastic about it as I am about critical infolit because it seems to center around format, media, and channels for information -- rather than what we want people to be able to do/accomplish as a result of information. To me, that's the best part about critical infolit. It's not about the info - it's about US and our learners. Also, I still think that without some grounded theory (in our case, CRITICAL theory) any new permutation of information literacy will have a similar comeuppance at some point. So, yes, let's just stop the madness now and stick with our chosen umbrella term: information literacy.

p.s. that in a genius image, btw.

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