Building citizen resilience to misinformation through information design

Dr. Hodson received Research and Professional Development funds for a workshop to develop an informational design approach to understanding the problem of misinformation.

The spread of online misinformation cannot be mitigated unless scholars, professional communicators, designers, and engineers first understand why it spreads. To truly understand why information and misinformation travel online, one must consider multiple interacting, sometimes conflicting, and often context specific or relational influences that cause people to engage with specific types of information and then pass them on to others. For this reason, this proposal builds on successful SSHRC connection grant funding to bring together a transdisciplinary group of subject matter experts in a collaborative workshop to develop an informational design approach to understanding the problem of misinformation. The funds requested here will help augment SSHRC funding in two ways: 1) It will allow us to meet our SSHRC commitment of providing $2000 cash to hire a student to develop best practices guide out of the material produced from the workshop, and 2) It will facilitate Dr. Hodson’s travel to an international conference to report on this workshop and its outcomes.