Deciding Where to Live: Information Studies on Where to Live in America explores major themes related to where to live in America, not only about the acquisition of a home but also the ways in which where one lives relates to one's cultural identity. It shows how changes in media and information technology are shaping both our housing choices and our understanding of the meaning of personal place. The work is written using widely accessible language but supported by a strong academic foundation from information studies and other humanities and social science disciplines. Chapters analyze everyday information behavior related to questions about where to live. The eleven major chapters are: Chapter 1: Where to live as an information problem: three contemporary examples Chapter 2: Turning in place: Real estate agents and the move from information custodians to information brokers Chapter 3: The Evolving Residential Real Estate Information Ecosystem: The Rise of Zillow Chapter 4: Privacy, Surveillance, and the "Smart Home" Chapter 5: This Old House, Fixer Upper, and Better Homes & Gardens: The Housing Crisis and Media Sources Chapter 6: A Community Responds to Growth: An Information Story About What Makes for a Good Place to Live." Chapter 7: The Valley Between Us: The meta-hodology of racial segregation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin Chapter 8: Modeling Hope: Boundary Objects and Design Patterns in a Heartland Heterotopia Chapter 9: Home buying in Everyday Life: How Emotion and Time Pressure Shape High Stakes Deciders' Information Behavior Chapter 10: In Search of Home: Examining Information Seeking and Sources That Help African Americans Determine Where to Live Chapter 11: Where to Live in Retirement: A Complex Information Problem While the book is partly about the goal-directed activity of individuals who want to buy a house, and the infrastructure that supports that activity, it is also about personal activities that are either not goal directed or are directed at other goals such as deciding in which geographic location to live, personal entertainment, cultural understanding, or identity formation.
William Aspray is professor of information science and adjunct professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has formally taught at Harvard, Indiana (Bloomington), Penn, Rutgers (New Brunswick), Texas (Austin), Virginia Tech, and Williams. He has also served in senior management positions at the Charles Babbage Institute, Computing Research Association, and the IEEE History Center. He served as the editor in chief of Information & Culture: A Journal of History. His books in the information studies area include: Fake News Nation (with James Cortada, Rowman & Littlefield), From Urban Legends to Political Fact-checking (with James Cortada, Springer), Food in the Internet Age (with Melissa Ocepek and George Royer, Springer), Everyday Information (ed., with Barbara Hayes, MIT Press), Digital Media (ed., with Megan Winget, Scarecrow), and Privacy in America (ed., with Philip Doty, Scarecrow). Melissa G. Ocepek is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the School of Information Sciences. Her research draws on ethnographic methods and institutional ethnography to explore how individuals use information in their everyday lives. Her research interests include everyday information behavior, critical theory, and food. Dr. Ocepek has published two books that address the intersection of food, information, and culture: Food in the Internet Age and Formal and Informal Approaches to Food Policy (both with William Aspray and George Royer). Dr. Ocepek received her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in the School of Information.
Preface Chapter 1: Where to live as an information problem: three contemporary examples - William Aspray and Melissa G. Ocepek Chapter 2: Turning in place: Real estate agents and the move from information custodians to information brokers - Steve Sawyer Chapter 3: The Evolving Residential Real Estate Information Ecosystem: The Rise of Zillow - James W. Cortada Chapter 4: Privacy, Surveillance, and the "Smart Home" - Philip Doty Chapter 5: This Old House, Fixer Upper, and Better Homes & Gardens: The Housing Crisis and Media Sources - Melissa G. Ocepek Chapter 6: A Community Responds to Growth: An Information Story About What Makes for a Good Place to Live." - Hannah Weber, Vaughan Nagy, Janghee Cho, and William Aspray Chapter 7: The Valley Between Us: The meta-hodology of racial segregation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin - Judith Pintar Chapter 8: Modeling Hope: Boundary Objects and Design Patterns in a Heartland Heterotopia- David Hopping Chapter 9: Home buying in Everyday Life: How Emotion and Time Pressure Shape High Stakes Deciders' Information Behavior - Carol F. Landry Chapter 10: In Search of Home: Examining Information Seeking and Sources That Help African Americans Determine Where to Live - Jamillah R. Gabriel Chapter 11: Where to Live in Retirement: A Complex Information Problem- William Aspray Chapter 12: Closing Statement About the Editors and Contributors
Emphasizing the crucial role of information and information science in vital decisions about "where to live," this complex, well-researched, multifaceted, multi-authored volume provides an exhaustive perspective on the economic and technical aspects of the real estate industry and its historical, demographic, and social-psychological influence. Contributing authors are accomplished researchers and professors specializing in information science at major universities in five states: Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, and Texas.... Offering much more than a compendium of real estate facts and figures, this edited volume is a unique contribution to the field. The book will be useful to general readers searching for new homes and to real estate specialists and interested academics, including instructors and students.Recommended. All readers. * Choice Reviews * Deciding Where to Live, edited by William Aspray and Melissa G. Ocepek, comes at a timely moment, as it is a comprehensive guide to some of the more elusive and less recognized aspects of deciding where to call home. . . . As informational as it is thought-provoking, the book compels readers to understand recent shifts in real estate that have been affected by contemporary realities like social media, the internet, and the pandemic. Readers will be drawn not only to the facts and statistics, but also to the cultural and social deep-dives in several of the sections. * News @ Wesleyan * With such a rich landscape of problems, it is surprising that the informational and emotional dimensions of housing have not been probed before now. In Deciding Where to Live Aspray and Ocepek explore one of life's central concerns."-- -- Donald O. Case, Professor Emeritus, University of Kentucky, Author of Looking for Information (2012) Focusing on information behavior in the context of real estate decision-making, this multidisciplinary analysis of information practices in a significant daily life context brings key contemporary issues to the fore, including the pandemic, race, and identity. Students and scholars across a range of disciplines will find this book compelling and illuminating. -- Heidi Julien, Professor of Information Science, University at Buffalo The place we choose to live is the single most important decision we make, shaping everything to the kind of jobs and economic opportunity we have access to, the people we meet, date and take as life partners, and the kinds of schools our kids attend. Deciding Where to Live examines the rise of new digital technologies and services that make more and better information available to all of us and enable us to make more informed decisions about where to live. I'm someone who spends far too much time scouring on-line real estate sites like Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor. And this book helped me better understand not just how those technologies that are changing real estate search, but also how they reflect and reinforce underlying structural inequalities of race and class which continue to structure our housing choices and life outcomes. -- Richard Florida, professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, Who's Your City? and The New Urban Crisis. These detailed accounts of an array of real estate information objects-such as Zillow, HOLC maps, This Old House, and 'smart homes'-offer intriguing insights (e.g., real estate agents as information brokers; emotion, racism, and retirement as influences on home-buying decisions) that are sure to inform future practice and research. -- Diane E. Bailey, Geri Gay Professor of Communication, Cornell University
