Now Available: Truth-Seeking in an Age of (Mis)Information Overload, HI's first open access publication

Truth-Seeking in an Age of (Mis)Information Overload book cover image with illustration of multi-colored rays splayed on a black background.

Not all photos need captions but if they do this, this is the area to do it.

Published October 7, 2024

The fourth volume in the UB Humanities Institute's book series Humanities to the Rescue was released in September. Edited by David R. Castillo, Siwei Lyu, Christina Milletti, and Cynthia Stewart, Truth-Seeking in an Age of (Mis)Information Overload is the first open access publication in the series published by SUNY Press.

Offers a thorough, multidisciplinary picture of the informational challenges of our media ecosystem, as well as collaborative strategies for addressing them.

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“The deterioration of the information environment in our age of inflationary media has precipitated a crisis of reality: any sort of baseline for what we take to be “facts” no longer exists. Evidence-based information is routinely drowned in a media market that rewards the loudest and most strident voices at the expense of truth and the common good. ”
David R. Castillo, Editor, Immediate Past Director UB Humanities Institute,
Professor of Spanish, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Co-Director, Center for Information Integrity

The unprecedented spread of false and misleading information is the flip side of the Internet's promise of universal access and information democratization. This volume features original contributions from scholars working on the challenge of misinformation across a wide range of STEM, humanities, and art disciplines. Modeling a collaborative, multidisciplinary "convergence approach," Truth-Seeking in an Age of (Mis)Information Overload is structured in three parts. Part 1, "Misinformation and Artificial Intelligence," confronts the danger of outsourcing judgement and decision-making to AI instruments in key areas of public life, from the processing of loan applications to school funding, policing, and criminal sentencing. Part 2, "Science Communication," foregrounds the need to rethink how scientific findings are communicated to the public, calling on scientists to cooperate with colleagues in other disciplines and community representatives to help minimize the negative effects of mis/disinformation in such vital areas as climate change science and public health. Part 3, "Building Trust," further advocates for and explores instances of trust-building initiatives as a necessary precondition of both community-oriented scholarly activity and effective intervention strategies in high impact areas such as public health.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the generous support of the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. It can also be found in the SUNY Open Access Repository at https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/15540.