At the intersection of digital identities and new language and social practice online is the concept of searchable talk (ST). ST describes the process of tagging discourse in a social networking service (SNS) with a hashtag (#), allowing it to be searchable by others. Although originating in Twitter, ST has expanded into other SNS, and is used…

This dissertation examines the information practices of individuals identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ+). It responds to two significant problems in current Library and Information Science (LIS) studies examining these populations. First, there exist a paucity of research studying how these individuals act…

Information retrieval (IR) systems have tremendously broaden users' access to information. However, users need to select their needs from trillions of information indexed daily. Due to the "semantic gap" between queries and indexed terms in IR system, whether users can satisfy their needs depends on whether they use the correct terms as…