Libraries and Learning Links of the Week

Comic Book Bans & Challenges

Episode 59 of ALIA Graphic Podcast from November last year is sadly suddenly more relevant, after the Queensland Police referred a complaint about certain books to the Australian Classification Board.

In this special episode, we discuss challenges and bans to books and specifically to comics in libraries across the United States of America.

Looking from a distance, the current wave of challenges and bans the US is going through seems alien to us. We are concerned about what’s going on. We are concerned that teachers and librarians are being targeted and intimidated.

We are concerned that comics, graphic novels, and books are being pulled off the shelves. Even titles that have won awards, have received world wide recognition and have been part of the curriculum for years.

ALIA Graphic's prediction that this would come to Australia soon was, indeed, correct.

PNAS is not a good journal

Moin Syed with some truth bombs about the sorry state of academic publishing – ridiculous subscription and APC prices isn't the core problem.

Journals are simply not diagnostic of the articles published therein, and thus there is no way any particular journal could be construed as “good.”

This article also includes a hilarious Conflict of Interest Statement:

I made a bet ($5.00) with Ira Hyman in 2019 that the journal impact factor would no longer be used within five years, and thus I have financial motivation to write negatively about impact factors.

Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium

Exploring the future of arts, culture, and technology in Australia – and the mindsets, capabilities and skills we need to get there.

This symposium took place on 14 and 15 February, you can see videos of some of the sessions at the link.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

Let’s forget the term AI. Let’s call them Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences (SALAMI)

A great, short blog post from late 2019 that has resurfaced in the last week or two.

The name “artificial intelligence” has an implicit bias that does not allow for a cognitive perception adherent to reality.

From now on I will attempt to get people to refer to SALAMI instead of AI.

NormConf

NormConf was a small conference aimed at “presentations of middlebrow machine learning topics”. There's a lot here that is relevant to academia too, check it out.

We've always been distracted

From Aeon, an exploration of all the times in written history that people have worried about our relationship to texts, and what it tells us about how we should think about reading, writing, and thinking.

It is remarkable how two different eras could both say something like: ‘We live in a distracted world, almost certainly the most distracted world in human history,’ and then come to exactly opposite conclusions about what that means, and what one should do.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

Beyond Web of Science and Scopus there is already an open bibliodiverse world of research – We ignore it at our peril

Saurabh Khanna, Jon Ball, Juan Pablo Alperin and John Willinsky with a rather polite article pointing out the myopia of the most common indexes of (allegedly) global research publications. North Atlantic corporates don't see much potential profit in acknowledging global south academic research, and universities and researchers in wealthy nations aren't much interested either. So everyone pretends that no research exists outside of large corporate pay-to-read or pay-to-publish journals.

AI Cataloging and Technical Services

Good news for catalogers – ChatGPT is just as bad at creating accurate MARC records as it is at producing accurate citations. Try not to look at the horrifying DALL-E images.

Openverse

You may already know about this, but I didn't. A great search engine for images and audio that are all openly licensed. You can filter by format, source and license type. Be warned though, depending on the source not all of these images are safe for work.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

A bit late today – I went for a walk instead of going to work, and then accidentally took a nap instead of posting links. Sorry.

Could There Be Some Viable Challengers to Google Scholar on the Horizon?

Hilda Bastian talks through a few viable alternative options to Google Scholar, mostly building off Microsoft Academic Graph (RIP). Just as well too: the AIpocalypse may well severely dent Google's search ad business – don't be surprised to see Google Scholar shelved in the next few years as they consolidate.

The ARK origin story

I attended ARDC's little summit/workshop on PIDs this week and while I was looking at something else I stumbled upon the Archival Resource Key, something I'd never heard of before but instantly fell in love with:

ARKs are uniquely decentralized so that anyone can assign, steward, and redirect them as freely as URLs.

Shadow Libraries

From Monoskop, a collection of “shadow libraries” – illicit, unofficial, and sometimes baffling:

Independent, shadow, self-hosted, artists' digital libraries.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜

In 2021 Timnit Gebru, the head of Google's “Ethical AI” research team, was abruptly fired. The reason? She refused to remove her name from this conference paper. I've read a lot of articles about chatGPT specifically and generative AI generally in the last two weeks, but this article really explains best the fundamental problems with the very large language models behind all of the tools gaining so much attention. No wonder Google didn't want to hear it:

...human-human communication is a jointly constructed activity... Even when we don't know the person who generated the language we are interpreting, we build a partial model of who they are adn what common ground we think they share with us and use this in interpreting their words.

The problem is, if one side of the communication does not have meaning, then the comprehension of the implicit meaning is an illusion arising from our singular human understanding of language...[Language Models] is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot.

Lib-Static

Lib-Static is a provocation to rethink how we do digital infrastructure in libraries to recenter our technology choices around sustainable, pragmatic, and minimal approaches.

I keep thinking about this. Probably because I'm the sort of person who always prefers to fire up a text editor and write in Markdown rather than firing up a word processor or, heaven forbid, a WYSIWYG edit-in-browser setup.

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

You might have already seen this one, and apologies for all the AI/GPT links recently but, well, that's been my main focus at work the last few weeks. I really like this article because it manages to explain why the technical implementation of large language models will always make them “hallucinate”, in a way that normal people without PhDs in mathematical modelling can actually understand.

Enjoy!

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

I've had to read a lot of stuff about generative AI this week for work. There, I can't simply say “don't use it, it's bad”, so thank goodness I have other outlets.

We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it

So sayeth Dan McQuillan. I've played around with ChatGPT after resisting doing that for a couple of months, and whilst it's impressive in some ways, what's noticeable is just how unimpressive it is at most things, given the extraordinary resources poured into it. As Chloe Xiang has said, “AI isn't artificial or intelligent”.

GitHub is Sued, and We May Learn Something About Creative Commons Licensing

Microsoft GitHub's Copilot is also powered by OpenAI's GPT-3 model, and it seems pretty clear that they have absolutely committed industrial level copyright violation to build it.

Plaintiffs allege that OpenAI and GitHub assembled and distributed a commercial product called Copilot to create generative code using publicly accessible code originally made available under various “open source”-style licenses, many of which include an attribution requirement. The resulting product allegedly omitted any credit to the original creators.

Open licenses have tended to be looked upon by users as a free-for-all, without adequate attention to the very real concerns of the creators. In this case, the sheer scale of the alleged violation in terms of works used may well form the basis of the defense. “Your honor, we needed so many works that it was simply not practical to ask permission of the creators.” I don’t find this argument convincing given the ability today to license many content types at scale for TDM ...but it is an argument often offered by infringers.

What really caught my eye in this article though, to be honest, was this hilariously Scholarly Kitchenesque nugget:

The impulse to create and use open source code is reasonable and has some social utility.

Nice to know that the thing powering the entire modern economy “has some social utility”.

Curationist makes it easy to enjoy art and culture online.

Something a bit more fun to finish off. Curationist appears to be something a bit like an international non-profit Trove or DPLA. Definitely worth watching, their roadmap is pretty interesting.

See you next week!

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

Happy New(ish) Year! LLLotW is back. In typical style, this edition is a bit late in the day. It's been A Week.

FLASHback: Reimagining the Australian Extension to LCSH

Alissa McCulloch's opening lines provide an excellent summary of this great blog post:

Australian library catalogues speak American English. This has pissed me off for as long as I can remember (long before I started working in libraries). I want to do something about it.

A new replication study revives the question: Is taking notes by hand really better for students?

Michelle Miller with some great stuff on learning, note-taking, and research replication:

Sure, it feels like vindication for those of us who have had it with the kids-these-days tone of the worst of the laptop ban arguments. But I hope we can make this more than another tit-for-tat exchange between pro- and anti-technology camps. It should serve as a warning against the confirmation bias that is naturally going to happen as we search for evidence that supports our passionately held positions about learning. It should continue to serve as a push towards universal design for learning, with the realization that some learners are put at a disadvantage or excluded altogether when handwriting is mandatory.

Dance of the naked emperors

Adam Mastroianni has many correct opinions and interesting things to say about scholarly peer review. You should read them.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

LLLotW will be taking a break for a few weeks over what hopefully is “summer” in Australia.

See you with more links of the week in February!

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

Teaching AI when to care about gender

This quite technical paper from code4lib Journal outlines a really interesting tool for “de-biasing” machine learning models. Interestingly, the tool is designed for subject-matter experts to define what that bias is in a given corpus, rather than trying to make generic rules about what is and is not biased. A really intriguing tool with potential for discrete collections of the sort found in archives and library special collections.

Z-Library Was a Lifeline for Students on Shoestring Budgets

An article from Slate about “Z Library”, the domain name for which appears to have been seized by the US Government. I'm always interested when news about the iniquitous and often farcical academic publishing industry breaks through to mainstream publications. This Slate piece does a nice job of pointing out how commercial academic publishing locks researcher and students from formerly colonised countries out of the prestige markets and restricts any “legal” access to knowledge.

t.co

Ed Summers on Twitter archive downloads and ways to unshorten all the links that Twitter “helpfully” changes to t.co links.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.

Requiem for a Tweet – Is there a future for the academic social capital held on the platform?

Mark Carrigan on what Twitter entering platform death means for academia. This is an interesting analysis throwing up some challenges and important questions, but for me the key section is this:

Rather than take responsibilities for an infrastructure upon which their operations depended, universities encouraged the narrow and unreflective use of these platforms in a way which entrenched the existing competitive individualism within the academy.

Why this? Because “these platforms” could apply to nearly every digital platform or software used in academia. Technological solutionism has already arrived in the Fediverse, and publishing papers via ActivityPub won't make universities democratic and diverse any more than everyone getting a Twitter handle did.

Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online

Turns out large language models and “artificial intelligence” will spout garbage no matter what you feed them with, because they're not actually intelligent. Plenty of people have been pointing this out for some time, but there's plenty of money available if one chooses to ignore them.

LARPing your job

Something a little different, specifically about being a professional journalist/critic, but generally about being an “information worker” which more and more of us are:

You can LARP your job in person (holding lots of meetings, staying late and getting there early as a show of ‘presentism’) and digitally (sending lots of emails, spending a lot of time on Slack, or whatever group chat platform your organization uses).

We’re performing, in other words, largely for ourselves. Justifying to ourselves that we deserve the place that we’ve found ourselves. Justifying to ourselves that writing for the internet is a vocation that deserves steady payment. At heart, this is a manifestation of a general undervaluing of our own work: we still navigate the workplace as if getting paid to produce knowledge means we’re getting away with something, and have to do everything possible to make sure no one realizes they’ve made a massive mistake.

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Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every Thursday by Hugh Rundle. If you like email newsletters you might also like Marginalia, a monthly commentary on things I've read and listened to more broadly.