Category: Uncategorized

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My day-to-day news sources of choice are The New York Times and Democracy Now. When I’m in the mood for a sensationalized slant, I will usually visit Huffington Post. Lately, I’ve been enjoying the editorial notes that accompany Trump-related articles:

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.

It uses a strategy from Trump’s own playbook: repeat the same thing over and over in the hope that it sticks. I have to imagine there is some search optimization foo at work here as well.

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Published another blog post for ALA’s Programming Librarian. This time, I’m writing about hosting your first Wikipedia edit-a-thon:

Many eyes can fix many errors, as they say, but what are we to do with the knowledge that the individuals behind those eyes are mostly men in their mid-20s? Enter the Wikipedia edit-a-thon. For the past few years, educational and cultural institutions have brought together women, people of color, LGBT communities and other underrepresented groups to collectively edit and improve Wikipedia’s content, with an eye toward greater inclusivity and broader perspective.

Source: Building on Millions of Tiny Shoulders: Tips for Hosting a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

 

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One of the goals I’ve been working on this year has been to gradually reduce the number of systems (read: networks, apps, channels, things-which-need-checking) in which I take an active role. Since my first foray into cobbling together tools like rss and bookmark managers circa 2006, I’ve long been fascinated by productivity-tech hacks. The result is that over the past decade I’ve built and habituated a number of workflows. I’m now beginning to think many of these are no longer necessary. I’m using technology less and less of late, preferring paper and pen to tools like Evernote or Dropbox. I don’t check feeds daily anymore and most of the time simply hit the “mark all as read” button in my rss reader.

With all that in mind, the latest two episodes of Back to Work have been a calming breath to my troubled mind which, despite my best efforts, still gets frequent bouts of fomo.

Thus far on my vacation I have planted strawberries, made pickles, read half a book, watched a movie, gone swimming, tried a new restaurant, and made chicken stock. And I haven’t checked my email since Friday. For the first time in probably a decade, I’m doing vacation right.

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One of the benefits of working for a Jesuit institution is having the opportunity, encouragement, and strategically-justified resources to engage in social justice work, both within the library, within the university, and in my community. However, having also worked within an institution where neoliberal ideals ran rampant, I understand Nisha Mody’s fear:

“But now that I am fully immersed in this deep dive, I also see the danger of academic elitism, an elitism which underpays adjunct professors and reflects neoliberal ideals. Will being an academic librarian make it difficult for me to effect change in the “real world” because I am so entrenched in academic lingo? Will lengthening my CV remove myself from applying the principles I promote? I often question if being a part of the academy will distance myself from those that are marginalized. So…do I still want to do this?”

The rest of the post on HackLibSchool is a worthwhile read and a good reminder for us old folks about the passions that drove us to library science in the first place.

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So long as we rely on code and algorithms to locate information, there will always be the hurdle of implicit bias. The same can be said of relying on humans.

“As long as Google has a commercial interest in appearing omniscient, it probably won’t work to improve knowledge panel transparency. That burden will fall instead to people like Taraborelli and nonprofits like the Wikimedia Foundation, which is working on an open-license, machine-readable knowledge base that will both source all of its statements and accommodate conflicting sources.”

The burden also falls to librarians and educators to teach the skills necessary for being a critical reader-researcher.