The Distant Librarian

Thoughts on fighting QAnon - How can so many people believe things that are obviously untrue?

Well that was a sobering read.

A few weeks ago the following post by Barbara Fister was circulated at MPOW: Lizard People in the Library. We were supposed to have a discussion about it, but I wasn't able to make the Zoom time, so I didn't read it then. Yesterday someone pointed out that the original post had been adapted for an article in The Atlantic, so I went and read The Librarian War Against QAnon, and then read the first one. While they're essentially the same article, they're different enough that they're both worth reading. And re-reading. Damn.

There are so many quotes I want to pull, but here are some of the most powerful ones to me.

How did we get here if we've been teaching information literacy for our entire careers?

While school-based efforts to promote information literacy are typically tied to producing information (college papers, digital projects, PowerPoint slide decks), students are not as frequently invited to reflect on how information flows through and across platforms that shape and are shaped by participatory audiences and influencers. They aren’t learning much about how information systems (including radio, print journalism, academic and trade-book publishing, television, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram) make choices about which messages to promote and how those choices intersect with political messaging and the social engineering of interest groups.

Why don't these people see the world the way I do?

Those who spend their time in the library of the unreal have an abundance of something that is scarce in college classrooms: information agency. One of the powers they feel elites have tried to withhold from them is the ability to define what constitutes knowledge. They don’t simply distrust what the experts say; they distrust the social systems that create expertise. They take pleasure in claiming expertise for themselves, on their own terms.

How to these people draw their conclusions?

While it may seem odd to use the phrase “crisis of faith,” we are experiencing a moment that exposes a schism between two groups: those who have faith there is a way to arrive at truth using practices based on epistemology that originated in the Enlightenment, and those who believe events and experiences are portents to be interpreted in ways that align with their personal values.
As Francesca Tripodi has demonstrated, many conservatives read the news using techniques learned through Bible study, shunning secular interpretations of events as biased and inconsistent with their exegesis of primary texts such as presidential speeches and the Constitution.

The future doesn't look bright if things continue the way they are in Alberta:

This failure has many roots: The low social status of teachers and librarians relative to those in other professions, the lack of consistent instruction about information and media literacy across students’ educational experience, the diminishment of the humanities as a core element of general education, and the difficulty of keeping up with technological change and digital culture have all played a role. So has the fact that information literacy has no specific place in the curriculum. It’s everywhere, and nowhere. It’s everyone’s job, but nobody’s responsibility. In many cases, the people who care about it the most—those in academia, journalism, and nonprofits especially—have had their jobs felled by the austerity axe.

I love this description of how things work out there on the internet:

There’s no doubt it will be difficult to shift the information literacy narrative from emphasizing finding, evaluating, and using information in an academic setting to something that addresses a broader understanding of how information “works” these days. Our information systems operate in a complex world in which messages take root in dark corners and spread rhizomatically through connections that are often hidden from view...

There are suggestions for how to proceed. Are you a teacher? Are you in any way involved in academia? Do you wonder how the eff your friends and acquaintances on Facebook and Twitter come to their conclusions? Please read and consider these articles.

Queering Zoom: students and educators say online learning must be more inclusive

Here's a good article from the University of Alberta student newspaper: Queering Zoom: students and educators say online learning must be more inclusive.

A couple of points and counterpoints:

While professors often include anti-harassment and inclusionary policies in their syllabus, Morris noted that they feel these are hollow statements.
“[These professors that have these inclusion policies] don’t do the bare minimum, and aren’t putting their pronouns into their Zoom names or their emails,” they said. “It kind of feels like a slap in the face, like that was definitely just a copy and paste.”

but also,

“Some people are simply not ready to reveal their pronouns,” she said. “I’ve been there before, where I’ve just not been comfortable talking about my gender identity … [for some transgender people, pronouns] could be a really intense source of gender dysphoria.”
Yabut said while this is why she believes pronoun use should not be standardized, she would like more effort to be put into ensuring the classroom is a space where students are encouraged to share their pronouns if they so choose.

At the very least, students, staff and faculty should have the ability to include preferred pronouns. I've had mine in my email signature for over a year now (it's the simplest thing to signal respect for people's gender identity), and last week requested that our IT office include my preferred pronouns as part of my Zoom name. It's frustrating that the latter is a mediated process, but my request was handled with courtesy and professionalism. I believe students at UofC are already able to make their own changes, but faculty and staff display names are more hard-coded and tied to our back-end systems. It's been 9 days so far, which of course is too long, but I'm betting things will become more streamlined sooner than later!

Is this a new concept for you? Here's one place to start reading: United Nations Gender-inclusive language.

Are you able to display your preferred pronouns at your place of work?

 

Twitter Opening Its Tweet Archive to Researchers

Well this seems like good news. One of the biggest annoyances of trying to do research on Twitter, IMHO, is the difficulty in obtaining older tweets. There are workarounds, such as using a previously-captured dataset from Documenting the Now, or collecting via snscrape, but it seems there is now better official access for researchers via Twitter's API version 2.

According to the c|net article, Twitter wants to make it easier for researchers to analyze tweets,

Researchers will have to submit an application to Twitter to receive access to this trove of data. To be eligible, applicants have to be a "master's student, doctoral candidate, post-doc, faculty, or research-focused employee at an academic institution or university." They also have to a "clearly defined research objective," and the research must be used for "non-commercial purposes."

And MakeUseOf's report, Twitter Opens Up Its Tweet Archive to Researchers highlights,

Twitter plans for its new API to eventually fully replace its current standard, premium, and enterprise APIs. In the meantime, in order to get feedback from researchers, the company has launched early access for Twitter API v2.

I've had a couple of ideas rolling around for a while now, so have submitted an application. I'll let you know how it goes!

Initial Thoughts on Alberta's FOIP Process

On December 8, I noticed the Govt. of Alberta had posted a new video to YouTube titled, FOIP Request Service Guided Tour. You know what? I've honestly always wanted to submit a FOIP request!

Here are some initial thoughts on how it went, and I'll report back if/when I hear something.

So we start at https://foip.alberta.ca, where we learn that,

Alberta's Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIP Act) provides a method to request records, your own personal information, and to request correction of your own personal information in records held by public bodies. The FOIP Request Service allows you to make requests to the Government of Alberta and some provincial public bodies. If you want to make a request to another public body not covered by this service, please contact the FOIP Coordinator for the appropriate FOIP Office.

At the suggestion of a friend, I thought I'd see what I could learn about one of the firms the current government seems to use as a go-to for so many of their reports, McKinsey & Company. This is what I ultimately came up with, and this was submitted on Dec. 16:

I would like to obtain a list of all contracts awarded by the Alberta Government to McKinsey and Company for the calendar years 2019 and 2020. I would also like to obtain a list of all reports finished by McKinsey and Company for the Alberta Government during the calendar years 2019 and 2020. These two lists should be delivered in an open format such as CSV.

I already had an Alberta ID, so was able to log in right away. I was immediately disappointed to realize that I wasn't going to be able to request records across the entire government :-( Right off the bat I had to choose a specific department. Fair enough, Advanced Education it is.

FOIP Request Body

The first unanswered question is what's the difference between a General and a Personal request? No idea or explanation. I guess from later questions that a Personal request is a request for data about oneself.

FOIP Request Details

Question #2 comes right after that. Scrolling down the screen I have lots of options. What, exactly, do they mean? Will it cost more, or take longer, if I select or deselect some of these options? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

FOIP Request Options

The last question on the form itself is about supporting documentation. In the video I just rewatched, it does note that this is optional, but wouldn't it be nice to mention that on the form too?

FOIP Supporting Documents

Huh. Neither at the end of the submission nor in the email receipt is there any indication of what comes next, or how long this might take. I did some searching, and eventually found a PDF from 2009 that suggests I'll hear back within 30 days.

FOIP Received

I just logged in to check the status of my request, and am left with a final question. Did I miss something, or does this just mean, as I hope, that the request is still open? Too many questions!!!

FOIP Request Status

So yeah, a $25 experiment. Stay tuned, and Happy Holidays!

January 26, 2021 update: I realized the 30-day period had passed, so I logged back on and saw that the status still read "Online Incomplete". I poked at it a few times and finally realized when I hit the Continue button (screenshot above) it was not in fact asking me to submit a new request, which is what the screen looked like to me.  I clicked next on each existing page looking for some indication that I had missed some information, and eventually got to the page that showed I had paid, and when I clicked the next screen it then said the status was Submitted. So NOW the 30-day clock starts. See you again at the end of February. (smh)

Continuing Algorithms of Oppression

For a meeting last week at MPOW we were asked to read Algorithms of Oppression, by Safiya Umoja Noble. As a cis, white male, I found it a good reminder of a lot of stuff I am vaguely aware of, but don't have to "deal with" in the same way as the majority of the world. She makes quite a few references to the library world, in addition to her main focus, which is Google.

Turns out it was an incredibly well-timed read, as that same week, on Dec. 2, Dr. Timnit Gebru was fired from Google for raising pretty much the same points. Well, it's more complicated than that, but that's what it boils down to.

If you're unfamiliar with the story, here are some links:

• Google ethics researcher’s departure renews worries the company is silencing whistleblowers
• Backlash against Google grows over firing of prominent Black A.I. researcher
• The mentioned emails: https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-an-ethical
• The Open Letter of Support: https://googlewalkout.medium.com/standing-with-dr-timnit-gebru-isupporttimnit-believeblackwomen-6dadc300d382 (which you, too, can sign, not that it seems it will do any good, but you gotta start somewhere!)

How to stop a Zoombombing

Thank goodness I haven't personally experienced this while teaching / presenting via Zoom, but I have been a participant in a workshop that was Zoom bombed, and that was traumatic enough. I can't even imagine how nasty that would be for the presenter.

Lifehacker reports that Zoom is rolling out some new features aimed to make it easier to stop a bombing-in-progress, but also appears to be monitoring for, and will warn you via email "if your meeting invite appears in any public social media posts or other websites where these things are usually posted."

I haven't received anything from my POW (we have a licence for Zoom), or from Zoom directly, nor did I see any abuse options as described by Lifehacker until I manually checked for updates in my Zoom client and updated to version 5.4.3 (Mac).

Go update your clients, folks!!!

The best screen recording software in 2020

Not my original post, but Zapier has a post looking at the best screen recording software in 2020. Definitely useful if you're prepping for online delivery in the months to come! Plenty of choices for Windows, macOS, and even mobile, but they do seem to focus on software and services that cost money. Even though usually that cost is worth it, if you flat out don't have any money, you could also look at TechRadar's post, the best free screen recorder 2020.

Preparing a dataset to use in Hydrator

Every few months I get an email from someone looking for some help with the Hydrator tool I wrote about back in 2017. Hydrator is a simple tool to rehydrate twitter ids into full tweets. From the Hydrator GitHub page, "Twitter's Terms of Service do not allow the full JSON for datasets of tweets to be distributed to third parties. However they do allow datasets of tweet IDs to be shared. Hydrator helps you turn these tweet IDs back into JSON and also CSV from the comfort of your desktop."

The advantage for me, and apparently many others, is that it's an actual program instead of a command-line tool, so it's pretty damn easy to use for those of us who only occasionally need to rehydrate a list of tweeter ids.

The biggest issue people have is that Hydrator only wants a file with a single list of twitter ids, and nothing else. Not even a header on that list. For a reasonably-sized list it's usually no problem to use Excel or similar to clean up the offending dataset, but the other day someone asked if I could help with prepping the file at A Twitter Dataset of 150+ million tweets related to COVID-19 for open research. For some reason the researchers added two columns to the dataset, so in addition to the column of twitter ids, there are also columns for date and time.

Note this is all happening on my MacBook. YMMV on other platforms.

I did some Googling and decided that csvkit should do the trick and it did, with a couple of caveats. First, it's an incredibly simple command-line tool, with a stellar step-by-step tutorial. Trust me, you can use it! So I installed it and ran the first command to turn the COVID-19 dataset from a TSV (tab-separated values) file into a CSV (comma-separated values) file:

in2csv full_dataset-clean.tsv > full_dataset-clean.csv

And it didn't work :-( csvkit is supposed to be able to recognize and parse tsv, but for whatever reason it didn't in this case. No biggie, back to Google, and after a little trial and error, I settled upon this single command line to convert the file from TSV to CSV:

cat full_dataset-clean.tsv | tr "\\t" "," > full_dataset-clean.csv 

And just below that is a suggestion that I might not've even needed csvkit for the next step, but I didn't see that until just now :-)

So that command did indeed translate my TSV file into a CSV file, and I went back to the csvkit tutorial to get a file with only the first column, using the command:

csvcut -c 1 full_dataset-clean.csv > full_dataset-clean-tweet_ids.csv

One last problem is that there's still a header on that column (tweet_id), which I verified with the command:

csvcut -n full_dataset-clean-tweet_ids.csv

Google suggests the SED (stream editor) command will do the trick:

sed -i -e '1d' full_dataset-clean-tweet_ids.csv

And I can verify the first line is now gone with:

head full_dataset-clean-tweet_ids.csv

Probably way more convoluted than it needed to be, but it got the job done, and now I can point Hydrator at my full_dataset-clean-tweet_ids.csv file and Bob's your uncle!

Note to self, xsv is another CSV tool that might be worth exploring.