The Distant Librarian

Quick review: An AI toolkit for libraries

Even more on artificial intelligence. I'm going to create a new category for this blog! I just finished reading An AI toolkit for libraries, by Michael Upshall, in UKSG Insights. I found it to provide a really good background on what artificial intelligence is, and isn't, including some examples of some basic narrow AI currently in use in the academic world (spell check, plagiarism detection, topic discovery, etc.). Then he gets in to what you, as an information professional, should pay attention to when evaluating the use of AI in your workplace. Finally, at the end of the article, we get to the actual toolkit, which is actually a nice checklist. I won't repeat it here, but the main considerations for you to consider are the goal of the product, what's in the corpus used to train it, what's the algorithm, evaluation and metrics, sanity check, dissemination, and feedback.

Even if you don't think you care about AI, or that it doesn't play a role in what you're currently doing at work, this is a great introduction to the topic, and you'll learn something useful. If you already have some knowledge on the topic, it's a great refresher with some good, current references. Oh, and those of you that don't think AI's already in your daily routine, I think you're probably wrong. Go read the article!

Intellectual and unreasonable - AI and male librarians

I've been poking a bit at the multitude of AI image-generation tools, and just ran across this tool that allows one to do a little exploring of the algorithmic bias that's pretty much baked-in, but otherwise not really visible. I learned about it via this article in Vice, and thanks to @ResearchBuzz. Here's what I found:

First, according to Stable Diffusion, all librarians must appear against a background of books. Second, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of librarians present as female. And third, there are only two adjectives in this tool that will return pictures with a majority of male-presenting librarians, "intellectual" and "unreasonable". On the left of each of the images below are the default returns for the profession of "librarian", and on the right are the returns including the above adjectives. Click through to embiggen.

Intellectual Librarians

 

Unreasonable Librarians

ResearchBuzz Search Gizmos - a collection of search tools based on 25+ years of tinkering

Over at ResearchBuzz, Tara has had a busy summer learning JavaScript in order to satisfy her cravings for simple search tools that only exist in her head. The result is RB Search Gizmos, which you should definitely check out. As I continue to be a daily RSS user, one of the first I gravitated towards was Kebberfegg. WTF is that? You'll have to check it out to see! And the latest, Wikipedia GenderScanner, allows you to find the gender of people mentioned in any of Wikipedia's categories. Results will vary greatly on that one depending on how far down you drill in the categories, but it's an interesting example of the types of niche searches she's playing with. And best of all, she'll consider your requests! (no guarantees) :-)

AI, Images, and Academic Titles

Yesterday, shortly after helping a student start a literature search, I found myself poking around at DALL-E, one of the crop of machine-learning tools that can generate images based on a text prompt. I had an article title saved on my clipboard, and wondered what would be generated from the title. I was not impressed.

The prompt: Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision

The 4 results:

Here's a second example.

The prompt: The curvilinear effect of professional faultlines on team innovation: The pivotal role of professional identity threat.

The 4 results:

At least that one's got some curves...

Pretty underwhelming, but then I wondered what the others would make of it, so I headed over to Midjourney, and after figuring out how to interact with it in Discord, generated the following MUCH more interesting images from the same prompts. Can you guess which is which this time, w/o seeing the prompt? :-)

 

And finally, what about Stable Diffusion?

Could all turn in to a fun party game. I certainly know which ones are most visually-appealing to me... Thoughts?

tl;dr papers rolls into Elicit?

Early this year, there was some buzz about a new site called tl;dr papers, which claimed to "use machine learning to summarize arguments in scientific papers so that even a seven-year-old could understand them". From the moment I tried to visit the site it was down, so I put a watch on it, hoping to be able to do some fun learning when it came back up. But it never did. Earlier this week I got an alert that content at https://www.tldrpapers.com/ had changed, but it just redirects now to https://elicit.org/, which has been around a little longer, according to Archive.org, so tl;dr didn't become Elicit...

Now that I scroll to the bottom of the Verge article, I see I could've saved myself some hope (or maybe I saw that before and just didn't want to believe):

Unfortunately, although tl;dr papers has had a rapturous reception among the academic world, its time in the spotlight looks limited. After going viral this weekend, the website has been labeled “under maintenance,” and the site’s creators say they have no plans to maintain it in the future. (They also mention that other tools have been built that perform the same task.)

Anyhoo, I guess I'm now off to play with Elicit, which may be similar to these other Research Network and Discovery Tools I've been meaning to explore. Or maybe it's something completely different.

• ResearchRabbit
• Inciteful
• Litmaps

So what is Elicit?

Elicit is a research assistant using language models like GPT-3 to automate parts of researchers’ workflows. Currently, the main workflow in Elicit is Literature Review. If you ask a question, Elicit will show relevant papers and summaries of key information about those papers in an easy-to-use table.

Climate change books for kids

I'm nearly done listening to an episode of What On Earth, from the CBC, which talks about a couple of books on climate change that have been written for kids. I know my teenage daughter is anxious about the future of our planet, and can only imagine it's even more acute for younger kids. You can hear the authors reading from the books, which should give you an idea if they're something you and your kids would like/understand. Unfortunately, I don't see a listing of the actual titles, so here they are:

• The Lorax (of course!)
• Coco's Fire: Changing Climate Anxiety into Climate Action
• The Tantrum That Saved The World

Mentioned in passing, 20 Canadian books for kids to read for Earth Day 2022.

Hey @cbcwhatonearth would you consider upping your game on show notes, please?

Wonder Tools - New ways to record conversations

Because of my role supporting qualitative data analysis at MPOW, I'm always on the lookout for new transcription tools (see my current list here). The latest issue of the Wonder Tools newsletter introduces several new-to-me automated tools to record conversations. As a bonus, Jeremy includes many links to StoryCorps resources on how to improve interviewing techniques.

I haven't actually used any of the apps mentioned in this issue yet (though I've played around with Otter.ai). The biggest concern on my campus is with the security and confidentiality of any given transcription service. What's the most secure or rigorous service you're aware of?

Free (until April 15) Ukraine Digital Book Collection from Exact Editions

I received an email touting:

Exact Editions is providing access to a digital collection of non-fiction books related to the history and culture of Ukraine in support of the Ukrainian people during these difficult times.

The collection currently contains 18 books from Yale University Press, Edinburgh University Press, Reaktion, Hurst, Central European University Press, Cambridge Scholars Publishing and Open Book Publishers. The books are written by specialists in European history, Russian studies, political science, Islamic history, art and film.

You can access the collection at https://ocean.exacteditions.com/magazines?rc=c63e19f7-da07-46fb-a26b-16ca683f6659

Once there, you'll see obvious links to buy the books, but you can, in fact, click the cover, and then use the toolbar at the bottom of the screen to scroll through each title. Downloading doesn't appear to be an option.

No idea on the quality of these titles, but still nice to have if you want to do some quick reading!

Under the Influence: Long Overdue: The Creative Boom of Library Marketing

One of the most well-written podcasts (oh, and I guess it's a radio show too) out there is Terry O'Reilly's Under The Influence. Terry tells stories of how marketing works (and sometimes doesn't), and it's always an entertaining and fascinating half-hour. His most recent episode, Season 11, episode 3, is Long Overdue: The Creative Boom of Library Marketing. If you want to listen online, the CBC site is probably best. If you want to subscribe to the podcast (and you should), that's now over here.

From the show notes,

This week, we look at the ways libraries market themselves. If you think libraries are quiet, you’ve got another thing coming. We’ll talk about a library video series that played like a TV cop show - and - we’ll look at library wars - when libraries battle each other on social media.

Very frustrating though that on none of the sites affiliated with this show do complete transcripts with links appear. :-( He mentions an epic twitter fight between the Toronto Public Library and the San Francisco Public Library that occurred when the Raptors were playing for the NBA championship against the Golden State Warriors, and he also details a bunch of innovative YouTube videos.

So I did some searching for you, and here are the relevant links:

• Twitter fight
• Kawhi's personalized library card
• Central Rappahannock Library's Libraries Will Survive video
• UMD "Gangnam Style" Parody 강남 스타일 (Official) video
• BYU Library Research Rescue videos
• NYPL Black Friday
• Johnson County Library Trucks
• Save Our Libraries campaign

Such good stuff!

 

 

Why you should pay attention to your Creative Commons licenses

I have never given a second thought to ensuring I've chosen the correct/most recent version of a creative commons license. That's changed, because I just finished reading Cory Doctorow's post, A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled a New Breed of Superpredator. In it, he outlines the emergence of the Copyleft troll, someone who posts images with an outdated CC license, and then sues people for using those images as they were intended to be used, but who may (or may not!) have neglected to completely comply by the letter of the license.

I don't know whether any of this would even apply to the textual works I would more likely post with a CC license, and maybe that doesn't matter because I'm not going to be going after anyone for using my works that may have an old license, but here at MPOW we're really starting to move to Open Educational Resources, and I could easily see the authors of such resources including images that are CC licensed earlier than 4.0 (or whatever the current version is by the time you read this). Going back to Cory's post, it seems that license version 2.0 is the really problematic one, but perhaps 1.0 and 2.5 are bad for the same or similar reasons? Please let me know if you know!

Does anyone know of a tool that allows me to search a specific site for content that has any creative commons license? So I'm looking for something like https://wordpress.org/openverse/ that includes something like Google's "site:" option. Bonus points if it could allow a search to be limited to content that applies a specific CC license! @researchbuzz? @cogdog?

Resources:

• Creative Commons FAQs
• Creative Commons version 4.0
• Creative Commons history of license versions

I love these quotes from Cory:

If you put a CC license on your work, its explicit message is, “I want you to re-use this.” Not “I am a pedantic asshole with a fetish for well-formed attribution strings.” The point of CC is not to teach the world to write attribution strings: it is to facilitate sharing and re-use. If you are a good-faith user of CC licenses, then your response to an incorrect attribution string should be a request to correct it, not a threat to sue for $150,000 in statutory damages.

If you send threats instead of requests for correction, you are a terrible person and you should feel really bad about yourself.

Stay safe, all, and do let me know if you have answers to any of my questions above!

 

5 Tools to Create Bar Chart Races Without Coding

One of my more popular posts from the past few years was Thoughts on building my first bar chart race with Flourish, so HT to @ResearchBuzz, who recently pointed to this post on Hongkiat: 5 Tools to Create Bar Chart Race Without Coding. They mention Flourish, but there are four more you might explore. They missed Tableau, though. Lots of fun choices!

Shasta vs. Descript

It's a premature title, as I don't actually have access to Project Shasta yet, but this announcement makes it sound very similar to Descript: Adobe’s Project Shasta is an AI-powered, web-based audio editor. I have requested access, though, and will report back when I know more! :-)

Visualizing Qualitative Data

A big part of my job these days is supporting campus researchers in their use of NVivo, a tool for analyzing qualitative data. While NVivo does offer some data visualization options, in my workshops I describe it as, "Microsoft Office-level". In other words, not terribly sophisticated, and that's fine.

But I'm always keen to see examples of how qualitative data can be displayed visually, and I found a recent post on the Datawrapper blog wonderful. Rose Mintzer-Sweeney took a look at data gathered by a recent Pew Research Center study and used Datawrapper to highlight certain aspects. Her visuals are at The meanings of life, and represent her reinterpretation of the data from Pew at What Makes Life Meaningful? Views From 17 Advanced Economies. (<-- that sucker goes on for pages!)

Oh, and of course the results overall are simply fascinating, too!

 

More proof that information wants to be free?

Originally noted by ResearchBuzz, from PsyPost: The “Sci-Hub effect” can almost double the citations of research articles, study suggests.

The researchers found that articles downloaded from Sci-Hub were cited more frequently compared to articles not downloaded from Sci-Hub. After controlling for variables such as the number of figures included in a paper, title length, the number of authors per article, the H-index of the first author, and the impact factor of the journal, Correa and his colleagues found that articles downloaded from Sci-Hub were cited 1.72 times more frequently on average.

This would seem to me to be more proof that making articles available via open access (i.e. not behind a paywall) is a good way to get yourself cited.

New to me: Google Scholar “Public Access” feature

I was alerted to a new(ish?) feature within Google Scholar earlier this week by this blog post: What does this new Google Scholar “Public Access” feature mean for me or my work? More information on the Google Scholar site itself: https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/citations.html?1#publicaccess.

From that original post:

The new Google Scholar feature is a reminder that it is all too easy to forget about open access responsibilities when you’ve already got your sights set on the next project. But researchers should keep in mind that making work open does more than just comply with funder policies — when research is more accessible to a broader audience, it has the best chance for the biggest impact. The more people who can read it, the more people who can use it, implement it, draw on it, build on it, and cite it.

Here's the page at the University of Calgary that discusses many options for hosting publications in order to comply with Open Access mandates.