The Distant Librarian

A couple of quick updates - FOIP and Twitter Academic

Just a couple of quick updates.

First, in December, I posted about my initial experience with Alberta's new(?) FOIP process. And then I actually submitted that request on January 26. So the fact that I was never notified that my submission was incomplete is a strike, for sure. But on February 16 I did get my response, so they easily made the 30-day deadline. Download AE000-2021-G-9 Applicant Copy. As you can see, it's a PDF, not the CSV I requested. Not a big deal in this case, but had there been lots of information it might've been, so another strike. I actually emailed back and forth a couple of times, because I didn't realize that both of my requests were being satisfied on that single page. Ultimately this response clicked with me:

I can confirm that the record provided to you in response to your FOIP request identifies all contracts awarded by Advanced Education to McKinsey and Company under the heading “Contract Number”. The list of reports finished by McKinsey and Company is identified under the heading “Finished Reports”, which indicates “None to date”.

If you are not satisfied with the response to your request, you have a right under Part 5 of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act to request the OIPC review the decision of the public body. Additional information regarding this process can be found here: Request a Review/File a Complaint.

I have to assume the 1054-20200609-MCKINSEY contract number is associated with the Alberta 2030 Building Skills for Jobs contract (CBC article), but they would not claim that in the email, so I guess I'd have to spend another $25 to verify that? :-(

I am no longer a FOIP virgin.

Second up, on January 7 I submitted an application to be accepted into Twitter's Academic Developer program and on February 2 I got an email that I was in. I've since attended a webinar on the program and understand that lots of people have been waiting far longer than that, so I may have slipped in by being quick. I haven't actually done anything other than log in, attend that webinar, and install the postman tool that was being demoed in the webinar, so I can't give you any more info on the ease of the back end (I'm truly not a developer), but when I get around to it, I'll report back on that, too!

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.

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!

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!)

Archives in the news

I've recently become more involved in a project to digitize historical maps held at the U of Calgary, so this article really spoke to me (thanks @achurrell!) Yukon geologists raid the archives to aid ongoing search for gold. And because it seems so often news reports like this don't seem to include a link to the actual resource being reported on, I'm pleased that the CBC did provide a link directly to YCGC Historic Placer Data, which is fascinating to poke around. I wonder whether our (currently small) collection of Oil and Gas maps will be used in the same way, some day?

Also recently crossing my path is a news release talking about the use of an archival collection from the Glenbow Archives, which are now held here at the U of Calgary. The Imperial Oil Files: New Collection Adds to Climate and Energy Research Archives On Science and Denial. And the collection itself: Introduction to the Imperial Oil Archival Document Collection. The U of Calgary has no affiliation with this organization, I'll add. We just hold the archives. I'm curious to know whether these images were captured on the sly, or in an open fashion. It's almost like an analogue version of scraping a website!

Report: Academic Freedom Breached at Thompson Rivers University

I first posted about this issue just over a year ago, A disturbing story on academic freedom and predatory publishing, and now it appears to have reached a conclusion, with the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) releasing a 30-page report on their findings. Report: Academic Freedom Breached at Thompson Rivers University

TL;DR:

(Ottawa – November 19, 2019) An investigation into the suspension of Dr. Derek Pyne by Thompson Rivers University (TRU) has concluded that the administration’s actions breached academic freedom.

But you really should read the whole thing. It's mostly about issues of academic freedom, but, because the catalyst appears to have been research about predatory publishing, there's a little bit of that in there too, including this quote from page 27 of the report:

"In an increasingly complex arena for publishing research, universities and academics grapple with assessing faculty members’ published research for tenure and promotion, and for various institutional benefits, including salary increases and research awards. Academic librarians have long provided their expertise in identifying scholarly resources and are now assisting researchers in identifying which constitute legitimate open access publishing and which do not. There is a clear need for universities to ensure the integrity of their academic decisions for tenure and promotion, in particular, by having policies that differentiate between legitimate and predatory publishing."

For anyone from the UofC reading this, please see this section on predatory journals and conferences in our libguide on Scholarly Communication.

At the time of this posting I couldn't find a response on the TRU website.

 

Some thoughts on Research and Indigenous Librarianship

A couple of weeks ago I read an excellent article, Research and Indigenous Librarianship in Canada, and I'd like to recommend it to you. I think it's more about understanding the implications of undergoing research with or about Indigenous Peoples than it is about doing so in a library setting, but that's great, because it makes it relevant to all academics, IMHO.

The author, Deborah Lee, does a good job of explaining how Indigenous Peoples have been impacted by traditional academic research methods in the past, and how their expectations for sharing research results, and their reasons for participating in research, may be significantly different than what we're used to in the academy. The single biggest takeaway for me was how important it is for a researcher to seriously consider why they're conducting research on or with Indigenous Peoples. If you're just gunning for publication or tenure, you should look for another subject.

And because I'm always looking for a tech angle, I learned about a new-to-me open source Content Management System called Mukurtu, which is designed to hold information in a way that is considerate of the needs of Indigenous Peoples. Bet you also didn't consider there was even a need for such a thing!

Do read the article - I guarantee you'll learn something from it.

Some Sci-Hub stuff

Sci-Hub popped up a couple of times today, along with a link to a tool I hadn't seen before.

1. Tools to liberate scholarly articles, help sources understand journalism and publish printable online zines. Mentioning the existence to journalists
2. They Know We Know They Know: Does Sci-Hub Affect Library Subscriptions? which in turn led to the
3. Sci-Hub Stats Browser, which is a dated snapshot of just how comprehensive the Sci-Hub database is. This is data supporting the article, Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature.

Wow.

Review: A funder-imposed data publication requirement seldom inspired data sharing

We've been doing a lot of talking about Data Management Plans at MPOW, and I recently came across the following article from PLOS One: A funder-imposed data publication requirement seldom inspired data sharing.

In it, the authors take a look at 315 research projects that had been funded by the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council (EVOSTC) between 1989 - 2010 to see how many data sets could be obtained. This is an interesting funding agency, as it funded research from many different disciplines, including the Social Sciences. As you might guess, the number of retrieved data sets is pretty darn low (26%), but the single biggest reason was that the authors were unable to reach the original researcher. I guess that shouldn't surprise me as much as it did. The other thing I found surprising is that they found slightly lower retrievability for research that was conducted after the EVOSTC enacted a formal data policy in 1995. I guess that's the sound bite for the article title!

But the other thing we've been talking about at MPOW is what kind of reward might entice researchers to post their data, and this article addressed that as well:

"Inherent in all of the above hurdles to data recovery is the absence of a reward structure for sharing data. There is no reward for the time investment required to learn how to curate data or construct data packages (including well documented and formatted error-free data, with project and file level metadata) in cases where original data curation was insufficient. The focus in science has traditionally been on production and citation of publications, and as such, a process for identification and citation of manuscripts has been well developed. Similar attribution and recognition of data would incentivize the archiving and sharing of data in the scientific community. One way publications are tracked and cited is through the use of digital object identifiers (DOIs), a tool that is also increasingly being used to attribute data. DOIs are particularly important for data identification because unlike manuscripts, data can be regularly updated or exist in multiple formats or subsets, so identifying specific versions of the data via a DOI is key to data proper data attribution and use. Although the use of data DOIs is a relatively new practice, they should facilitate more routine data citation as compared to traditional methods. Incorporating data citations into a scientists’ overall research output alongside journal publications should further incentivize data sharing."

So they're making some claims that they can't back up with this research, but which certainly makes sense. The one thing that might get researchers to post their data sets is better recognition in the tenure and promotion process of the work that's involved in making this information available online.

As a snarky aside, I wonder if the EVOSTC website has seen a redesign since it was first launched? :-0

Archive of tweets from Semantic Web in Libraries (SWIB) 2018

Here is an archive of tweets from this year's Semantic Web in Libraries (SWIB) conference. You can search and filter the results here,  and explore nifty visualizations here. All this courtesy of the excellent (and free) TAGS project.

A disturbing story on academic freedom and predatory publishing

While I had actually read the article in question shortly after it first came out, I was unaware of the fallout until earlier this morning. This is a story you should be aware of.

How I learned of it: Investigation launched into alleged academic freedom violations at Thompson Rivers University

What I had missed: B.C. economist in grim battle against deceptive scholarship and Suspended B.C. prof who exposed fake journals welcomes investigation.

In a nutshell, Dr. Derek Pyne wrote a paper in early 2017 titled, The Rewards of Predatory Publications at a Small Business School, in which he looked at how many of his colleagues in the business school at Thompson Rivers University had published articles in predatory journals. Quite a few, as it turned out. From his conclusion (emphasis mine):

Predatory journals have become an increasing problem when it comes to assessing and rewarding researchers for the merit of their publishing records. In addition, the presence of predatory journals makes it difficult for non-experts to judge the quality and validity of published research. This paper finds that, at least at one university, there are few incentives not to publish in predatory journals. In addition, when the opportunity cost of forgone income from extra teaching is significant, publishing in ranked journals is costly.

Of course it's understandable that his colleagues and administrators would be embarrassed by this paper, but apparently he has been suspended from his position, and the university as a whole, for bringing this information to light. I say apparently, because so far Thompson Rivers University hasn't provided any actual reason. Well, they do say all this.... Despite what you'll find in the preceding link, this appears to be completely against the concepts of academic freedom and tenure, like seriously TRU?

So this post is just to make sure y'all are aware of this sorry situation, and I now have an alert on his name so will let you know when it's been resolved. Of course these are my opinions and not those of my employer, yadda yadda yadda.

November 7 Updates:

Here's a good 15-minute audio summary of the whole situation: 10/3 podcast: A B.C. economist is in hot water for exposing fake journals

And here's an article from The Economist I missed from this past summer which mentions Dr. Pyne's paper, but appears to have come out just before his suspension: Some science journals that claim to peer review papers do not do so 

November 20, 2019 Update:

Report: Academic Freedom Breached at Thompson Rivers University

First look at NVivo Transcription

Almost exactly a year ago I took a quick look at three automated transcription tools, and today there's another one to add to the mix, though this one's not free. NVivo has launched an automated transcription service and I'm impressed! I uploaded the same audio clip I used in last year's shootout, a 40-second snippet from the inauguration of George W. Bush, and here's what NVivo made of it:

Please raise your right hand and repeat after me. I George Walker Bush do solemnly swear. George Walker Bush do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and will to the best of my ability and will to the best of my ability preserve protect and defend the Constitution of the United States preserve protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help me God. So help me God. Congratulations.

It didn't pick up the separate speakers, but other than that it was a perfect transcription of a somewhat noisy audio clip, which moves it to the top of the list of the one's I've looked at so far.

You'll get 15 minutes of free transcription when you sign up (and as far as I can tell, you could use this w/o having a license for NVivo), though you DO have to enter a credit card to get an account. You can access the tool from within NVivo, on the Create tab:

Or from the website of your account, which is what I did. You just browse to your audio file and hit "upload". NVivo claims transcription occurs at 2x speed, so this should've only taken 20-seconds to transcribe. In my case it was just going and going, so I refreshed my browser after two minutes and it was all done, so that may be a little bug, or more likely something with my browser.

Cost of the service is on a per/hour basis, as follows:

I honestly have no idea if that's a fair price, but it certainly seems like it is. If you needed quality transcription I suspect you could pay a lot more. A major bonus is that this service covers 28 different languages! Feel free to try out one you know and let me know if the quality is still this high. Oh, I chose "English - North American" when I tried the Bush file.

Pretty nifty overall, I think.

Tweet Archive from Designing Libraries 2018

The 7th edition of the Designing Libraries conference just wrapped up here at the U of Calgary, and I thought it'd be fun to capture the tweets using the hashtag #designinglibraries, so here you go:

Here's the full archive (457 tweets as of posting)

Here's a dashboard summary view

Here's a nifty view that allows for easy searching and filtering. (only one tweet even mentioned the weather!)

All this brought to you by the awesome TAGS project.

Update: Here's an article from our campus newspaper: Calgary 'head of the list' of library cities around the world.

A fascinating article about replication in psychology

The Atlantic recently posted a fascinating article looking at the problem of reproducibility in the field of psychology: Online Bettors Can Sniff Out Weak Psychology Studies
So why can't the journals that publish them? Ed Yong breaks down

the new results from the Social Sciences Replication Project, in which 24 researchers attempted to replicate social-science studies published between 2010 and 2015 in Nature and Science—the world’s top two scientific journals. The replicators ran much bigger versions of the original studies, recruiting around five times as many volunteers as before. They did all their work in the open, and ran their plans past the teams behind the original experiments. And ultimately, they could only reproduce the results of 13 out of 21 studies—62 percent.

I've seen lots of dismal numbers like that before in other fields, but what I found fascinating was that in addition to their attempts to reproduce these studies, the SSRP team also ran "a "prediction market", a stock exchange in which volunteers could buy or sell “shares” in the 21 studies, based on how reproducible they seemed." And it turns out these 206 volunteers predicted overall that the 21 studies would replicate 63% of the time!

That's just freaky-close! I want to be in on one of these prediction markets, and I want to see how these would play out in other academic disciplines. Off to learn more!

Some thoughts on citations in the 21st Century

Colleagues at work pointed to this long read on Medium: Open Access Knowledge: Digital Style Guide. In it, Patrick Dunleavy makes the case that, whenever possible, academic citations should point to "free" online versions of resources rather than the archaic "dead tree" version seemingly favoured by traditional style guides. He also argues that in addition to "real" open access repositories, if the material is available on ResearchGate, Academia.edu or Mendeley, go ahead and throw in a link. The idea is that whatever gets the material into the hands of the reader is what should be included in the citation (or alternate citation, which he suggests adding). Fair enough, but why not go ahead and include some sort of link to SciHub too? :-)

One of the other arguments he makes is to drop the practice of abbreviating author names and journal titles in the citation, and I wholeheartedly agree. Why, then, does he suggest abbreviations to describe the type of access? ([OAg] [PW] [LEV] [Non$] etc.) Spell those suckers out too! If you're going to stick with them though, why not substitute the $ for PW - I think it's clearer.

The second interesting citation-related post comes from Jon Udell, who suggests How to improve Wikipedia citations with Hypothesis direct links. Hypothes.is is sort of like a URL-shortening service, but with the ability to annotate text as well. Hey wait a minute, Hypothes.is could be used to perfectly solve the issues mentioned in points 9 and 10 of Dunleavy's post! Seriously, click this link!

I love it when stuff like this mashes up. I'm now off to make sure Patrick and Jon know about each other!