The Distant Librarian

Jeremy Singer-Vine's Data Liberation Project

Not to be confused with Canada's Data Liberation Initiative, Jeremy Singer-Vine is spending his time on the Data Liberation Project, "an initiative to identify, obtain, reformat, clean, document, publish, and disseminate government datasets of public interest." There's not yet a lot to look at there, but there's plenty in the pipeline.

I just attended a webinar he gave in conjunction with MuckRock and DocumentCloud (I think I'd missed the memo or forgotten that MuckRock and DocumentCloud had merged in 2018) You can watch a recording of it here. Jeremy described how he built an add-on for DocumentCloud that allows him to subscribe to an email distribution list, turn the content of the emails that are received to RSS, and then parse the RSS looking for PDFs which are then automatically loaded to DocumentCloud, where the PDFs become searchable. Pipelines!

Unfortunately, at this time Jeremy's pretty much focussed on US data sources, which is completely understandable for a one-man show, but I couldn't help thinking about the recently-launched Canadian Investigative Journalism Foundation. Even if they don't end up working together, there are definitely some tools available in Jeremy's project that could be of use to IJF, and indeed anyone who's interested in surfacing data that should be public.

What's that, you say, you don't already know about DocumentCloud? That's probably because it's geared towards journalists, but I think I got in when I was working on a project I thought it would help with. Your mileage may vary for gaining full access as a non-journalist, but if you've got a good use-case, your odds are probably good. It's pretty frickin' cool, and I've just made a mental note to spend some more time with it :-)

Library Futures Funtime Book Talk w/Chokepoint Capitalism and Data Cartels

On November 17, I was able to attend most of an amazing book talk sponsored by Library Futures. It was with the authors of two timely books, Chokepoint Capitalism (Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow), and Data Cartels (Sarah Lamdan). You can, and should, watch the entire recording!

In Chokepoint Capitalism, "by analyzing book publishing and news, livemusic and music streaming, screenwriting, radio and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct “anti-competitive flywheels” designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices." (Can everyone say, Taylor Swift?) 

From the introductory chapter of Data Cartels, "Data analytics companies are a relatively new type of information firm, the result of mass consolidation across information markets and a proliferation of data analysis technologies. We think of companies like RELX (Reed Elsevier LexisNexis) and Thomson Reuters as publishers, but they've made a transition away from being traditional content providers. Instead, they're crunching their warehouses of digital content through AI software, machine-learning technology, complex algorithms, and other types of data analytics systems to form new information products to sell."

I grabbed the following links from the chat box during the time I was able to spend watching the first part of the talk. They're in no particular order, but may help contextualize some of the stuff being talked about.

Monopoly - a situation where there is a single seller in the market.
Monopsony - a market with a single buyer.

Progressive Librarians Guild Calls for Elsevier to End Corrupt Publishing Practices and for Library Associations to Take Advocacy Role on Behalf of Scientific Integrity.

WNYC On The Media: Infinite Scroll (audio)

Publishing Giants Are Fighting Libraries on E-Books

Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox

Markets and the Future of the Circular Economy

Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves

Inoculating Law Schools Against Bad Metrics

 

 

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

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!

 

Historical COVID-19 R-Values for Alberta charted

Last month, I posted about how a patron request prompted me to collect the historical COVID-19 R-values for Alberta. That data is available on a public Google Sheet, but I had meant to throw up a chart as well. The other day I was reminded about Datawrapper, so I used that to make this:

Hopefully it will update itself as I continue to update the source...

I could've also done it right on Google Sheets, but with fewer customization options. I think. Maybe I'll go add that there now!

Update (June 22, 2021): Apparently this chart will not automatically update, which seems a glaring oversight on the part of Datawrapper. From their site: "The data will be updated from the spreadsheet every time you open the chart in Datawrapper, but not after the chart is published."

Historical COVID-19 R-Values for Alberta

Filed under stuff no citizen should have to do, today I went through pages archived by the Wayback Machine in order to provide a patron with historical R-Value data for COVID-19 for the Province of Alberta. This information is updated weekly (since mid-December, 2020) at https://www.alberta.ca/covid-19-alberta-data.aspx, but for some reason the Government has chosen not to make previously-reported numbers available. Anywhere.

Here are the Historical COVID-19 R-Values for Alberta in a Google Spreadsheet. I'll continue to manually update.

 

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)

An RSS feed for the Statistics Canada Infographics page

I got tired of there not being an RSS feed for the Statistics Canada Infographics page, so I made one. You can use it too! https://feed43.com/8203235035481320.xml

3 Simple, Free Apps for Accessing Your Home Computer From Anywhere (Gizmodo)

AnyDesk is totally new to me, so I thought I'd make note of Gizmodo's post on 3 Simple, Free Apps for Accessing Your Home Computer From Anywhere. I use Chrome Remote Desktop at least weekly, and have used TeamViewer to good effect in the past, so can vouch for each of those. The commenters overwhelmingly choose TeamViewer. I'll certainly explore AnyDesk and likely add it to my arsenal.

Good tools to know about for sure!

Factiva filters for Fake News Phenomenon

Thanks to a tip from my colleague Dani I learned that Factiva has recently added a filter for fake news. Like many things with Factiva (IMHO), it's not terribly intuitive to find, so here are the steps. You can either add this as a filter to a  search you've already run, or just use it to see what all is out (in) there.

From the main search page choose Subject, then Political/General News, and finally, Fake News Phenomenon. If you simply click on the blue arrow to the right and then run the search you'll see all there is on the subject within Factiva. According to the scope note, it looks like this category was added on March 14, 2017.

 

 

 

 

Shape file and .KML for First People's Language Map of British Columbia

I spent a couple hours today helping a student look for a shape file of the First People's Language Map of B. C. (or anything even close to it). No luck, but feel free to chime in if you know of something we missed! Finally while Inspecting and Viewing Source, I tripped across an embedded (or linked, I can't even remember now) .kml file that included the coordinates for all the polygons. Yay! 

I thought this would've been information that was much easier to find, so in the interests of saving the time of anyone else who might be looking for that same info, here you go:

Language_Boundaries .kml file for Google Earth

Contemporary Languages Boundaries shape file for ArcGIS etc. (.zip)

The student had emailed the owner of the site and got no response. Obviously I'll take this down if asked...

Oh, and while I was able to convert the .kml to the shape file within ArcGIS, I had a cleaner experience using the MyGeodata Converter.

Hope this is helpful to someone else!

If You See Something, Save Something – 6 Ways to Save Pages In the Wayback Machine

Last month I railed on the new Wayback Machine plugin for Chrome. Well they've been busy, and the current version solves many of my nitpicks on the initial version. Archive.org has a post detailing 6 ways you can save pages to the Wayback Machine, and that Chrome plugin makes the list because it now allows you to SAVE existing pages and not just retrieve missing ones. The other 5 options in the post are also well worth knowing about - please do use one or more, and let's make sure important stuff never disappears!

Here's how to monitor for disappearing or changing news online

Over the weekend Ed Summers released a tool called diffengine that monitors an RSS feed and then posts captures of any changed text to Twitter. It's meant for monitoring news sites, but could be used for anything that has an RSS feed. Useful for monitoring your news site of choice for disappearing news, but also reports that change on the fly, here's what it looks like in action, from a CBC article:

Wood believed mall owner would fix multiple leaks, court hears - Sudbury - CBC News https://t.co/ZtTe8d6nWt ➜ https://t.co/3A0ZOGM3w7 pic.twitter.com/xJBsfoVqfM

— cbc_diff (@cbc_diff) January 16, 2017

Probably a really neat tool for journalism students too! Right now there are a handful of mainstream or influential sites publicly posted, such as The Washington Post, Breitbart and the Toronto Star. Not sure if there will be a logical directory of these things once people start running their own instances?

Mita makes the case: Why Libraries Should Maintain the Open Data of Their Communities

Mita Williams has an excellent blog post titled Why Libraries Should Maintain the Open Data of Their Communities. It's a long (for a blog post), but important read, and includes an excellent history of how Canadian government data has evolved, and how it compares (poorly) to US government data .

I've been making the same case for Libraries and Open Data myself this year, but in a much less eloquent and scholarly way :-) While Mita's post is based on slightly older research (2014), the bibliography is still a great place to learn pretty much all you need to know on the subject. Having similarly researched over the course of this year, I sadly don't think much has come out in the interim, except maybe Brian Jackson's 2015 article, The State of Canadian Library Data.

If you're at all interested in the role libraries can or should play when it comes to Open Data, you owe it to yourself to carve out some time to give Mita's post a read.