2. Taking and Giving Back? Open Access, Generative AI, and the Transformation of Scholarly Communica... (55:13)

Date:
2023-10-27
Main contributors:
Lucy Lu Wang
Summary:
Generative AI systems trained on decades of open access, digitized scholarly publications and other human-written texts can now produce non-copyrightable(?), (mostly) high-quality, and (sometimes) trustworthy text, images, and media at scale. In the context of scholarly communication, these AI systems can be trained to perform useful tasks such as quickly summarizing research findings, generating visual diagrams of scientific content, and simplifying technical jargon. Scholarly communication will undergo a major transformation with the emergence of these model capabilities. On the plus side, AI has the potential to help tailor language, format, tone, and examples to make research more accessible, understandable, engaging, and useful for different audiences. However, its use also raises questions about credit and attribution, informational provenance, the responsibilities of authorship, control over science communication, and more. This talk will discuss how open access scholarly publishing has helped power the rise of the current generation of AI systems (especially large language models), some ways that AI is primed to change/has already changed scholarly publishing, and how the OA community might work with these models to improve scholarly communication, for example, by introducing different and more flexible forms of science communication artifacts, incorporating human feedback in the generative process, or mitigating the production of false/misleading information.

3. From Rio de Janeiro (1992) to Paris (2015) to the Future: Why is international cooperation on cli... (1:33:00)

Date:
2023-10-26
Main contributors:
Michael Oppenheimer
Summary:
Just as countries seemed to be turning a corner at Paris, COVID, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the resulting instability in energy markets have drawn attention elsewhere. Meanwhile, at the Glasgow Climate Summit (2021), negotiators had to face yet another politically complex and confounding aspect of the climate issue -- “loss and damage” to the world’s poorest countries due to climate change. Has international cooperation on climate change reached a dead end? Will other concerns continually push it off center stage, delaying a successful global effort to solve the problem and exposing humanity to ever greater climate risk? What have we learned about treaty-making on climate change over the past 30-plus years that should make us either optimistic or pessimistic about international cooperation?

4. Short Memories, Long Time Frames, Perverse Incentives: How Well Will We Adapt to Climate Change? (40:46)

Date:
2023-10-24
Main contributors:
Michael Oppenheimer
Summary:
Humanity is accustomed to highly variable weather but climate, the average weather over the long term (for example, a human lifetime), was quite predictable. In the US, we established institutions like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Flood Insurance Program to cushion the shock of those rare extreme events, like landfall of a category 5 hurricane, a once-per-century flood of a major river system, or a severe multiyear drought, but as far as the climate went, we didn’t need to think ahead because it wasn’t changing. Now, those days are gone and we face a continuously evolving climate for decades to come. The most challenging aspect is that those formerly rare events are becoming commonplace, each having the potential to compound the damage from the last. Are our institutions up to the task of dealing with the increasing frequency of hazardous events? Is human psychology capable of the forward planning required to limit the damages? Can our political system provide adequate incentives to policy makers to think and act ahead?

5. Applying Digital Scholarship to Book History Inventory Research (52:41)

Date:
2023-10-11
Main contributors:
Alexandra Wingate
Summary:
Inventories are one of the most useful types of documents available to book historians. They are essentially lists of person or organization’s goods, but these seemingly simple lists contain a wealth of data and information. For a private individual, an inventory of their household goods can point towards their wealth and status in society while an inventory of their books allows us to analyze their book ownership habits and potential reading. For members of the book trade, inventories of their businesses can tell us about the size and characteristics of their business, the typical tasks they performed, as well as what types of books they produced or sold. Aggregations of these book inventories help us understand the production, sale, ownership and reading of books in a given geographic and temporal space as a whole. However, the data found in inventories of early modern private libraries, booksellers, and printers are usually published by book historians as simple transcriptions of the documents (sometimes with metadata identifying the book described in each entry) in print or in online journals as PDFs. Whether in print or in PDF, this static presentation of inventory data makes it difficult for book historians to browse, search, aggregate, compare, and build upon each other’s data. As part of my doctoral work investigating bookselling and private libraries in early modern Navarre, Spain, I am using TEI-XML and the open-source database builder Heurist to address these issues of dissemination, interoperability, and sustainability for book inventory data and to improve my overall process for conducting historical research. In this presentation, I will outline my current workflow for moving from historical documents in the archives to a final dataset. I will discuss my use of TEI inside and outside of the archive and the development of my Heurist database, Libros en Navarra | Books in Navarre (LN|BN), which stores data for private library and bookseller inventories documenting what books were present in Navarre during the 16th and 17thcenturies. I seek to show how these methods of digital scholarship provide a base which facilitates not only my research but hopefully the research of other book historians who in the future may wish to incorporate and transform my data in their own work.

6. Empowering Privacy-Centered Practices for Diverse Communities (39:34)

Date:
2023-09-27
Main contributors:
Ece Gumusel
Summary:
As the digital landscape continues to shape how we interact and engage with information, the LGBTQ+ community faces unique challenges in maintaining their online identities securely and privately. This presentation explores empirical findings from a user study that evaluates the usability and effectiveness of privacy and security tools among LGBTQ+ individuals who are part of the library and information science profession. The study shows unique insights into the barriers influencing their adoption of such tools, the criteria they consider when deciding to disclose personal identifiable information and their overall satisfaction with the tools currently available. By leveraging the study’s findings, the significance of implementing robust privacy and security measures in libraries will be emphasized. Furthermore, we will collaboratively develop practical recommendations to empower libraries in better supporting and embracing the LGBTQ+ community. Through meaningful discussions and knowledge exchange, this presentation aims to raise awareness about the critical importance of privacy and security tools within diverse communities, inspiring a privacy-centered mindset and approach among libraries and professionals.

7. A Fresh Take on JATS: Book Reviews as a Simple, Immediate, and Accessible Gateway to Full-Text Pu... (13:09)

Date:
2023-05-09
Main contributors:
Matthew Vaughn, Richard Higgins
Summary:
Even as JATS XML has become the standard format for academic publishing, the challenges involved in implementing a JATS XML-based publishing workflow have prevented many library publishers from moving beyond PDF-based publishing. The complicated apparatus of even the most basic scholarly articles complicates XML production considerably. In addition, most existing workflows are reliant on XML conversion tools or paid vendors to convert author submission documents into JATS XML. In either case, these XML documents are time-consuming to produce and often require additional editing and correction before publication. Book reviews, on the other hand, provide a less burdensome format for library publishers who wish to transition to XML publishing. With minimal training, editorial teams can format JATS XML book reviews in-house without resorting to paid vendors or conversion tools. This presentation outlines the successful onboarding of a JATS-only book review journal to the Open Journal Systems platform. To facilitate this, we created a simplified JATS XML template using the DAR tag subset specification to optimize machine readability, avoid redundancy, and ensure reusability. The onboarding process also required customization of the OJS interface and the creation of detailed documentation and training materials for the editorial team. Although the editorial team had no prior experience with OJS or JATS XML, they are now publishing full-text, machine-readable books reviews. As the result of our work, these book reviews will now be more easily indexed and permanently stored as markup in a digital preservation archive. The semantically tagged content will facilitate keyword searches and increase discoverability over the long term. Finally, as a machine-readable format, JATS XML is inherently accessible and includes elements that allow for accessibility tagging and for the creation of interfaces that are both Section 508 and WCAG compliant.

8. The Cosmopolitans: The Institute of International Education from Liberal Internationalism to Neol... (57:59)

Date:
2023-04-26
Main contributors:
Spaeth, Elizabeth
Summary:
The Institute of International Education (IIE) administers the most prestigious awards for international education such as the Fulbright. As an intermediary between states, private philanthropies, corporations, and universities, the IIE has smoothed global crises and facilitated U.S. diplomatic policies related to international education for the past century. In my dissertation, “The Cosmopolitans: The Institute of International Education from Liberal Internationalism to Neoliberal Globalization (1919–2003),” I ask how parastatal organizations like the IIE became central to twentieth century liberalism. I argue that Americans came to rely on international students as proxies to end global conflicts, fortify the United States’ geopolitical standing, advance capitalist economic development in the Global South, and keep U.S. colleges financially afloat.The Institute of International Education has dominated the fields of international education and person-to-person diplomacy from 1919 to the present as an intermediary between states and private organizations. It has bolstered international student programs with private grants and administered flagship federal programs such as the Fulbright. This combination of private administration and capital with federal legislation and the brand of the U.S. government has characterized the shift from massive public spending and liberal internationalism in the postwar era to the neoliberalism of the late-twentieth century.

9. Expanding the Boundaries of the Archive: Descendant Communities, Memory-Keeping, and Digital History (57:28)

Date:
2023-04-12
Main contributors:
Sutton, Jazma
Summary:
This talk will explore Dr. Sutton’s introduction to Digital and Public History through the Remembering Freedom: Longtown and Greenville History Harvest. It will discuss the method she termed Descendant Archival Practices– a method that reveals new ways of writing histories of Black women and acknowledges the preservation and memory work of Black women elders as an alternative to mainstream archives–and how she incorporates the skills and methodological approaches she learned from HASTAC and IDAH in her research and classrooms.

10. Overcoming Vetocracy: Democratic Decision-making and the Climate Crisis, Part II (1:17:00)

Date:
2023-03-30
Main contributors:
Francis Fukuyama
Summary:
"Liberal democracies constrain power by imposing legal constraints on the exercise of power. Among developed democracies, the United States has one of the most extensive sets of checks and balances. When combined with the country's current polarization, this institutional setup often leads to what I have termed "vetocracy," in which there are so many veto points that even the simplest forms of collective action become impossible. The US and other liberal democracies will face major challenges in the coming years in making difficult and costly decisions to both mitigate and adapt to climate change. Is there a way of reducing vetocracy without undermining basic principles of liberal democracy? We do not want to imitate China, which stands at the opposite end of the spectrum as a consolidated authoritarian state with virtually no checks on the power of the Communist Party. These lectures will look at institutional measures that democracies might adopt to improve decision-making and implementation."