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Haunted libraries, invisible labour, and the librarian as an instrument of surveillance
This post was inspired by the article Intersubjectivity and Ghostly Library Labor by Liz Settoducato which was published earlier this month on In the library with the lead pipe. The article, in brief: Libraries are haunted houses. As our patrons move through scenes and illusions that took years of labor to build and maintain, we…
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Digitization is a multiplier and metadata is a fractal
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (sorry), Helga Hufflepuff’s goblet is stored in a vault at Gringotts that’s been cursed so that every time you touch one of the objects in it, dozens of copies are created. On the cover of the original U.K. edition of the book, Harry, Ron and Hermione are pictured…
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If the map becomes the territory then we will be lost
That which computation sets out to map and model it eventually takes over. Google sets out to index all human knowledge and becomes the source and the arbiter of that knowledge: it became what people think. Facebook set out to map the connections between people – the social graph – and became the platform for…
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Blogging again and Never again
It appears that I haven’t written a single post on this blog since July of 2018. Perhaps it is all the talk of resolutions around me but I sincerely would like to write more in this space in 2019. And the best way to do that is to just start. In December of last year…
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What ruined the web was the lack of good library software
In some libraries, there are sometimes particular collections in which the objects are organized by the order in which they were acquired (at my place of work, our relatively small collection of movies on DVD are ordered this way). This practice makes it easy for a person to quickly see what has been most recently…
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OK ScholComm – time for some game theory
I have approximate knowledge of when I was first introduced to game theory. It was the late 1980s and I was in a classroom and we were shown a documentary featured The Prisoner’s Dilemma (which is best understood through Nicky Case’s The Evolution of Trust). Some idle googling on my part makes me think that…
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Bret Victor’s Bookshelf
A couple of posts ago, I wrote a somewhat unorthodox introduction to the work of Bret Victor. In it, I brought the reader’s attention to a recent article from The Atlantic called The Scientific Paper is Obsolete. I know that this article had already made the rounds among some library people because I saw…
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Chasing Shadows
Last Monday when Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani opened his keynote at the 2018 Open Education Summit, one of the first things he did was place his work in the context of bell hooks and Jesse Strommel. And after hearing this my internal voice said to itself, “O.K. now I know where he’s coming from.” It’s an…
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Bret Victor, Bruno Latour, the citations that bring them together, and the networks that keep them apart
Occasionally I have the opportunity to give high school students an introduction to research in a university context. During this introduction I show them an example of a ‘scholarly paper’ so they can take in the visual cues that might help them recognize other scholarly papers in their future. After I point out the important…
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The Tom Longboat Awards as Wikidata
This year I helped out and participated in two Wikipedia ‘editathons.’ In March I assisted in the Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon hosted at Hackforge and in November I was at the Editathon on Elite Aboriginal Athletes in Canada held on the University of Windsor campus in conjunction with the North American Society for…
Librarian of Things
Mita Williams. Her blog.