James Baker on Bluesky: 'From 2025/26 University of Southampton DH will be running a new MSc in Digital Humanities (Data Science). Huge thanks to all my colleagues who've helped turn our little idea into a reality, especially the amazing
Lexi Webster https://www.southampton.ac.uk/courses/digital-humanities-data-science-masters-msc
And look out for a Humanities Data Science Lectureship we'll be advertising in the Autumn to lead this programme (ask me if you are interested in knowing more before the ad comes out).'
'By looking at that graph, can you tell which year the library started to grow by around one hundred terabytes of data per year? With the expectation that billions of items would be findable and made available while operating under a complex set of legally-defined technical constraints entirely specific to this singular context?
It was 2013. There in the middle of that downward curve.
Today, the library manages petabytes of data and has the responsibility of providing nation-scale digital memory, on funds that have only ever shrunk.'
My hunt for a missing TV episode – and what it shows about being Black in Britain | Jason Okundaye | The Guardian
On making sure the stories of all communities can be told in the future:
'callouts for people to submit their possessions to valuable public archives is one solution; and a greater effort from museums, libraries and universities to build trust and reach people is essential'
Today I learnt about Masakhane, a 'grassroots NLP community for Africa, by Africans', helping make sure that the 2000+ languages and related names and cultures in the continent are represented in technology https://www.masakhane.io/#NLP#AI#MachineLearning#language
Patriarchal AI: How ChatGPT can harm a woman's career (LSE blog)
If you ask ChatGPT to write performance reviews based on nothing but names, 'men are priceless and should be given more leadership positions in the organisation, whereas the women need help and guidance to improve their skills in their existing jobs'.
Oh blimey. I love a good hackathon, but for me the point is the chance to build something small in collaboration with others in a supportive environment. The idea of being a sole competitor live on stage sounds frankly terrifying! My brain does not perform well under that kind of pressure. Will share though.
@luis_in_brief@flickrfdn@mia Not a dumb question at all. (this is me as me not me-for-work) I think part of the idea of the lifeboat is not just the images but the relevant details of the metadata, the social metadata and context (to the extent practicable) and also to have a "dock" where the information can link up and be extracted with as much of its context as possible.
UNESCO's nvestigation into Gender Bias in Large Language Models: 'LLMs generated negative content about gay subjects in approximately 70% of instances for Llama 2 and in approximately 60% of instances for GPT-2. Finally, in generating content using prompts which intersect gender and culture with occupation, the results highlight a clear bias in AI-generated content, showing a tendency to assign more diverse and professional jobs to men (teacher, doctor, driver), while often relegating women to roles that are stereotypical or traditionally undervalued and controversial'
Lovely quote from the Wordsmith's A Word A Day newsletter this morning:
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. -Penelope Lively, writer
Do you work with archaeological archives? Is your research collections based? Have your say on the development of a [UK] National Collection for Archaeological Archives: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NCAA-researchers
Gene Tan on the 'fourth age' of libraries - not just GenAI - 'It is about people coming together to generate new content that did not exist before. It is also about generating new connections and opportunities that did not exist before, especially for people who are somehow always one step behind others.
Libraries can be platforms to equalise individuals and communities through providing these opportunities for reading, learning or just to be better.'
I've always been bothered by the phrase 'digital transformation'. I've finally realised it's because you could swap in 'magical transformation' for the same effect. It says nothing about where you want to go.
(And obviously societies and organisations are transformed by people learning how to adapt or resist new technologies, and the financial incentives they sometimes mask)