@mia@hcommons.social
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

mia

@mia@hcommons.social

Digital Curator, British Library

I do digital, UX and collections stuff in libraries, museums and archives, especially crowdsourcing / digital participation / public history. Formerly @mia_out on twitter. Trying tootfinder to make my posts searchable

Also posting from https://glammr.us/@libcrowds https://zirk.us/@LivingWithMachines https://techhub.social/@BL_DigiSchol

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

mia, to random
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

Online anonymity: study found ‘stable pseudonyms’ created a more civil environment than real user names

'What matters, it seems, is not so much whether you are commenting anonymously, but whether you are invested in your persona and accountable for its behaviour in that particular forum. There seems to be value in enabling people to speak on forums without their comments being connected, via their real names, to other contexts.

...calls to end anonymity online by forcing people to reveal their real identities might not have the effects people expect'

https://theconversation.com/online-anonymity-study-found-stable-pseudonyms-created-a-more-civil-environment-than-real-user-names-171374

mia,
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

@dl2jml I guess that's a question for the study authors, but it's worth considering. I've been shocked though at what people will post under their FB accounts - wishing death on asylum seekers etc, so it'd be interesting to consider who's more silent under a 'real name' policy

mia, to random
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

'Germany and France will jointly spend €2.1m (£1.8m) to further research the provenance of African heritage objects in their national museums’ collections, which could prepare the ground for their eventual return.' https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/19/france-germany-research-provenance-african-objects-national-museums

mia, to random
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

Academic friends starting another year and wondering about the AI elephant in the assessment room, have you seen (or written) good policies on AI in university teaching?

For example, @ryancordell shared his, including the classic phrase '| am not keen to spend hours of my one precious life reading prose entirely generated by an LLM'.

In case you can see bluesky links without a login: https://bsky.app/profile/ryancordell.bsky.social/post/3kj6qeephfe2o

mia, to ai
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

National Museum in Norway shares a prototype semantic collection search tool. Uses various models from OpenAI to generate image captions then vectors to expand searches.
Tord Nilsen: 'we are currently in a beta phase where feedback from users is crucial to evaluate and adjust the search tool' https://beta.nasjonalmuseet.no/collection/

#MuseTech #AI4LAM #AI #search

simon, to random
@simon@simonwillison.net avatar

With the benefit of hindsight, my post from a few days ago "It's OK to call it Artificial Intelligence" was a bad post. It ended up being confrontational and rude, and it didn't get across the point I had intended to convey. Here's an apology and a final attempt at clarifying my position: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jan/9/what-i-should-have-said-about-ai/

mia,
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

@simon I have no idea if my compromise works, but I'll accept an invitation to talk about 'AI in libraries' then say '(for now) AI is just fancy autocorrect / statistics made sexy / machine learning' in the first minute of my talk.

I gave up being more precise because nobody knew they actually wanted to learn about ML until they knew what it was, while everyone thinks they should know something about AI.

mia, to random
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

I keep seeing people saying 'the media hasn't reported on issue x', when it has been reported. Do they mean 'I haven't seen the articles on my social media'?

mia,
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

@Chris do you mean when people say 'MSM won't report this?!?!'? (ugh)

I think this is a different vibe, more bewildered than trying to hit an emotional button. But not bewildered enough to try a news search...

mia, to random
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

'British Library cyber attack costs still unconfirmed'

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/british-library-cyber-attack-costs-still-unconfirmed

mia, to random
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

Front page of today's FT. Sigh.

anj, to random

Seems I need an FT subscription to find out what’s going on? https://code4lib.social/@g3om4c/111706045600971296

mia,
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

@anj

mia, to random
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

@ftrain, To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare:

'All you have to do is look at a tree—any tree will do—to see how badly our disciplines serve us. Evolutionary theory, botany, geography, physics, hydrology, countless poems, paintings, essays, and stories—all trying to make sense of the tree. We need them all, the whole fragile, interdependent ecosystem. No one has got it right yet.'

https://www.wired.com/story/own-future-artificial-intelligence-read-shakespeare/

mia, to random
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

I've noticed a few people commenting on not reaching their 'reading goals' for the year, so this A.Word.A.Day quote seemed timely:

In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. -Mortimer J. Adler, philosopher, educator, and author (28 Dec 1902-2001)

mia, to random
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

There are no museums on a dead planet. How much will flood defences and other climate change mitigations to save the collections cost?

So not cool, BM, especially when BP are busy rebranding as 'Back to Petroleum'.

British Museum announces new £50m BP deal to fund masterplan - Museums Association

https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/2023/12/british-museum-announces-new-50m-bp-deal-to-fund-masterplan/

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“Bad AI Business Models, Lazy AI Criticism, Queer Holiday-themed movies, and a bunch of links”

First weeknotes in a while. Also first movie note in a weeknote in a while. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/weeknote-12/

mia,
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

@baldur 'spotty production values, uneven acting, but delivers on emotional and social authenticity' hit a queer film festival bruise I'd suppressed for a long time!

Could you possibly add the women's titles to your great list of AI critics? IIRC there's a full professor and a couple of other doctors on the list

mia, to random
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

Cool tool! MastodonContentMover

'a command-line tool that downloads your posts from one Mastodon instance, saving them as a set of files on your computer, and then re-posts them on any other Mastodon instance.

[so that] Mastodon users [can] move content they value when migrating from one instance to another, which is not currently possible within Mastodon itself.'

https://mastodoncontentmover.github.io/

mia,
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

@NatureMC I haven't tried it as I'm not planning to move instances. Also, Java. But I figured it'd help someone somewhere to know about it

mia, to random
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

Why Covid is still flooring some people - BBC News

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67726685

Anecdotally, I've noticed this - some people are having a really rough time with covid. It's worth digging out those masks for public transport and shops, even if you'd feel weird in one at work or socialising

jonty, to random
@jonty@chaos.social avatar

I cannot get over this salesdude filing a Freedom of Information request with THE BRITISH LIBRARY asking if they have "any paper documents in storage"

mia,
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

@jonty lol. Out of interest, when was this sent?

mia, to random
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

There are so many joyful things in this roundup of design in 2023, including some simple interventions in the environment https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/dec/13/best-designs-and-designers-of-2023-a-chunk-of-glossy-sexiness

mia, to random
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

Looking for a unique job that needs imagination and technical expertise; linking the worlds of ancient manuscripts and algorithms, historical newspapers and large language models? Make a difference at one of the world's biggest libraries

BL Labs Technical Lead, £51k, closes Dec 22
https://www.vercida.com/uk/jobs/bl-labs-technical-lead-british-library-st-pancras

More on this job, also Product Owner, Research Software Engineer and Test Engineer posts in the @BL_DigiSchol Universal Viewer product team, close Jan 3 https://livingwithmachines.ac.uk/digital-posts-at-the-british-library/
https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2023/09/join-the-british-librarys-universal-viewer-product-team.html

#JobFairy #JobKlaxon #RSE #UniversalViewer #IIIF #MuseTech #DigitalHumanities #ComputationalHumanities #HASS

joelanman, to gardening
@joelanman@hachyderm.io avatar

a small paddling pool/pond like this, do you need to clean it? If so how?
#gardening

mia,
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

@joelanman and in London, how do you stop mosquitoes breeding in it?

simon, to random
@simon@simonwillison.net avatar

I kind of wish Python virtual environments were just called "environments" - maybe that would make them a tiny bit less intimidating to newcomers

mia,
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

@billseitz @simon I like 'containers'. And ideally there'd be one, well documented for newbies, super-reliable way to do them, swap between and return to them

mia, to random
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

Melbourne / Naarm / Australian sewers, is there somewhere good to donate old stashes of fabric?

mia, to ai
@mia@hcommons.social avatar

I really like this scrolly visual explainer of generative AI terms like 'transformer', and it's a good overview of how machine learning models can understand your prompts and generate new sentences in response

https://ig.ft.com/generative-ai/

#AI #explainer #MachineLearning #GenAI #jargon

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