Archive for 2018
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Integrating Crowdsourcing Projects for Archives Using IIIF
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🔖 Thinking with Linked Data; Representing History –
Given these limitations, historians need to work hard to prevent the data model itself from becoming a site of distortion and misrepresentation that wrongly projects a false degree of stability and permanence. For example, in the community I am studying, information about partner relations between adults comes in many forms. There are few clearly documented sacramental marriages, but many couples are listed together as parents of children, and others are discussed in terms of family units in ledgers and correspondence. In my data model, I have decided to use the Relationship Vocabulary property “Spouse Of” to be the predicate connecting these individuals. That choice signals the likely relationship in question, but it offers us no way to note the precarity and uncertainty of those relationships under slavery. Does the RDF structure lend an impression of stability and fixity to that relationship that likely does not reflect the historical reality? It may. And it is my job as a scholar to adequately make those possible distortions clear throughout the many facets or the project.
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🔖 Jen Manion: The Performance of Transgender Inclusion –
But the real reason we need to rethink the place of pronouns in public life is even more significant: the advancement of transgender rights. What a distraction the pronoun go-round has become. I have sat through countless meetings in all kinds of spaces facilitated by well-intended people, often gay, sometimes straight, seldom trans, who righteously assert compulsory pronoun identification on everyone in the room and then never speak another word about transgender issues, rights, or people. It is as if this achievement — making space for pronouns — is the beginning and the end of the needs of transgender people. College students report doing this in meetings of all kinds and not really understanding why they do it. No one is doing anything to educate themselves or each other about the widespread discrimination and violence faced by transgender people, but by golly, every person will have a chance to state their pronoun! Now, if only people actually listened when said pronoun is declared — and remembered it — and used it every time in reference to that person. Then we would be getting somewhere, but that never happens. People cannot hear what you said or they forget it or mix it up with someone else’s anyway. What a thoroughly misguided good intention.
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🔖 UCLA Community Archives Lab –
The Community Archives Lab at UCLA explores the ways that independent, identity-based memory organizations document, shape, and provide access to the histories of minoritized communities, with a particular emphasis on understanding their affective, political, and artistic impact.
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When basil has gone to seed: contemplative pesto
We are growing three kinds of basil in our garden: “regular” basil, purple basil, and Magic Mountain basil. The regular basil and Magic Mountain basil have been thriving quite a bit; the purple basil, less so, as it is growing at the base of the regular basil plant. But the other two, my goodness. The regular old basil was going to seed, though, much to the chagrin of my partner. I’d promised for weeks on end to do something with all that basil, as the stems grew woodier, and as the flowers turned from brilliant white to the brown of kraft paper. Meanwhile, the Magic Mountain basil also grew tall and bushy, went to flower, but only because that’s what it’s supposed to do.
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🔖 ‘It’s Time to Decolonize Environmentalism’: An Interview with Zina Saro-Wiwa –
Another reason indigenous environmentalism is overshadowed I think is because of Pentecostal religion, which has altered Africa’s relationship with the natural world and dampened this connection. Animism, for all its faults as a belief system, described and forged strong relationships between humans and the natural world. For me a Niger Delta environmentalism has to implicate invisible ecosystems, such as spiritual and religious beliefs. We also have to face our own capitalistic desires and manage them. Niger Deltans aren’t anti-capitalist wood nymphs. For want of a better phrase, it’s time to decolonize Environmentalism, democratize the conversation and create a more nuanced approach to environmental challenges.
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Evidence of Them: Digitization, Preservation, and Labor
This is a lightly edited version of the presentation I gave as part of as a part of Session 507: Digitization IS/NOT Preservation at the 2018 Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting. The session was overall pure fire, with thoughtful, funny, provocative, and challenging presentations by Julia Kim, Frances Harrell, Tre Berney, Andrew Robb, Snowden Becker, Fletcher Durant, Siobhan Hagan, and Sarah Werner. My heart goes out to all of them. All of the images used in the presentation were adapted from The Art of Google Books.
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Lightweight rights modeling and linked data publication for online cultural heritage
Institutional websites and aggregation initiatives like Europeana and DPLA seek to facilitate access and re-use of vast amounts of digitized cultural material online. Metadata about digitized content has long been identified as a key asset to facilitate these ends, and these initiatives have created metadata frameworks that enhance interoperability across information spaces and systems. Expressing the conditions for re-use that derive from intellectual property rights remains an issue, however. Published (meta)datasets still often indicate copyrights and other access conditions using ad-hoc descriptions that specific to sectors, languages and national contexts. Creative Commons is a great leap forward, as it provides a standardized set of licenses and public domain marks that can be used to label open digital heritage resources in an interoperable way. Its focus on full openness, however, means that it cannot be used for a significant part of cultural collections published online. Recently, W3C has published the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) for representing policies that combine permissions and duties. -
Evidence of Them: Digitization, Preservation, and Labor
This is a lightly edited version of the presentation I gave as part of as a part of Session 507: Digitization IS/NOT Preservation at the 2018 Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting. The session was overall pure fire, with thoughtful, funny, provocative, and challenging presentations by Julia Kim, Frances Harrell, Tre Berney, Andrew Robb, Snowden Becker, Fletcher Durant, Siobhan Hagan, and Sarah Werner. My heart goes out to all of them. All of the images used in the presentation were adapted from The Art of Google Books.
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A Minimum Viable Strategy for Archives and Linked Data using Schema.org
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What Can Linked Data do for Archives
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Mixed Feelings: Negotiating Mixed and Multiracial Identity, Racial Imposter Syndrome, and Passing for White While Serving Diverse Student Populations
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🔖 Can the San Francisco Bay Be Saved From the Sea? –
A massive wetlands-restoration effort aims to protect wildlife, people, and real estate from the worst effects of climate change.
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🔖 Meet the Anarchists Making Their Own Medicine –
For instance, Laufer said that many of the medicines for orphan diseases are made of biological material, such as fungus. … Since biological cells are self-replicating, this would simply require one user to grow a sufficient amount of cells for themselves before shipping some cells to another user who would repeat the process, similar to the way people ‘seed’ a media file on torrent sites.
The question, then, would be how to ship the biological material cheaply and without getting caught. To this end, Four Thieves is investigating the use of books and CD cases as grow media for biological precursors. Mycelia are basically the ‘roots’ of many fungi and feed on cellulose, which is found in abundance in the pages of a book. So Laufer and his collaborators began injecting books with mycelium, which feed upon the pages and grow out of the book. Similarly, compact discs are similar enough to petri dishes that if they’re streaked properly they can be used as a growth medium for bacteria and other biological precursors. The advantage of this is that Four Thieves members using the BioTorrent site could ship these cells using the cheaper “media rate” charged by the US Postal Service for items like books and compact discs while avoiding scrutiny from law enforcement.
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🔖 Boot Boyz Biz’s new collab is a tribute to women like Ursula K. Le Guin –
How do you invite people to slow down and spend more time investigating phenomena important to our time? Can we turn closets into libraries which reflect important ideas into a public sphere? Can garments be effective as living mobile archives on cotton? We want to consider the idea of ‘looking back to where we’ve come from to understand where we are now and where we’re heading’, and make it a practice. We want our projects to be reminders that everything is connected and constantly changing. Exploring and digesting ideas improves and expands us. In addition to disseminating information we want to promote the process of critical investigation through making. Any of our projects could live as an individual zine, film, podcast, article, exhibition, poster etc, though we believe garments have a unique potential to translate important information.
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What one says and does not say: vulnerability, leadership, and professional trajectories
An extended reflection on professional trajectories, leadership, vulnerability, community, and finding my voice, written as part of my participation in the IT Leadership Program. -
🔖 Beyond the Viewer: fragments and links in annotation space –
What we also want to do is freely reuse the IIIF model itself, to describe things in manifests without publishing a new manifest for a conventional viewer to load. And then using these extracts, these collected descriptions, to generate new user experiences. The IIIF model is fantastic for this.
All these millions of published IIIF manifests don’t just exist to be processed by viewers. We can cut up the model in different ways, we can say new things by making new IIIF resource fragments as part of a content editorial process. This might involve making new manifests that can be viewed in a manifest viewer — but it might involve arbitrary creation of annotations, ranges, or alternate sequences, and use of those new resources behind the scenes to generate new user interfaces on the server as well as the client. And extend the familiarity of hyperlinking into digitised content: the creation of linking annotations in and out of IIIF resources.
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Beyond hearing (one another): radical empathy in archives-as-workplace
I am writing this amidst being crammed into a seat flying back from New York City, after a few days of intensive meetings. Between a number of good and less ideal things, my mind has felt really unsettled lately, and I’m working through some professional malaise, and feeling a bit rudderless. In an attempt to give myself something be myself optimistic about and to set some direction, I reread Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor’s Archivaria article “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in Archives”. Part of their analysis outlines four affective shifts in archival relationships based on radical empathy - those between 1) archivist and records creator, 2) archivist and records subject, 3) archivist and user, and 4) archivist and larger community. Given a long list of topics on my mind (precarity, developing inclusive workplaces and cultures, my own uncertain pathway), it felt like there was plenty of space to identify other shifts.
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Implementing the IIIF Content Search API at Stanford
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🔖 Arbella Bet-Shlimon, "Preservation or Plunder? The ISIS Files and a History of Heritage Removal in Iraq" –
Kirk H. Sowell, a consultant who publishes the risk newsletter Inside Iraqi Politics (for which Al-Tamimi is a contributor), initiated an exchange with me in response to a defense of the NYT’s Iraqi critics that I had written on Twitter. He opened with a tweet reading, “Point me to the Iraqi newspaper which does in-depth investigative journalism & I’ll happily read it.” Puzzled by the relevance of this comment to a statement about the ethics of removing archives for private ownership, I asked Sowell, “Just to be clear: your take is that Iraqis should stay quiet about their archives being taken to the U.S. because they don’t yet have the means to establish a [NYT]-caliber paper?” He responded, “Absolutely.” (Callimachi herself “liked” this last tweet.)
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🔖 Lukas Koster and Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer, "FAIR Principles for Library, Archive and Museum Collections: A proposal for standards for reusable collections" –
We deem it necessary for collections to be FAIR. When collections do not meet the FAIR criteria, these collections will be harder to use by teachers, researchers and enterprises. Collections that will not be FAIR will run the risk of being out of the picture, as will in the long term their institution. The objective of this article is to provide a compact, and practical list of guidelines for achieving reusability of LAM collections that can be fairly easily applied by LAM institutions according to their own roadmaps and resources
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Digital Libraries at Stanford: Infrastructure, Services, & Projects for Accessible Content
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Feedback Frameworks for Developers
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🔖 Karen Gregory - DATA AND MAGICK: ALEATORY TECHNOLOGIES –
While it is true that cards “speak” through the symbols or signs that they carry, we can also look to what cards can “do” or what can be “done with” cards, and we can see that a card is not entirely meaningless outside of a semiotic context. Cards, most basically, can be flipped. They can also be used, as Ian Hacking (1988) has shown, as agents of randomization, and simple playing cards were not only employed in the history of the search for telepathy, but cards as an “organizational system” (Hayles 2005, Chun 2005) played an important role in the history of computing, making possible serial functions and memory.
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🔖 Peter Molnar - The internet that took over the Internet –
The Internet is still present, but it’s shrinking. Content people really care about, customised looking homepages, carefully curated photo galleries are all diminishing. It would be fantastic to return to a world of personal websites, but that needs the love and work that used to be put into them, just like 20 years ago.
At this point in time, most people don’t seem to relate to their online content. It’s expendable. We need to make them care about it, and simpler tooling, on it’s own, will not help with the lack of emotional connection.
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just testing again…
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testing a Workflow/Working Copy note posting workflow on my iPad
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🔖 How Do Institutional Philosophies Manifest in Online Collections? –
Undertaken while the museum is closed for a transformational expansion, SFMOMA Lab is conducting a series of explorations into key questions of contemporary museumhood. As part of research focused on digital storytelling, we’re investigating how museums (and their GLAM peers) communicate internally, interinstitutionally, and, in particular, with their many audiences. We’re also interested in how an institution’s professed mission, brand identity, and culture — its philosophy — help shape the various communications, engagements, and experiences it provides for its audiences. Here we address that question by examining the ways such institutional philosophies manifest in online collection presentations at three peer museums. To help inform our internal thinking on this topic, we interviewed experts from those institutions as well as key members of the SFMOMA team. What follows is a survey of our findings and some speculation on SFMOMA’s future direction in this arena.
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🔖 Esmat Elhalaby - Archives In and Of the Global South –
The printed matter of the modern Arab or Indian or Chinese mind was simply the bearer of sedition and rebellion or a vehicle for propaganda and profit, never an arena of theory or thinking. Therefore, to write a new history of these ideas, a new archive must be raised. How to raise this new archive, much of it now decaying in Third World libraries that are themselves crumbling under the conditions of structural readjustment or withering away thanks to a growing chauvinist disregard for particular pasts, is the task before us.
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indieweb + code4lib = ♥
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Sending WebSub notifications from static sites using Netlify functions
As part of my iterative intentions for 2018, I started a project to rebuild and simplify my website. I’ve used Jekyll for quite some time (either by itself or with Octopress), and as part of the latest iteration of the site, I’ve been working to align the site more with Indieweb principles, and to smooth the deployment path for my site by hosting it on Netlify.
One challenge with Jekyll and other static site generators is that “dynamic-ish” functionality, including sending notifications through protocols like WebSub. The trouble is knowing where these actions fit into the build process for your site: you don’t want to send the notifications before your site gets built, or pushed to the CDN hosting your site. Recently, Netlify announced a private beta for its new Netlify Functions service, which provides lambda-style functions deployed as part of your site deployment. One of the neat features that exists as of the beta is the ability to trigger the functions via Netlify events, like when your site successfully deploys.
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sparkinthedark workshop at code4lib 2018{:.h-event}: understanding the metaphor of data processing
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🎵 Sloan - The Day Will Be Mine
just some time is all i need to turn it around
put me on a postcard mail me back home -
🔖 Olieman et al., "Finding Talk About the Past in the Discourse of Non-Historians" –
Via Ryan Shaw’s presentation at nlp4arc 2018.
A heightened interest in the presence of the past has given rise to the new field of memory studies, but there is a lack of search and research tools to support studying how and why the past is evoked in diachronic discourses. Searching for temporal references is not straightforward. It entails bridging the gap between conceptually-based information needs on one side, and term-based inverted indexes on the other. Our approach enables the search for references to (intersubjective) historical periods in diachronic corpora. It consists of a semantically-enhanced search engine that is able to find references to many entities at a time, which is combined with a novel interface that invites its user to actively sculpt the search result set. Until now we have been concerned mostly with user-friendly retrieval and selection of sources, but our tool can also contribute to existing efforts to create reusable linked data from and for research in the humanities.
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🔖 Benjamin Kuipers: Why don't I take military funding? –
My stand is a testimony, saying “I will not devote my life’s work toward making warfare more effective.” I am also trying to show, by example, that one can be a successful and productive computer scientist, even while taking this stand.
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Socially Impactful Digital Libraries and/as Challenges to NLP Application
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🔖 Stephanie Ricker Schulte, “United States Digital Service: How “Obama’s Startup” Harnesses Disruption and Productive Failure to Reboot Government” –
This article tracks the culture of start-ups as it entered government through the U.S. Digital Service (USDS), a new agency and self-described White House “start-up” designed to rewrite the government’s digital presence. This critical discourse analysis traces the cultural history of the start-up, showing how and why it became an American ideal and icon of American power. This explains how and why the start-up became a cultural infrastructure for the federal government and how it became a commonsense solution to both technological and civic problems and a model for “venture government.” This article concludes that ventures like USDS allowed the government to harness industry popularity, expertise, and credibility to tap venture capitalist modes of production and to capitalize on cultural associations with disruption and failure in the hopes of fortifying public trust in government. However, it also provided technology industry unprecedented influence in federal institutions for both better and worse.
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webmention cupcakes with tantek in the background at Homebrew Website Club SF
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🔖 Joulin et al.: "Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification" –
This paper explores a simple and efficient baseline for text classification. Our experiments show that our fast text classifier fastText is often on par with deep learning classifiers in terms of accuracy, and many orders of magnitude faster for training and evaluation. We can train fastText on more than one billion words in less than ten minutes using a standard multicore CPU, and classify half a million sentences among 312K classes in less than a minute.
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↩️ – RSVP: yes
yes, i’m going to the !
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🔖 James Jackson Toth - Too Much Music: A Failed Experiment In Dedicated Listening –
And then one day, a revelation: It occurred to me that it was no longer just difficult to hear all the music I’d amassed, but impossible. I mean literally, mathematically impossible: I calculated that if I lived another, say, 40 years, and spent every minute of those next 40 years — that’s no sleeping, no eating — listening to my collection of music, I would be dead before I could make it all the way through. That means there are records I own today that I will definitely never hear again. It was a sobering thought.
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🔖 Nan Goldin - Artforum International –
I SURVIVED THE OPIOID CRISIS. I narrowly escaped. I went from the darkness and ran full speed into The World. I was isolated, but I realized I wasn’t alone. When I got out of treatment I became absorbed in reports of addicts dropping dead from my drug, OxyContin.
I learned that the Sackler family, whose name I knew from museums and galleries, were responsible for the epidemic. This family formulated, marketed, and distributed OxyContin. I decided to make the private public by calling them to task. My first action is to publish personal photographs from my own history.
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this is an experiment to use a netlify deploy notification (an outgoing webhook) to notify a PuSH hub. the bits are wired together using beehive.
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Notes on ITLP Workshop 1 readings
I completed my reading and viewing assignments for my cohort’s IT Leadership Program Workshop 1 (- at UC Berkeley.) This is a brief set of notes for my own use about how all of them tie together.
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netlify cms posting on mobile is doable but not great. the editor pages are not responsive
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test of netlify cms
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🔖 USGS Earthquake Hazards Program · M 4.4 - 2km SE of Berkeley, CA –
i felt my first earthquake. while i was up late last night working on my website. a magnitude 4.4 earthquake. its origin was 2km SE of Berkeley, CA (37.855, -122.257) at . this is was also an excuse to work more on my website, adding bookmarks and locations to posts, and experimenting with marking up an h-event in the text of a post.
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procrastinating on doing my reading for itlp
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Iterative Intentions for 2018
While I enjoy seeing what my friends are setting their intentions towards in the new year, I don’t really believe in new year’s resolutions for myself. They tend to wear on me heavily whenever I’ve proclaimed a long list of things I’m hoping to get better at. Instead, this year, I’m starting with a very short list. My hope is that I can commit to a small number of good habits at a time, which I can then build on iteratively. I want to have the windows of reinforcement stay small at first (maybe a week or two), and once I feel satisfied about whichever habits I’ve committed to, I can add more. I’m starting with three items: Rebuilding this website: simplified tooling; new layout/style; using and publishing more structured data, and a partial implementation of a stack following Indieweb and Solid principles. The last part is intentionally slippery, but I mostly really care about sending and receiving notifications at this point.