dh+lib review – Page 19

CFP: Computational Creativity Short Papers, ICCC’23

The 14th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC) will take place from June 19-23, 2023 in Federation Hall at the University of Waterloo. ICCC is an annual conference that welcomes papers on different aspects of Computational Creativity (CC), ” on systems that exhibit varying degrees of creative autonomy, on systems that act as creative partners for humans, on frameworks that offer greater clarity or computational felicity for thinking about machine (and human) creativity, on methodologies for building or evaluating CC systems, on approaches to teaching CC in schools and universities or to promoting societal uptake of CC as a field and as a technology, and so on.” Submissions for short papers are due after the long-paper notifications, which allows authors to rework their proposals for resubmission.

From the call:

Short papers offer concise treatments of work and ideas that are better suited to this concentrated format. We anticipate submissions in the short paper category along any or all of the following lines:

Debate Sparks: The short paper format is ideal for provocations that get the community talking. Is there some aspect of CC that you feel deserves more attention from the community?

System Demonstrations: Submissions for the show-and-tell session can be described in a short paper.

CC Translations: Researchers in other fields often do work that we in CC would see as related to our own. We invite those researchers to present such work at ICCC, via a Translations short paper. This is submitted as an extended abstract that summarizes your work in another field.

Nuggets and Gems: short papers on any topic of CC for which one might consider a long paper. In this case, the work will be succinct enough, or at an early enough stage, to warrant the short paper format.

Late Breaking Results: The results of your work (empirical or system-related) may not have been ready for a long-paper submission. Consider submitting that work now in a short-paper format.

CC Bridges: Research communities often retreat into silos and fail to reach out beyond their own borders. A bridging short paper explicitly seeks to create bridges to another field, to foster interdisciplinarity. Unlike a Translations paper, a Bridge is written by a CC researcher wishing to introduce new ideas from beyond our conventional horizons.

Pilot Studies: Have you conducted an initial foray into a research topic that deserves attention? Plant a flag for your research with a short paper.

Grand Challenges: Do you have a proposal for a task that can bring large parts of the community together in a productive collaborative effort?

Meta-Perspectives: Do your experience of the CC community (such as our conferences, workshops, reviewing processes, etc.) move you to write an analysis of how we might do things differently and better?

Field and event reports: Have you taken your CC research into the field, where practitioners and/or commercial partners have explored its uses first hand? Consider writing a short paper about your experiences.

Have you organized a CC-flavored event – a workshop, a tutorial, a seminar series, a postgraduate course, a public debate, an exhibition of CC outputs, or related outreach activity? Consider writing a short paper on your experience and that of your audience.

The deadline for short paper submissions is May 2, 2023, and those accepted will be notified shortly thereafter, on May 19. Proposals must be submitted through the EasyChair platform: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=iccc23.

CFP: Life Narrative and the Digital 2023

The Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna will present Life Narrative and the Digital 2023: Interdisciplinary Conference and Workshop September 26-27 of this year. This combination of conference and workshop, “brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and different career stages to explore the possibilities, uses, and challenges of digital methods and technologies for auto/biographical research and practice.”

From the call, questions of particular interest include:

In what ways can digital methods and technologies aid the study and analysis of biographical data?

How can the digital help us devise innovative pathways to the representation of historical individuals’ lives? (e.g. digital platforms)

To what extent do digital formats of life narration tie in with new trends in auto/biographical scholarship and practice? (e.g. metabiography, relational biography, persona studies, group biography, object biography, etc.)

How do we deal with uncertainty and the issue of data quality in the digital representation of biographical data?

The workshop track of the event will take place on September 26 and will feature short presentations of “work-in-progress, with a strong focus on tools, technologies, software, and methods, and with an emphasis on feedback and exchange,” while the conference portion will occur the following day, September 27, and will follow a traditional conference format, with research papers and panel discussions. The latter will be open to the public, though participation in both formats is free of charge.

Proposals for 300-500 words for both tracks will be accepted until May 26, with notifications of acceptance by June 23. Selected contributions will be published in the European Journal of Life Writing.

CFP: SWIB23 – 15th Semantic Web in Libraries Conference

The 15th annual Semantic Web in Libraries (SWIB) will take place from September 11-13 in Berlin, Germany. The event will be in person for the first time in three years and “will have more interactive formats in order to get the most out of participants coming together physically in one place.” The conference is an established event “where IT staff, developers, librarians, and researchers from all over the world meet and mingle and learn from each other,” with a focus on Linked Open Data (LOD) in libraries and related organizations.

From the call, organizers appreciate proposals on the following and related topics:

Projects & Applications

integration of LOD into productive library applications
re-use of LOD (from libraries, Wikidata and other sources)
presenting & visualizing LOD
graphical user interfaces for interaction with LOD (e.g. editing or annotation)
(other) applications in the context of open science

Technology & Tools (focus on Open Source software)

data transformation/integration/cleansing/enhancement/mapping/interlinking/validation
data flow management, read/write linked data, providing updates & syncing data sources
machine learning applications in/for libraries
integration of symbolic and subsymbolic approaches

Standards & Best Practices

implementation of FAIR data principles, interoperability
open web standards relevant for libraries, data models, usable APIs
application profiles & provenance information
working with controlled vocabularies & knowledge organization systems
preservation, maintenance & sustainability

Culture

decentralization, federated structures
consolidating open source projects
collaboration, crowdsourcing, community building and empowerment
diversity sensitivity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility

Proposals are due by April 24. Abstracts of 1000-1500 characters should be submitted to the conference system: https://www.conftool.org/swib23.

JOB: Digital Initiatives Librarian, University of Idaho

From the announcement:

The University of Idaho Library seeks an innovative, flexible, and highly collaborative librarian who will help promote, develop, and maintain the digital services and projects of the library and the relationships that make these services and projects possible. Reporting to the Dean, this position will work within the Digital Scholarship and Open Strategies (DSOS) unit and closely collaborate with other library units such as Special Collections and Archives and Research and Experiential Learning. This position will work with the Head of DSOS to oversee the day-to-day operations of the digital initiatives laboratory and will work closely with members of the DSOS unit and Special Collections & Archives department to maintain and monitor the functionality of the libraries many online representations, including the library website, digital collections, open educational resources, and the many digital scholarship projects created and made accessible via the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CD?L). This position will also play a role in the administration, promotion, and development of the CD?L, working with CD?L fellows and collaborators on a variety of digital scholarship and open publishing projects. The ideal candidate will have an excellent attention for detail and a capacity to learn new skills and technologies, but need not be proficient in programming or systems. We are looking for someone who will take pride in the library’s innovative digital products and services, and who has the oral and written communication skills to express the importance of these assets to both the university community and communities outside the university.

JOB: Digital Repository Services Librarian, Iowa State University

From the announcement:

The Iowa State University Library is seeking applications for a dynamic and forward-thinking Repository Services Librarian who will work collaboratively within and outside of the Digital Scholarship and Initiatives (DSI) department to lead the digital repository unit.

DSI is comprised of specialists that support digital collections, digital scholarship, and the digital repository. The Repository Services Librarian will manage the digital repository and supervise a staff of three in support of digital repository services and a platform which provides free, open access to digital materials that embody the scholarly, cultural, and creative activities of Iowa State University. Example services include the facilitated deposit of research material and publications as well as the maintenance of ISU research profiles and support for the ISU open access initiatives.

The Repository Services Librarian will be instrumental in the continued success of the digital repository, now in its 10th year, by liaising with participating repository faculty and staff, departments, and the Graduate College on the evolution and value of the digital repository and digital repository services. The Repository Services Librarian will evaluate programs, services, policies, and processes of the unit and will work collaboratively with other library units and departments to meet the goals of DSI and the library. As part of their work, the Repository Services Librarian will participate in discussions and working groups focused on library resource discovery, open scholarship and scholarly communication, and collection development.

Candidates for this position must have a strong desire to collaborate with faculty, students, and other library units to develop and support the ISU digital repository. Candidates must also be willing to introduce the digital repository and support services to faculty, students, and staff across campus. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to refine the new open-source platform that ISU recently migrated to (DSpace) and engage with a supportive and eager R1 institution campus community.

JOB: Research Data Curation Coordinator, University of Houston Libraries

From the announcement:

The University of Houston seeks a Research Data Curation Coordinator to lead data services across the research lifecycle. Reporting to the Head of Research Services within the University Libraries, the Research Data Curation Coordinator will establish partnerships in the Libraries and on campus to address existing and emerging research data needs of faculty and students and collaborate with researchers to develop data skills through workshops, classroom instruction, and direct interaction with ongoing research projects and infrastructural initiatives. This position supervises one full-time librarian with the possibility of additional personnel based on demonstrated need.

In these pursuits, the incumbent will build relationships with campus partners engaging in research administration, including the Division of Research, University Information Technology, and the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Data Science Institute. This position also provides opportunities to collaborate with library colleagues to promote research data best practices for accessibility, archiving, assessment, attribution, and discoverability. There is potential growth for the position in areas of data analysis, data visualization, and other areas of digital scholarship.

POST: John2Vec, or embedding Dewey’s philosophy

Elisabetta Rocchetti and Tommaso Locatelli (both University of Milan) have authored a post on the ISLAB at Università degli Studi di Milano’s Tales from the ISLab blog, “John2Vec, or embedding Dewey’s philosophy.” This post describes using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN), in this case, word2vec, on the massive text corpus of the writings of philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952).

This technique allowed the researchers to identify “how vector operations relate to semantic relations”:

For instance, the nearest embedding to Kant is Hegel; Empiricism is placed next to Rationalism; nature and universe embeddings are next to each other. These examples show that Euclidean distances relate to semantic similarities.

To further demonstrate word2vec potential, we try to extract complex relations using vector operations. By adding the difference between two semantically related terms, such as idealism and Hegel, to another embedding, such as Kant, we obtain the vector associated to rationalism. Equivalently, we are comparing Hegel to Kant to find out which is Kant’s school of thoughts. This experiment demonstrates the possibility of extracting analogies through vector operations involving word2vec’s embeddings [2].

The authors go on to use Dewey’s writings to examine semantic shift:

Semantic shift is a phenomenon that concern the evolution of a word usage. Indeed, the meaning of a word is not fixed once for all and can change over generations, lifetimes or geographical regions.

In this case, semantic shift was used to track Dewey’s changing thought process over time – for instance, which philosophers he’s referencing at different periods of his life and career – as well as for the change in concepts mentioned in relation to education over time.

As the authors note in their closing paragraph, “Computational natural language processing methods can be of great interest for social sciences such as philosophy: experts in this fields can benefit from these tools and techniques to analyse its history and evolution, automatically extracting relevant concepts and thoughts.” Information workers similarly can use ANN’s like word2vec in their own research, or as part of their toolset when working on collaborative projects with others.

RESOURCE: Counter Narratives in Practice

The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion, and Cultural Heritage at the Rare Book School is launching “Counter Narratives in Practice,” a podcast series about multicultural heritage collections, storytelling, and representation in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums, and beyond. The Mellon fellows worked in three groups: the Pacific Time Zone Group, Central Time Zone Group, and the Eastern Time Zone Group, producing a total of 6 episodes.

Descriptions of the episodes created by each group, from an email from the fellows:

The Pacific Time Zone Group produced the podcast episodes “Archiving Political Histories that Shape Education” and “Disconnection and Accessibility in the Archive.” Guests highlight the roles of Indigenous advocacy, settler colonialism, disability, and accessibility in archival collections.

The Central Time Zone Group produced the podcast episodes “We Were Never Silent: Immigrant Narratives & Caribbean Print Culture as Counter Narrative” and “We Were Never Silent: Bilingual Text in the Ottoman Empire & Pidgin English in Chinese Text as Counter Narratives.” Discussants explore immigration, oral history, and music as they relate to formal and informal institutions of memory.

The Eastern Time Zone Group produced the podcast episodes “Hidden Histories: African American, Asian American, and Afro-Asian Relationality” and “Hidden Histories: Immigrant Farm Workers and Black Intellectual Histories.” Guests discuss Florida Farmworkers, Covid-19, and the importance of documenting marginalized stories.

EVENT: Professional Pathways in the Black Digital

Temple University Libraries is hosting a virtual workshop on April 27, “Professional Pathways in the Black Digital.” From the workshop description:

Digital tools are being used in a plethora of ways to study and serve the lived experiences and cultures of people across the African continent and Diaspora. These digital tools can include digital mapping, XR technologies (e.g., virtual reality, augmented reality), artificial intelligence (AI), and other emerging technologies. While these tools are increasingly available at universities, many faculty, graduate students, independent researchers, teachers, and activist/community advocates are still working to understand whether or not these tools are of value to their work. This virtual workshop will bring together 5 of speakers who have experience in building Black digital projects, organizing digital humanities centers, using technology to advocate for their communities, and incorporating technology into their teaching and research about Black people. Not only will they share about their research and career trajectories, but they will also answer specific, individual questions in a small group format.

Speakers include Isis Semaj-Hall (University of the West Indies, Mona), Kimberly Annece Henderson (NYPL’s Schomburg Center), Walid Kilonzi (Fallohide), Damien McDuffie (Black Terminus AR), and Faithe J. Day (UC Santa Barbara).

EVENT: AI and Archives: Explorations, Possibilities and Challenges Symposium

Women in Focus, Full Stack Feminism, and the Sussex Humanities Lab are hosting the AI and Archives: Explorations, Possibilities and Challenges Symposium. The full-day hybrid symposium is on April 27, with the in-person portions taking place at the University of Sussex Sussex Humanities Lab.

From the symposium description:

AI and Archives: Explorations, Possibilities and Challenges explores the possibilities and challenges afforded by AI in archives, and does so specifically from an intersectional, eco, feminist perspective. The purpose of this symposium is to share interest in, knowledge of and concerns with AI systems in archives and archival practices. We see this event as an opportunity to engage in conversation and to support further formal and informal networking and collaboration…

We start from the position that AI systems inherit the biases of their creators and require a feminist praxis to ensure that AI tools are ethical and equitable and reduce rather than perpetuate existing problematic hierarchies and power structures in archives and other cultural heritage institutions. Invited speakers include Dr Lise Jaillant, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Loughborough University, who is running three AHRC-funded international projects on Archives and Artificial Intelligence, including the AURA Network.

EVENT: Inclusive and Ethically-Informed Approaches to Digital Projects

The ACRL Digital Scholarship Section (DSS), in association with ACRL DSS Digital Humanities Discussion Group, will present Inclusive and Ethically-Informed Approaches to Digital Projects, a program featuring presentations on digital project work with a focus on studies that highlight inclusive, ethically-minded approaches. From the talk abstract:

Molly Roy and Miriam Posner will each present a case study that highlights the considerations for intentionality around inclusive, ethically-minded approaches to digital project work. Molly will speak about her work on the No Boundaries archive project with Gesel Mason and Miriam will discuss digital humanities work and ethical collaborations with digital project contributors.

The program will take place virtually on April 27 at 3:00pm CST.

Registration can be found here.