30472 research outputs found
Sort by
AI, Copyright, and Open Licensing
No full textFor many years, proponents of open culture suggested that more liberal licenses were in line with their ethos. More restrictive licenses, it was felt, would restrict possible future reuses that could not be anticipated. For the past few years, one such "unanticipated" use has come to the fore: the training of large language models. This chapter theorises the unintended consequences of AI training on open-access cultures and views. While arguing that AI training is actually only a logical extension of the text and data mining that OA advocates promised, the danger foreseen here is that those who might otherwise make their work open will now retreat behind paywalls despite germinative “transformative use” court rulings in the US
The Archive at the End of the World: Speculative Preservation and the Politics of Loss
No full textThis chapter proposes the possibility that future textual ecologies will inherit an archive marked not by abundance, as is often supposed, but by profound loss, whether from climate catastrophe, economic disaster, or digital decay. How might textual ecologies prepare for such an archive? Drawing on theories of dark archives, disaster librarianship, and “post-apocalyptic computing,” this chapter develops a speculative preservation framework that treats redundancy, community mirroring, and federated metadata as anticipatory responses to (textual) ecological instability. Rather than assuming infinite reproducibility and perpetual abundance, this chapter centres loss as a constitutive horizon for future textual cultures, asking what new forms of reading, ethics, and governance emerge when preservation is no longer guaranteed
AI and the Gothic
No full textFor as long as technology has existed, there have been those who are afraid of its implications and wish to roll back its progress. One way in which this has traditionally been effected is through the use of gothic tropes to render new technologies as frightful or vampiric upon either labour or life. In this chapter, I explore the ways that gothic aspects are applied to the new breed of large language models, broadly dubbed AI. Taking a base history of artificial life and its intersection with gothic literatures, such as Frankenstein, but also more contemporary touchstones, this chapter aims to understand how gothic rhetorics influence societal uptake and acceptance or rejection of new technological inventions. This chapter will naturally also explore the unnaturalness of supposedly "playing God" and creating artificial life, a trope very much rooted in gothic traditions
The Dark Web
No full textWith 5.52 billion internet users in 2024, the world wide web is today at least as prevalent as any of its predecessor media forms. In truth, the internet is everywhere and its terminologies – “to Google” – have entered the public lexicon. However, beneath the surface veneer of this twenty-first century convenience lurks another layer of the internet, normally hidden from view. This so-called “dark web”, a space of illicit markets and heavily encrypted communications that encourage anonymity, is powered by a series of sophisticated technologies.
This introductory book offers a concise sociological and technical analysis of the technologies that make up this dark web, charting the histories, technicalities, and uses for a range of different underground services. Assuming an interested, but not necessarily technical, reader, this book presents clear technological analyses and insightful sociological critiques of the technologies in question. Covering underground technologies and services such as The Onion Routing Project (Tor), hidden web services, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), cryptocurrency and privacy coins such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Monero (XMR), and dark markets, the book also speaks to the legality and ethics, not only of these tools, but of the services to which they facilitate access.
By shining a light into the hidden and dark spaces of the internet, this book provides its readers with the knowledge they need to understand the contemporary darknet environment
Repetition and Return: The Politics of Episodicity in Star Trek: Voyager
No full textForthcoming work on Voyage
Rage Against the Machine: The Politics of Open Access, Large Language Models, and the Reaction Against Open
No full textFor over two decades now, a select group of scientists and researchers have called for academic publishing to harness the digital abundance of the internet and the world wide web. This movement – dubbed "open access" – has called for the open and free availability and re-use of scholarly material. For the longest time, the key arguments for such access centred not only on the epistemic congruence of open practices with research itself, but also on the gross iniquities in scholarly communications on the global stage, fuelled by a voracious for-profit publishing industry that valued returns over scholarship. Meanwhile, governments expressed the more neoliberal view that business access to OA would fuel national economic growth and make academia serve industry, leading to a conflicted political history. In recent days, however, open-access scholarly material has served as the engine that powers the training of so-called AI large language models (LLMs). This has prompted outrage and kickback among substantial portions of the academic and creative community who seek a re-entrenchment of strong copyright principles to guard against AI systems; a rage against the machine. This chapter explores the contradictory motivations and methods of the OA movement and argues that LLMs were an easily foreseen consequence and extension of text and data mining practices. It closes with suggestions of ways to reconcile openness for humanity with the brave new world of artificial intelligence
Atomics
No full textGeorge Orwell wrote several essays that mention the atomic bomb. This chapter examines these sources alongside Nineteen Eighty-Four to show that the atomic bomb was a structuring force for Orwell's novel and thought. Although Orwell died before the true implications of the Cold War -- a term he coined -- were felt, his prescient writing on nuclear war reverberate through his novel
The C.A.R.S. model
No full textBook synopsis: Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 14 Volume Set is the most authoritative, comprehensive and international reference work of its kind. Ground-breaking in its sheer scope – the 2nd edition had almost 3,000 chapters – no other linguistics reference work matches it for sheer broadness of coverage. Over the years it has been a much-loved and invaluable resource for researchers, academics, students and professionals in linguistics, anthropology, education, psychology, language acquisition and pathology, cognitive science, sociology and media/cultural studies. Led by a brand new and outstanding international editorial team, the 3rd edition will be thoroughly modernized to address the considerable growth and development in this field since the previous edition published in 2005. Existing chapters will be revised and updated, obsolete material removed and approximately 300 brand-new chapters will be commissioned to cover newer areas of research such as machine learning and natural language processing. Significant multimedia such as high-quality figures, audio files (highlighting differences in accent and dialects within languages) will be available to complement the text content, and chapters will follow a consistent chapter template in order to provide a logical reading experience for the user. The end-result will be an outstanding and market-leading reference work: modern, fully up to date, easy to navigate via its electronic platform, and logistically and consistently structured. Once again it will be the perfect resource for the modern-day language scholar
Blocked from becoming a physician or nurse because of gender: global state-of-the-art review
Full text linkBackground: Females were historically blocked from or under-represented among physicians, while males were historically discouraged from training as nurses, and previous systematic reviews and meta-analyses have reported the scale of problems such as sexual harassment. There are ongoing attempts at finding solutions, but there is a gap in literature which seeks to understand the surrounding historical, legal and sociocultural reasons why people behave that way.
Methods: We segmented the world into regions and comprehensively reviewed different countries’ laws within an OECD database, World Health Organization data about gender representation presently and historically, published literature about history, and current records of gender-related initiatives in medicine and nursing.
Results: For countries with available data, a global average of 47% of physicians are female, whereas 23% of nurses are male, but both vary widely, ranging 8-82% and 0-79% respectively. Good representation is associated with laws about female or male inclusion in medicine/nursing from the mid-19th century, whereas poor representation is associated with adverse sociocultural gender norms and inadequate or absent laws against workplace gender equality, gender-based violence, and unequal rights within families. We report the strengths and limitations of common solutions to the problem, noting that reactive law enforcement (e.g., through employment tribunals or lawsuits) is rare, and that for physicians/nurses gender inequalities often exist even in countries with laws against them because of historical and sociocultural influences.
Conclusions: A promising solution to the problem is “professional norming” which transforms cultures about how to behave, and what is acceptable behavior, among physicians and nurses
Do corruption experiences promote emigration? Observational and experimental evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa
Full text linkHow does corruption influence emigration decisions? Previous research has focused on the relationship between individuals’ perceptions of corruption and their desire to emigrate internationally. In this paper, we argue that personal experiences of corruption influence the desire to emigrate even more strongly than perceptions in order to escape from extortion and demands for bribes. To explore the relationship between corruption experiences and emigration, we analyse survey data from Afrobarometer alongside an original survey experiment. We use Afrobarometer to model the relationship between different types of corruption experiences on both intentions and specific plans to emigrate. We conduct a vignette experiment in Kenya in which respondents rate the desirability of emigration for a hypothetical countryman with varying experiences of corruption. We find that personal experiences of corruption are a strong push factor for migration, and that this relationship does not vary with education levels. Our study extends the literature by focussing on how personal experiences of corruption shape migration
Data sources:
Access Repository Dashboard
Do you manage Birkbeck Institutional Research Online? Access insider analytics, issue reports and manage access to outputs from your repository in the CORE Repository Dashboard!