1,720,980 research outputs found
In vitro meat as environmental techno-fix
No full textNathan Poirier, a graduate student in sociology, delivers a lecture entitled "In vitro meat as environmental techno-fix." Poirier frames his review of the literature surrounding in vitro meat by examining a variety of definitions of sustainability and proposing new terminologies to guide our thinking about the topic of sustainability and animal agriculture. After giving a brief overview of the environmental effects of animal agriculture, Poirier walks through the process of creating and growing in vitro meat. He concludes his talk by examining the relative sustainability of in vitro meat in comparison with animal agriculture, analyzing a variety of factors. Poirier answers questions from the audience following his lecture. Part of the Library environmental series
Make it explicit: Surfacing Power and Ethics in the CURATE(D) Protocol
No full textIn 2018, the Data Curation Network (DCN) developed the CURATE(D) model, a standardized set of steps for curating research data with an eye toward the FAIR and CARE principles. The CURATE(D) model has proven to be a useful teaching tool for demonstrating data curation best practices; while practical and structured enough to provide a foundation for learners, it also provides enough flexibility to be adaptive for different disciplines and data format needs. The CURATE(D) model has been revised over the years to integrate feedback and keep pace with the evolving data curation profession. In the past year, the DCN has undertaken efforts to rework this model to be responsive to ethical and power considerations highlighted by data sovereignty and data justice movements. This has meant revising the guidance to make explicit the tacit, power-laden assumptions regarding data appraisal and selection criteria, sharing decisions, and the iterative nature of curation. In this presentation, attendees will be invited to compare the previous and current versions of this model, will learn about the revision process, and have the opportunity to provide feedback on the model. Presented at IASSIST 2023 in Philadelphia, PA.Woodbrook, Rachel; Taylor, Shawna; Dolan, Lana Tidwell; Murray, Reina Chano; Narlock, Mikala R.; Calvert, Scout. (2023). Make it explicit: Surfacing Power and Ethics in the CURATE(D) Protocol. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, 10.5281/zenodo.7988032
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Research Libraries, Emerging Technologies—and a Pandemic
Get PDFLast October, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), and EDUCAUSE partnered to explore how research libraries can leverage emerging tech-nologies to meaningfully and productively support research and learning, given ongoing evolutions of digital tools and data collections. Even while we were working on the slippery task of identifying and predicting technologies and processes that could have big impacts on research library objectives, we did not anticipate that a pandemic with world-stopping power might be a scenario we should consider.
Pandemic Advice Not long after the novel coronavirus reached US shores in late Janu-ary 2020, my library, like most others in North America, closed, and staff dispersed to work remotely. We focused on doing as much of our work from home as possible and on providing support for students and faculty who had to suddenly shift the context for learning to an online model. With most labs closed, we grounded ourselves in whatever support for research continu-ity we could engineer. We now know enough about the virus to say that the next few years are uncharted and uncertain, and this uncertainty compounds financial and other strains on research libraries. In the early days of the pandemic, I read some expert advice that stuck with me: people should prepare for pandemics by, among other things, ensuring that the essential functions of society are maintained. In a worst-case scenario, research libraries’ functions that are not maintained could be difficult to restore when we’ve returned to some form of normalcy in the future. So the question is: Given what we’ve learned about promising emerging technologies, what approaches should research libraries take to maintain the most essential and valuable aspects of their work
Keynote: Library Futurisms: Interoperability, Adaptation, and Resilience
Get PDFDr. Scout Calvert\u27s recent projects have traced the social aspects of data-centric knowledge production in lay communities of genealogists, livestock breeders, and citizen scientists. Dr. Calvert also investigates data and metadata practices in libraries and among academic researchers, exploring emerging research methods afforded by new forms of data, and informing data policy issues in academic libraries. This month, Scout concludes her term as a Visiting Program Officer at the Association of Research Libraries, where she has been investigating emerging technologies and practices with positive and transformative potential for research and learning
The Literature of Difference In Cultures of Science
Get PDFReview of The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics, edited by Evelynn M. Hammonds and Rebecca M. Herzig.
The Nature of Difference is a timely addition to conversations about race and genomics, organized so as to allow readers to make new connections between contemporary discourses and the histories of science and race. The text’s selections and the organization of the selections with introductory material are especially helpful, serving as navigational aids to the sometimes astounding statements of racial fact that could otherwise be conversation stoppers. The book would be useful either as a course text or as a collection of primary material for individual research. Students wishing to track the scientific construction of sex and sexuality more directly alongside race should consider pairing this text with Lucy Bland and Laura Doan’s 1998 edited volume of primary sources, Sexology Uncensored. For those looking for analysis of the production of genetic racial difference, Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, edited by Barbara Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah Richardson (2008), keys its essays to genomics, race-based medicine, and genetic ancestry, while Genetic Nature/Culture, edited by Alan Goodman, Deborah Heath, and M. Susan Lindee (2003), offers an anthropological approach and respected scholars in science studies (Troy Duster, Sarah Franklin, Joan Fujimura, Donna Haraway, Rayna Rapp, and Hilary Rose, to name just a selection). Both of these essay collections would help students see how the analytic questions suggested by Hammonds and Herzig open up the apparently settled domain of science for productive interdisciplinary inquiry
Crest or Trough? How Research Libraries Used Emerging Technologies to Survive the Pandemic, So Far
Get PDFIntroduction
In the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was impossible to tell if we were at the crest of a wave of new transmissions, or a trough of a much larger wave, still yet to peak. As of this writing, as colleges and universities prepare for mostly in-person fall 2021 semesters, case counts in the United States are increasing again after a decline that coincided with easier access to the COVID vaccine. Plans for a return to campus made with confidence this spring may be in doubt, as we climb the curve of what is already the second largest wave, fueled by the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant, 18 months into the pandemic.
This report is the last in a series of reports on the role of research libraries in shaping critical technologies for use in research, learning, and libraries. Sarah Lippincott’s extensive overview, Mapping the Current Landscape of Research Library Engagement with Emerging Technologies in Research and Learning, provides background and context for the range of digital technologies we consider in this project. The project launched with a series of interviews in fall 2019, some of which informed Lippincott’s report, and the rest of which were reported in Emerging Technologies for Research and Learning: Interviews with Experts. That report supported a series of forecasting workshops with members of EDUCAUSE and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) in spring 2020, as we braced ourselves in the first wave of the pandemic. Insights generated from these workshops were shared in Future Themes and Forecasts for Research Libraries and Emerging Technologies, as participants described what they saw as drivers of technological adoption in the near term of one to three years.
In these reports, we described not just the technologies that attracted the attention of our expert participants, but factors in technology adoption, drawing on insights from historians and sociologists of technology. We also detected high expectations for the development of novel emerging technologies, and concomitant technological practices, with transformative potential for research, learning, and research libraries. In this follow-up, we returned to 11 of the participants in the interviews conducted for the project, to find out how their perspectives have changed in the year and a half since we had spoken to them, given the disruption to research and learning caused by the pandemic. (See the appendix for a list of the 11 participants.) In these new conversations, we see that optimism is retained for the same transformative technologies, but that the intense activity of these pandemic months has been largely related to adoption and refinement of existing technologies rather than innovating truly novel technological solutions to our research and learning challenges.
Remembering Shoshana Zuboff’s insights that “the interplay of intrinsic qualities and human choices [about technologies] is further shaped by social, political, and economic interests that inscribe the situation with their own intended and unintended opportunities and limitations,” we draw the following conclusions from these interviews:
• The pandemic tested prior commitments to networked and digital collections and services and validated those past decisions.
• The technologies that were identified in previous reports are still on the docket, but with adjusted priorities in response to conditions on the ground.
• Many small and large technologies to continue life at a distance were explored, which also generated insights into adoption under pandemic conditions that we can draw on in the future.
• As research libraries work to regain some semblance of normalcy during continued uncertainty (and after), there is a risk of retreating on important gains in the adoption of technologies and practices that benefit research and learning.
What follows is organized in three parts: first, reflections by our interview subjects on how their libraries and universities have fared in the pandemic so far, and to what factors they attribute their successes. Six socio-technological thematic areas emerged from the conversations about changed expectations for the futures of technologies—these form the second section of this report. Finally, we share some factors for technological adoption that were gleaned from these conversations
Situated Data: Feminist Epistemology and Data Curation
Get PDFIn the last decade or more, academic libraries have taken up the challenge of providing data curation and research data support, bringing expertise in metadata and digital preservation to key aspects of the research data life cycle. This activity has hastened since 2013, when the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo directing federal funding agencies to require data, among other products of research, to be shared as a condition of funding.1 The OSTP memo did not come out of the blue, but recognized changes in data practice in some disciplines as the costs of sharing data digitally declined and the open science movement gained steam. The practice of open science seeks to improve the reliability and efficiency of science by making it possible to share digital tools and products of research, including data, more readily. Data sharing is said to promote scientific transparency, maximize the value of federal research support, create opportunities for reanalysis and reuse, discourage fraud, and perhaps most idealistically, provide a means for reproducibility and replication, indicators of objectivity in high-stakes science.
During this same time, a body of thought within librarianship has coalesced under the phrase “critical librarianship” or “critical library practice” as practitioners apply critical theories available in other disciplines to their work. Critical approaches to library practices have called neutrality, along with the profession’s traditional commitment to it, into permanent question, enlarging the conversation about objectivity within library and information sciences. Conceptions of objectivity and neutrality are also central concerns in the study of scientific practice, a transdisciplinary domain of inquiry that is well developed within some strains of information science. Critical library practice is inflected by this scholarship, and together they can extend rigorous interrogation of practice to data curation, the specialty subdiscipline that cares for the stuff of scientific claims, research data.
In this chapter, I bring these conversations together through a feminist theory of knowledge production, or epistemology, and propose “situated data” as a framework for critical data practice. By connecting feminist epistemology to data curation, I provide a frame for understanding data sharing as a critical library practice with the potential for engaging a wider range of knowers in scientific knowledge production and producing better, more objective, and more just accounts of the world
The Literature of Difference In Cultures of Science
Get PDFThe Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics Edited by Evelynn M. Hammonds and Rebecca M. Herzig. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Pp. 368. 45.00 paper.
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