academic libraries

WeekNotes for 2024 Week 17: “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” Reports and Iridescent Circle of Clouds

weekNotes

Weeknotes are a habit I’m cultivating where I share writing (and some links) as a thinking-in-public process. The idea is to explore ideas I’m grappling with, primarily in my professional life, without worrying about them being full-formed. The potential visibility of these notes is a nudge to develop them a bit more than if they were private. While my audience is mostly theoretical, if you’re reading this, please understand these are meant to be exploratory and provisional.

quotes

“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” – Wendel Berry, 2000, Life is a Miracle

thinking about

It’s the end of the academic term, which means many things require reports.

While I am beholden to write reports and sometimes even do them of my own volition, I’m not sure how often they’re read or have any impact, especially if they are required by some process but not by any actual person. I’m reminded of a colleague at a previous job who would joke that our annual performance reviews should take the form of a form filled out by both the employee and their manager that just had a checkbox for “I’m doing okay” and “you’re doing okay” and if everyone agrees everyone is doing okay, that would be the end of the review.

The one beneficial thing these reports could provide, honest assessment and reflection, is often lost by the need to be relentlessly positive, especially if your job or resources for your organization is at stake. Their format, usually formal and narrative, further obscures anything valuable they might contain.

All this makes them one of the things we do that AI is actually pretty good at, and I suspect a lot of us (me included) are using it for summarizing and drafting reports, if not for writing the whole thing. If done poorly, as it usually is, just further removes and obscures what is valuable.

I’d love to just a submit a shorthand “I’m okay, you’re okay” style report for many of these, but I suspect that wouldn’t go over well. But here is my shorthand “I’m okay, you’re okay” END OF THING REPORT for a couple of things I’ve written up recently.

Makerspace End of Term Report

  • I spent less time than I wanted in the space with students and staff, but more than last term. I am working on increasing this by getting out of other commitments, but this is taking time.
  • It feels a little less busy in the space this year, but I don’t think this is a problem (though we should probably do some formal assessment to find out). There are still a lot of people using the space, and more of those seem to be learning independently and working on intensive projects over longer periods of time. If true, I am not sure if this is due to a change in our users’ behaviour, a change in how we run the space, or both.
  • Trained staff who understand the vision and culture of the space remain essential to student success and we are losing two staff members this year, one to a promotion and one to pursue a master’s in library and information science. While it’s wonderful watching colleagues move on to their next thing, it does cause some uncertainty about the future.
  • Sustainability and Indigenization connect with many other values that we want to promote, such as equitable access, belonging, community, and critical making. They are multipliers for the rest of our values.

Sustainability Grant

  • I was far too ambitious when I wrote this grant. Present Frank always assumes future Frank will have more time than he currently has, which is never true.
  • We completed most of the concrete objectives but none of the stretch goals
  • Student workers bring energy, connections, perspectives but require a lot of time, probably as much time as doing most tasks yourself. it is still worth it to gain those perspectives and connections and provide mentorship.
  • I need to get better at delegating work

Coyote Grant

  • We did a lot in a short time, including hosting welcome events for Indigenous Students and sponsoring workshops on feather work, moccasin making, and beading.
  • We need to start earlier in the year, probably right away in September, if we expect to collaborate with student clubs on events as we wanted.
  • Indigenization is about relationships and community. Everything we do must be part of an ongoing connection.

Department Chair

  • There is most likely a joke about to be made along the lines of: “the first rule of being department chair is don’t talk about being department chair”
  • There are many problems in the world that are in the category “not big enough to deal with the consequences that will arise when dealing with them” and which are therefore left alone until they become big enough that it’s worth dealing with those consequences.

photos – Iridescent Circle of Clouds

I recently started playing Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends and I’ve been playing around with using AI to teach me the rules and strategies. It works surprisingly well to give it your character sheet and some background story and then ask it questions over time about rules, spells, etc. It’s also a good way to learn how it’s memory works and when it breaks down.

Last night after we played I used the same chat to generate some images of the character. ChatGPT’s image generation now allows you to ask for specific edits to images and even parts of images. It’s definitely not perfect and to my amusement, no matter how many times I asked it to give me a baseball cap it remained convinced (for training data reasons I suspect) that gnomes wear pointy hats. I love this because this is exactly my partner’s preferred “toque on baseball cap” hat style.

I also asked it to write a bio in the style of a New Yorker profile. It’s not perfect, but this was it’s first draft and it’s pretty good:

“Iridescent Circle of Clouds,” a rock gnome Druid, recently emerged from decades of hermetic solitude in the desert, arrives in the world with a conviction as clear as it is radical: that all existence is conscious, nothing possessing more intrinsic value than anything else. This philosophical outlook, born from long contemplation and the harsh realities of the desert, flavors his every interaction with a curious blend of detachment and profound connection. Despite his austere background, he has cultivated a somewhat incongruous taste for the finer things—silk robes, aged bourbon, the cool draw of a well-crafted pipe—each a reminder of the sensory joys he once eschewed. As he navigates the bustling towns and verdant wilds beyond his sandy confines, “Iridescent” often seems to orbit the edge of solipsism, seeing the universe’s vast complexity as a mirror of his own consciousness. This true neutral character is constantly weaving his personal revelations into conversations, seeking his place in a world he regards as both an extension of self and a boundless mystery to be unraveled.

links

Matt Pearce on Journalism After the Death of Hyperlinks

But I am going to say something that I mean sort seriously but not literally: I don’t really care about copyright! I don’t really care about paywalls! I’m okay with it if you only ever see my reporting via a chatbot! Copyright and paywalls are simply means to an end, and that end is the pursuit of human knowledge and self-liberation: the end is our freedom. And one of the principles of human freedom that I hold dear to my heart is that nobody should be providing labor to massively profitable corporations for free.

Sara Hendren on The City and the Limiting Virtues – This year we formalized our values and pedagogies into a program description and passed that through out faculty council. The main reason I decided to do this was because I think I’ve learned that its as important to know what you aren’t (in our case, we are not a classroom, a lab, or a print shop) as what you are, and this document clarified both. This article reminded me of that.

The library holds a gradation of the limiting virtues: a half-quiet first floor with new books, tables and chairs for afterschool tutoring, and the information desks for everyone — the neighborliness of a public institution’s front door. The second floor features enclosed meeting spaces for groups on a first-come, first serve basis, plus a really really quiet room for patrons wanting the moderation of all notifications off. The entire third floor is devoted to children — a beautiful raucous energy, with activity rooms, cozy nooks, and floor-to-ceiling windows on every side. A teen room in the old structure holds high-backed wing chairs and booths for semi-sedentary socializing, and a maker space occupies much of the basement. Things you can do and things you can’t, by design.

L. M. Sacasas – Vision Con

But what if, as Bennett suggests, the world is already enchanted and the real alchemy that summons the miracle of being is that fusion of time and care that we call attention?

Weekly Review 1: March 27-April 9, 2023

weekNotes

It’s Easter Sunday and I should be driving to Vancouver to spend two days with family but instead I’m at home on antibiotics. Two weeks ago I had two bridges done, and one of them turned on me within a few days, requiring an emergency root canal. Dental pain is impressive in how rich and textured it feels, though of course that novelty gets tiring quickly.

I’m going to combine these link-sharing posts I’ve been doing lately with the weekly reviews I’ve been meaning to start doing. A weekly review appeals to my inner toxic productivity geek as an opportunity to close out tasks and make sure I’m planning for the week ahead. The link posts were meant as a way to structure how I look back at what I have written and read recently. Combining the two will hopefully help make the productivity review more focused on ideas and things that are actually important, and the link-sharing more about what I’m really doing.

(yes, this review will actually cover 2 weeks and be labelled #1, no I don’t really have a justification for this aside from it catches me up from the last post. I’m sure this will happen again)

I started The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, and I suspect I’ll finish it tonight because it’s so personal and percussive I find it hard to put down. I just started God, Human, Animal, Machine by Meghan O’Gieblyn, and I’m enjoying it more than any recent book I’ve read on consciousness, nature, or AI. It’s very readable, which I mean as a compliment.

I am also reading A Primer for Poets, by Gregory Orr. Poetry is something I was introduced to in my mid-30s and is now something I read almsot every day. This book is an opportunity to try writing poetry more than I already do, and while I’m not sure I’ll ever share anything I write I’m enjoying the process.

“You, the reader, are invited to make use of anything that seems worthwhile and to discard the rest. But to do either—to assimilate or reject—is to become what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls “an active soul,” and that is essential if you wish to engage poetry.” Gregory Orr

Links and Quotes

“With every creature that vanishes, we lose a way of interpreting the world” – How Animals Perceive the World – articles – annotations

“Every animal is enclosed within its own sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. There is a wonderful word for this sensory bubble—Umwelt. It was defined and popularized by the Baltic German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909. Umwelt comes from the German word for “environment,” but Uexküll didn’t use it to refer to an animal’s surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world. A tick, questing for mammalian blood, cares about body heat, the touch of hair, and the odor of butyric acid that emanates from skin. It doesn’t care about other stimuli, and probably doesn’t know that they exist. Every Umwelt is limited; it just doesn’t feel that way. Each one feels all-encompassing to those who experience it. Our Umwelt is all we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion that every creature shares.”

A review of Jenny Odell’s new book – Procrastination Is the True American Pastime

Saving Time is a rebuke to that restlessness. It is not merely a challenge to industrialized time; it is also—more so—a challenge to readers to resist the habits of cynicism that are so entwined with the tempos of our days. Our vernaculars of time tend to treat life’s moments as both saleable commodities and plodding inevitabilities; the contradiction leads to dissonance, yes, but also to nihilism. This is how procrastination, so often framed as an individual flaw, can become a collective failure. If time can be controlled, why worry about the future? And if it can’t be controlled, why bother to try? We carry time with us, on our wrists, on our screens, in our moral imaginations. But the ways we carry it can prevent us from feeling what this moment requires: urgency about the present, and agency over the future. Instead, too often, we feel very little at all. We allow ourselves to be lulled by the steady ticking of the clock.

The taste of AI – My New Job Is AI Sommelier and I Detect the Bouquet of Progress

“If I were an AI sommelier I would say that gpt-3.5-turbo is smooth and agreeable with a long finish, though perhaps lacking depth. text-davinci-003 is spicy and tight, sophisticated even.”

This prompted a lot of thinking about how to create opportunities for joy – The Broadest Portal to Joy

“My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow — which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow — might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival. \”

Thinking about library technicians and how the status divide in libraries hurts both our colleagues and our work – Status in Academic Libraries

“If you think about current titles, staff positions mostly have “assistant” or “support” added to them. It just acts as a reminder that you don’t get to have that sense of ownership or authority, even if you have years of knowledge and expertise. It just felt like more of a way to signal how little power you have in those positions. While now, I have more freedom over my workday, people take me seriously (give or take a disciplinary faculty), and I get more confidence from that. But why couldn’t I have that before becoming a “librarian”?”

Opinion What if Climate Change Meant Not Doom — But Abundance?

“To respond to the climate crisis — a disaster on a more immense scale than anything our species has faced — we can and must summon what people facing disasters have: a sense of meaning, of deep connection and generosity, of being truly alive in the face of uncertainty. Of joy.”

Let’s not get trapped in the stories we are being sold right now – Resisting Deterministic Thinking – danah boyd

“what bothers me most about the deterministic framing that is hanging over all things AI right now is that it’s closing out opportunities for deeper situated thinking about the transformations that might unfold over the next few years.”

Stories about libraries and informatics that we have forgotten – Informatics of the Oppressed

“But alternatives are possible. In fact, from the very beginnings of informatics—the science of information—as an institutionalized field in the 1960s, anti-capitalists have tried to imagine less oppressive, perhaps even liberatory, ways of indexing and searching information. Two Latin American social movements in particular—Cuban socialism and liberation theology—inspired experiments with different approaches to informatics from the 1960s to the 1980s. Taken together, these two historical moments can help us imagine new ways to organize information that threaten the capitalist status quo—above all, by facilitating the wide circulation of the ideas of the oppressed.”

This possible future sounds wonderful and terrible and very plausible – Phase Change

“Language models as universal couplers begin to suggest protocols that really are plain language. What if the protocol of the GPT-alikes is just a bare TCP socket carrying free-form requests and instructions? What if the RSS feed of the future is simply my language model replying to yours when it asks, “What’s up with Robin lately?””

“I like this because I hate it; because it’s weird, and makes me feel uncomfortable.”

Mostly, I like the idea that being silly will once again be an advantage. We talk a lot about how manual labor and emotional intelligence are for the moment safe from AI disruption, but what about silliness? Will being silly protect us? I sure hope so – What Is the Single Best Way of Improving Your GPT Prompts?

“Imagine if humanity ends up divided into two classes of people: those who are willing/not embarrassed to tack on extra “silly bits” to their prompts, and those who are not so willing.  The differences in capabilities will end up being remarkable.  Are perhaps many elites and academics unwilling to go the extra mile in their prompts?  Do they feel a single sentence question ought to be enough?  Are they in any case constitutionally unused to providing extra context for their requests?”

If We Don’t Master A.I., It Will Master Us

“For thousands of years we humans have lived inside the dreams of other humans. We have worshiped gods, pursued ideals of beauty, and dedicated our lives to causes that originated in the imagination of some prophet, poet or politician. Soon we will also find ourselves living inside the hallucinations of non-human intelligence.”

This whole interview is great – Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life

“There’s no earthly reason why we need to invent a technology that can mimic this most beautiful and mysterious creative act. Particularly writing a song. The thing about writing a good song is that it tells you something about yourself you didn’t already know. That’s the thing. You can’t mimic that. The good song is always rushing forward. It annihilates, to some degree, the songs that you’d previously written, because you are moving forward all the time. That’s what the creative impulse is—it’s both creative and destructive and is always one step ahead of you. These impulses can’t be replicated by a machine. Maybe A.I. can make a song that’s indistinguishable from what I can do. Maybe even a better song. But, to me, that doesn’t matter—that’s not what art is. Art has to do with our limitations, our frailties, and our faults as human beings. It’s the distance we can travel away from our own frailties. That’s what is so awesome about art: that we deeply flawed creatures can sometimes do extraordinary things. A.I. just doesn’t have any of that stuff going on.”

Academic Librarianship in the Chthulucene

Posts, Wilding Makerspaces

“Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places” (Haraway, 2016, p. 1)

Recently a friend asked me to explain the link between the things I’m interested in and frequently share (articles, poems, hikes, stories, tweets, photos) and the work I do (libraries, makerspaces, education, mentorship, departmental leadership). This is a hard question because while I can sense a link, it’s tentative and speculative. My interests over the last few years have coalesced around nature, biology, emergence, bodies, movement, poetry, wonder, and love. That is a weird list, especially for someone who for many years identified as an avowed atheist and materialist. I no longer find these stories as sufficient or interesting as I once did.

It’s also a hard question because I want there to be a link. I sympathize with those who want a clear separation between their work and the rest of their lives. Boundaries are important, and need to be structurally part of our institutions to protect people from exploitation and give them time for rest and deep thinking. But my interests and beliefs bleed through these boundaries, and I’ve decided I like that about myself.

I’m also much more interested than I once was in pragmatic ideas that can be implemented. How do we actively respond to the world we actually find ourselves living in? The world I grew up in doesn’t exist anymore and probably never did, at least for most people. The illusion of stability and progress has been undone by upheavals on every front: environmental, social, political, and technological. Many of these upheavals are good, some are existential.

Recently I’ve been returning to my notes from the book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway. There is so much wisdom in this book, which is rich with metaphor and imagery and grist for thinking about how we live in the world in which we find ourselves:

“I am not interested in reconciliation or restoration, but I am deeply committed to the more modest possibilities of partial recuperation and getting on together. Call that staying with the trouble. And so I look for real stories that are also speculative fabulations and speculative realisms. These are stories in which multispecies players, who are enmeshed in partial and flawed translations across difference, redo ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite flourishing, still possible recuperation” Haraway, 2016, p. 10

One of the stories Haraway proposes is the Chthulucene:

“All of these stories are a lure to proposing the Chthulucene as a needed third story, a third netbag for collecting up what is crucial for ongoing, for staying with the trouble. The chthonic ones are not confined to a vanished past. They are a buzzing, stinging, sucking swarm now, and human beings are not in a separate compost pile. We are humus, not Homo, not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman. As a suffix, the word kainos, “-cene,” signals new, recently made, fresh epochs of the thick present. To renew the biodiverse powers of terra is the sympoietic work and play of the Chthulucene. Specifically, unlike either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen—yet. We are at stake to each other. Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene, with all other beings able simply to react. The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main story” (Haraway, 2016, p. 55)

Universities and academic libraries were built for stable stories and dominant narratives. I’m not saying these stories were true or even about stability (many of them were about change and innovation), but they relied on ideas about stability (degrees lead to stable jobs, expertise is this and not that, knowledge is best captured in these forms) that I don’t think can be taken seriously anymore as stories that organize our lives.

So how do we live, teach, and do research in the Chthulucene? How do we provide space and services that support the co-creation of the new stories we will need, without creating new dominant stories that silence others? What does instruction and mentorship look like? What about care and love? How do we relate to our students, ourselves, staff, faculty, administrators, contractors, and community members, including the owls that nest above the loading zone behind the library? What abour the land? What does the research commons, the academic department, the student union, the academic library, the makerspace, the reference desk look like?

These are the questions I’m thinking about when I think about the connections between the things I am interested in and my work. I do not really have answers. Answers aren’t necessarily the point.