This week I attended Code4Lib 2021 from my basement. This is my first virtual, multi-day conference, and I have to say I’m not a big fan. This makes me realize how important it is [for me] to go to a different physical space for a conference and do nothing but attend that conference. You want an immersive experience? Go live somewhere else for a few days and spend most of your waking hours on that experience – no dishes, no laundry, no pets demanding attention. Three afternoons spent looking at a different browser tab? Doesn’t really do it for me. [Also: you kids get off my lawn!]
For those unfamiliar with Code4Lib, it is a loosely organized group of people doing software development for libraries. You might see a presentation about developing an application at C4L one year, a presentation about implementing it at LITA Forum (sorry, that’s “Core Forum”) the next year, and a presentation about maintaining and assessing it at ALA the following year (to grossly overgeneralize).
Highlights: a very cool opening keynote by Rudo Kemper of Digital Democracy. He has worked for many years with Maroon communities in Suriname. These communities have been historically under-represented in digital archives – their oral histories seldom get recorded, and even their place names go unknown to the outside world (maps use Dutch colonial names instead). Many digital archive apps cannot be used in these communities because they rely on working Internet connections, so the challenge was to create an app that can add stories to a map, without needing a network connection to build the archive. The speaker used a local Hack-a-Thon project to jumpstart this idea, and the result is a free, open source web app available at terrastories.io. In addition to the Suriname examples, he showed projects using this with First Nations in Canada.
Other highlights include:
- A block of machine learning sessions, including an illuminating look at PubMed’s new relevance ranking algorithm. PubMed fields an enourmous number of searches (3.3 billion in 2017, the last year with full stats), and 80% of clicks are on the first page, so there are serious ethical consequences for tinkering with the rules for deciding which search results go to the top.
- A session on the “Mrs. Husband’s Name” problem: how to improve discoverability for people mentioned in digital records as, e.g., “Mrs. George Smith” or “Mrs. Henry Jones.” It’s a good hint to how little this can be automated that one of the software components is called “gender-guesser”.
- A block of sessions on accessibility. Major takeaway: AI captioning is not [yet?] good enough, so fund human captioning.
- A block of sessions on ethical computing, which took an unexpected [for me] turn into topics like the carbon footprint of big data centers and the ecological costs of storing and transmitting data over the web. I have thoughts – meandering, nebulous thoughts – that I will try to smoosh into a separate blog post.
Disclosure: I’m posting this before the actual closing session this afternoon, but there’s dishes and laundry piling up and the pets look like they’re scheming something. Good news! With these fancy online conferences, I’ll be able to catch the closing keynote later.
11 Comments on ‘Thomas @ Code4Lib’
Thanks for this report, Thomas!
This sounds really interesting–were the sessions recorded?
Tanya – yes, they were recorded. I’m not certain when they’ll be made available for non-attendees. https://2021.code4lib.org/ will be the place to look.
Thanks, Thomas! I’ve been wondering about multi-day online conference experiences, and this helped prep me for ACRL next month! (and that PubMed stat was sobering!)
Fascinating, Thomas! I have to talk to students about the “Mrs. Husband’s Name” problem when they’re doing primary source research, and I’m glad to hear that there’s an ongoing attempt to improve it. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on ethical computing!
Very interesting, especially the subject of the keynote concerning the lack of representation of indigenous groups in the digital archives of Suriname.
That keynote sounds amazing, I will keep an eye out for it too. And I agree about online conferences – I’ve enjoyed half-day online workshops, but day after day of gazing into the screen abyss, even if I’m moving around or washing dishes while I do it (benefits of a small living space!), is much less satisfying than the ebb and flow of an IRL conference. Who knew I’d miss *that*!
I have just been grappling with the Mrs. Husband’s Name problem this week with an identification project with a digital panoramic photo, so I was interested to see that note. Also while AI captioning isn’t super, it’s recently gotten some marked improvements in some software thanks to the pandemic, so I think you were right to be hopeful.
I’m bookmarking your report. Thank you, Thomas!
PubMed’s new algorithm is concerning. Each fall when I meet with the HES honors students for in-depth PubMed training, I hammer home the importance of looking beyond the first page or two of results. And that’s without this added factor. We don’t actually need everything to mimic Google.
Thanks for this report, Thomas! I too have suffered under the multi-day virtual conference attendance, and the constant drag on my attention to other things. (More likely things popping up in my inbox than cats demanding attention, but the idea is the same.) I long for the immersive experience. Your summation was as entertaining as always.