American Academy of Religion Online Sessions
Neocalvinismus: europäische Formationen einer transnationalen theologischen Bewegung
NISO Plus 2024
The title of this panel sounds like you have a choice between options but, in fact, most academic projects that employ machine learning or artificial intelligence require both buying and building. Representing the ‘building’ side of the panel, I survey real-world AI/ML projects at an academic research library: automating the segmentation of television news broadcasts, using retrieval-augmented generation to produce credible Wikipedia articles about women religious leaders, experimenting with diffusion models for a course on sustainable fashion, and training a supervised model to distinguish the anchors, reporters, and experts who contribute to news programming. Drawing on these examples, I review the platforms we return to again and again—Databricks, Google Colab, AWS machine learning services, Hugging Face, vector databases, and Labelbox—and the mostly open-source protocols (packages, libraries, and APIs such as Top2Vec, the OpenAI API, LangChain, Marvin, Unstructured, and MLflow) that hold these projects together. I conclude that the calculus should still be weighted toward buying: the field moves so quickly that home-built applications risk constant recoding as APIs change—or being superseded outright by the market.
WikiConference North America 2023
The Women in Religion User Group is an initiative to create, update, and improve Wikimedia content pertaining to the lives of cis-gender and transgender women who are notable as scholars, activists, and practitioners in the world’s religious, spiritual, and wisdom traditions. As of July 2023, our project has added or improved more than 300 Wikipedia articles and almost 9,000 Wikipedia articles have been categorized under our WikiProject banner. (See our Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Religion page.) Since its founding, its members have worked on regional projects in Australia, India, and Kenya and have contributed to Wikidata, WikiCommons, and WikiQuote.
One of our most noteworthy projects is the publication of three volumes of monographs (see the Women in Religion series), for the purpose of increasing content about women in religion in the general scholarship in order to provide secondary sources for Wikipedia editors and contributors. The first volume, Claiming Notability for Women Activists in Religion (2020), was edited by Colleen D. Hartung, Wikiproject Women in Religion’s co-founder, and consists of ten biographies of women underrepresented in Wikipedia and in academic literature. Volume two, Challenging Bias against Women Academics in Religion (2021), also edited by Hartung, focuses on female academics (teachers, professors, theologians, and scholars). Our most recent volume will be published in the summer of 2023 and focuses on knowledge creation and equity, and contains biographies about women important in the history of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, which published it.
We have also presented at about a dozen conferences and conducted virtual monthly editathons, one for our general members and the other for our members in Kenya who are also members of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians. In the summer of 2023, four WikiProject Women in Religion members conducted a study using Artificial intelligence large language models to ascertain their usefulness in editing Wikipedia articles and biographies, in preparation for a presentation they will make at Wikimania 2023.
Our presentation will report on these and other activities, focusing on the third monograph volume and on our ongoing AI study. We will introduce the Women in Religion User Group and its activities. The presenters will speak about (1) the genesis and goals of the Women in Religion User Group; (2) the series of edited volumes and their relationship to knowledge equity on Wikipedia; (3) how our User Group supports the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians in Kenya; and (4) the prospects of using augmented AI to accelerate the production of articles and Wikidata items about women in religion.
Knowledge Beyond Boundaries: Strengthening Wikimedia and Libraries, National Library of Singapore
A conversation with Wikimedia and Libraries User Group’s Steering Committee and the Senior Program Officer for Libraries at the Wikimedia Foundation. This talk will introduce the audience on why Wikimedia Projects can leverage librarians’ work; how you can get started and become a Wikibrarian (a librarian who does Wiki work); what national libraries are doing; how Artificial Intelligence fits in a Wikibrarian’s work, and how these skills can be intertwined with the Wikimedia Foundation’s Movement Strategy.
WikiCite 2020
Project VandyCite began during spring 2020 as librarians and staff members at the Vanderbilt University Library transitioned to offsite work due to COVID-19. The goal of the project was to enlist librarians and staff to add bibliographic information about faculty members at Vanderbilt University to Wikidata.
SnapCon 2020
In this short talk, we present a case study of how faculty at Vanderbilt University adapted The Beauty and Joy of Computing curriculum into an introductory computing course for non-majors and potential majors at the School of Engineering. We share how the spirit and principles of the BJC [1] guided the development of the course even as we diverged significantly from aspects of the curriculum.
Cultural Heritage at Scale 2019: Encoding Cultural Heritage at Scale
This workshop introduces TEI Publisher, a rapid application publishing framework for digital editions developed by Magdalena Turska and Wolfgang Meier. Participants will learn how to upload their TEI documents, customize the interface using ODD files, and publish their editions to the web.
94th Annual Meeting Medieval Academy of America
In this contribution to the roundtable, Creating and Keeping Medieval Scholarship: A Consideration of Digital and Traditional Methods, I argue from a library and information science perspective that Laura Morreale’s Digital Documentation Process provides a collaborative means for curating digital scholarship data while also preserving representations of those projects. This paper discusses its application to Lynn Ramey’s digital edition of Jean Bodel’s Les Congés and suggests minor improvements to the process.
Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) Conference 2019
This poster (co-authored with Jim Duran) presents the results of a year-long study of the sustainability of television news archives, including a workshop on the legal, sustainability, and technical issues. The goal of the project was to explore possible points of collaboration between the libraries and archives actively-capturing broadcast television news, like UCLA NewsScape, TV News Archive at the Internet Archive, and the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, as well as other TV news collections like WGBH American Archive of Public Broadcasting and the Associated Press. A major result of this effort was a clearer understanding of the differences between collections with respect to the process of capturing broadcast news, creating metadata, fostering access, developing collection scope, and financial models. On the basis of these findings, we propose recommendations about future initiatives to improve the practice of collecting and preserving audiovisual news content.