Volume 7, Number 1, 2024

EN:

There are many items in Wikidata representing scholarly articles. However, these items have been created mostly by volunteer Wikidata editors and not systematically by journal publishers or editors, which can lead to gaps and inconsistencies in the datasets. This article presents findings from a survey investigating practices of library and information studies (LIS) journals in Wikidata item creation. Believing that a significant number of LIS journal editors would be aware of Wikidata and some would be creating Wikidata items for their publications, the authors sent a survey asking 138 English-language LIS journal editors if they created Wikidata items for materials published in their journal and follow-up questions. With a response rate of 41 percent, respondents overwhelmingly indicated that they did not create Wikidata items for materials published in their journal and were completely unaware of or only somewhat familiar with Wikidata. Respondents indicated that more familiarity with Wikidata and its benefits for scholarly journals as well as institutional support for the creation of Wikidata items could lead to greater participation; however, a campaign of education about Wikidata, documentation of benefits, and support for creation would be a necessary first step. The article presents and discusses the results of the survey, but the conclusions that can be drawn are minimal; therefore, the authors also discuss the benefits of creating Wikidata items for LIS journals as a first step in this educational campaign for editors and publishers.

EN:

Indigenous place names contain knowledge of the landscape and encode unique perceptions of landscapes with which Indigenous Peoples have interacted for hundreds, often thousands, of years. However, many Indigenous place names have been lost as a result of colonization. Furthermore, many of these have been replaced with colonial place names, and their loss contributes to overall language attrition. In turn, the loss of language makes it difficult, or even impossible, to understand the concepts embedded within Indigenous place names that do remain in use. The documentation and conservation of place names is thus an important aspect of Indigenous language preservation and revitalization that can help facilitate reconnection with the language and the land. This paper outlines the Atlas of Kanyen'kehá:ka Space digital atlas project, an initiative that uses digital mapping to aid in the documentation and revitalization of the Kanyen'kéha (Mohawk) language through community participatory mapping of Kanyen'kéha place names and landscape-related language. It describes the initial stages of the Atlas of Kanyen'kehá:ka Space project, including its theoretical framework, the O'nonna model, and its community-based participatory methodology for digital mapping. It reports on a series of mapping workshops within three Kanyen'kehá:ka communities and shares initial findings and future directions for the project.

EN:

The AI hype cycle has come for scholarly publishing. This essay argues that the industry’s feverishーif mostly aspirationalーembrace of artificial intelligence should be read as the latest installment of an ongoing campaign. Led by Elsevier, commercial publishers have, for about a decade, layered a second business on top of their legacy publishing operations. That business is to mine and process scholars’ works and behavior into prediction products, sold back to universities and research agencies. This article focuses on an offshoot of the big firms’ surveillance-publishing businesses: the post-ChatGPT imperative to profit from troves of proprietary “training data,” to make new AI products andーthe essay predictsーto license academic papers and scholars’ tracked behavior to big technology companies. The article points to the potential knowledge effects of AI models in academia: Products and models are poised to serve as knowledge arbitrators, by picking winners and losers according to what they makevisible. I also cite potential knock-on effects, including incentives for publishers to roll back open access (OA) and new restrictions on researchers’ access to the open web. The article concludes with a call for a coordinated campaign of advocacy and consciousness-raising, paired with high-quality, in-depth studies of publisher data harvestingーbuilt on the premise that another scholarly-publishing world is possible. There are many good reasons to restore custody to the academy, the essay argues. The latest is to stop our work from fueling the publishers’ AI profits.

EN:

The uses of generative AI have prompted both positive and negative responses. This short commentary contemplates potential issues concerning bibliodiversity, epistemic diversity, and data surveillance. It also cautions the potential erosion of public trust in academic publishing in the age of generative AI. Invoking the Sokal hoax, the commentary sheds light on what it means when knowledge, experience, expertise, and the pursuit of truth are on the line.

EN:

The concepts of epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression both aim to track obstacles to epistemic agencyーi.e., forms of epistemic exclusionーthat are undue and persistent. Indeed, the two terms are often used interchangeably. In this paper, I begin by addressing the question of whether the concepts of epistemic injustice and of epistemic oppression are in fact synonymous, and how we might articulate the relation between the two. I argue that while they partly overlap, the two concepts are not synonymous, and that one fruitful way to characterize their relation is by drawing on the distinction between systematic and incidental epistemic injustice. I then turn to the question of what might be gained or lost by focusing on one concept rather than the other. I argue that the concept of epistemic injustice, specifically that of incidental epistemic injustice, allows us to track certain types of undue and persistent obstacles to epistemic agency that the concept of epistemic oppression does not, but that should nonetheless be of interest to theorists of epistemic oppression. I close with some suggestions for further avenues to explore in order to gain a richer and more precise understanding of the various forms that problematic epistemic exclusion can take and how we might characterize them within our philosophical taxonomies.