I planted a lilac because I read Nancy Drew mysteries as a child.
jessica
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Here’s how data ecofeminism can work https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11086
Data Ecofeminism
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is driving significant environmental impacts. The rapid development and deployment of increasingly larger algorithmic models capable of analysing vast amounts of data are contributing to rising carbon emissions, water withdrawal, and waste generation. Generative models often consume substantially more energy than traditional models, with major tech firms increasingly turning to nuclear power to sustain these systems -- an approach that could have profound environmental consequences. This paper introduces seven data ecofeminist principles delineating a pathway for developing technological alternatives of eco-societal transformations within the AI research context. Rooted in data feminism and ecofeminist frameworks, which interrogate about the historical and social construction of epistemologies underlying the hegemonic development of science and technology that disrupt communities and nature, these principles emphasise the integration of social and environmental justice within a critical AI agenda. The paper calls for an urgent reassessment of the GenAI innovation race, advocating for ecofeminist algorithmic and infrastructural projects that prioritise and respect life, the people, and the planet.
“This study shows that interventions are needed to support the mental health of autistic youth by decreasing bullying by peers and increasing positive peer relationships.” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/13623613251322923
avatars matter to kids: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18705 “Our findings show that children's avatar creation is motivated by self-representation, experimenting with alter ego identities, fulfilling social needs, and improving in-game performance.” #childhoodstudies #parenting #screentime #arxiv
Understanding Children's Avatar Making in Social Online Games
Social online games like Minecraft and Roblox have become increasingly integral to children's daily lives. Our study explores how children aged 8 to 13 create and customize avatars in these virtual environments. Through semi-structured interviews and gameplay observations with 48 participants, we investigate the motivations behind children's avatar-making. Our findings show that children's avatar creation is motivated by self-representation, experimenting with alter ego identities, fulfilling social needs, and improving in-game performance. In addition, designed monetization strategies play a role in shaping children's avatars. We identify the ''wardrobe effect,'' where children create multiple avatars but typically use only one favorite consistently. We discuss the impact of cultural consumerism and how social games can support children's identity exploration while balancing self-expression and social conformity. This work contributes to understanding how avatar shapes children's identity growth in social online games.
Search and Society: Reimagining Information Access for Radical Futures
Information retrieval (IR) research must understand and contend with the social implications of the technology it produces. Instead of adopting a reactionary strategy of trying to mitigate potential social harms from emerging technologies, the community should aim to proactively set the research agenda for the kinds of systems we should build inspired by diverse explicitly stated sociotechnical imaginaries. The sociotechnical imaginaries that underpin the design and development of information access technologies needs to be explicitly articulated, and we need to develop theories of change in context of these diverse perspectives. Our guiding future imaginaries must be informed by other academic fields, such as human-computer interaction, information sciences, media studies, design, science and technology studies, social sciences, humanities, democratic theory, and critical theory, as well as legal and policy experts, civil rights and social justice activists, and artists, among others. In this perspective paper, we motivate why the community must consider this radical shift in how we do research and what we work on, and sketch a path forward towards this transformation.
Emancipatory Information Retrieval
Our world today is facing a confluence of several mutually reinforcing crises each of which intersects with concerns of social justice and emancipation. This paper is a provocation for the role of computer-mediated information access in our emancipatory struggles. We define emancipatory information retrieval as the study and development of information access methods that challenge various forms of human oppression, and situates its activities within broader collective emancipatory praxis. The term "emancipatory" here signifies the moral concerns of universal humanization of all peoples and the elimination of oppression to create the conditions under which we can collectively flourish. To develop an emancipatory research agenda for information retrieval (IR), in this paper we speculate about the practices that the community can adopt, enumerate some of the projects that the field should undertake, and discuss provocations to spark new ideas and directions for research. We challenge the field of IR research to embrace humanistic values and commit to universal emancipation and social justice. We also invite scholars from fields such as human-computer interaction, information sciences, media studies, design, science and technology studies, social and political sciences, philosophy, law, environmental sciences, public health, educational sciences, as well as legal and policy experts, civil rights advocates, social justice activists and movement organizers, and artists to join us in realizing this transformation. In this process, we must both imagine post-oppressive worlds, and reimagine the role of IR in that world and in the journey that leads us there.
DASCH: Bringing 100+ Years of Photographic Data into the 21st Century and Beyond https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12977
DASCH: Bringing 100+ Years of Photographic Data into the 21st Century and Beyond
The Harvard College Observatory was the preeminent astronomical data center of the early 20th century: it gathered and archived an enormous collection of glass photographic plates that became, and remains, the largest in the world. For nearly twenty years DASCH (Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard) actively digitized this library using a one-of-a kind plate scanner. In early 2024, after 470,000 scans, the DASCH project finished. Now, this unique analog dataset can be integrated into 21st-century, digital analyses. The key DASCH data products include ~200 TB of plate images, ~16 TB of calibrated light curves, and a variety of supporting metadata and calibration outputs. Virtually every part of the sky is covered by thousands of DASCH images with a time baseline spanning more than 100 years; most stars brighter than B ~ 15 have hundreds or thousands of detections. DASCH Data Release 7, issued in late 2024, represents the culmination of the DASCH scanning project.
Preserving Culinary Traditions. A Crowdsourced Digital Collection of Cookbooks
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12786
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12786
Preserving Culinary Traditions. A Crowdsourced Digital Collection of Cookbooks
Recipes of popular origin and handwritten cookbooks are often overlooked by scholars. Ragù is a pilot project that tries to fill in this gap by gathering and digitising a collection of cookbooks belonging to the Italian traditional cuisine, and making it accessible via a digital platform. The project aims at contributing to two research lines: a) to identify agile methods for publishing data in a low-cost crowdsourcing project, and b) to devise an effective storytelling journey for the Ragù project.