Founder and principal consultant of Webster Research and Consulting, helping make better digital services for research.
Head of Digital Scholarship and Innovation, University of Southampton Library. (But these are my own views, naturally).
Digital archives, digital scholarship, publishing, policy.
(Also an historian of contemporary British Christianity: toots at @peterwebster )
#digitalHumanities #digitalHistory #OpenAccess #digitalArchives #webArchives #webHistory
| Research website | https://peterwebster.me/about |
| ORCID | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5181-4475 |
| Webster Research and Consulting | https://websterresearchconsulting.com/ |
seeing another round of "don't favorite posts on fedi"
folks it is a kind and lovely thing to favorite someone's post and anyone who tells you not to be kind and lovely has told you something about themself
it's true that it doesn't particulary increase the distribution of your post but the idea that we're all here to get things distributed as far as possible is pretty weird
Interested in a hands-on, hackathon-style workshop on preserving born-digital materials & exploring open source tools and workflows for pre-ingest tasks?
Sign up now for this in-person, day-long workshop at University College Dublin on 13 March: https://forms.gle/CWpMi82LAeDfHhud9
The workshop is organised by Assoc. Prof. Amber Cushing and Dr Giulia Osti, with @anj of the #DPC also contributing to the day!
New post:
I accidentally became a FOSS maintainer and all I got was this lousy new perspective on librarianship
https://www.hughrundle.net/i-accidentally-became-a-foss-maintainer-and-all-i-got-was-this-lousy-new-perspective-on-librarianship
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@kingsdigitallab/116137307296287333
Please do touch base if interested to find out more about this role - KDL is an excellent team of digital Research Technical Professionals keen to innovate responsibly - this role is essential for the team to continue delivering digital research outputs with a design-centred approach - you could bring in new ideas, benefit from a collaborative culture while accessing opportunities to develop in the role, contribute to the communities you care about and mentor others. Deadline for applicants 12 March 2026!
We executed 24,000 search queries in 243 countries, generating 2.8 million AI and traditional search results in 2024 and 2025. We found a rapid global expansion of AI search and key trends that reflect important, previously hidden, policy decisions by AI companies that impact human exposure to AI search worldwide. From 2024 to 2025, overall exposure to Google AI Overviews (AIO) expanded from 7 to 229 countries, with surprising exclusions like France, Turkey, China and Cuba, which do not receive AI search results, even today. While only 1% of Covid search queries were answered by AI in 2024, over 66% of Covid queries were answered by AI in 2025 -- a 5600% increase signaling a clear policy shift on this critical health topic. Our results also show AI search surfaces significantly fewer long tail information sources, lower response variety, and significantly more low credibility and right- and center-leaning information sources, compared to traditional search, impacting the economic incentives to produce new information, market concentration in information production, and human judgment and decision-making at scale. The social and economic implications of these rapid changes in our information ecosystem necessitate a global debate about corporate and governmental policy related to AI search.
It's been a long time in the making, but I'm delighted to be able to mention the soft launch (in beta) of the new Library Data Lab at Southampton, giving dataset and API access to our digitised collections of print, MSS, image and media.
My colleague Matt (not on here) introduces the service in this presentation: https://southampton.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=69caa4b1-2875-4fab-b07b-b3f000dc787b
The service itself is at https://datalab.library.soton.ac.uk/
All comments very welcome.
A little post about a new publication that just appeared in print, on using digital methods (and edited collections of essays) as a way into the history of a discipline.
if you ramp up the production of information, you need better discernment, because your capacity limitations haven’t just magically increased
without better discernment things will break *even if* the quality of the additional information is high ….
it’s not just “AI slop” that’s a problem, just helping regular scientists to produce more is damaging if we don’t simultaneously provide better tools for discernment (human and technical) - but if anything, we are weakening those (e,g. by de-skilling)….
that’s a disastrous feedback loop in the making…
Sara
JakeB
Digital Preservation Coalition
hughrundle.net
Arianna Ciula
petersuber
Ulrike Hahn