Issue #94
by Gary Marchionini (UNC School of Information & Library Science)
iSchool faculty and students participate in dozens of global research conferences each year and now that the COVID pandemic has subsided, more of these conferences are held as in-person events again. The Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) holds an annual meeting pertinent to the interests of many in the iSchool community. This year’s meeting was held in Calgary, Canada on October 25-29, 2024 (https://www.asist.org/am24/ ).¹
The conference attracted 450 attendees from 23 countries and included two keynotes. Lerato Chondoma, from the University of British Columbia opened the conference with an inspiring talk “Towards Equitable, Decolonial and Anti-Racist Futures in Research” that included audience meditation exercises and powerful points about how Western capitalism, marketing, and aggressive competition stunt holistic innovation and creativity. One point that generated good discussion in the Q&A focused on our fixation on text generation and analysis and the career constraints this brings to young scholars who choose to work in oral, visual, or movement modalities. Ranjit Singh, from Data & Society closed the conference with his talk “The Ordinary Ethics of Putting People First” that examined how generative AI exacerbates social risks. An important question that drove the talk asked what kind of ethical vocabulary might we use to investigate how we delegate authority to AI and assess resultant agency over time to eventually make AI seem ‘ordinary’. He included fairness, accountability, colonialism, experimentation, sovereignty, and solidarity in his suggested vocabulary list, and concluded that the ordinary backend work we allocate to AI is the cost of living in a data driven society.
The keynotes focus on social dynamics and AI were recurring themes in the conference papers, panels, posters, and workshops. One paper session I particularly enjoyed was “Tipping the Balance: Human Intervention in Large Language Model Multi-Agent Debate” by Haley Triem and Ying Ding that used actual legal rulings being appealed as a test bed for multiple AI agents debating whether to uphold, overrule, or remand a ruling. An interesting takeaway was agents exhibiting ‘stubborn’ behavior by not changing their conclusions in the face of argumentation. A thoughtful panel entitled “Exploring Some Impacts of Advances in Artificial Intelligence: A Social Informatics Approach” included doctoral work by Ece Gumesul that defined a three stage privacy interaction framework and raised questions about chatbot persona influences on interactions.
I participated on a panel “Provocations on iSchools and Librarianship: New Priorities for LIS Forward” that continued discussions held at last year’s iConference, ASIST, and several other meetings based on the LIS Forward report that considers how librarianship and library education fit in iSchools (https://tascha.uw.edu/projects/lis-forward/). In breakout sessions, participants and the panelists discussed the tension between library science research and education programs as a socially grounded cores for iSchools and the strong trends toward technical training programs that attract large numbers of students and research funding. This tension leads to inequities in faculty recruitment and workloads and serious disagreements of values and career trajectories among students in library and technical degree programs. One conclusion was to insist that our complements are more important than our differences, and our ability to have strong iSchools that value and practice collaboration and mutual respect across participants will depend on vigorous but civil discussions of values and consequent equitable sharing of resources. Another possible conclusion is that library science education cannot thrive in iSchools and an eventual schism cannot be avoided. My own belief is that such a schism will devalue and reduce the success of everyone in our field. This is an important discussion that will continue to drive us forward in the years ahead as long as it remains a vigorous exchange of how to work together to extract the best results from multiple points of views and skill sets rather than a winner-take all competition between iSchool factions.
Finally, a note about practicing what we preach. The conference provided support for on-the-fly translation service for all attendees through the Wordly app. This technology relies on AI driven NLP and is an example of how international conferences can leverage technology to welcome broader communities to the scholarly table.
1: The following observations and notes may be of interest to iSchool faculty and students who were not able to attend. These represent a small sliver of the program and events limited by the sessions and conversations I was able to have and surely reflect my own interests/biases rather than a comprehensive summary of the conference.
Comments