Web 2.0 Projects at Warwick University Library

About 2 years ago at Warwick our senior managers encouraged Academic Support staff to really explore web 2.0 technologies and find out if anything particularly lent itself to supporting library work or marketing. We were given free reign to find out what worked and what suited the library, and what didn’t. The following brief overviews cover only four of the projects that have been running since then. We have also investigated much more, including Twitter, Google Documents, wiki reading lists, You-Tube and more, but we couldn’t possibly fit it all in here. The brief articles below are just to give a taste of the kind of projects we have worked on. There are many more members of staff involved and many more web 2.0 adventures underway..

Collection Development and the Value of the Library

This is a draft 2 of a discussion paper written for Boston University LibrariesDiscusses recent trends in scholarly communication and library collection developmen

A Mongolian horsepacking adventure through my paranoid poetics of digital ontology

This is not quite an essay. It is more of a scientific experiment conducted with words. It titrates the paranoid poetics of critique with the narrative practices of social media to precipitate a postcritical theory of digital ontology. The organic compounds used in this titration were extracted from a 16-month mine of ethnography among digitalreal tourists known as Dimecams. This ethnographic mine was full of participant-observations among the “digital” and “real” aggregates of horsepacking adventures in Mongolia. Starting with myths of Mongolian adventures that circulate in the backpacker communities of Asia, this experiment rewires the narrative circuits of exploration to illuminate two distinct iterations of adventure—the “real” and the “digital.” Common sense would have it that digital adventures appearing on social media are “representations” of real adventures from the flesh. The experiments I conducted, however, demonstrated that the digital and the real are actually two separate ontologies in which different types of adventures occur. Real adventures are full of misery and hunger while digital adventures are nothing but epic selfies and unhinged freedom. The radical alterity between these two kinds of adventures necessitated a turn towards ontology. However, in this ontological turn, my experiment spun out of control and crystallized as a fractal. That fractal was later revealed to be a continuously self-referential postcritique of the paranoid poetics of critique. The same fractal was also shown to be the operational procedure which kept the narrative ontology of digital adventures afloat in a self-sustaining world that endlessly retold itself into existence. What emerged at the end of this experiment was a not-quite-ontology composed of not-quite-beings—which, in the not-too-distant future, will detach itself from reality entirely, drifting off into space and forming a new planetAnthropolog

The Long Road: An Analysis of the 1557 Book of Mirrors by Seydi Ali Reis

In 1552, Piri Reis was relieved from the Admiralty of the Ottoman Imperial Navy. Seydi Ali Reis was appointed to replace him and his assignment was to return fifteen galleys from Basra to Egypt. This should have been a relatively short journey. Seydi failed miserably, however. He lost most of the ships in battle with the Portuguese and bad weather, which he documents in his travelogue The Mirror of Countries. With nowhere left to turn, he sold the remaining ships in Surat on the west coast of India. To make matters worse, he took the long road home to Istanbul: a circuitous route which stretched his journey for two years. This path went as far north as Samarqand in modern Uzbekistan. The question which arises is why did Seydi take so long to return home

Augmenting Librispeech with French Translations: A Multimodal Corpus for Direct Speech Translation Evaluation

Recent works in spoken language translation (SLT) have attempted to build end-to-end speech-to-text translation without using source language transcription during learning or decoding. However, while large quantities of parallel texts (such as Europarl, OpenSubtitles) are available for training machine translation systems, there are no large (100h) and open source parallel corpora that include speech in a source language aligned to text in a target language. This paper tries to fill this gap by augmenting an existing (monolingual) corpus: LibriSpeech. This corpus, used for automatic speech recognition, is derived from read audiobooks from the LibriVox project, and has been carefully segmented and aligned. After gathering French e-books corresponding to the English audio-books from LibriSpeech, we align speech segments at the sentence level with their respective translations and obtain 236h of usable parallel data. This paper presents the details of the processing as well as a manual evaluation conducted on a small subset of the corpus. This evaluation shows that the automatic alignments scores are reasonably correlated with the human judgments of the bilingual alignment quality. We believe that this corpus (which is made available online) is useful for replicable experiments in direct speech translation or more general spoken language translation experiments.Comment: LREC 2018, Japa

Blogging: an opportunity for librarians to communicate, participate and collaborate on a global scale

Blogs are an important element of the second generation of the web; or ‘Web 2.0’ as it is commonly referred to. ‘Web 2.0’ refers to the evolution from static "read only" web pages (Web 1.0) to dynamic, interactive pages encouraging users to create, interact and share content across multiple applications (O’Reilly, 2005). Blogging, along with other Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking, wikis, social bookmarking, photo sharing, video sharing, and microblogging, form part of the emergent ‘social media’ family; a collection of online tools that encourage users to communicate, participate, and collaborate on a global scale. Many library and information professionals have embraced blogging as a platform to document their career, enhance their profile, network with other librarians; and share anecdotes about their lives as librarians. The aim of this article is to present a brief overview of the history of blogs and a short review of literature related to blogging, libraries and reference librarians. It will also provide a list of recommended blogs, a discussion of the advantages of reading and writing blogs and some top tips for starting up your own blog

Spartan Daily, October 23, 2019

Volume 153, Issue 26https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2019/1069/thumbnail.jp