I was describing my professional activity to a friend in the industry the other day, and they said “what you do is data science!” That was news to me, as I hadn’t heard the term applied to text analytics before. My …
Judea Pearl’s The Book of Why (co-authored with science journalist Dana Mackenzie) (2018) is a tantalising read. For the initial premiss of the book, I am convinced by Pearl’s description of the limitations of current tools, particularly in statistics. He describes …
I’m a great admirer of the Very Short Introductions: clear, concise outlines of a topic by an expert in the field. Well, this book is certainly very short, but how good is it as an introduction? Readers hoping for a good …
Reading Time: 4minutesNicolaes Maes, Vertumnus and Pomona, c.1655, not in the exhibition catalogue (but who knows?)
When creating a digital collection of textual content, some attempt is made to structure the individual texts in a standard way. After all, every journal article has …
For the entirety of my career in publishing, there have been regular events that punctuate regular work. For weeks or months you trudged to the company office, but then you were given a moment of freedom to meet others and to …
Reading Time: 3minutesA screenshot created using Miro
This was never going to be a pale imitation of earlier iterations of this conference. Mark Carden has always set his stall out to provide more interactivity than in other conferences. The standard format of workshops, …
Reading Time: 4minutes “Partial view of Wikipedia’s category system from 2007. Arrows point from category to sub-category.”
I’ve written before about Wikipedia categories, using the example of a brand of toothpaste, and this post is an attempt to understand them a bit better. …
Reading Time: 5minutesLibrary of Congress [public domain]
I was interested to see a new report, Machine Learning + Libraries, commissioned by the Library of Congress. Actually, the report is from LC Labs, a team in the Library Digital Strategy Directorate, so it …
A new publication from OCLC outlines progress on the use of linked data for research archives and special collections. There is a list of 21 members of the relevant OCLC linked data review group, so this publication looks to represent a …
