‘Face on the wet ground, I don’t know it was Monopoly money he pressed into my hand instead of legal tender. Not yet. That’s for tomorrow. A whole self-hatred-steeped, restless sleep away.’
Well, isn’t that nice!
I’ve been on a quest to get my brain back into shape, having finished a rather long (and emotionally draining) work project. One of my goals for 2025 is to get back up to speed with all things Open Science and Open Data, having been mostly observing from the sidelines for the couple of years whilst I’ve focussed on other projects.
To that end, I recently completed the NASA Open Science 101 course which was a nice and gentle introduction to a future of tests and exams (for someone with not a small phobia of them). They’re so sweet they even gave a little accreditation badge – and as you have to get 70% or above, it does give a nice little boost of sorts!
//cdn.credly.com/assets/utilities/embed.jsThe design is pretty cute too.
Is it a matter of language?
Reading through this online class about LLMs, this particular chapter (https://thebullshitmachines.com/lesson-5-hard-to-understand-harder-to-fix/index.html) got me wondering about whether (from a philosophy of language perspective) there is something about providing the software with the words as data as opposed to words as signifiers (which is what’s going on when we train with imagery).
A quick review of the 10th Uncodebar
So, in the spirit of getting it out before I gather another mega list of tabs, let’s get into Codebar.io’s 10th Uncodebar!
Unfortunately I didn’t take a lot of photos (except for a few of the pixel art via medium of post-its on the walls) which only occurred to me a few hours after the end having a lovely meal with the fantastic Sareh Heridari. So you’ll have to forgive the lack of visuals.
Anyway, when I arrived, they were sorting out the agenda. I put in a very last minute thing for the first session (it was totally empty, I promise) and spent about 15 minutes in total introducing the latest news from the Museum Data Service, chatting about what we as technologists thought it might need and why it was important to get into it.
My lightning talk and various links
My lightning talk – https://slides.com/sapphonouveau/unconference-2024-museum-data
Basically was trying to find a list of solid, publicly available APIs for the write up and found some of these interesting references to get into:
- A survey of access to the digital collections of 195 UK GLAMs across internal and external platforms – Appendix 1 for A Culture of Copyright: A scoping study on open access to digital cultural heritage collections in the UK – https://data.niaid.nih.gov/resources?id=zenodo_6242178
- Access to All: GLAM Data and API Service report – https://www.projects.ed.ac.uk/project/dlib007/closure-report
- A Checklist to Publish Collections as Data in GLAM
- Institutions – https://pure.strath.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/180480843/Candela-etal-GKMC-2023-A-checklist-to-publish-collections-as-data-in-GLAM-institutions.pdf
- A nice bit of a historical reckoning – https://www.openobjects.org.uk/2013/04/an-even-briefer-history-of-open-cultural-data-at-glam-wiki-2013/
Interesting orgs
- https://datatopower.net/
- Research Libraries UK – https://www.rluk.ac.uk/
What next?
I actually managed to attend each of the sessions I wanted from a talk about getting into open source projects, to mentoring seniors, to tips on how designers and developers best work with each other and what we think about the state of tech ethics and society. All very reassuring in the sense that everyone’s got the same problems, the same half-solutions, and plenty to learn from each other! I learned about the importance of clarifying expectations when mentoring seniors and that developers won’t be put off by getting to do some contextual enquiry of their own to better understand the problem space.
All things Open Source
The open source session reminded me that once the various reports, next years Afro Dino Hack and side projects are wrapped up, I need to get into some of the cool open source projects in climate tech and Smart Cities. A list of some that seem particularly interesting:
Smart cities repos and project lists
Smart cities data and further reading
- https://www.hassellstudio.com/conversation/open-source-city
- https://opencode.md/en/registry/smart-city/
Climate tech
A neat open access climate tech project
The final session I attended was really led by Sareh Heidari who very kindly invited me to play the role of the extra-critical partner to her more balanced points, which was absolutely fine by me. That was definitely a really interesting conversation although ended too soon before we got to the point of collective action. At the very least it was a good run up to her amazing lightning talk about why people in tech should join a union – with a special shoutout to UTAW!
Overall, I am incredibly glad I attended. I haven’t been to an event like this for ages – not since last year I don’t think – and it was just nice to sit back, learn whilst yes sharing experiences. There’s at least several people I suspect I will be in touch with for a while to come. In fact, maybe I should get myself going to a codebar one of these days…
Random things I read today
- https://www.openrightsgroup.org/publications/e-visas-hostile-and-broken/
- https://www.benjystanton.co.uk/blog/service-assessment-looming/ – reassuring to see the jitters never go away!
- Post-growth innovation lab – https://postgrowth-lab.uvigo.es/
- Argh yes I need to get back to reading about how to teach stat if I’m to ever do a successful community science intervention – https://www.google.com/search?q=communicating+statistics&oq=communicating+statistics&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyCQgAEEUYORiABDIKCAEQABgPGBYYHjIICAIQABgWGB4yCAgDEAAYFhgeMggIBBAAGBYYHjIKCAUQABgKGBYYHjIICAYQABgWGB4yCggHEAAYChgWGB4yCAgIEAAYFhgeMggICRAAGBYYHtIBCDYwODlqMGoxqAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Working on some posters…
…and found this excellent list of Black typographers:
- https://library.typographica.org/black-type-designers-foundry-owners
- https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/tre-seals-is-turning-typography-into-a-radical-act/
- https://www.velvetyne.fr/fonts/format-1452/ – ooh an open source font foundry? Yeeees sign me up!!
Additional reading
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/typography/comments/gveq7m/fonts_created_by_black_designers/
Whatever happened to the European Theatre Lab
The latest Digital Things has come through and as always, had a solid mix of the interesting and thoughtful and just plain “wait what— ooh, actually…” on top of a link to the European Theatre Lab. From the website it looks like they haven’t done much since the late 2010s…
Bit sad, and also somehow unlikely – would love to know if anything’s still going on in this space.
Extra reading
Approaching AI at the National Library of Scotland – a very careful public statement with some interesting links
Musical Greats: Sarah Vaughan
As always, thanks to twitter for pointing me in the direction of this amazing singer.
On the body, history and work of the self-aware Christian
For a whole bunch of reasons I ended up going to the 8am service in the morning during which there was a brief talk on Jesus’ teaching in John chapter 6 regarding the ‘bread of heaven’ and what it might have to say on the nature of the body*.
One of the ideas that the priest put forward was in the same way that – whether through the connection through communion, the nature of the incarnation etc. – the talk about ‘bread of life’, about having to ‘eat flesh and blood’, turns the taboo and slightly stomach churning into something life-affirming, so too should the body be focussed as a site of fundamental positivity (being the thing that can ‘digest’ or ‘imbibe’ the ‘bread of life’).
Whilst in general I rather think there’s always a danger of reading a lot into something that reads often more provocation than anything else, what I couldn’t help but think about is, given the legacy of western Christianity in contributing to and creating pathological views of the body as something impure, is this enough? I always am mindful of the privilege of growing up in a fairly milquetoast but nonetheless open and interesting Christianity and never more so than when rolling up sleeves to donate, to march, to protest against those who would use legislation, lobbying and charitable networks to inflict their anti-body theologies on everyday society.
Interesting as the talk was, it did make me further muse on why we seem incapable of organising around ideas such as those described by the priest, not least to contest who has a right to public and political interpretations of the Christian faith.
*Not for the first time, I rather wonder what would be different if more of us explicitly used just these kinds of perspectives from Jesus both as a philosophical perspective and as praxis.
A little more friction to get a little more action?
Anyway so was catching up on case studies from the irrepressible Growth.Design and the one on Tinder made me think.
There’s a bit where Louis-Xavier is responding to a match and he makes an interesting point:
The fact that Keely didn’t start the conversation when we matched… is a good indicator that it’s not easy!
This gave me an idea…
How Tinder Converts (Almost) 8%
Of Singles Into Customers
In Less Than 15 Minutes
One of the most common points made by cishet women looking for guys is the prevalence of the dick pic. It did Louis-Xavier’s point about the obstacle of getting a match when there isn’t anything to go on beyond that fact reminded me about the fascinating and often anxiety-enabled (but not generated, to be clear – we have patriarchy to thank for that) weirdness of how so many cishet men understand attractiveness, sexiness etc. – the fact that reverse flashing them actually kind of impresses them, that all too many genuinely think dick pic==increased likelihood of sexual success, that for the more sexist amongst them, it’s almost de rigeur for the dating process, the list goes on.
It would be interesting to know if providing additional friction (see what I did there?) as Louis-Xavier himself suggests could be part of the UI arsenal to save the cishet girlies from unwanted dickpics and inadequate responses. Especially given the kind of data apps like Tinder have about you, I’m sure there’s ways to get inventive with it – and that could well include ways of supporting the eternal quest of the guys-who-like-send-dickpics to meet the girls-who-like-to-receive-dickpics?
Interesting reads
Workshopping at the International Black Speculative Writing Festival
One thing I’m experimenting with (very much inspired by the work of Matteo Menapace) is overtly introducing game mechanics as a design teaching technique. An example is a die-and-board that I used last year, enabling students to dig into an aspect of a persona as part of the steps required to mapping out a full journey.
This weekend I used a die-and-card mechanic to aid the prototyping stage. Each ’round’, the team rolls the die and then withdraws the respective number of cards from a stack. The cards were all assigned the following meanings:
- The sphinx – whoever is assigned can use their superpower to contribute to the prototype
- The seedling – gives a team member the right to exchange resources with another table
- The maze – the assigned reminds of realities that the solution needs to account for. Their job is ‘to keep it real’
- The tortoise – a trickster who flips everything on its head
It seemed to work nicely – from observation there was a good mix of activities (i.e. not solely talking but making and trading). The ratios also worked well as each table summoned the trickster at least once!
by F. Okoye 
