How Saskatchewan’s Community Organizations Responded to the COVID-19 Pandemic
#COVID
https://rememberrebuild.ca/how-saskatchewans-community-organizations-responded-to-the-covid-19-pandemic/

The world is changing faster than a lot of people expected. Are Saskatchewan and Alberta ready for the disruption? Tilting at windmills (or attacking Trudeau) isn’t going to change this global trend. https://policymagazine.ca/cutting-through-the-fog-of-war-on-energy-transition/

Mastodon might have fewer total users and no algorithm (which seems like a big limitation), but today it is best place to talk with people about the future of history in the age of social media.

@pepita Twitter was also a place for regular people to talk with politicians and journalists. As a historian I tend to be drawn to these very public conversations and not to the semi private bar talk. I think it is fine that Facebook keeps the semi private material out of archives. The engagement with politicians should be archived.

@krono if people want private network discussions, that is valid. I just hope it isn’t all we end up with. I don’t want a handful of billionaires owning the archive of the public discussion and then deleting it when they lose interest or stop profiting.

@danbrotherston totally agree

@danbrotherston I still have api access to Twitter. It looks like it is in a tail spin, so who know how long it will last, but I’m not ready to welcome Meta’s shit policy just because Twitter is getting worse.

Reasons for historians to be concerned about Threads winning and killing Twitter: Twitter provides access for the Internet Archive and allowed my project full access to download up to 10 million Tweets a month related to COVID and Saskatchewan. Facebook and Instagram block the Internet Archive and don’t provide access to academics. Twitter owned by Musk is terrible and not currently providing access for new Academic projects, but Meta is also really bad for archiving.

Fired up #Threads and scrolled for a few minutes through the content that was placed in my timeline by The Almighty Algorithm.

Gotta say, if #Meta were going for a first impression of "Wow I care about literally none of this inane bullshit" then they nailed it.

@BrentToderian We’ve known this approach works for close to 20 years (at least); Toronto had pilot projects back around 2004/5. It is an active choice to keep people in poverty to avoid the perceived moral hazard of giving people decent lives without “earning” it.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri says pretty conclusively they don’t want Threads to be the new app for news and journalists. Makes sense given Meta is threatening to pull news in Canada and California.

Ultimately, Threads is a sanitized space for brands, grifters, and celebrities — all designed to sell you more shit.

#meta #tech #threads #socialmedia #instagram

My new social media app is called Grouse. You can only post criticism of the 3,000 other new social media apps.

Posts are called “Gripes.” No likes or reposts—just one button to “Commiserate.” If a Gripe receives enough Commiseration it’s elevated by the algorithm into a “Complaint.”

Also there’s an academic version called “Faculty Meeting.”

“Everyone alive knew that not enough was being done, and everyone kept doing too little.” The Ministry For The Future

And now we have bigrams and trigrams. It is a big corpus, so it took me some time to figure out how to develop a loop that didn’t require 230GB of RAM. This is a simple test of the Premier’s name in our Sask COVID Twitter corpus. Something interesting happened during the Ottawa occupation. #DigitalHumanities #WebArchives

I’m about to show some students around this Hubs exhibit: https://hubs.mozilla.com/A5MY6Gv/excited-blushing-safari

Working with the Sask COVID Tweets data we collected, I’ve now processed the daily word frequency and can chart the change over 2022-2022. #ChatGPT was a big help with the code. #histodons #DigitalHumanities #ai

DH folks interested in LLMs and what they mean for our field(s) -- HMU if you are thinking about these questions and would like to collaborate on a CFP for a cluster or special issue for DHQ or a similar venue. Would love to hear from folks outside my own expertise in literary studies -- I've got a draft CFP now and would love to get collective insight. #criticalAI #DH #AI

If you know how to code in Python at a very amateur level, #ChatGPT is a game changer. I just wrote a fairly complicated scrip after too many years without practice that is working great. It does require some editing and vague knowledge of Python, but I am very out of practice and this would have taken me days instead of hours. #histodons #DigitalHumanies

Also, I have 10 other things I should have done with my morning!!

"Read the books they're banning. That's where the good stuff is."

--LeVar Burton