When you’re enamoured of a technology and someone points out important ethical challenges, a typical reflex is to seek permission: yeah, but what about this use? If you find yourself seeking permission, one useful thing to do is to step back and inspect the underlying value conflict. What does your own moral compass say? Centering values leads to mindful choices. As you move from a tech-first to a values-first perspective, the question shifts from “won’t you give me permission?” to “how do I do the best science possible?”. And that, to me, is a question worth asking.
Will synthetic text generators usher in a new age of creative thinking? The remarkable fluency of large language models may make them interesting tools for rapidly exploring semantic and stylistic spaces, yet the deceptive ease with which they generate output also provides countless new ways of appropriating ideas and erasing authorship. To better understand challenges and opportunities in this domain, we consider the interactional foundations of human creativity. Drawing on documented cases of creative collaboration, we argue that there is a world of a difference between text generation and true grasp — and that the friction and interaction that comes with the latter may be a meaningful element of human collaborative creativity.
We don’t generally see PhD dissertations as an exciting genre to read, and that is wholly our loss. As the publishing landscape of academia is fast being homogenised, the thesis is one of the last places where we have a chance to see the unalloyed brilliance of up and coming researchers. Let me show you using three examples of remarkable theses I have come across in the past years.
One of the key tasks scientists need to master is how to manage bibliographic information: collecting relevant literature, building a digital library, and handling citations and bibliographies during writing. This tutorial introduces Zotero (www.zotero.org), an easy to use reference management tool made by scholars for scholars. The tutorial covers the basics of using Zotero for collecting, organizing, citing and sharing research. Zotero automates the tasks of managing bibliographic data, storing and renaming PDFs, and formatting references. It also integrates with widely used text processors, and can synchronize your library across devices. There is no more need to search through disorganized file folders full of inscrutably named PDF files, to copy and paste references across documents, or to manually deal with pointless differences in citation styles. Ultimately, the point of using a reference manager is to free more time for real research.
Academia.edu takes your academic work and puts it behind a privacy-defying signup form, laces it with ads, botches the metadata, and tries to appease you by offering stats and social ranking that promote constant comparison. What’s not to like?
Google Scholar is useful, but its inclusiveness and mix of automatically updated and hand-curated profiles means you should never take any of its numbers at face value. Case in point: the power couple Prof. Et Al and Dr. A. Author, whose profiles I created following Scholar’s recommended settings (and a bit of manual embellishment). If you have a Scholar profile, make sure you don’t let Scholar update the publication list automatically. If you’re looking at somebody else’s profile, take it with a big pinch of salt, especially when they have a reasonably common name or when messy entries or weird citation distributions indicate that it is being automatically updated.
Magritte’s best known work by far is of course his drawing of a pipe with the text Ceci n’est pas une…
Note to readers: A version of this argument has been written up and published as: Dingemanse, Mark. 2015. “Ideophones and…
One of the most common word-processing related task for academics is to generate PDF versions of documents — for sharing…