In my practice, I use Critical Information Literacy as a teaching method to help students understand the power structures that exist behind their sources, in an effort to deconstruct barriers of information. There is considerable value in teaching the complexities of information privilege, especially to undergraduates who are the next generation of researchers and information consumers.
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The start of this year’s Open Access Week coincided with No Kings demonstrations that took place around the nation on Oct. 18. I found myself that day, as so many of us did, shoulder to shoulder with friends, family and strangers speaking up for democracy. I was at the Seattle Center, at the foot of the Space Needle in downtown Seattle, in a vast crowd, my attention divided between fired-up speakers, inflatable unicorns, posters with wry comments and a rank of flags for veterans for peace. Amid the crowd was a group of intellectual-looking types, most wearing glasses and lab coats, waving SOS banners: Save Our Science. When I saw the SOS signs, I thought about how difficult it is to protect something we can’t see, how difficult it is to convince people of the value of something that they can’t use.
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People can experience the same public policy very differently. Some feel their lives are improving; others feel left behind. This is not simply disagreement, it reflects a core part of policy impact that is hard to capture with objective indicators alone: public perception. Traditional social surveys are designed for this purpose, but they are often slow, expensive, and hard to adapt quickly. They also face challenges such as fixed question formats, limited flexibility, and cross-cultural comparability.
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Many Canadian post-secondary institutions currently describe themselves as supporting community-based research, where the work of marginalized community members is valued and integrated into community-based research projects. Our experiences working on sister projects the Sex Work Activist Histories Project (SWAHP) and Eco-systems of Community Research and Recordkeeping (ECRR) have led us to conclude that these institutions in fact often undermine or ignore non-academic knowledges and expertise. University reform is needed to support community-driven research, especially for extremely marginalized communities such as sex workers.
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In modern societies, many of the hardest problems are not “single-point” problems. They are system problems. A rumor jumps across communities in hours. A public service reaches some groups quickly but misses others. Platform risks reappear in new forms even after repeated governance actions. In education, healthcare, and emergency management, we have plenty of data—yet decision-makers still struggle to pinpoint which connections, pathways, and bottlenecks truly drive outcomes. What is missing is often not data, but a way to represent multi-actor, multi-relationship, and multi-context complexity in a form that computers can learn from and humans can interpret. This is where heterogeneous graphs come in.
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In my previous career as a systems librarian, I saw information privilege as a technical problem: who has the password to the database, and who has the funding for the subscription? But as I transitioned into research with Chinese immigrant cancer survivors, I realized that privilege runs deeper than a personal login. Even if we made every medical journal in the world “Open Access” tomorrow, many of the survivors I work with would still be excluded from the conversation. Removing a paywall doesn’t help if the person behind it can’t read the language or can’t find their cultural realities reflected in what counts as evidence.
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Doing science is not the same thing as producing science. Science, at its core, is a profoundly human activity. It involves not just generating knowledge but developing judgment about what questions matter—asking not only how something might be done, but whether it should be done at all.
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Imagine global politics not as a grand marble hall full of flags and translators but as a login screen. Username. Password. Payment tier selected. That’s the thought experiment at the heart of Trump’s Board of Peace. The idea here isn’t about whether it’s good or bad; it’s about what happens when international legitimacy starts to look and feel like a software product.
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On 6 February 2023, the Kahramanmaraş-centered earthquakes reduced large parts of southern Türkiye to rubble. Countless buildings collapsed or became uninhabitable. Yet one public building remained standing: the Adıyaman Provincial Public Library. Amid the devastation, this fact was impossible to ignore. This observation became the starting point of my master’s thesis, which examined the earthquake risk of public libraries in Türkiye using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). It also raised a more immediate and human question: what can a library that remains standing actually do after a disaster?
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Among the most recent AI developments with the potential to significantly transform library services is tiny machine learning (TinyML). TinyML is a low-latency technology that enables intelligent, on-device decision-making without requiring data transmission to the cloud for processing.
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