Religious cults represent the worst form of marginalization. Libraries must help people avoid falling into the trap of cults by informing them. Otherwise, it becomes almost impossible to return cult members to normal life, and even if a person leaves a cult after several decades, the effects of living in a closed system will keep them marginalized forever.
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In this reflective piece, I share my experience as a post-PhD early-career researcher navigating the challenges of the academic job market, particularly in applying for academic skills tutor roles within university library teams. Despite an academic background and a range of experiences, I encountered repeated rejections, which led me to ask: Who belongs in the library?
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Applying inclusive design for holistic wellness, aging, and mental health reduces elements that may aggravate symptoms of a challenge, disability, or some stress-inducing factors. This Healthcare UX design approach is a process of creating a digital experience that addresses the needs of healthcare users, including healthcare patients and their providers, plus the families and caregivers of the healthcare-services users. The bottom line is that whatever the ailment or healthcare goal is, digital healthcare products should be intuitive, effective, and useful so people get the care they need. This article looks at how healthcare can apply UX design to overcome or prevent potential challenges and frustrations from using technologies for health-related reasons.
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There is little doubt that GenAI can provide valuable services in certain areas e.g., by aiding and arguably empowering people who lack experience in say, writing business English or formatting CVs in specific ways, especially when applying for jobs that require submitting job applications online as is very common nowadays. However, it also creates uncanny language with a sensation of unease. Examples include employing idioms, phrases, or expressions that are used slightly incorrectly, or any other “slight but noticeable deviations from natural human writing can create a sense of disconnection and discomfort in the reader.” (ibid) Or, as Robertson (2024) puts it, “AI used to be weird. Now ‘sounds like a bot’ is just shorthand for boring.”
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The recent quota-reform movement in Bangladesh has brought the country to a significant historical moment, resulting in the deaths of more than two hundred people, including students and law enforcing agencies. Under the existing quota policy, only 44 percent of government recruitment was based on merit, while the remaining 56 percent was allocated to freedom fighters and their children, district quotas, women, and underprivileged communities. Students opposed this quota system and demanded its reform. Initially, university students across Bangladesh engaged in peaceful protests, rallies, and other activities, calling their efforts the “Anti-Discrimination Students’ Movement.” On July 7, they initiated a nationwide “Bangla Blockade,” obstructing roads and railways with demonstrations in major cities. As the protests escalated, they spread across the entire country, leading to violent incidents. The students’ demand for quota reforms resulted in significant clashes with law enforcement. On Thursday, July 18, around 9 PM, the entire country experienced an internet blackout, with all mobile and broadband services suspended, rendering social media inaccessible. This was followed by a nationwide curfew imposed by the government.
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Collaboration on the interpretation and analysis of texts, images, artifacts, qualitative data, and other recorded information is fundamental to knowledge production in many disciplines. However, collaborators may have different goals, work routines, research paradigms and methodologies, background knowledge, and more. Scholars have documented a range of challenges for successful collaborations, whether stemming from the mode of collaboration, differences in disciplinary perspectives and goals, or the need to establish common ground and find effective modes of communication. This special issue explores some of those challenges and through 10 articles showcases how collaborative interpretation happens, how existing knowledge infrastructures can and should support it, and how diverse individual perspectives come together during collaborative interpretation.
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Mnemohistory, a term coined by German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, refers to the study of how societies remember and construct their historical narratives. Unlike traditional historiography, which focuses on the objective recording and analysis of past events, mnemohistory emphasises the subjective processes through which memories are formed, preserved, and transmitted across generations. It explores the ways in which collective memory shapes, and is shaped by, cultural, social, and political contexts. Mnemohistory investigates the symbols, rituals, and narratives that communities use to create a sense of shared identity and continuity with the past. Originating from the Greek word “mnemos” meaning memory, and “historia,” meaning enquiry or knowledge, mnemohistory looks into the interaction between memory and history, recognising that our understanding of the past is not static but constantly reinterpreted through the lens of present concerns and future aspirations.
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Not everyone has the time and money to book a flight across the world to look at an artifact in person, so how do researchers with limited funding access one-of-a-kind resources? The Internet is a godsend for collaboration, letting us share photos of ancient pottery fragments, 3D scans of mummified tissue, and create virtual tours of ancient Egyptian tombs. However, sharing becomes a little more complicated when that artifact contains thousands of individual pages in 61 diaries, handwritten by a steamship clerk living in nineteenth-century Iraq. The Svoboda Diaries Project (SDP) focuses on exactly that. For nearly two decades, this project has used new and exciting digital preservation methods and extensive collaboration to make these diaries accessible to everyone.
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The beauty of qualitative research is that it allows flexibility and embraces nuance in interpretation. Of course, this comes with the recognition that reflexivity is essential to interpretation. However, interpretation becomes challenging when it involves varying perspectives. We (Irish, Gerard, and Yhna) provide an account of our collaborative interpretation experience in, analyzing the Out of the Box Media Literacy Initiative’s Media and Information Literacy for Democracy Handbook.
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I am the curator of A David Bomberg Legacy – The Sarah Rose Collection, a group of Modern British artworks by selected members of the David Bomberg and the Borough Group. In my role as the curator of the collection, I have expanded the site of curatorial production to include the Internet, and the archive of digitised material associated with the collection. One of the methods I have experimented to engage users in interpreting the digital collection is to create polyvocal audio recordings.
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