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Azeez Adeoye

Paperless Society: The Prediction That Came Too Early, Yet Came True

In the early 1970s, bold predictions emerged about the coming of a “paperless society.” The concept was first formally introduced by F. W. (Frederick Wilfrid) Lancaster, an information scientist and professor at the University of Illinois, who envisioned that advances in information technology would make paper largely obsolete by the year 2000. In 2025, Lancaster’s once-ambitious vision appears closer to fulfilment. The long-envisioned dream of a paperless society is gradually becoming a tangible reality, as many sectors including education, commerce, governance and healthcare now rely significantly less on paper for their daily operations.

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Anita Coleman

AI-Powered Peer Review: How Review Reveal Can Detect Bias, Improve Fairness, and Transform Scholarly Publishing

When a harsh peer review exposed systemic bias, the author drew on established and emerging research to envision AI‑powered Review Reveal: a tool that flags exclusionary reviewer language, maps critiques to manuscript sections, audits equity‑related phrasing, and suggests inclusive rewrites — protecting intellectual freedom and making global digital knowledge culture more accessible to under‑represented and all participating scholars.

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Ponego Letswalo

When the Algorithm is Blind: AI, Data Bias, and the South African Patient

This article explores how bias in artificial intelligence (AI) systems affects healthcare outcomes for South African patients. It highlights real-world examples, including the inaccuracy of pulse oximeters on darker skin and the disproportionate targeting of Black healthcare providers by fraud detection algorithms. Drawing on case studies and policy developments, including South Africa’s National AI Policy Framework, the article examines how biased data can reinforce inequality in medical decision-making. It calls for inclusive data practices, transparent algorithm design, and ethical oversight to ensure AI technologies serve all South Africans fairly and effectively.

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Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

Nothing Beats a Metadata Holiday: Hashtags, Memes and the Accidental Information Science of Jet2

What began as commercial ephemera (an advert produced to shift package holidays) has mutated into cultural capital, a memetic passport to viral belonging. I want to explore that the Jet2 phenomenon is less about planes than about metadata. In fact, nothing beats a metadata holiday. I think hashtags, remixes and tags act like boarding passes: they authorise entry into specific memetic communities, classify users within folksonomies and direct cultural traffic through algorithmic hubs. If airlines build infrastructures to move bodies, platforms build infrastructures to move information. Jet2 (perhaps unintentionally?) has done both.

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Tommy Bui

Artist Residencies and Libraries: The Perceived Perils of Productive Frictions and Co-Creation

Critical to this investigation is to examine how the current scholarship defines and characterizes artist residencies. A surface level description of artist residencies is a program wherein a practicing artist is selected to collaborate with a host institution to address an issue and is afforded resources such as time, space, or financial backing at varying scales and scope. Other core principles of artist residencies and expectations that fall upon the selected artists include being enablers of the creative process, mutual experimentation, and striving toward capacity building.

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Pathum B Rathnayake

End of an Era? How Libraries Are Thriving in a Screen-Obsessed World

In today’s fast-paced world, many teenagers and young adults in their 20s and 30s seem glued to their screens. They stream videos, scroll social media, and read e-books on devices. This raises a big question: Are physical libraries dying out because young people aren’t visiting them to read books? This review looks at the past, present, and future of libraries to argue that no, this isn’t the end. Instead, libraries are changing to stay relevant, blending old-school charm with modern tech.

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Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

When the Gates Open: Ghost Month and the Hauntings of the Web

At its core, Ghost Month is about infrastructures of connection. The gates of the underworld are said to swing open, allowing for traffic (spiritual, emotional, social) between realms. It is about networks: between the living and the dead and also between generations, between households and temples, between earthly desires and cosmic orders. And here is where I want to ask: what if we read the internet itself as a kind of ghost gate? What if the lag, glitches, hidden circuits of our digital infrastructures are not simply “errors” but hauntings, reminders that our networks, too, are spectral spaces where living and nonliving, human and machinic, constantly mingle?

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Magnus Igbinovia

Through a Filtered Lens: How Information Retrieval Bias Shapes Users’ Information Consumption

Everyone is interacting with information systems to access, retrieve, and subsequently use information for diverse purposes. What if the information we are consuming to make life-staking decisions has been filtered by an invisible hand? Like the lens of a camera, the invisible hand filters what information we receive, decides for us what is most relevant to our search queries, what is emphasized in our search results, and the ranking order of the information we receive. Unfortunately, this invisible hand is with a “closed fist” (devoid of openness, clarity, and understanding) and is highly subjective.

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