Original - Information Matters

Cartoon of an AI data centre with a bag of TSMC computer chips saying 'byte-sized snack' even as an enormous bag of money goes up in flames in the background. Blue skies and other data centres form rest of the background.

February 26, 2026 Abhinav Choudhry

AI—The Familiar Promise of the One Ring

Generative AI (GenAI) has raised quite a stir in the past three years, pun intended. Trained, very arguably, on the ‘entire internet’, these models not only effortlessly breached the Turing Test barrier but today, laypersons are even using them as appeals to authority: ‘@Grok, is this true?’, or journalists quoting AI as ground truth for fact checks. The machine heuristic is still at play: AI is assumed to be unbiased, objective and rational. The hype around AI is palpable too: it being the panacea to the world’s problems and sparking debates on future need for universal basic income, even as hungry data centres gobble up gargantuan quantities of RAM and chips. However, trillions of dollars need to take stock first.

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February 25, 2026 Toni Anaya

The Impact of Digital Redlining in a Post-Pandemic World

As public spaces, employers, and schools shut down in response to the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, an issue that librarians and educators were familiar with became evident: the digital divide was alive and well in communities around the world. While historically, the digital divide has been defined since the middle of the 1990s as “the gap between those who do and those who do not have access to new forms of information technology” , two decades later, this definition encompasses information technology such as broadband internet, home computers, stable mobile telephone connectivity and digital television.

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February 15, 2026 Nicole Thomas

From Gatekeepers to Guides: Unlocking Information Privilege in the Library Classroom

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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February 13, 2026 Danielle Allard

Towards Knowledge Justice: Centering Marginalized Community Expertise in Academia

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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February 7, 2026 Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

The Billion-Dollar API: Trump’s Board of Peace and the Monetisation of Sovereignty

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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February 5, 2026 Xiaoguang Wang

Digital Humanities and Intelligent Computing for Cultural Heritage: A Global Book Series and Its First Volume

The rapid development of digital technologies is reshaping humanities research and the preservation of cultural heritage worldwide. In response to these transformations, the book series Digital Humanities and Intelligent Computing has been initiated by the Intelligent Computing Laboratory for Cultural Heritage (ICLCH) at Wuhan University, originating from the Centre for Digital Humanities at the same institution, and is under contract with Routledge. The series is designed to provide a comprehensive global perspective on the latest advancements and trends in digital humanities (DH) and intelligent computing for cultural heritage, and to promote cross-cultural dialogue, knowledge exchange, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

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February 4, 2026 Pathum B Rathnayake

Open Access Boom: Citations Up, Barriers Up

Open Access (OA) publishing has become a major change in how research is shared. In traditional publishing, readers pay to access articles through journal subscriptions. In OA, articles are free to read online right away. This trend has grown fast because many believe it makes science better and fairer. Supporters say OA articles get more citations because more people can read them, leading to greater impact. However, authors often pay high Article Processing Charges (APCs) to publish in OA journals. This creates a debate: Does OA truly boost research impact, or does it create new problems by charging authors large fees?

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February 3, 2026 Lynne Bowker

Unlocking access to information through plain language

Have you ever been excited to learn something new, but when you started reading about it, you felt completely lost and ended up setting it aside? A large volume of knowledge production is carried out by researchers, who typically convey it using the specialized language of their subject field. This often includes specialized terminology and expressions, acronyms or other abbreviated forms, stylistic conventions, and even particular ways of structuring or formatting a text. The end result is comprehensible to other researchers in the same subject field, but it may be far less accessible to other groups.

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January 30, 2026 Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

Taiwanese Disease, Formosan Flu: Central Bank as Information Gatekeeper

If an economy were a body and its policies were cells, then the rumoured “Formosan flu” afflicting Taiwan might be best diagnosed not with a stethoscope but with an information scanner. In The Economist’s recent cover story (which dubbed the situation “Taiwanese disease” or “Formosan flu”) it was the persistent undervaluation of the New Taiwan dollar that served as symptom and signal. The magazine’s use of its own Big Mac Index, an informal gauge of purchasing power parity that suggests Taiwan’s currency is around 55 % undervalued relative to the US dollar, turned what might seem like a quirky economic snack into a sprawling public health narrative of economic strain. But what if this isn’t simply about price mechanics or exchange rates? What if Taiwan’s central bank isn’t just a macroeconomic organ but an information gatekeeper, curating the very signals that shape how the domestic body hears itself, thinks about itself and behaves?

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January 20, 2026 Chang Liu

Book Review: Human–AI Interaction and Collaboration

Human–AI Interaction and Collaboration, co-edited by Professors Dan Wu and Shaobo Liang of the School of Information Management, Wuhan University, arrives as a timely and deeply thoughtful contribution. Published by Cambridge University Press, this volume brings together twelve chapters by interdisciplinary scholars from around the world, offering a richly layered exploration of how humans and AI systems interact, collaborate, and co-evolve in contemporary sociotechnical contexts.