Our next meeting takes place this Friday, July 4 at our usual time (4 PM CEST / 10 AM EST)
The agenda is quite light this month, which is a great opportunity for open discussion. Please bookmark any inspiring papers, news or resources to share with the group! Otherwise, we can share what we have been up to and make plans for new collectively maintained initiatives. See you there!
https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/2320704440
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@evanwill I also wonder if this counts as supervised application of LLMs for qualitative research??
@evanwill Yep I completely agree! It is super distracting and may potentially lead to creating bad data. I still haven't figured out how to turn off suggestions for git commit messages.
So I'm using a CLI-based qualitative data analysis system (it's great! https://qualitative-coding.readthedocs.io) that I integrate into my VSCode workspace. I happened to start experimenting with copilot last week and today when I started qualitative coding I noticed it was offering me suggestions. Seems to be based on my prior codings rather than the actual file from the corpus, but still a bit eerie and not sure if I want to keep this on or not.
#OpenScience lobbyists, skeptics and everything in between: consider coming to Munich in May 2026 (gorgeous time to visit..) to discuss the future of Open Research!
FOR2026 is open for submissions, deadline 30/09/2025: https://opensciencestudies.eu/for-2026-conference/
@felwert I absolutely agree. I do like how it's very clear about how it processes information and maintains the human as the leading actor, but I'm not sure how transparent it is about things it doesn't know that it doesn't know --- which to be fair, humans have a hard time with too, but it's more odious when there's a claim to store "all" human knowledge at scale. I'm not sure if this is what this service claims, but some others certainly do
@felwert Very poor quality for monographs, chapters in edited volumes and grey literature, and for anything not in english or from before the past ~15 years
@felwert If it's just using the same scholarly metadata sources as all the others, I don't see anything special about it. Garbage in, garbage out!
I wish it was easier to capture more nuanced community structures. Because the real world is more complicated than two separated communities. It's does not boil down to "clusters". I wonder if we're obsessed with polarized structures because it's hard to see the more nuanced ones.
We may be in a computational social science conference, what I see is that design shapes the tools we use to think, and model the world.
I want to account for the nuance and ambiguity of the world!
5/5
Transparency as a substitute for governance: on Nature’s open review process
The DAFNEE database of academia-friendly journals is now using @OpenAlex instead of PubMed to find your papers for the author index.
That's great especially for #archaeology since most are not indexed in PubMed.
Go see the second tab on https://dafnee.isem-evolution.fr !
@GaltierNicolas
@tillgrallert I just realized that you're the dev for OpenArabicPE. I don't usually work with TEI so I stumbled on your tool to convert TEI to bibtex (for initial validation and learning purposes, since I'm more familiar with the latter). Thanks for making this :) However, I'm wondering if there are some more detailed instructions on how to install and run this locally? The URL to the github pages deployment also seems to be broken
@tillgrallert @cmboulanger Watching this presentation now and all my frustrations are manifested here. Thank you so much for sharing this!
@kiru I believe it!
@tillgrallert @cmboulanger This is great! I also started using grobid, seems like the best tool for the job. And I could see it being a standard part of my toolbox for many other things going forward
Now attempting to circumvent the whole mess using machine learning to extract references from PDFs
Metadata is only useful if it exists
Open scholarly metadata is actually such a huge mess, especially for monographs, edited volumes, grey lit, i.e. anything that isn't an english STEM journal article.
Which actually explains so much about why the "metascience" scene is how it is....
Having to extract lists of references from monographs and chapters and edited volumes, in norwegian 😖
@adr I mean, it's probably not *the* explanation but maybe one factor