#AcademicRunPlaylist - 9/22/24

I managed to catch a glimpse of a 🦝in the woods today as it was trudging along, and while enjoying the wildlife I also enjoyed some talks from my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an amazing talk by Will Orr on rethinking dataset creation at the Design Justice Network AI Institute. Orr examines the people and processes of Common Crawl, the organization responsible for providing the web crawl data that powers pretty much every large model out there. He shows how the inherently subjective method of choosing what to crawl is masked with choices by Common Crawl, how the algorithms used likely lead to misrepresentation of non-English text, and many more issues. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/live/AtLWmGnEeEw?si=MT8V0YBk63W01Lhp&t=1723

Next was a fascinating talk by Camilla Power on traditional and ancient methods of timekeeping and how our biological adaptations are at odds with modern timekeeping practices at UCL Anthropology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGuvxGq9hB8

Last was "The Worlds the Shawnees Made" by Stephen Warren. Most histories often look only at great powers, and histories of the colonial period in America are no exception. Spain, Britain, France, and more recently the Iroquois feature prominently, with only passing mention made to most other actors prior to the formation of the US. Stephen Warren presents a wonderfully researched, unique view into this world by focusing instead on the Shawnees, who took up migration wholeheartedly with the rise of these different powers and were constantly interfacing between these different, conflicting groups.

Warren blends archaeology, the written historical record, and modern oral history to present one of the most complete looks at a Native American tribe that I've seen. The interactions between technology, culture, climate, and politics that are mapped out and explored here are extremely insightful and leave one with a much richer view of the complex web of relationships that developed prior to 1800. Highly recommend

https://uncpress.org/book/9781469627274/the-worlds-the-shawnees-made/