Sunday, April 28, 2024

Curated Nuggets of Knowledge - Week ending 4/28/2024

Let's start with a quote I recently curated.

"I'm drawn to the idea that the key to creating in the age of information abundance is to become a skilled curator. With so much content available, the ability to sift through the noise and identify the most relevant, compelling, and thought-provoking ideas becomes invaluable." 
~Joan Westenberg, How to be a creator in the age of information overload, Medium, March 2024.

Image by DALL.E.: Curation in the Age of Knowledge Graphs. 


The intense, very intentional curation wave I started this past February is already paying off.  My memory doesn't track every interesting thing I come across and read, but my notes do. I would not have remembered the quote above if I had not curated it (copied, stored, tagged).  I am also learning to take more atomic notes to facilitate more granular retrieval and reuse.  

Here is a selection of things I curated this week:

  • Hicks, J.; Dioma, A.; Apgar, M. and Keita, F. (2024) Early Findings from Evaluation of Systemic Action Research in Kangaba, Mali, IDS Working Paper 604, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, DOI: 10.19088/IDS.2024.016

    Why did this get my attention?
    • I like IDS research in general.
    • I think I passed through Kangaba 20+ years ago in my early career focused on Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E).  It was not Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) yet.
    • Anything that has the word system or systemic gets my attention, and so does action research, so "systemic action research" triggered big flashing lights in my brain, and of course, that led me to try to figure out what that was and how it might connect to my focus areas for curation purposes.  

  •  Happy Arbor Day! from the Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia

    Why did this get my attention?
    • I like trees. 
    • Arbor isn't a word I use regularly, but it explains "arborist" and "arbre" (tree in French)
    • April is Earth month and there was a lot going on locally that made my Earth/Nature curation theme pop up.
    • I've been curious about how these dedication days get started.

         Why did this get my attention?
    • Another IDS research paper. 
    • I was intrigued by the term "imaginary".
    • I'm interested in understanding systems and in particular systems that scale or how systems scale.
    • I want to know more about the extent to which local knowledge is leveraged to make progress at ginormous scale. 

  • Nature as an artist on Spotify
          Why did this get my attention?
        Why did this get my attention?
    • I am preparing for two presentations related to Knowledge Mapping, so every time the term pops up I have to check it out. It will help me articulate how I am approaching the subject.
  • Maas, Matthijs, ‘AI is Like… A Literature Review of AI Metaphors and Why They Matter for Policy.’ Legal Priorities Project. AI Foundations Report 2. (October 2023). 

    Why did this get my attention?
    • I have been paying more attention to metaphors and analogies, even using ChatGPT to help me come up with useful metaphors to use in a teaching context... though it could be useful in consulting as well.  
    • I started curating metaphors and analogies related to AI.

  • The Society Library 

    Why did this get my attention?
    • A link shared by Ross Dawson in a conversation around mapping  public debates at scale.
    • Mapping arguments and issues relevant to national and international decision-making is intriguing.  For example, The Society Library is Mapping AI Safety/Alignment Arguments and Issues.  They've also done work around Climate change. It relates closely to my own work using concept mapping approaches to document (ile., map) conversations such as After-Action-Reviews (AARs). 

  • Peiling Jiang, Jude Rayan, Steven P. Dow, and Haijun Xia. 2023. Graphologue: Exploring Large Language Model Responses with Interactive Diagrams. In The 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’23), October 29–November 01, 2023, San Francisco, CA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 20 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3586183.3606737 

    Why did this get my attention?
    • It was also shared in a conversation with Ross Dawson where our mutual interest in concept mapping and maps was revealed. 
    • I love the idea of interacting with a graph-like concept map AND Generative AI at the same time, navigating concepts much more efficiently than just through text alone. 

  • What we -- and AI -- can learn from nature's intelligence, TED Radio Hour with guests Greg Gage (neuroscientist), Frances Chance (computational neuroscientist), Keely Muscatell, (social psychoneuroimmunologist), and Karen Bakker (environmental researcher). 
        Why did this get my attention?
    • I will admit that I did not know there was such a thing as a social psychoneuroimmunologist.
    • Conversations around human vs. artificial intelligence are pervasive.  Bringing in natural intelligence was refreshing. Our perspectives on "intelligence" are very biased by human intelligence since that's the only way we can perceive the world and make sense of it. 

  • Viability of Personal Knowledge Systems, by Ivo Velitchkov on YouTube

    Why did this get my attention?
    • Personal Knowledge Systems sound like PKM (Personal Knowledge Management). 
    • It's very aligned with my efforts to develop a personal knowledge graph. 
    • I probably grasped only 50% of it, not just because the audio was quite poor but because it was slightly above my head.  I will have to step back and read more from Ivo to revisit this in a while. He has produced much more around Personal Knowledge Systems.
There were a few more things but this is enough.  Trying to articulate WHY something got my attention prompted me to think a little more about my curation process, or at least the filters and selection process.  

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