Dan Scott @dbs@scholar.social

I helped design a bilingual survey, but didn't implement it. The PI entered it all into Qualtrics, twice: once for each language.

Now that we have the results, the codes don't match up between languages (of course), so I have to do a ton of cleanup before I can start analysing the data.

But first I have to stop staring at https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/survey-module/survey-tools/translate-survey/ wondering why the PI didn't just use that?

@bgcarlisle once everyone taps on the tables you'll know it's all good (and German)

See p.8 of https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.63n2.119 for my current example. (It's paywalled--stupid ALA--but Google Scholar will find a perfect copy for you at academia.edu)

If I zoom in on-screen, I can barely make out the blurry label text.

Worse, even when printed at 600dpi--theoretically the whole reason for the weird layout--fig. 3 is unreadable.

I hate when I have to struggle to read graph labels in PDF articles on even a 27" QHD screen.

There has to be a better way. Like HTML?

Or at least not arbitrarily scaling the graphic down to 5/8s of the page width. Use the full "8.5"" page-width; it's not like an extra page or two in article length is costing you anything.

@VictorVenema I like that too, but "The person who identified the problem gets to solve the problem" was a principle that I learned at IBM, and it seems to be the default elsewhere...

Today from when you join the review of draft #1 of a collaboratively-edited 30 page whitepaper on how to implement X in an information retrieval system, where X is a cool thing big corporations have been doing for a few years, and ask the question "So has any research been done on whether X actually benefits users? Is there a lit review?", and you get (presumably embarrassed) silence as a response.

Guess who gets to pull together that lit review?

@cassandreces That's a cool project! Can't believe I hadn't heard of it before--thank you (both for sharing it, and for mentoring)

@cassandreces To be honest, I've never tried that; always started with fresh Wikibase instances.

But as Appropedia seems to be a unilingual wiki, maybe Semantic MediaWiki might be a better fit? https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/FAQ#What_is_the_relationship_between_Semantic_MediaWiki_and_Wikidata.3F

@cassandreces Right! Barbara Fischer from the German National Library was a participant in the Wikibase workshop Stacy and I led at SWIB18 (https://gitlab.com/denials/wikibase-workshop-swib2018/blob/master/wikibase-workshop-swib18.adoc)

@cassandreces Really like the workshop approach. I've been lucky to work with Stacy Allison-Cassin on putting together a few different Wikidata workshops over the past few years. And generally have been a volunteer, mentor, speaker at local tech learning events.

@cassandreces Welcome back! I've also been involved with Wikidata, and am considering how I might weave it into my doctoral research in Information Studies (I'm currently pre-comp exams).

I'd like to see what happened if libraries built information systems that used Wikidata QIDs as identifiers for entities, for example.

@bgcarlisle Give a copy to your library; preservation is part of their mission.

Well, good news is that the data was saved in the database correctly; bad news is that the incorrect data that I was shown & downloaded resulted in my negative evaluation of the tool's reliability & data accuracy. (I finished the survey before the researcher responded to me).

Completed a survey + exercise sent out by a PhD candidate working in the same research space. I found and reported a bug in the exercise that might skew their data significantly.

They're doing really interesting work, and including a hands-on exercise in the middle of the survey was a methodological approach that was new to me. I liked it!

But I hope that bug doesn't screw things up too much--my heart sank when I ran into it.

Every time I try and copy a bit of text from a PDF and the text comesoutallsquishedtogether or fully justified via spaces, I get annoyed.

I get angry when it's a paper behind a paywall, because apparently it takes a lot of $$$ for those publishers to mess up basic reader requirements.

@bgcarlisle I understand. Lots for him to be yelled at for.

I do give the Liberals credit for instituting the carbon tax; it is a concretely positive step, and the PCs would not (and will not) take any meaningful action.

I wish they would say "PBO says it has to go to $102/ton to meet our Paris targets: OK, that's what we're doing" instead of fuzzy promises.

But that would probably be political suicide due to the (apparent) majority of voters who see taxes of any kind as evil.

@bgcarlisle Indeed! Ideally with Firefox (as Apple broke support for the Safari connector).

BTW I award you bonus points for the nifty Zotero icon

O-ho, and the editor's reply: "The biggest issue on our end is that we rely on the royalty payments we receive from MUSE and JSTOR to run the journal and our contracts require exclusivity."

$$$, and a possibly overly conservative reading of those contracts? I can't imagine every journal on MUSE/JSTOR is blocked from offering OA options.

My response: "This is indeed unfortunate, as it means that our faculty and students cannot comply with open access mandates from funding sources such as the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Non-compliance would render them ineligible for future grants. I will therefore have to recommend that they choose a different venue for publishing their work."