Joshua Chalifour @jc@scholar.social

Over the holidays, I read Olga Tokarczuk's book, Flights. I loved how it played with time, historicity, through the scopes and structures of its characters. Anyway, that's just a bit to encourage people to check it out.

Trump's order to kill Iranian General seems like the set-up for a situation to put the US into a state of emergency. Trump could take control of awesome power, becoming dictator, suspend rights, etc. Read about SoE powers in this prescient 2018 article: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/what-president-could-do-if-he-declares-state-emergency

Past midnight, a morpheme slithers from my head. I haven't found where it comes from nor where it goes. Maybe there are many. It floats away.

Counteracting misuse of the WWW and related information, The #WebFoundation has launched the Contract for the Web (https://contractfortheweb.org). Tim Berners Lee explains the motivation in this op-ed https://webfoundation.org/2019/12/i-invented-the-world-wide-web-heres-how-we-can-fix-it/ -- great initiative to encourage improvement.

Did you know or suspect that you were being tracked? If you haven't thought about it, THEY have. And you are tracked. Read NY Times investigative reporting on phone geo location tracking. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html

Call for Proposals! Concordia #Library’s 18th Annual Research Forum (April 17, 2020), presentations or posters on research or a case study in any area of #LIS, in English or French, due Jan 30, 2020 at 11am: https://library.concordia.ca/about/staff/forum/ #Librarians #Bibliotheques #Bibliothécaires

New tab in Firefox browser this morning had this little message at the bottom: "Blink182 is one of the most common passwords that has been hacked. If that's your password, you now have TWO reasons to change it." I think that's reason enough to use Firefox.

Levitated the evening on a Godspeed You! Black Emperor show. I could've been lost in there for weeks, except outside the hall things are as they were.

For International #OpenAccessWeek Project Muse has put up a curated bibliography of #OpenAccess books and journals relevant to the theme of equity in #OA https://about.muse.jhu.edu/muse/open-access-week-2019/

Next week the Concordia University Library has a great line-up of events for #OpenAccessWeek. I'm offering a session on Using and Sharing #OpenAccess Content with #CreativeCommons Licenses. Most of our events are open to everyone (in Montreal): https://library.concordia.ca/research/open-access/open-access-week.php spread the word and join us!

This seems to me, to be essentially an argument from Nick Cave to embrace uncertainty and engage in continuous critical thinking. He's woven a brief, difficult, and eloquent path through some contemporary social/political issues to consider https://www.theredhandfiles.com/why-do-you-write/

Lisa Lamont's digitization work in www.detaineeallies.org project really stands out among the wonderful talks at #DLFforum 2019 #t2e. Letters from imprisoned migrants will prove important for things that we haven't even imagined. Complexity of the ethical issues to grapple with is immense. Repercussions? Identification via unique travel routes? What does repetition among routes tell us? Letters made public are good or will there be repercussions in the migrants' home? For-profit prisons? Ahh!

Heading to Florida in a couple days to present at the 2019 #DLFforum (Digital Library Federation). I attended for the first time last year and was impressed by how well organized it was and the great variety of interesting topics. One of my colleagues and I have a brief talk based on our digital scholarship needs gathering work at Concordia.