Yasmeen Shorish
LightNews LightNews
banner
yasmeen-azadi.bsky.social
Yasmeen Shorish
@yasmeen-azadi.bsky.social
840 followers 160 following 17 posts
Library person working with data, scholcomm, and justice issues.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
librarythingtim.bsky.social
Carnegie Mellon has cancelled hosting the Code4Lib conference this year because Code4Lib has scholarships supporting diverse attendees. Some lame fuckery indeed.
zen0effect.com Richard Higgins @zen0effect.com · 5d
Carnegie Mellon deciding at the last minute that they can't host the annual Code4Lib conference is some lame fuckery.
Text: Recently, the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) ordered Carnegie Mellon University to review all third-party partnerships for compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. As part of this review, the university determined that aspects of Code4Lib's diversity scholarship program raised compliance concerns under Title VI and Title IX.
December 5, 2025 at 6:03 AM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
sambramble.cryptoanarchy.network
I set the study aside to read and annotate. My first take is that the study conflates ability (re: navigating a system) and literacy (understanding the dynamics of the system and human computer interaction).

It reinforces the Dunning-Kruger effect and a research librarian would've spotted this
hypervisible.blacksky.app Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · Oct 30
“‘When it comes to AI, the [Dunning-Kruger effect] vanishes,’ study senior author Robin Welsch, a professor at Aalto University, said in a statement about the work. ‘In fact, what’s really surprising is that higher AI literacy brings more overconfidence.’”
AI Is Causing a Grim New Twist on the Dunning-Kruger Effect, New Research Finds
New research shows how AI tools is making a Dunning-Kruger specimen out of everyone that uses them, no matter how smart.
futurism.com
October 30, 2025 at 3:17 PM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
hypervisible.blacksky.app
“From street cameras to drones and regional fusion hubs, surveillance systems are increasingly built atop AWS. The pitch Amazon makes to law enforcement is about more than raw infrastructure. It is also about access, connections, and momentum.“
Amazon’s quiet rise as a power broker in police surveillance | Biometric Update
AWS has positioned itself not just as a host of police data but also as a promoter and intermediary for surveillance tools.
www.biometricupdate.com
October 6, 2025 at 7:53 PM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
carolinehaskins.bsky.social
Palantir is in the news a lot lately. However, the public discourse about the company often misconstrues it as a data broker, a data miner, a single centralized database, etc. But what does Palantir actually do?

I wrote a piece to firmly & clearly answer that question:
www.wired.com/story/palant...
What Does Palantir Actually Do?
Palantir is often called a data broker, a data miner, or a giant database of personal information. In reality, it’s none of these—but even former employees struggle to explain it.
www.wired.com
August 11, 2025 at 2:01 PM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
dorothyjberry.bsky.social
Excited to finally announce the release of my first ever book, and the first ever book from we here press. It is a pocket-size guide to my archival theories and experiences in the form of essays- some you may have heard in part as lectures, some which are unpublished until now.

www.weherepress.org
Book cover. The top of the image is covered in overlapping black&white and sepia photographs of Black pas from the early to mid 20th century. Below that, against a seafoam green or robin's egg blue (depends on your view I suppose!), the book's title "The House Archives Built & Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities" is printed in black. There is a small white rectangle inset that reads "Dorothy Berry"
August 20, 2025 at 5:58 PM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
authorsalliance.bsky.social
An update from The Public Interest Corpus from
@thomaspadilla.bsky.social on our second workshop held at NYU Law School. Many thanks to @nyuengelberg.org for hosting us!

www.authorsalliance.org/2025/08/13/t...
The Public Interest Corpus Update – NYC Edition
NYU Law School Workshop Participants Last month, a diverse set of stakeholders gathered at New York University Law School to contribute to an implementation plan for The Public Interest Corpus. Thi…
www.authorsalliance.org
August 13, 2025 at 2:58 PM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
sifill.bsky.social
Dr. Hayden is a consummate professional, career librarian, and public servant. I cannot think of anyone in the Trump administration who is fit to address the Librarian of Congress in this way:
May 9, 2025 at 2:56 AM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
damonberes.com
Meta initially considered licensing books. New legal docs show that a Llama senior manager felt it was “really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,” as “books are actually more important than web data.” Paying and waiting wouldn't do. So they sought—and received—permission to torrent LibGen.
Text screenshot: Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren’t thrilled with their options. This “seems unreasonably expensive,” wrote one research scientist on an internal company chat, in reference to one potential deal, according to court records. A Llama-team senior manager added that this would also be an “incredibly slow” process: “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data.” In a message found in another legal filing, a director of engineering noted another downside to this approach: “The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy,” a reference to a possible legal defense for using copyrighted books to train AI. Text screenshot: Court documents released last night show that the senior manager felt it was “really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,” as “books are actually more important than web data.” Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.
March 20, 2025 at 11:42 AM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
philipncohen.com
IMLS is the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It's about $200 million per year for libraries and $50 million for museums. Not a lot for the federal budget, but a huge piece of the culture and knowledge system - which is why MAGA is eliminating it.
March 15, 2025 at 1:02 PM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
eve.gd
Really shocking from the National Library of Australia. Tim's digital work is so fantastic but it's facilitated by OA to this corpus of newspapers. If other libraries follow suit, work like @ryancordell.org's will be threatened too. Stunningly bad.

updates.timsherratt.org/2025/03/02/t...
Trove API users beware! – the latest in the saga of my cancelled API keys
After my Trove API keys were cancelled without warning on 21 February, I reluctantly agreed to a meeting with the National Library of Australia. They had provided so little information in their emails...
updates.timsherratt.org
March 2, 2025 at 7:20 AM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
datarescueproject.org
Are any users of NOAA data willing to share how potential loss might impact their work? We could use some for an event next week. Please share if you feel able: forms.gle/zvx2eoLLzKU5...
Public Data User Stories
The Data Rescue Project wants to gather stories from public data users as a way to give more specific information about the impact of data loss. In submitting your story, you are giving us permission ...
docs.google.com
February 28, 2025 at 10:03 PM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
roopikarisam.bsky.social
A new medium for age old strategies of data warfare 🤔 The scale though… oof.
ninajankowicz.com Nina Jankowicz @ninajankowicz.com · Feb 27
A pro-Russia content aggregation network is churning out at least 3 MILLION pieces of propaganda per year, all on sites that are virtually unusable by humans.

So what's the goal? We explore the idea that it might be to flood LLMs with pro-Russia content:
static1.squarespace.com/static/6612c... 1/
Executive Summary A pro-Russia content aggregation network, Pravda, appears to be set up to flood large-language models with pro-Kremlin content, The American Sunlight Project has found. Over the past several months, ASP researchers have investigated 108 new domains and subdomains belonging to the Pravda network, a previously-established ecosystem of largely identical, automated web pages that previously targeted many countries in Europe as well as Africa and Asia with pro-Russia narratives about the war in Ukraine. ASP’s research, in combination with that of other organizations, brings the total number of associated domains and subdomains to 182. The network’s older targets largely consisted of states belonging to or aligned with the West. Notably, this latest expansion includes many countries in Africa, the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and North America. It also includes entities other than countries as targets, specifically non-sovereign nations, international organizations, audiences for specific languages, and prominent heads of state. The top objective of the network appears to be duplicating as much pro-Russia content as widely as possible. With one click, a single article could be autotranslated and autoshared with dozens of other sites that appear to target hundreds of millions of people worldwide. ASP researchers also believe the network may have been custom-built to flood large language models (LLMs) with pro-Russia content. The network is unfriendly to human users; sites within the network boast no search function, poor formatting, and unreliable scrolling, among other usability issues. This final finding poses foundational implications for the intersection of disinformation and artificial intelligence (AI), which threaten to turbocharge highly automated, global information operations in the future.
February 28, 2025 at 12:23 PM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
hypervisible.blacksky.app
The new ceo is hoping to increase their sales to the federal government, something that was less available during the previous administration because of its concerns about privacy and civil rights.
February 20, 2025 at 12:46 AM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
chanda.blacksky.app
This is my “daughter of a Black Panther breakfast program volunteer” coming out but anyone who tells you that you have to be public about all your resistance activity should immediately be under suspicion for being an op, or being under the influence of an op
February 18, 2025 at 2:12 AM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
datarescueproject.org
Our recent post on Preserving Our Public Data Heritage is up. If you'd like to stay in touch, please subscribe to our newsletter. www.datarescueproject.org/preserving-o...
Preserving Our Public Data Heritage
The PEGI Project recently released a post about the preservation of public federal data in support of the Data Rescue Project. PEGI stands for Preservation of Electronic Government Information and was...
www.datarescueproject.org
February 18, 2025 at 10:17 AM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
dennistclark.bsky.social
An important read about the firing of the Archivist of the Unites States.

www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-sho...
We should all pay attention to what is happening at the National Archives
On Friday night, the president officially fired the Archivist of the United States, as he had promised to do before taking office. So, hi there! 👋 Former National Archives employee here.
www.linkedin.com
February 12, 2025 at 11:13 AM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
nycsouthpaw.bsky.social
Someone at the American Bar Association ate their Wheaties this morning.
ABA It has been three weeks since Inauguration Day. Most Americans recognize that newly elected leaders bring change. That is expected. But most Americans also expect that changes will take place in accordance with the rule of law and in an orderly manner that respects the lives of affected individuals and the work they have been asked to perform. Instead, we see wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself, such as attacks on constitutionally protected birthright citizenship, the dismantling of USAID and the attempts to criminalize those who support lawful programs to eliminate bias and enhance diversity. We have seen attempts at wholesale dismantling of departments and entities created by Congress without seeking the required congressional approval to change the law. There are efforts to dismiss employees with little regard for the law and protections they merit, and social media announcements that disparage and appear to be motivated by a desire to inflame without any stated factual basis. This is chaotic. It may appeal to a few. But it is wrong. And most Americans recognize it is wrong. It is also contrary to the rule of law. The American Bar Association supports the rule of law. That means holding governments, including our own, accountable under law. We stand for a legal process that is orderly and fair. We have consistently urged the administrations of both parties to adhere to the rule of law. We stand in that familiar place again today. And we do not stand alone. Our courts stand for the rule of law as well.
February 10, 2025 at 8:32 PM
yasmeen-azadi.bsky.social
Great thread of resources related to endangered and disappeared data.
nurnberger.bsky.social Amy L. Nurnberger @nurnberger.bsky.social · Feb 7
Concerned that the gov’t data you rely on might disappear or be altered? Here’s a list of data rescue/efforts resources: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

See something; save something: #DataRescue
Join @datarescue2025.bsky.social
#science #climatechange
February 7, 2025 at 5:09 PM
yasmeen-azadi.bsky.social
Since data sources are inconsistent these days, this account may be helpful for folks keeping an eye on current public health circumstances.
February 7, 2025 at 5:06 PM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
cheriepriest.com
A cartoon cat meme that features a purple kitty spray painting on a wall. It reads: Don’t get caught - nobody needs to know it was you.
February 6, 2025 at 3:36 AM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
datarescueproject.org
MIT has created an excellent checklist for those making data backups on their own: libraries.mit.edu/data-managem... Data is special. Treat it with care!
Checklist for USA federal data backups | Data management
Introduction The United States (US) federal government collects, aggregates, and disseminates a large volume of information and data. This content is used by researchers, policymakers, and many others...
libraries.mit.edu
February 6, 2025 at 1:07 AM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
chanda.blacksky.app
FINALLY
February 4, 2025 at 3:02 PM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
penamerica.bsky.social
PEN America responds to action taken today by the Department of Education dismissing complaints about book bans and referring to them as a “hoax”:

"All students deserve to see themselves and the world around them reflected in the books shelved within their public schools.“ pen.org/press-releas...
PEN America Criticizes "Alarming" and "Dismissive" Language on Book Bans by U.S. Education Department - PEN America
Kasey Meehan, director, Freedom to Read, at PEN America, said: "For over three years we have countered rhetoric that book bans occurring in public schools are a “hoax.” They are absolutely not. This k...
pen.org
January 24, 2025 at 10:21 PM
Reposted by Yasmeen Shorish
yusufsarfati.bsky.social
Important: The AAUP released a statement urging universities not to engage in “anticipatory obedience,” which it defined as “acting to comply in advance of any pressure to do so.”

www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...
AAUP opposes "anticipatory obedience" to Trump, GOP
The American Association of University Professors released a statement Thursday urging universities not to engage in “anticipatory obedience,” which it defined as “acting to comply in advance of any p...
www.insidehighered.com
January 24, 2025 at 10:57 PM