2024 Keynote Speakers Nominations
Keynote nominations are now closed. Voting will open soon.
Dawna Ballard
Dawna I. Ballard (Ph.D., University of California at Santa Barbara) is associate professor of organizational communication and technology in the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. An expert in chronemics—i.e., the study of time as it is bound to human communication—she researches what drives our pace of life and its impact on the communication practices and long-term vitality of organizations, communities, and individuals. Dr. Ballard is currently completing a book, Time by Design (under contract at MIT Press), about how effective organizations routinely communicate slow to go fast.
She delivered a keynote at Electronic Resources & Libraries in 2016. She talked about “her work and the search for work/ life balance.” She seems to be focusing on communication among group members, which I think is pertinent to all practitioners in our field and I wonder if she has anything to say about how researchers think about time when organizing and retrieving concepts. She has done keynotes at other professional conferences but no other GLAM-related ones, as far as I can see.
Faculty page on the UT website https://commstudies.utexas.edu/faculty/dawna-ballard
ER&L event: https://erl2016.sched.com/event/5ZPJ
Dr. Joy Buolamwini
Dr. Joy Buolamwani is a computer scientist and poet of code who uses art and research to illuminate the social implications of artificial intelligence. She founded the Algorithmic Justice League to create a world with more equitable and accountable technology. Her TED Featured Talk on algorithmic bias has over 1.4 million views. Her MIT thesis methodology uncovered large racial and gender bias in AI services from companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon. In 2020, these companies stepped back from selling facial recognition technology to law enforcement. In addition to advising elected officials during US congressional hearings, she serves on the Global Tech Panel to advise world leaders and executives on reducing AI harms.
Dr. Buolamwini has a book coming out in late October 2023 called Unmasking AI which is investigating the harms and biases of AI. I feel she has a number of intersecting interests that are relevant to much of what this conferences/community discusses even though she's not directly involved in the GLAM field. Having a keynote from her would be particularly relevant given how much the GLAM community is currently wrestling with the ethical and professional concerns of using Artificial Intelligence. The algorthimic Justice league she founded has a mission to, "...raise public awareness about the impacts of AI, equip advocates with resources to bolster campaigns, build the voice and choice of the most impacted communities, and galvanize researchers, policymakers, and industry practitioners to prevent AI harms." I have no idea if she would be available or if this would be feasible as she's becoming more well-known but just throwing her name out just in case!
the email for the company who manages her speaking engagements
Kawanna Bright
Dr. Kawanna Bright is Assistant Professor of Library Science at East Carolina University. Dr. Bright earned her PhD in Research Methods and Statistics from the University of Denver in 2018. Prior to earning her doctorate, Dr. Bright worked as an academic librarian for twelve years, with a focus on reference, instructional services, and information literacy. She earned her MLIS from the University of Washington iSchool in 2003. Dr. Bright's research can inform how we can think about diversifying the field of library workers who code and red flags in positions for libraries.
https://edispeakers.ala.org/listing/kawanna-bright/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4siYUeGX_g&pp=ygUOa2F3YW5uYSBicmlnaHQ%3D
Dr. Noelani Arista
Noelani M. Arista is an Indigenous historian of Hawaiʻi and the U.S. She is ‘Ōiwi (Hawaiian) born in Honolulu, Oʻahu. She is the Director of the Indigenous Studies Program and an Associate Professor in the History and Classical Studies Department. Her research focuses on the organization of Hawaiian traditional knowledge, intellectual, legal and religious history and the ethical rules and norms governing relationships to ʻike (knowledge).
Arista seeks (ʻimi) to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to apply traditional modes of organizing Hawaiian knowledge in Hawaiian language textual and oral sources to increase community access to ʻike Hawaiʻi, the methods of which will provide useful and scalable models for scholars working in their own indigenous language source base.
Dr. Arista his one of the folks who worked on the Indigenous AI Working Group. Her areas of interest as seen on her faculty website include "19th Century U.S. History; Pre-Contact – 19th century Hawaiian legal and intellectual history, governance; AI and Indigenous knowledge organization systems, epistemology and methodology; Indigenous language archives and translation; Indigenous AI & ethics; Colonial and Indigenous history and historiography" I think her take on AI/ML is fascinating, and I think she would be a fabulous keynote speaker for this conference. Her focus is on the ethical use of AI, particularly in relationship to research and scholarship. This is a major subject of interest in many GLAM institutions.
Chuck Severance
Dr. Chuck Severance is a long-time advocate of open-source educational technology and open educational resources that empower teachers, librarians, and everyday people. His "Python for Everybody" course is the most popular online programming course in the world. He teaches at the University of Michigan's School of Information.
He has a long history of public speaking and has hosted television and podcast programs as an expert on the Internet and technology. A sample of his speeches is available on his website.
For voting form drafting purposes: "The general theme of my talk would be to take folks through the creation of my Python for Everybody book and curse on Coursera that is current the most popular programming course in the world. A little known fact is that the course was developed over five years of teaching programming to librarians at the University of Michigan School of Information :)"
He has a [bio](https://www.dr-chuck.com/dr-chuck/resume/bio.htm) available.
We should list him as "Dr. Charles R. Severance (a.k.a. Dr. Chuck)".
Emily Higgs Kopin
Emily Higgs Kopin is the head of digital collections strategy at the Swarthmore libraries. From her LinkedIn, she "is a librarian/archivist with interest and experience in digital collections, infrastructures, exhibits, and technology." I'm nominating her on the strength of her 2023 Code4Lib lightning talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McqOGzHfmOM&t=4486s), which was easily the funniest talk we've seen in years, and I would like 50 minutes of that, please.
Eli Neiburger
Eli Neiburger joined the staff of the Ann Arbor District Library as a helpdesk technician in 1997 and was IT manager and Deputy Director before being appointed Director of AADL in 2022. Eli has given keynote talks about gaming in libraries, the impact of the web of library services, and embracing open source solutions at library conferences across the US, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. AADL has been rolling its own tech whenever it can for 20+ years, and Eli would be happy to give Code4Lib an entertaining and inspiring overview of what it looks like to run a busy public library using as little proprietary software as possible, from the ILS and catalog to digital archives, from staff tools to the public computing environment. Eli is the author of 2007's GAMERS.. in the LIBRARY?! and contributed to O'Reilly's BOOK: A Manifesto and to Well Played, a games journal from Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center.
More information at this page
Patricia Garcia
Patricia Garcia is a professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. Her research and contributions center on gender, youth, race and their intersections with technology and justice. She has led a project with public libraries to study how a computational justice program can support girls of color in developing identities in computing and programming. She would bring a unique perspective that joins educational work with libraries and technology in highly current and topical ways.
More information at this page.
She says: "If selected, I could speak about the work I've been doing related to critical data studies and the Feminist Data Manifest-No OR the work I am doing with public libraries to design computational justice programs for youth."
Lisa Nakamura
Lisa Nakamura is a professor at the University of Michigan, where she teaches in the Department of American Culture at the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, and she also directs the Digital Studies Institute. Nakamura has published pathbreaking work about race, gender, and identity in digital culture, as well as recent work on harassment and hate speech in online spaces. Nakamura also leads the DISCO Network, a Mellon-funded collective working to integrate humanities, arts, and technology perspectives in envisioning an alternative and inclusive digital futures.
More information at this page. Information about the DISCO Network. Nakamura's work on digitizing race.
Jackie Shieh
Jackie Shieh is the Descriptive Data Management Librarian at the Smithsonian Libraries. Previously she worked as the Catalog Librarian at Georgia State University Law Library, the Original Cataloger for Electronic Resources for University of Virginia Library, the Team Leader for Special Collections & Projects at the University of Michigan Library and the Resource Description Coordinator for George Washington University Libraries. Over the years, she has been involved in metadata projects related to the Web, e.g. TEI; OCLC’s InerCat, and CORC projects; ALCTS, CC:DA, PCC’s task groups: URIs in MARC, BIBFRAME (BF) mapping of BIBCO and BF, and Metadata for Application Profiles.
Find out more about Jackie Shieh's work:
Libby Hemphill
Libby Hemphill (Associate Professor, University of Michigan School of Information, Research Associate Professor, U-M Institute for Social Research, and Director, ICPSR’s Resource Center for Minority Data and founding Director, ICPSR’s Social Media Archive) studies social computing and digital curation. Her research on social computing has demonstrated the impact of social media on Congressional behavior, has shown how social media platforms shape public discourse in virtual and IRL public spaces, and has developed a natural language processing approach to detecting and intervening to de-escalate abusive online behavior. Her research in digital curation has studied the responsible and ethical use and reuse of datasets in research, the design of infrastructure and technology to support research data archives, the importance of curation for improving the FAIRness of social media and other data, and the impact of data reuse. Her practice of digital curation at ICPSR has made available transformative data such as TransPop, the first national probability sample of transgender individuals in the United States, and SOMAR, a platform for transparent, reproducible preservation and ethical access to social media data. She has worked with the Anti-Defamation League to understand and respond to online hate, and she has created a post-baccalaureate program to diversify the pipeline of students engaged in computational social science research. She is a transformative scholar who has used her expertise and position to democratize data access.
Find out more about Libby Hemphill's work:
https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/pages/RCMD/
Nomination instructions (closed)
Code4Lib 2024 will take place May 13-16, 2024 at the University of Michigan's Ann Arbor Campus.
When making a nomination, please consider whether the nominee is likely to be an excellent contributor in each of the following areas:
1) Appropriateness. Is this speaker likely to convey information that is useful to many members of our community?
2) Uniqueness. Is this speaker likely to cover themes that may not commonly appear in the rest of the program?
3) Contribution to diversity. Will this person bring something rare, notable, or unique to our community, through unusual experience or background?
Please include a description and any relevant links. Please try to keep the list in alphabetical order.
We require the following information in your nomination for a candidate to act as keynote:
- Speaker’s full name
- Brief description of individual (250-word max)
- Pertinent links (Maximum of 3)
- Contact information for candidate (email address)
The Keynote Committee will attempt to contact all nominees and will only include on the ballot those who consent to be nominated.
If you would prefer to submit a nomination anonymously, please send your nominee(s) to Mike Taylor at mike.taylor@nau.edu.
Please follow the formatting guidelines:
== Nominee's Name == Description of no more than 250 words. [[Link(s) with contact information for nominee]] [mailto:email_link.foo nominee's email address]