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@ruthburns.bsky.social

980 followers 1.1K following 260 posts

Library person, bibliovore, retro gamer, goth, sporadic crafter

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ruthburns.bsky.social @ruthburns.bsky.social · Jan 1

Having reached the aftermath of my book challenge I have a few reflections on how it has gone.

ruthburns.bsky.social @ruthburns.bsky.social · Dec 5

💙📚 31 book December challenge. This time I've wrapped the books so it's more of a mystery what's coming next. I started reading on the 1st Dec, and am currently reading book seven, so have a comfortable margin at the moment- it isn't one book per day- so shall start posting them.

A stack of books, wrapped in either plain brown paper or coloured tissue paper.

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Dr Zara Bain @zaranosaur.bsky.social · 3d

Skeptical of AI transcription services (transloption?)?

Want to support a small but fantastic disabled-majority, unapologetically intersectional AND research specialist transcription social enterprise instead?

Contact us quoting code SPOOKY10 for a spooky 10% off our definitely all-human services

Academic Audio Transcription Ltd @aat-transcribes.bsky.social · 3d

Conducting #QualitativeResearch or #ParticipatoryResearch this autumn?

Prefer the peace of mind and ease of proper human transcription services over the inaccuracies and confabulations of automated transcripts that cost you editing time before analysis?

Contact us for a free no-obligation quote 📧

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Get high-quality, human-made transcripts and closed captions from our specialist disabled-led and disabled-majority team of expert transcribers.

academicaudiotranscription.com

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Steffen Rayburn-Maarup @rayburnmaarup.bsky.social · 6d

On the off chance: Does anybody have these two Dorothy L. Sayers books *in these editions* and are willing to part with them for money? I'm finding it impossible to get my eager hands on them.

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CILIP @cilip.bsky.social · 8d

Our CILIP LGBTQ+ Network seeks a new Chair. You'll act as leading officer, informing the decisions made to raise awareness & advise Library, Knowledge & Information workers on LGBTQ+ subjects. Role open to those identifying as LGBTQ+ or Queer. informationprofessionaljobs.com/jobs/chair-u...

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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 9d

YES! THIS on GenAI!

Please read this absolutely splendid piece of writing that had me cheering, a little bit weepy, and writing in the margins:

"An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny."

Large Language Muddle | The Editors

The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...

www.nplusonemag.com

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Tanja Bueltmann @tanjabueltmann.net · 9d

When I was a teenager there was a bus direct from my hometown in Germany to London - we had a British army base, and this direct bus connection was one of the benefits of that. One summer I went on that bus to go volunteer in an old people's home in Southend-on-Sea. I had just turned 18 and was... 🧵

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Small Robots @smolrobots.bsky.social · 13d

Time for me to deploy my expertise from having worked with databases of individuals and their data in the public sector: whatever you might imagine will be happening behind the scenes of a digital ID card, the actual reality of that dataset is going to be an information governance nightmare.

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ruthburns.bsky.social @ruthburns.bsky.social · 17d

Just getting started with The Disordered Cosmos.

The cover of The Disordered Cosmos, a journey into dark matter spacetime and Dreams deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. The cover features the silhouette of a Black woman facing right with a nebula pattern to the silhouette against a white background. There is also a quote "a lovely letter to the wondrous universe we call home and an urge to think critically about how we explore its depths" credited to the Smithsonian magazine.

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ruthburns.bsky.social @ruthburns.bsky.social · 17d

I would, but you're too Far(amir)

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Vagina Museum @vaginamuseum.bsky.social · 19d

When we posted this a couple of weeks ago, we had some AI enthusiasts insist that this diagram was the result of poor prompting, or that the prompt that the original poster made was to generate a funny, bad diagram. So we decided to test ChatGPT's capability...

Vagina Museum @vaginamuseum.bsky.social · Aug 27

Today in AI Is Not A Good Source For Learning About The World's Most Misunderstood Body Part, meet this ChatGPT gem.

Funnily enough, we're actually going to talk about how most of this is kinda sorta right (for small values of right), as a cautionary tale about generative AI.

Screenshot of a reddit post: ChatGPT asked if I wanted a diagram of what's going on inside my pregnant belly.

A screenshot of ChatGPT's response. It is a side view of a foetus gestating in the uterus. The foetus is head-up with no umbilical cord or placenta. Behind the uterus is the rectum, which is unlabelled. Trailing down from between the rectum and spine, extending beneath the buttocks to the inner thigh is a yellow line labelled "pudendal nerve. At the front is an oval-shaped part labelled "cervix". And then we really struggle to image describe this bit. The uterus and the bladder are both attached to a single part which is long inside, then extends downwards into a penis with a single exist. This penis is labelled "rectum".

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Samuel Moore @samuelmoore.org · 20d

“These companies all advertise these tools as knowing your intent,” Taylor told 404 Media. “Understanding what you meant when you put those terms in. They don’t know. They don’t understand. None of those things are true. There is no technical way these tools can do that.”

Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books

It’s a trippy time to have a library card.

www.404media.co

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Emma Booth (she/her) @emmabooth.bsky.social · 20d

Joining a SCONUL webinar on "AI in the library supply chain" feat. Dr Sandra Tury Senate House Library and Elly Cope & Alison Hazelaar of University of Leeds Library.
Particularly interested in #AI in relation to #metadata both its utility and its implications for ethics & sustainability.

https://www.sconul.ac.uk/eventbooking/view?id=95

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Manchester University Press @manchesterup.bsky.social · Sep 4

Call for book proposals!

Are you passionate about punk? 🤘
Do you have an idea for a book? 📖
Send us your idea for a fresh take on punk to mark the 50th anniversary, that could be the next instalment our acclaimed British Pop Archive series. 🎶
More details below 👇 #booksky #punk

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Manchester University Press @manchesterup.bsky.social · 22d

Publishing today!

Ghosts and the Gothic, edited by @ruthheholt.bsky.social and @joparsons.bsky.social

The first book to examine ghostly presences (and absences) in #Gothic texts bit.ly/3I59Uzy
#Ghosts #GothicStudies

Find out more: manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526181923/

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The University of Manchester Library @uomlibrary.bsky.social · 23d

Main Library re-opens, featuring new study spaces at Muriel Stott. Over the summer, the Library has made some exciting upgrades to Main Library - based on what you told us matters most.

Find out more about these changes: ow.ly/vCLa50WQYlp

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C.A. Petrified 🎃 @capetrov.bsky.social · 23d

Also great! "That's why I think we should fund libraries more. It's not just because they're a great resource, it's because I don't wanna know what librarians will do if we don't give them a place to go."

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ruthburns.bsky.social @ruthburns.bsky.social · 25d

There are absolutely flaws with Dewey, but they won't be fixed by taking it away And I suspect his issue isn't with Dewey's parochial focus.

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ruthburns.bsky.social @ruthburns.bsky.social · 29d

If you sent it to ruth.burns @manchester.ac.uk (without the space) then I'll have a chat with our Store team. I don't want to make any promises but will see if there's anything we can do.

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ruthburns.bsky.social @ruthburns.bsky.social · 29d

I'll have a word with our Store team and see how much actual material that covers (and how out of the way it is stored) might be able to sort something out.

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ruthburns.bsky.social @ruthburns.bsky.social · Sep 9

University of Manchester Library has Empire News 1915-60 in our Store. Is it a specific reference you need to see or do you need to browse it?

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Dr. Laci Brock 🪐 @stellerarts.com · Sep 8

Um… LEGO just teased a Star Trek set (!), so friendly (definitely unrelated) reminder that I’ll have prints in my shop this Wednesday 😆

stellerarts.com/pages/spectr...

Print of my oil painting of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant

$Close up view of the print of my painting at an angle showing a star with diffraction spikes$

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ruthburns.bsky.social @ruthburns.bsky.social · Sep 8

Spent a moment thinking that design was going to be incorporated on to a Lego set, which would be an awesome Collab, then my reading comprehension caught up.

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Matthew Cobb @matthewcobb.bsky.social · Sep 8

News in the history of molecular biology. The Science History Institute in Philadelphia has acquired a huge archive of correspondence and other scientific material from the pioneers of molecular biology (Franklin, Klug, Perutz, Delbrück etc, with items from Crick and Watson, too). 1/n

History of Molecular Biology Collection

This unparalleled collection includes Rosalind Franklin's historic 'Photo 51,' which revealed the double-helix structure of DNA.

www.sciencehistory.org

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
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Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Alice Bennett but scarier @aliceponderland.bsky.social · Sep 3

A personal thread about perceived threat vs actual threat, fear and flags, because recent events around asylum seekers in the UK and the flag based responses, and the way they are discussed in the media is really bothering me 1/

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Dr Beth @drbeth.bsky.social · Sep 3

We're also still looking for a chair for LGBTQ+ Network @ciliplgbtq.bsky.social to replace me. Very much only continuing for a short time as an interim chair. #librarian #cilip

Louis Coiffait-Gunn @louiscoiffait-gunn.bsky.social · Sep 3

Some great volunteer roles going for CILIP members to develop their skills, build their networks, and give back to their profession

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