Open Access Week 2024

Open Access Week is an international event whose goal is to highlight how open scholarship can help people meet their goals in research, scholarly publishing, teaching and learning. Each year, as part of Open Access Week, UBC showcases diverse events highlighting areas of open scholarship that UBC’s faculty, students and staff participate in as well as guests from local and global community. This year’s events will explore the evolving role of generative AI in open scholarship, addressing its potential benefits and challenges, including ethical considerations related to Indigenous knowledge, the impacts on institutional barriers, and strategies for responsible use. All of these events are FREE and open to the public, students, faculty, staff and schools.

“Stop Generating”: Generative AI in the Contexts of Indigenous Studies

Date: Thursday, October 24, 2024
Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm
Location: Online

Generative AI has forced universities to contend with complex ethical and social questions—namely because writing is so deeply entrenched as an institutional gatekeeping. For many students, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds or for whom English is not a first language, the pressure to translate ideas into “proper” English contributes to attrition rates and exacerbates feelings of inadequacy, alienation, and exclusion from many academic communities.

From an equity and inclusion perspective, AI has the potential to disrupt institutional barriers by offering accessible tools that level the grammatical playing field. By functioning as virtual tutors or co-writers, AI systems can assist students in producing more polished and coherent prose, thus challenging the traditional hierarchies that privilege certain grammatical and stylistic norms. Instead of attempting to ban these tools (which is, to say the least, impractical), I side with a growing number of technology scholars who argue that we should focus on teaching students how to use generative AI responsibly and effectively. However, I do so with the caveat that teaching responsible AI use means critically engaging the complex and often messy processes that make AI what it is.

In this presentation, I draw from Indigenous theorists and authors to situate generative AI and large language models (LLMs) within a long colonial history of extraction. Just as colonial states declare Indigenous lands terra nullius, allowing settlers to exploit resources through mining, clear-cutting, and other forms of extraction, generative AI similarly depends on the unchecked extraction of data, including Indigenous knowledge and cultural resources, often without consent. The late Gregory Younging refers to this process as gnaritas nullius, the colonial rendering of Indigenous knowledge into public property. The unchecked extraction of writing, including, but not limited to, Indigenous knowledge, represents a new frontier for colonial capitalism, where cultural and intellectual property are commodified by those with the most access and power. As Nando de Freitas notes, the future of AI development depends on scale: those who control the largest datasets will have the greatest advantage and profit the most from AI. The numerous high-profile copyright cases against companies like OpenAI and Meta show that how this data is collected is treated as a secondary issue. This unbridled, dehumanizing race for data mirrors the extractive practices that have driven capitalist-colonial expansion for centuries. Building on these ideas, I mobilize the insights of Indigenous authors like Younging, Scott Lyons, and Cherie Dimaline to highlight strategies for resisting colonial extraction and challenging capitalist systems through rhetorical sovereignty and the concept of incommensurability. The goal is not to discourage the use of generative AI but, in the Faustian sense, to reveal the costs of embracing it, especially when it is employed to subvert oppressive institutional structures.

Speaker

David Gaertner, Associate Professor, Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies

David Gaertner is an assistant professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the co-Director of the CEDaR space: a community-centered new media and immersive storytelling lab. He writes, researches, and teaches new media, critical Indigenous studies; Indigenous literatures; contemporary Canadian literature, cultural theories of reconciliation, and speculative fiction. He has published articles in Canadian Literature, American Indian Research and Culture, and Digital Pedagogies in the Humanities, amongst others. He is the author of The Theatre of Regret: Literature, Art and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada (UBC Press) and editor of Soykeyihta: The Poetry of Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe (WLUP).

The Influence of AI on Academic Publishing

Date: Monday, October 21, 2024
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm
Location: Online

Join us for a discussion with Taylor & Francis VP External Affairs and Policy, Priya Madina, on AI and academic publishing. This session will provide an overview of AI and opportunities and challenges of utilising AI, illustrated by academic publisher use cases of AI. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer period.

This session will be recorded an made available in UBC’s institional repository, cIRcle.

Presenter

Priya Madina , Vice President, External Affairs and Policy, Taylor & Francis

Priya joined Taylor & Francis in December 2019. She has extensive experience in developing and positioning global policies with relevant stakeholders and decision-makers. Priya sits on the company’s Race and Ethnicity Network, the Publishers Association’s Academic Publishers Council and chairs STM’s Open Research Committee.

Before joining the world of publishing, Priya spent ten years at GlaxoSmithKline in a variety of government affairs, policy and market access roles. In her most recent role as Director of Government Affairs, she led the company’s positioning on international intellectual property and global health issues.  She also gained experience in the external affairs function for the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations in Geneva.

Priya’s previous roles include working across a wide range of policy and government affairs functions at the World Health Organization, the European Commission and the UK Government‘s Department of Health. Her global and regional experience includes working in the Philippines, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium and France.

Priya has a Masters in Classics and Modern Languages from Oxford University. She speaks English and French and has good knowledge of Hindi and Spanish.

Date: Wednesday, October 23, 2024
Time:11:00 am – 12:30 pm
Location: Online

Beware the Copyleft Trolls – Questionable Use of Open Licenses

Date: Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Time: 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Location: Online

Sharing & Discoverability – Making an Impact with your Open Education Resources

Date: Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm
Location: Online

Open Access Week 2024

“Stop Generating”: Generative AI in the Contexts of Indigenous Studies

The Influence of AI on Academic Publishing

Additional Open Access Week Sessions:

Finding, Using, and Creating Open Educational Resources

Student Learning Analytics Hackathon

OER Fund General Info & Grant Proposal Consulting Session

Publishing a Book with Pressbooks – An Introduction

Navigating the Path to Publication

Accessibility and OER Studio