NISO Plus 2020

The current point in time in the information ecosystem is one in which trust and facts and evidence are an increasingly precious currency. Healthy resilient ecosystems require cross-pollination, and this talk will discuss the importance of diversified and distributed infrastructures and how seemingly divergent stakeholders and models ideally interoperate in our print-optional post-truth world.

Data. People talk about data as oil, a natural resource that both fuels opportunity and devastates the planet. People talk about data with reverence, as though if we only had more data, we could solve the world's problems. The hype is profound, especially as the conversation turns to artificial intelligence. Data become legitimate because we collectively believe that those data are sound, valid, fit-for use. This means that there is power in collecting and disseminating the data, but there is also power in interpreting and manipulating the data. The struggle over data's legitimacy says more about our society - and our values - than it says about the data itself.