News, announcements, updates, and happenings in the UVA Library

It’s Fair Use Week! UVA Library’s Director of Information Policy, Brandon Butler, penned a piece for Harvard’s Fair Use Week series titled, “‘Stolen Books,’ Bad Faith, and Fair Use.” The piece examines the origins of AI training data and its intersections with court cases such as those around HathiTrust and Google Books. He writes: 

Artificial intelligence is sure to be the hottest topic of this year’s Fair Use Week, and that hotness is well-deserved. It’s startling when a machine can instantly create written or visual works that would ordinarily require a skilled human writer or artist.
 

Fair use analysis is (famously) case-by-case, and the outcome of a fair use analysis for any particular AI technology will depend on how that technology works and (especially) the nature of its outputs and the purposes it serves. But we know from the Google Books and HathiTrust cases that some unlicensed computer processing of large datasets of in-copyright works is clearly fair use. Some AI technologies are sure to pass the fair use test from those cases, all else equal. But there is one interesting difference between HathiTrust and Google Books on one hand, and some of the AI tools being sued on the other: the books used in the former cases were lawfully owned by libraries and scanned with the libraries’ consent. It’s not clear that the AI companies have obtained all of their data with as clear a pedigree.

Indeed, one of the author class action lawsuits over AI argues that the datasets used to train some artificial intelligence tools are comprised partly or entirely of material of apparently dubious origin. As The Verge reports, the plaintiffs claim that some of the AI training data “were acquired from ‘shadow library’ websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, noting the books are ‘available in bulk via torrent systems.’” Does this matter for the fair use calculus? Should it?

Read the full article from Harvard’s Fair Use Week blog.

For more Fair Use Week content, like “Fair Use Week 2024: The Taper’s Greatest Fair Use Hits, and a Taper Swan Song,” visit The Taper.

The University of Virginia Library has nearly five million print books available for checkout, five million e-books, myriad cozy study spaces, and a slew of teaching librarians to help you in the classroom or with research. And did you know we also offer events ranging from workshops to musical events for UVA and the Charlottesville community throughout the year?

Below, check out five upcoming events for those who love reading, crafting, eclipses, and more. All Library events are free.

1. “DIVERSIFY IT!” Reading Challenge

Inspired by the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! reading challenge in elementary schools, we’re hosting a higher education remix to encourage UVA students, faculty, and staff to read diverse stories. Each month we’ll be hosting themed pop-up libraries within the School of Education and Human Development that include children’s, young adult, and adult books. For February we are celebrating Black authors! Everyone who checks out a book from our February pop-up library will receive a “Free People Read Freely” bookmark.

Each month you will get a stamp on your “DIVERSIFY IT!” challenge card if you check out a book. At the end of the semester, if you have checked out at least one book each month from our pop-up libraries, you'll receive a special prize and we’ll celebrate with a pizza party!

• When: Tuesday, Feb. 27; 12 – 3 p.m.
• Where: Ridley Hall Lobby

2. Prepare for the April 8th Total Solar Eclipse!

On April 8th there will be a total eclipse of the sun visible from the United States, the last one until 2045. If you viewed the last U.S. total solar eclipse in August 2017, the April 8th eclipse will appear markedly different at totality because the sun is in a period of much greater activity. In addition, this eclipse will last longer, and will cover a wider path, as well as covering a more populated swath of the US.

To help you prepare for the eclipse, Professor Edward Murphy from UVA’s Department of Astronomy will give a lecture and demonstrate safe solar observing on Tuesday, February 27. During the program, we will discuss what to expect during the eclipse, where to go see the eclipse if you can travel to it, and how to safely observe the eclipse. (This event is part of the “STEM for Everyone” lecture series.)

• When: Tuesday, Feb. 27; 6 – 7 p.m.
• Where: Alderman Library, Room 330
• Registration is required: Register to Prepare for the Eclipse

3. Alderman Library Re-Orientation

We’re back and better than ever! Join Education and Social Science Research Librarian, Ashley Hosbach-Wallman, for a tour of the new spaces in Alderman Library. This tour will cover the history of library design at UVA and all of the new study spaces and services open to students (both undergraduate and graduate). We'll meet in the main lobby to get started.

This tour is a joint initiative between the UVA Library and the School of Education and Human Development’s student affairs office.

• When: Wednesday, Feb. 28; 1 – 2 p.m.
• Where: Alderman Library, main lobby/Memorial Hall
• Registration is required: Register for Alderman Re-Orientation

4. Pi Day Maker Craft

Make a Pi Day craft to celebrate the best holiday a-round!

Register to secure your spot, or drop in to the Scholars’ Lab Makerspace anytime between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Thursday, March 14, to make a craft. And dig in to some FREE pie while supplies last!

The Scholars’ Lab Makerspace is located in Alderman Library on the third floor (308i). See here for Makerspace hours and a map.

• When: Thursday, March. 14; 11a.m. – 5 p.m.
• Where: The Makerspace (Alderman 308i)
• Registration is required: Register for the Pi Day Maker Craft

5. AI Tools Beyond ChatGPT

ChatGPT exploded on the scene and has been the focus of much of the conversation around AI and AI tools. But there are a host of others that offer similar functions but are trained on different corpuses and many tools that offer different functionalities. In this workshop, we’ll cover a variety of AI tools including Bard, Claude, Copilot, and more.

If you’re curious about AI tools and would like to learn more, this workshop will offer an introduction and opportunity to explore these tools yourself. There will also be opportunity for discussion and sharing, so if you have an AI tool that you use and find helpful, we’ll be asking for suggestions and demos from attendees as well.

• When: Thursday, March. 14; 3 – 4 p.m.
• Where: Online
• Registration is required: Register for AI Tools Beyond ChatGPT

In 2023, the Library was the grateful recipient of a major gift — a collection of humor and illustration, mainly of social and political satire — from retired attorney Josephine Lea Iselin, a noted collector of illustrated books, prints, manuscripts, and ephemera. The collection, housed in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, is relevant to fields ranging from art and literature to political science, history, and media studies, and will find broad use in research, instruction, exhibition, and outreach.

Here, we take a close look at just a few of the more than 900 items in the Iselin Collection of Humor.

Good news for bibliophiles: the books in Alderman Library’s fifth-floor stacks are now fully moved in and available to patrons! Browse the shelves to your heart’s content and, when ready, take your selected books to a circulation desk on the second or fourth floors for checkout. (Throughout the renovation, these books were available in Clemons or “by request” through Virgo.)

Each floor in the main library (aside from the basement and second floor, which do not have stacks) has two stacks locations — Stacks West and Stacks East. The fifth floor stacks books now available are in the Library of Congress Classification subclasses PS–Z, including American literature, German literature, Dutch literature, Scandinavian literature, fiction and juvenile belles lettres, bibliography, library science, and information resources.

The book-move-back process in Alderman Library will continue for several months, moving down floor-by-floor (the fourth-floor stacks will be completed next, likely by early March). When book movers are working on a floor, books on that floor will remain “by request” in Virgo and can be requested for delivery. When the movers complete a floor, the items will change to their new, permanent stacks location and become available for on-site checkout. To follow along with the progress of the book move, bookmark our status dashboard.

New cafe open for business

Another exciting update from inside the newly renovated building: the entirely student-run Saxbys is now open on the second floor of Alderman. Serving coffee, smoothies, breakfast all day, and an impressive array of grilled cheese sandwiches, Saxbys is open weekdays and Sundays. Students and staff packed the café during its opening day in Alderman earlier this month, observing a ribbon-cutting ceremony, picking up free swag, high-fiving Cav-Man, and sampling the menu.

In the news

UVA students have spoken, and Alderman is “the new place to be on Grounds,” according to the Cavalier Daily. Reporter Mia Tan interviewed multiple students in late January about their experience using the library since the start of the semester and the reviews in the article were uniformly positive. They remarked on the “open and spacious” feel of the renovated building and how its welcoming atmosphere is conducive to studying.

For now, students cite one another as the primary forces that shape the character of Alderman. From establishing the ‘talking floors’ to finding favorite study spots, [Fourth-year Engineering student Morgan] Small anticipates that students will fall into patterns as they frequent the library.

 

“I think that students will fill each space in a unique way, and this is something that will naturally occur over time,” Small said. “[Alderman] seems like it’s meant to be form-fitting to whoever is studying here.”

Another Cavalier Daily reporter, Emily Barrie, “explored every inch” of the main library earlier this month to find her top ten study spots. It may come as no surprise that the McGregor Room was listed as number one, but Barrie introduces readers to some new spots that she charmingly nicknamed, including the “Puzzle Place” and “Medieval Lights Area” (also known as the North Reading Room), both located on the fourth floor.

We’re thrilled that students are feeling so comfortable in the renovated library and hope you, whether you are a student, faculty member, staff, or community patron, come find your favorite reading spot soon.

It’s Love Data Week! This year’s theme is “My Kind of Data,” and we have a guest post from Laura Hjerpe, Senior Research Data Management Librarian.

In recognition of Love Data Week 2024, I’m featuring Charlottesville data stories from the University of Virginia Equity Center and local data from the City of Charlottesville, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the U.S. Government. I chose this because my kind of data is a data story with human interest, backed up by reliable data sources.

Data stories from the Equity Center

Health outcomes in the Charlottesville region, one of three Picturing Climate Justice data stories from the Equity Center, begins with a discussion about how environmental factors connected with climate change can affect physical and mental health, especially that of African Americans. Eight visualizations show the relationships between socioeconomic characteristics, such as income, racial demographics, age, and location with health outcomes such as asthma, diabetes, and poor physical health. Every visualization is accompanied by variable definitions, data sources, and Python code used to create the visualizations. Additionally, a new piece on Charlottesville Urban Heat Islands has been added that updates prior climate equity work. You may find this report and others on the Charlottesville Regional Equity Atlas by scrolling down and clicking “See all Reports.”   

The Charlottesville Regional Climate Equity Atlas can be used to explore social, infrastructure, and climate measures. To use, select any two measures to see the relationship between the measures in census tracts across the greater Charlottesville region. Researchers may narrow visualizations to specific counties or to the city of Charlottesville and choose from eight categories of variables: Demographic and Social, Health, Youth and Education, Jobs and Income, Housing and Transportation, Risk Factors, Community Assets and Infrastructure, and Climate Measures. After selecting a measure, the system shows that measure’s definition and data source.

These resources not only amplify data about Charlottesville area residents, but they also walk the reader through the data to make it easier to understand.

Local data collections 

Charlottesville has a number of local data collections. First, Charlottesville Open Data has municipality-generated data, such as Real Estate (Commercial Details) and a Tree Inventory. It features Charlottesville maps with city operations, historical preservation, and Green City data. 

Equity and Open Data features local historical data, as well as stories such as Union Ridge Today, a story told with maps about the transition of a neighborhood from Black-owned farmland to a busy Charlottesville suburb. There is overlap of datasets with Charlottesville Open Data, since both sites focus on local data.   

Virginia Open Data Portal contains Commonwealth-wide data. Popular topics include COVID-19, policing, food, and civil suit judgements. One popular historical dataset is called Freedom Suits which contains petitions initiated by enslaved people seeking to gain their freedom. Details extracted from these petitions include names, ages, years, claims, and judgements. The full text digital documents may be retrieved by file name from Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative. This collection, from the Library of Virginia, provides access to digital records documenting lived experiences of enslaved and free Black and multiracial people. 

Local data from the U.S. government 

The 2015-2019 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates found in Social Explorer are produced by the federal government and contain local data from communities throughout the United States, including the Charlottesville area. The 2015-2019 ACS 5-Year Estimates is a nationwide survey that asks about topics such as education, employment, internet access, transportation. The 5-year estimates represent data collected over 60 months and provide multiyear estimates for geographic areas with fewer than 65,000 residents. For more information about the ACS survey, see Understanding and Using American Community Survey Data: What All Data Users Need to Know. 

CDC Places, a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, reports county, place, census tract, and Zip Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTA) data and uses small area estimation methods to obtain 36 chronic disease measures.  

Ready to find your own data? Visit our Data and Statistics LibGuide for search strategy tips and to find data archives, data on a topic, and more.  

Visualization training 

Do you want to get started with visualizing your own data? Check out our RDS workshops. If you can’t make a session, reach out to the instructor for a one-on-one consultation. 

Do you want to enhance your story with maps? Visit Scholar’s Lab GIS Workshops. Coming up soon, Web Mapping and Visualization and Spatial Analysis with ArcGIS Online are offered during the last two weeks in February. Both workshops are one hour and assume no previous experience using GIS. 

There are lots of ways we can help — visit our Research Data Services site to learn about what we can offer. If you need help with finding data or using visualization tools, analyzing the data you already have, or managing your data, reach out to researchdataservices@virginia.edu.
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On a warm day last June, visitors flocked to the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library for a “Family Day” event in celebration of the library’s blockbuster exhibition, “Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style, and Racial Uplift,” curated by UVA Associate Professor of History John Edwin Mason. Since its installation in September 2022, the exhibition, which showcased portraits that African Americans in Central Virginia commissioned from the Holsinger Studio in the early 20th century, had drawn national media attention and attracted more than 10,000 visitors, nearly double the average amount. On this day in June 2023, families came to say goodbye to the exhibition just before it closed, and to have their own portraits taken as well.

Inside the Main Gallery of the Harrison Institute and Small Special Collections Library, modern-day Charlottesville residents found Holsinger portraits of their ancestors. Outside, families posed among the lush greenery for tintype portraits taken by Richmond photographer Em White, who was hired by Special Collections for the event. Nearby, visitors climbed inside the Free Book Bus to peruse titles, while on the first floor of the Harrison/Small building, children and teens participated in a “Zine Jam” workshop, cutting and pasting images to create their own tiny magazines.

“We had always wanted to do an event like Family Day for the local community,” said Holly Robertson, Curator of University Library Exhibitions, who organized the event and co-curated the Holsinger exhibition. “But it’s one thing to want to do an event, it's another thing to actually pull it off. ‘Visions of Progress’ had such good momentum, from the opening night to the media high of being featured on PBS News Hour in the dead of winter, and it really kept people coming to the exhibition, interested in the exhibition, writing in to say, ‘Hey, my relative is in here!’ It was an incredible, constant wave of positivity that propelled us to do a ‘last hurrah’ of sorts with Family Day.”

The success of “Visions of Progress” also inspired the curatorial team to continue examining Black life in the United States 100 years ago. “In thinking about other things that we wanted to highlight, both from a curatorial interest from staff and faculty, as well as a timely interest … we realized the Harlem Renaissance was what we wanted to do next,” Robertson said. As “Visions of Progress” wound down, Robertson worked with Special Collections curators Krystal Appiah and George Riser to dive into the Library’s rich collection of Harlem Renaissance artifacts, including books, magazines, illustrations, and manuscripts of the writers, artists, and thinkers of that era.

Looking back at the Harlem Renaissance

In September, 2023, UVA Library launched its latest major exhibition, “Their World As Big As They Made It: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance” in the Main Gallery of the Special Collections Library with an opening-night reception that featured live music from the Charlottesville Jazz Congregation. The curators had interpreted the cultural zeitgeist correctly; attendance for the event was at capacity, and just before the opening, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced plans for its own Harlem Renaissance exhibition (launching later this month).

The exhibition’s title is inspired by the Georgia Douglas Johnson poem, “Your World,” in which she looks back at the creativity of the Harlem Renaissance, acknowledges the hardships of being an emerging artist, and beckons a new generation of Black artists, writers, poets, and publishers with the line: “Your world is as big as you make it.” Johnson published her first poems in 1916 in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s magazine The Crisis, which is featured prominently in the exhibition.

“Our original idea for the exhibition was to take the three major magazines from Harlem from the period: Opportunity, The Messenger, and The Crisis, which all had different approaches to what they called ‘Negro uplift’ during the Great Migration, amid a background of incredible violence that was being perpetrated at that time,” said Riser, one of the exhibition’s curators. The works in the exhibition show “the countering of that violence, through this renaissance of art and poetry and music,” he said.

In addition to the original editions of those magazines, the exhibition features the papers of Langston Hughes; first editions of books by Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen; as well as fashions and music from the era, thanks to contributions from Sophie Abramowitz, a specialist at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (and former student assistant for Special Collections) whose graduate dissertation focused on songwriting in the Harlem Renaissance. Marlon Ross, a UVA English professor, also assisted with curation. Many of the items in the exhibition were originally collected by UVA Library soon after they were published. “Not many institutions have a [Harlem Renaissance] collection like ours,” curator Krystal Appiah told UVA Today. [See below for the curators’ favorite elements of the exhibition.]

Inspired by the way “Visions of Progress” drew in the local community through ancestral connections, Library curators put out a call this past summer for present-day artists to create works that would explore or respond to poems by Harlem Renaissance authors. The project, titled “As Big as We Make It!” was sponsored by a grant from the UVA Arts Council. A selection committee chose five contemporary artists with connections to UVA and Charlottesville to showcase their work in the exhibition. Read more about them here.

Curators provided tours of “Their World As Big As They Made It” to more than 600 middle school students on field trips just in the first three months of the exhibition run — and they will welcome almost 1,000 more Charlottesville-area high school students before the end of this month. In late January, more than 1,000 people registered to attend a virtual behind-the-scenes tour of the exhibition through UVA Lifetime Learning. On April 26, the Library will hold an open-house Final Friday celebration of the Harlem Renaissance. And for those traveling to Charlottesville for the 2024 Black Alumni Weekend or either Reunions weekends, the Library will offer in-person curator-led tours of the exhibition.

Sneak Peak: Curators share their favorite elements of “Their World As Big As They Made It: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance”

Looking ahead: The world of Anne Spencer

As Robertson was working on building on the Harlem Renaissance exhibition, she realized the Library had an opportunity to continue to examine Black life a century ago through the lens of poet Anne Spencer, a Virginia native who was an active figure in the Harlem Renaissance. UVA Library holds a vast collection of Spencer’s work and papers and this will be the subject of the next major exhibition opening in the Main Gallery of the Special Collections Library in September 2024. “I see ‘Visions of Progress,’ the Harlem Renaissance, and Anne Spencer as a triptych of exhibitions that look back at the African American experience 100 years ago, with a focus on Charlottesville and Central Virginia,” Robertson said.

Spencer lived most of her life in Lynchburg, Virginia, but had a strong presence in the literary world of the Harlem Renaissance. Her first published poem appeared in The Crisis and subsequent work was published in “The New Negro: An Interpretation,” a 1925 anthology of fiction, essays, and poetry edited by Alain Locke that served as a central text of the Harlem Renaissance, pushing for social and political change. In addition to being a poet, Spencer was a teacher, librarian, mother, gardener, and activist who helped revitalize the Lynchburg chapter of the NAACP, and her Lynchburg home was a meeting place for writers and intellectuals including Thurgood Marshall, Langston Hughes, and W. E. B. DuBois.

Spencer’s house is now a museum, maintained and run in part by her granddaughter, Shaun Spencer-Hester. “I just traveled to the museum recently and it is so beautiful,” Robertson said. “It is a liberated woman’s space, complete with a writer’s studio and gorgeous garden. The museum is starting to get its own national attention and funding. It feels like the right time to recognize the Library’s Spencer collection, which scholars are publishing on these days — and to lift up and celebrate the work of Shaun Spencer Hester as well.”

Robertson hopes to build the exhibition space to allude to architectural elements of the Spencer house and garden. “I keep thinking about family trees and the beautiful garden that [Spencer] left,” she said. “I plan to situate exhibition cases like trees, like the arbors that you see in the garden, giving people a sense of the beauty that they can behold and the story that they can behold about this incredible civil rights activist, librarian, and poet who brought the Harlem Renaissance into her own home.”

To see our latest major exhibition, “Their World As Big As They Made It: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance,” in person, visit the Main Gallery of the Special Collections Library, open weekdays and Saturday afternoons. Or attend our Final Friday event on April 26, 2024, for an open house-style celebration featuring gallery talks by exhibition curators. 

Since 1976, the U.S. government has officially observed February as Black History Month, with the Association for the Study of African American Life and History designating a theme each year. The theme for Black History Month 2024 is “African Americans and the Arts,” and UVA librarians are excited to offer recommendations for books, films, and even datasets that examine Black culture, history, and creativity. This year’s recommendations come from Reference Librarian Mandy Rizki and, where noted, from Keith Weimer, Librarian for History and Religious Studies. For more recommendations, also see our posts commemorating Black History Month 2023, Black History Month 2022 and Black History Month 2021.

“Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club,” edited by Kimberli Gant and Ndubuisi Ezeluomba (2022)

I was first introduced to Jacob Lawrence when I lived in Washington, D.C., and was lucky to be able to visit half of his “The Migration Series” at the Phillips Collection often. The other half lives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This book, “Black Orpheus,” explores the relationships between Lawrence and the members of the Mbari Artists & Writers Club through artwork, of course, but also through archival materials, essays, photographs, and images of the Mbari Club’s arts magazine, Black Orpheus (1957-67). Inspired by Lawrence’s lesser-known “Nigeria” series from the 1960s, this gorgeous exhibition catalog explores the huge, yet often ignored, impact of African Modernism on Lawrence’s practice and on art history globally.

Available in print.

“Moonlight,” by Barry Jenkins (2016)

You may remember this 2016 film for winning Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor — to Mahershala Ali — at the Oscars. Nearly eight years away from the revelation of its release and the buzz of awards season, the movie has aged to an even more beautiful, moving, thoughtful experience. Queer identity is easier to find in media now than ever before, but to explore queer sexuality is still so rare, even more so Black queer sexuality. “Moonlight,” available on SWANK Streaming Film Database, does just that, in luminous color and amazing performances through all three chapters of the film.

Available on SWANK Streaming Film Database.

“Beyond the Door of No Return,” by David Diop, trans. Sam Taylor (2023)

Set mostly in the 1750s in Senegal, this 2023 novel by David Diop (translated by Sam Taylor) layers language, time, relationships, truth, and imagination. The main character, Michel Adanson, was really a botanist who worked in Senegal in the 18th century. Diop, himself French-Senegalese, has taken Adanson as a starting point to imagine a story about his experiences traveling through the heart of the transatlantic slave trade, including descriptions of the House of Slaves and its Door of No Return on Gorée, off the coast of Dakar. You may recognize this historic location from other novels, including those by Kwame Alexander and Yaa Gyasi. Diop’s epistolary book, translated from French, completely engages us in the lives of Adanson and his daughter, Aglaé, with skillful writing. Its vivid descriptions and astute observations move what may have been a trite novel into a mesmerizing work.

Available in print.

“The History of Black Studies,” by Abdul Alkalimat (2021)

Alkalimat, a professor of African American Studies and of Library and Information Science, has worked in the field of Black Studies since its founding in the 1960s. This chronicle, therefore, is based in both historic research and first-hand experience. Alkalimat describes how Black Studies departments were born out of political movements from student activism to Black Power, and doesn’t underplay the impact of the women’s movement and co-ed activism on the creation of these departments and programs. Simultaneously, Alkalimat reminds us that Black intellectualism existed long before the institutionalization of Black Studies. Check out his subsequent book too, The Future of Black Studies.

Available in ebook.

“An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created,” by Santi Elijah Holley (2023)

This 2023 publication reviews the history of the Shakur clan and their commitment to Black resistance movements from Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association in the early 20th century, the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers and its offshoots — including the violent Black Liberation Army — and the cultural activism of rapper Tupac Shakur. Patriarch Salahdeen Shakur ties the various figures and movements together, though much attention is paid to his daughters-in-law Afeni Shakur (Tupac’s mother) and Assata Shakur (still a fugitive in Cuba). The book offered a clear overview of important currents of thought, organizations, and personalities within the Black community, as well as the connections between them.

Available in print. (This recommendation was provided by Keith Weimer)

National Survey of Black Americans Series, by James S. Jackson, Harold W. Neighbors, M. Belinda Tucker, and Gerald Gurin

Novels, books, and films are crucial to understanding and celebrating Black history and culture — so is data! Many institutions and research centers create datasets studying Black communities, health, experiences, and much more. This particular dataset from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, spanning 1979 to 1992, is focused on social, economic, and psychological data of Black Americans. Other publicly available datasets on Black American life can be found via Pew Research, the US Census Bureau, and more. Our Research Data Services team is here to help you work with data and find datasets. Attend a workshop to dive deep on software or visit the StatLab by appointment or walk-in hours. 

Available from the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

Join Lifetime Learning and the UVA Library for a virtual tour of the current exhibition “Their World As Big As They Made It: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance,” featuring the visionary works of writers, artists, and thinkers whose creative and intellectual pursuits defined Black American identity and political consciousness. The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library is fortunate to hold a wide selection of influential books, magazines, illustrations, and manuscripts from the Harlem Renaissance.

The exhibition curators—Marlon Ross, Krystal Appiah, and George Riser—will offer a look back one hundred years ago when the artistic and political revolutions of the Harlem Renaissance were in full swing. They will also offer a behind-the-scenes chronicle of their work, producing a highly visual exhibition in conversation with Black artists today.

Event details:

Wednesday, January 24, 2024
3-4 p.m. EST
Virtual event with live captioning
Free and open to all; register here

Speaker biographies:

Marlon Ross, Professor of English, Department of English, College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Krystal Appiah, Head of Collection Development, the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library

George Riser, Curator, the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library

Holly Robertson (moderator), Curator, the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library

Earlier this week, Indian cricket star Sachin Tendulkar spoke out about a deepfake video surging on social media in which Tendulkar appeared to be promoting a gaming app as an easy way to make money. “It is disturbing to see rampant misuse of technology," Tendulkar stated on X (formerly Twitter). Tendulkar is just the latest victim in the rise of deepfakes. According to The Guardian, more than 100 deepfake videos impersonating United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak appeared on Facebook in the last month, raising widespread concern about the damage artificial intelligence (AI) is causing before the country’s general election.

“Deepfake generators are tools that can edit videos to make it look like someone has done or said something they haven’t,” said Josh Thorud, a Multimedia Teaching and Learning Librarian at the University of Virginia Library. “As you can see, this technology is both exciting and frightening in its possible uses — everything from creative exploration to fake news, scams, false criminal evidence, and bullying or blackmail through impersonation.”

Thorud is part of a UVA Library team that offers resources to navigate the increasingly complicated landscape of AI in higher education. The group created a free guide for students and faculty, “Generative AI at UVA,” which features links and information about AI, including ethical use, citations, considerations for use, and more. The guide is one of nearly 600 online guides created by Library staff.

Novices to AI can start with the guide’s “What is Generative AI” section, which explains how programs like ChatGPT use artificial intelligence to create and produce new content through algorithms. Instructors who are teaching about the effects of AI on society or who are concerned about the use of AI in scholarship may want to explore the guide’s “Cautions and Considerations” section, which discusses how to use AI critically, taking into account knowledge gaps; risks of plagiarism and perpetuating misinformation; and complex concepts of bias, privacy, and equity. Students who are using permissible AI-generated content in their academic writing should check out the “Citations” section.

Thorud designed the guide’s “Images and Media” section, which examines how AI can produce artwork, music, and videos — including deepfakes — and all of the concerns that come with that. “By engaging with deepfakes in the classroom, students can critically examine the implications of this technology and develop media literacy skills by looking at misuse and getting hands-on experience of their own,” Thorud said. “And when it is so easy to create fakes, the only barrier is ethics, empathy, and integrity. This calls for an imperative in our classrooms to embed ethical decision-making and critical analysis as core components of media literacy.”

The guide also provides helpful links to wider work on AI going on at UVA, including a generative AI teaching hub through UVA’s Center for Teaching Excellence, which, in addition to a section by Thorud on AI media and non-textual tools, features recommendations from UVA librarians Meridith Wolnick and Maggie Nunley on ethically integrating AI into courses. Wolnick and Nunley worked with Thorud and others to build the Library’s Generative AI guide last fall and urge users to check it frequently for updates and new guidance as AI continues to evolve. “We built this guide at a breakneck speed to get it up,” Nunley said. “Because things are changing and we’re learning so much so quickly, this is going to be a guide that gets updated and changes a lot.”

For instructors who are curious about exploring AI in their classrooms, Thorud recommends striking a balance between technological exploration and critical thinking. “Encourage students to not only learn how to use AI tools, but also to critically analyze their impact on media, society, and ethics through using them,” he said. “This will not only equip students with valuable skills but also prepare them to responsibly shape the future.”

Students, faculty, staff, and community members streamed into the University of Virginia’s newly renovated main library when its doors opened to the public at 9 a.m. sharp for the first time in nearly four years.

Visitors explored five floors of new and updated space. They browsed books in stacks on the fifth floor; studied in the McGregor Room; and bathed in the light streaming in from skylights, clerestories, and massive arched windows. Check out our Instagram page to see a video of the first patrons entering the building.

Photographer Tom Daly was there to capture opening day; take a look at some of the highlights below.