Who are the publics engaging in AI?

Given the importance of public engagement in governments' adoption of artificial intelligence systems, artificial intelligence researchers and practitioners spend little time reflecting on who those publics are. Classifying publics affects assumptions and affordances attributed to the publics' ability to contribute to policy or knowledge production. Further complicating definitions are the publics' role in artificial intelligence production and optimization.

Building a Traceable and Sustainable Historical Climate Database: Interdisciplinarity and DRAW.

Turning historical meteorological observations into usable data is a challenging process that is immeasurably enriched when it encompasses interdisciplinarity. Here, the McGill DRAW (Data Rescue: Archives and Weather) project shows how climatologists, geographers, archivists, data scientists, and coders together built a citizen-science-based transcription platform to transform the McGill Observatory paper records into a traceable and sustainable database.

Spatial cyberinfrastructures, ontologies, and the humanities.

We report on research into building a cyberinfrastructure for Chinese biographical and geographic data. Our cyberinfrastructure contains (i) the McGill-Harvard-Yenching Library Ming Qing Women's Writings database (MQWW), the only online database on historical Chinese women's writings, (ii) the China Biographical Database, the authority for Chinese historical people, and (iii) the China Historical Geographical Information System, one of the first historical geographic information systems. Key to this integration is that linked databases retain separate identities as bases of knowledge, while they possess sufficient semantic interoperability to allow for multidatabase concepts and to support cross-database queries on an ad hoc basis.