Quinn Dombrowski, academic technology specialist in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and in the Library, at Stanford University, will present the 2024 Windsor Lecture, "What Happens After the End? Crafting Sustainable Librarianship in an Age of AI."
This lecture will draw upon several projects and initiatives from the library and digital humanities spaces—including Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, the Digital Humanities Role-Playing Game, and the Data-Sitters Club—to reflect on why we do this kind of work. It will grapple with what "ending" a project means, the relationship between endings and failure, and the specter of "sustainability" that looms over anything digital. Without falling under the sway of the vocational awe so well articulated by Fobazi Ettarh, it will argue for the value of librarianship, broadly defined, for sustaining people -- while necessarily considering our own sustainability as part of the equation. Particularly in an era of AI hype with the potential to bring about societal changes we can't yet foresee, this talk advocates for hands-on creative play, as found in makerspaces and the personal crafting of many librarians, as a method for building networks that can help sustain us, that cross the physical/digital divide.
