 I think that the walls between, you know, these roles are evolving in ways that seem new, but they were like back during the library of Alexandria, you know, the museum and the library were together and the archive was the library was the museum. You know, I don't know, you know, maybe people are reading less as you say, Mary, but like it's also, you know, they're 80 of us or something on this call right now, we're consuming media together, whatever, like while I'm talking, I'm reading stuff, I'm responding, I'm like reading from a book, I'm, you know, looking at the chat. And if we step back for a minute and just time ourselves in a given day, especially during the pandemic where we haven't been able to do a whole lot of anything, you know, the amount of just information and data that we're just piling into our brains is extraordinary. If you'd like to hold on for the next 30 seconds, you can enjoy the screen which is actually Wikipedia updating itself as we speak live. Welcome to Cambridge Forum, coming to you live via Zoom. I'm Mary Stack, the director of Cambridge Forum. And today we're continuing our transformation series, looking at the ways in which the pandemic has acted as an agent of change in our lives. Today we're examining our severe information disorder. Well, you may say, aren't we delusional information? Well, yes we are, but much of it is actually untrue and useless. We all need to have access to verifiable trustworthy information sources that are freely available. Indeed, one could argue that the future of our democracy depends upon its epistemic security, since society is reliant upon the facts in order to make well informed decisions and to coordinate collective action in response to crises. This has been demonstrated as never before in the last year with regard to two huge global problems, one climate change and two the pandemic. Yet no two random people on the street, if you polled them would agree on the facts, which is why it's of utter importance going forward to keep knowledge safe and uncorrupted. I'm encouraging that this is a huge subject for us to sink our teeth into. We're going to have a go at it today just because it's so important to help us understand what needs to be done. We've got the help of two fine minds in the field. This is Professor B Kaufman who's a writer, teacher, documentary producer, who works at MIT Open Learning. He's addressed many of his questions in this book, his latest book The New Enlightenment, and he's hoping that this will spark a new conversation on how we can change things. Once the discourse for public media, we have Casey Davis Kaufman, who is the associate director of GBH archives and project manager for the American archive of public broadcasting. Welcome to both. Again, a quick word of thanks, gratitude to PBS for all the magnificent programs that we're the lucky recipients of frontline Nova Ken Burns series like Eyes on the Prize and Vietnam. And also thank you to GBH forum network who are helping co-produce this series with us. Let's go to you, Peter. Prior to launching into present day challenges, perhaps you could give us a brief overview of the fight to free knowledge, historically, which is the saga of powerful forces trying to staunch the free flow of information, often with tragic consequences. We talked about William Tyndale in the book and Diderot, and then more recently Aaron Schwartz, right up to Ed Snowden, who endorsed your book. So maybe you could give us a little back story to the present situation today. Well, thanks. Thanks for inviting me, Mary. Thank you for organizing this great event today. And thank you to the great Cambridge forum and to GBH forum network and also to the Lowell Institute which helped put us together. Thanks to everyone for coming. I mean, I can't agree with you more about the issue of epistemic security which has always been, as you put it, which has always been unbelievably precarious my book opens with this story of William Tyndale, who, you know, there's a there's a bunch of gruesome activity at the start of this book, people are getting the headed disemboweled, burnt at the stake, strangled to death. You know, there's a there's a there's a TV movie, if GBH, you know, PBS passes on it, maybe showtime. The, the, the Tyndale had one goal in his life. He was an extremely devout guy, he lived in the 16th century he died in that century. He died by being burnt at the stake, actually being strangled and burnt the stake at the same, at the same time as they did back then. And, and, and he tried to translate the Bible, which was, you know, a capital offense it was unbelievably heretical to bring the Bible into English back then. He wanted it so that everybody could read it, or more importantly back then hear it in the in the common time. You know, King and Crown did not want that to happen. And King and Crown, you know, we, we just got through four years of. Yeah, some kind of monstrous King, we've experienced maybe King and church I mean to say we've experienced, you know, various challenges with organized religion, suppressing truth and knowledge. Back then in the 16th century, it was super hard. And all he wanted to do was translate this good book, all of it, old and new into English. They chased him Henry the eighth various popes, Thomas Moore chased him around Europe, caught him killed him. And, you know, the second chapter of the book is about did row and the effort in the original enlightenment through print to try to kind of create with the great historian at Harvard, Robert Darden, called maybe the most epistemic shift. He experienced an encyclopedia full of knowledge that could be sort of rendered available for those who could pay for it back then. You know, and guess what, King and church, we're not intact, we're not into that either. So, you know the fates of some of these people. They are kind of heroic, trying to bring us knowledge has its echo today in the way we've seen others committed to bringing truthful information, verifiable information out into the public, and they've been chased into jail. They've been cornered into suicide. They've been murdered or imprisoned. Not a great scene. And then we have present day where we've got, you know, the monstrous Googles and other entities that are on the internet, stopping us or making us distrust the facts. Before we came on air I saw that in Florida, they've just stopped some teachers teaching that are vaccinated, not because they're unvaccinated so I think protecting the integrity of information is very difficult because there's such a volume of stuff coming at us. Who's currently doing a good job of sifting the wheat in the chat. You know, obviously hats off to public broadcasting and I know Casey will say much more about this from its earliest days to now. Just one of the great heroic institutions of our time in any country, you know, our public broadcasting system. So, thanks. Thank you. But, you know, this book is a kind of tribute to Wikipedia tribute to the Internet archive tribute to activist organizations, a full third of the book is kind of a, you know what to do now about this issue because it, you know as your intro pointed out yes it's affecting all of us. There's a global pandemic raging parts of the world India Brazil that, you know, are facing these surges are facing them in part because people are lying about science and health left and right, but you know, there's climate change. You mentioned, there's the political violence that we have here that we witnessed, you know, in January there's the economic crises that we're facing. A lot of this is just is just a function of, as they say apparently in algebra. You know, a function of bad information. So, the thing that started us off at the beginning of this hour is a live sort of visual representation of Wikipedia being edited. Wikipedia is the successor institution to the encyclopedia of the original enlightenment it is this global encyclopedia. The most popular non commercial website in the world one of the most popular websites fifth, six 10, depending on how you counted on a given day in the world commercial or non commercial. The core of Wikipedia, just as the core of the original encyclopedia and the enlightenment is verification. So you have to be able, whatever you post there to have a source for it. This is not interpretive interpretative material, or if it is and you post it there it won't stay up for a long. It's always in progress as that video and the actual representation demonstrates and and Wikipedia to your to your, you know, to answer your question is, I think, premise intra paris and in bringing us a universe where we have verified information, but the Internet archive is a very extraordinary place and archives general universities, museums, libraries, broadcasters that are public and archives and then, you know, double triple it you've got the American archive which is public broadcasting and archive a library all together. These are the places that we have to draw some lessons from how they operate and how they verify information. This is to the question of kind of gatekeepers. Somebody is monitoring the content that Wikipedia, one presumes, because you're saying has to be posted with verifiable information. So, I don't know the inner workings but I presume someone is checking the veracity of that information. Because I think the question of that the Internet is not a publisher is a tricky one, because it actually is a publisher. You know, when newspapers were set up, you know, there was all the libel laws and you had a kind of structure regulatory structure, so that things had to be verifiable, or you sued the person for defamation. There's this sort of a Wild West scenario, where I can say anything about you. And then if you start getting upset and wanting it to be taken down I can say oh well I was just expressing an opinion, and you know, it's, it's just whatever citizen journalism. So we're in this tricky situation aren't we. One has to have gatekeepers of some kind surely. Although some people say that that's antithetical to free speech. Yeah, I mean I think there are a lot of, I think there are a lot of answers to that. It's a great question I, you know, the thing about Wikipedia is that anybody can edit it. You know, it is our sort of community resource it's a public in effect resource and non commercial. Obviously there's some great. There are some great experiences we've had where, you know, well financed media organizations have managed to publish verifiable information in such a way as to kind of change also provide like the original in secret PD and Robert Darten's words you know, like an epistemic shift epistemological shift the change the nature of human history and, you know, the Pentagon papers for example or, you know and Daniel Ellsberg for example is speaking with Ed Snowden this, this Friday. I had a UMass Friday and Saturday at a UMass event. Definitely worth. You have any details about that piece of I do I can find it. When I'm not, when I'm not talking and find it in the chat. That would be very handy for anyone wanting to do that. It's an extraordinary thing and you know also. I don't know great books on climate change have been serialized for example in New York current. But in the end it's like we're only as good as who controls us, and if we're controlling our own modes of communication I think we're a little stronger. So that's why you know hats off to public media which is not owned by shareholders. It's not. It's not governed by some kind of curious Sanhedrin that goes down to the Caribbean. I think any maybe you guys. But, you know periodically I think it's, it's our network, and I think we have to figure out ways of making sure the way we publish information. Whether it's video, which big part of my book is basically, you know, we have to focus on that's the new enlightenment. It's audio visual stuff it's like how we're communicating right now. Yeah, thank you Andy that's that's the link in the chat. Thank you. Well, since we've talked about public broadcasting. And we're going to move over to Casey before we talk about how important libraries are. Casey, you're in the business of kind of making history in the sense of recording and selecting what gets saved. So, apart from this being a huge responsibility, as we're now reevaluating all sorts of perspectives in terms of our own national history. What is the role of an archivist in fighting against fake news and reinforcing context. Hi, everyone here. My name is Casey Davis Kaufman as Mary mentioned earlier I, I work at WGBH. I've been there for about 10 years at now the associate director of the GBH archives and manage a project with the Library of Congress called the American Archive of Public Broadcasting and for eight years now we have been working with public media stations across the country to help them digitize their their material that they have recorded that the programming that they've created over the last 6070 plus years. Throughout the history of the public broadcasting system in the US and preserve that material at the Library of Congress and make it publicly available to the public. Just thinking about the history of public broadcasting and some of those lofty goals. Lyndon Johnson when he signed the public broadcasting act one quote from from his commentary that day. We must consider new ways to build a great network for knowledge, not just a broadcast system but one that employs every means of sending and storing information that the individual can use. So not just sending information but storing that information that the individual can use. The Public Broadcasting Act when it was signed created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and within their mandate, authorized CPB to establish and maintain a library and archives of public media so that mission to preserve and and and make available the content created by public broadcasting stations. From the very beginning was recognized that the programming that's being produced is evergreen and it has a long potential use to help not only educate and inspire and enlighten people when it's broadcast but as a historical record. And we're now at the point we have over if you count community radio and TV across the country we've got over 1300 public television and radio stations and licensees that have for 50 60 70 years been really on the front lines of their community documenting on video and and audio. What's going on in their community the history, the people the perspectives of what's happened in that community so as an archivist as someone, you know responsible for protecting the entire integrity of information. You know Peter says this so well in his book that cultural heritage institution should be publishing their the material that has been stored in in in vaults for years and that's what we have been doing. Magnetic media has a short lifespan, and it has been for four decades been really the driving medium of the cultural record of our time and making that material available now is imperative. Before it is lost magnetic media as I said, depending on the format can have a lifespan of 1015 years some formats like that tapes, which were pretty common in the 90s for recording radio. Audio dropouts in only five to seven years. So we learn from our past and you know the history that's written that is written is going to be based on the sources that scholars and people and what others have access to. And so we as cultural heritage professionals need to be making as much of that material available online as possible freely available for people to access. And we also need to ensure that the records of the past are reflective of the multitude of voices that are present within our historic record. Archives have been considered a very for a very long time as objectively collecting and preserving history as neutral third parties. There has been a trust in archivist as stewards of our collective history and as trusted sources of evidence, but we are, you know, reckoning with the fact that with, you know, within the last 10 or so years and especially over the last year as the, the calls for addressing injustices longstanding injustices facing black indigenous and other people of color are being amplified. We're reckoning with the fact that the actual process of selecting and preserving and describing archival records in itself is subjective. And it has for many years tended to skew towards the prioritization of documenting history from the top down white narratives where people of color have been marginalized from that record. There are movements now in our field to decolonize to reinterpret our collections to prioritize the preservation of collections documenting underrepresented communities and to rethink how we describe those materials, ensuring that the language we use in our metadata, the information about the material we're making available is inclusive and represents the communities and voices in the way that they would want to be shared. I'll also add that there is also recognition when our within our field that in order to truly evolve our practice and ensure equity in the preservation of our history that our field needs to be reflective of our population. The archival field has been primarily white for a long time, and we're now reckoning with the fact that we need stewards from the communities that are documented within our collections in order to ensure ensure that we're preserving them and making them available in ways that are in alignment with those communities. I just in fairness, Mary, you know, in case you said a couple nice things about this book that I like I have to say, and I would say it anyway, 100 ways to Sunday that that American archive is like one of the most important things that we've got going. And it's just an unbelievable resource from its conception to its execution to its future planning. I've been able to, you know, attend some of these meetings. But like, you know, the eyes on the prize series, which is kind of the landmark, maybe one of the, no doubt, one of the greatest civil rights, one of the greatest historical pieces of work that has been published in any medium produced in any medium in the United States. The full transcripts of those interviews, including interviews that relate directly to, you know, films we've been watching recently and to put it mildly issues that we've been experiencing as citizens are online now for anybody to go through. And it's just, it's just an unbelievably essential gesture. One thing I want to add Casey to what you said is, you know, you're quoting Lyndon Johnson. He had his dedication ceremony in 1967, and he also said to be like, you know, I don't know what, fully, fully kind of promotion oriented at the moment. He also said, you know, that the system he was signing into law will be free, and it will be independent, and it will belong to all of our people. We rededicate a part of the airwaves, rededicate, which is an interesting kind of concept like he was noticing and Bill Moyers who wrote some of this was noticing and a whole lot of other people had noticed like Newton Minow and others under Kennedy, that the television had gotten away from us in some sense similar to the internet. Today, we rededicate a part of the airwaves which belong to all the people, and we dedicate them for the enlightenment of all the people. And part of the reason why this book, you know, carries this title is because it turns out like at various times in, you know, the history of the 19th, 20th, 21st century. The enlightenment concept has come and come around again. And so I'm advocating for us to think ambitiously once more about what we're facing. On that note, Casey, I have to say I really enjoyed and continuing to enjoy the alternative independent films that are available it seems round the clock on as a world PBS channel that I watched constantly. And the versions of history you hear because it's it's people's oral histories, explaining things is riveting. I've learned a tremendous about about American history from that being as I'm not, you know, I'm not a native case anyone missed. So I think this is a great resource and it makes it riveting, because I'm going to move now to another topic which is the role of libraries because I was amazed. I was researching Aaron Schwartz, that his big crime was trying to liberate. Now, albeit illegally information from MIT's database correct, Peter. And it was information through a connection at MIT, but from a database of a nonprofit that provides access on a paid basis to scholarly journals. So, so you didn't go about it quite the right way but I think the intent was was a great idea, you know that he was way ahead of his time in that regard. So, how important are libraries still, because I'm really of the view that people are reading less and less. And how is their function evolved to kind of keep up with technology. Maybe you could have a bite at that Casey and then Peter you. So, the fight against fake news and misinformation has is one is one that libraries and archives have been working to address for many, many years. We're just dealing with it in new mediums now with with moving images we're thinking about, you know, how do we deal with deep fakes with, you know, the ability to the technical ability for someone to put someone's face on another person's body and, and, and for that, you know, sort of propaganda to be utilized as a way to communicate misinformation. So we're now just dealing with it in new ways. The libraries are the mission of them has been to just provide unfettered access to information. But with regard to the fake with, you know, the fight against fake news and information, because of libraries unique situation within communities as partners as educators as champions of knowledge. There's been an opportunity and they have been teaching information and media literacy. So within like the Association for College and Research Libraries, there are standards for information literacy that academic librarians have deployed within their within the academic situations that they're that they're working in and within public libraries and academic libraries, information literacy has been core teaching people how to evaluate information, look at sources evaluate the credibility of sources determine you know what is the chain of custody of this information, and then how do I go about making a good decision based on the sources that are provided. And in academic libraries, there have been movements to encourage open access publishing. Peter can talk all about that. But you know, encouraging creative commons licensing creative commons is a nonprofit whose mission is to encourage open access to cultural heritage material or other created works. It provides six licenses for people for for creators to assign to their works to communicate from the onset of publishing that they're okay with other people making use of their of their of their work in specific ways. So communicating the value of open access even creating journals that are housed within the library that they can use as an alternate that they can that scholars and students can publish in as an alternative to the, you know, really five or six major publishing companies that are going to lock away their, their scholarship and require people to have to pay a license fee in order to access it. No, I, you know, I second everything there I think I think that the walls between, you know, these roles are evolving in ways that seem new but they were like back during the library of Alexandria, you know the museum and the library were and the archive was the library was the museum and you know, I don't know, you know maybe people are reading less as you say Mary but like it's also, you know, they're 80 of us or something on this call right now we're consuming media together, whatever I'm talking I'm reading stuff I'm responding I'm like reading from a book I'm, you know, looking at the chat. And if we step back for a minute. And just time ourselves in a given day, especially during the pandemic where we haven't been able to do a whole lot of anything. You know, the amount of just information and data that we're just piling into our brains is extraordinary. And it's precisely like, it's not an accident that the Library of Congress as a partner in the American archive, because, you know, all the things that the Library of Congress can do, and of all the reasons why the Library of Congress was set up by the way by you know, an enlightenment character like Thomas Jefferson so I can't say like Brewster Kale who's another just incredibly, you know, visionary character who's the founder and runs the Internet archive calls himself a kind of librarian, even though he's the head of something called the archive. So I think all of these things are kind of blending together a little bit their roles are kind of, you know, there's some porous quality to them but they're all in the business as Casey has been just listing all the different roles that people are playing. And increasingly, I think it's going to be important for media such as this, we may be reading less but does that discount, like does that make this experience I hope not, although, yeah it's essential. But yeah, but like does that does that make this experience any like second best because we're getting together to talk about it rather than to read about it. No, and I think, you know if you look at the Trump era. The record of that is going to be audio visual. It's inescapable social media to and all of that. So, these are roles. The importance of information is the archive, the library, these are the seats, the seats of knowledge and therefore the seats of power in the in the in the coming decades and centuries. I've actually jumped in. Marcos has said, isn't the keyword for trustworthy gatekeepers accountability I'm all for gatekeepers as long as they explain what they're doing openly, but internal secret algorithms from private companies such as Facebook, or what gets us into trouble. Yeah, Marcos, you know, hello. Thank you for that question great that you joined this thing like. And that's part of the reason why on Wikipedia there's incredible transparency people don't love there's a lot to criticize Wikipedia for it's celebrating its 20th anniversary. As is, by the way, MIT open courseware, as is Creative Commons, which is mentioned. My colleague at MIT Kurt Newton asked this question like, what was in the water in 2001 that all these, all these, or 2000 that all these Oregon 2001 that all these organizations are, you know, established in that year. But yeah, accountability is essential. And that's why the original encyclopedia that these guys put together insisted on. Yeah, accountability for all the articles. There were codes set up for how to identify the authors. There were 27,000 intertextual links, if you can imagine, between articles. Wikipedia has inherited that mantle. It is the, it is the core to cross referencing. And it's likely to be the core to audio visual. How do you footnote, you know, Marcos back to you like how do you, how do you footnote a podcast, how do you make a footnote in a podcast. How do you, how do you create citations for Casey you know if, if, if eyes on the prize were being produced today. You know these sources and what have you are usually rolling at the end. You have a transcript to. Yeah, but like, there's no reason if we're watching it on, you know, machines like we're all using right now, why we can't, you know, just do the equivalent of what we're doing in chat. I mentioned something, you know, all of a sudden a link pops up to it. Like we should be able to get there with audio visual materials to make sure that people like, you know, can't jump in this cabinet of demons can't reimpose some just, you know, shroud of lies on us and, you know, we're, we can't penetrate it because we can't see where those falsehoods are really originating so that's an essential technological and media challenge. And thank God, you know I work at MIT where everybody figures all that stuff out. We've got a couple of very interesting quotes coming in here. Comments. Shannon shared a quote from Michael Crichton quote the irony of the information age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion, which I would totally endorse that I remember reading on that topic. When the new citizen journalists first hit the internet, and everybody was, you know, blogging from everywhere, and somebody who started off being a great supporter of that ended up being highly skeptical of it saying real journalists job, their job is on the line if they get something wrong. That's actually the only reason on them to get it correct and verifiable, whereas if I'm just blogging away my attic, I could just say anything about anything. So I think that's a very good point. Also, this brings us to a Elizabeth Seager has just come in, and I was about to actually mention her work. She read an article that she had done on BBC futures about epistemic security. She works at Cambridge, and she research is the future of intelligence. And she said in this article is becoming increasingly difficult to make sure everyone is well informed being well informed is often a privilege of time and resources that most people cannot easily afford. In the competition for eyeballs, the most effective attention grabbers appeal to people's emotions and existing beliefs. The resulting erosion of trust has led to the creation of a degraded information ecosystem, which has created a threat to global security. So this is how important this issue is. I think she raises a very important point. If you start off with small lies, you just keep building on them, and we all know the consequences of that. So, I think it's ever so important that people think about what sources they're going to for their information, which brings me to this other point which I don't want to play devil's advocate because of course I use my phone for checking things. I think what worries me a little bit is people are replacing real knowledge with soundbite kind of things, which are very ephemeral. People don't remember things when they they have a bite. They do remember something if they've read it. And I think it's, I think that context is very important. When you read something in a book, it's in a context. When you get a clip or a soundbite, it's just being. So, I don't know what I'm asking that would you agree with that Casey. Yeah, I read somewhere that six out of 10 people who share a link on Facebook don't actually even click the end to read the article before they share it. So yeah, it is a pervasive issue. You know, having access to these tiny computers. I also has its benefits, though, you know a lot of many low income people, you know the smartphones are really the only way that they can get access to the internet and have access online. But I checked our Google Analytics recently and about 38% of people who come to our archive website are on us are on a smartphone. So, even if people are, you know, scrolling constantly scrolling on their, you know, on their phones, they're also taking the time to to build their knowledge to come to our to an archive and spend time there on a phone. But in general, I think that, yes, the soundbite issue is one. I really love Peter's idea that he mentioned earlier if having the source right alongside the image or the or the soundbite. If you're watching a program I think that that's a way of the future that could help address putting the source right there in front of people before they did with, you know, giving them the option to select it or not. All right, listening to the baseball game while you're watching on the tele muted. That was a bad, bad comparison. Elizabeth Seger actually just typed in a comment. She says we're currently experiencing a decline in public trust in even public media sources. This is largely due to a decline in trust in institutions more generally. What are your thoughts on how we might regain public trust in reliable information sources. Is it more about educating the public. So Peter, do you want to take that. Yeah, I mean this is a great question. And I don't know. I wonder if Elizabeth Seger would agree or not but I mean this is a this is a multi generational challenge, you know, building trust in institutions, because in part that trust has been degrading degraded over generations. And that's part of what public broadcasting was the founders of public broadcasting were reacting to in the mid 1960s, but you know, broadcast radio and television had gotten to a point over. Some decades. If you count in radio, if you include visual education media like cinema and films in the classroom and in churches and what have you, which my book goes on ad nauseam about. I think, you know, you're talking about half a century. So, I think it's going to take a long time to build back that trust. But I think, while we do so, and while we try to regain. I don't know some hold of the reins over, you know how to regulate media that's gone out of control. Super hard to do with politicians bought and sold left and right and state houses and in the capital. We have to rededicate ourselves to use Johnson's language. I don't quote Linda Johnson a lot but you know to to ourselves as universities and archives and public broadcasters and others to get this material out online. I think it's going to go in a way where the chain of authority, the Casey your phrase like what librarians are helping us sort through our evidence so that we know that, you know, publish statement is a verifiable statement at whatever medium it's in those could be words that could be a clip from this event today in in, you know, the video. And for all of us open courseware at MIT, which, you know, is huge YouTube's its YouTube channel is 3 million subscribers. And it's the largest educational institution broadcaster in effect or telecaster on the on the on the web needs to sort through. How do you, you know, the fact that an MIT professor may be saying, you know, something about a linear algebra may not be enough for somebody or more specifically I guess or more relatedly the fact that a professor at any institution can be saying something about race relations or the vote may not be enough and we have to make sure that there's a, you know, that it's more than turtles all the way down. I've written in Martin Twitter now asks me, would you like to read the article first before forwarding. Very helpful. Peter has also made his book available through open culture and we've posted the link to that. Thank you for that. And then asks, I remember in this American life story, where a protagonist thought that the BBC and bright bar were reputable sources representing left and conservative sides. What does this tell us about the basic uncomprehension among the public. I mean I'd love to tackle that one. If that's okay. I, you know, there are 60% of Americans who believe in angels 40 to 50% of us don't fully believe in evolution. So, to the generational point, you know, you're not born. You're not born believing in angels. You're not born believing in bright bar. You're not born believing in, you know, man sudden appearance on on earth the way he is today at the at the on the first day. So you're taught this stuff, and you have to be. What's the word taught other stuff, I guess, or given verifiable alternatives and now the web. You know, we're all competing for space on this rectangle right now. This is the sort of the phone whatever, like, it's incredible and and the, you know, we're failing we as in whatever we are like universities and others. You know, if, if, if we're failing, we're failing to recognize this as a challenge as great as COVID. You know, and that's why that's why I wrote this book. And I hope that, you know, the knowledge institutions that are that are out there that can affect change and that can commit to, you know, public broadcasting was also not intended to, you know, generate an informed educated viewer base within a year. It's a generational project as we're experiencing now, maybe even its apogee is the American archive where you can sort through all this material. And who knows how searchable and, you know, how many nuggets it will generate in the future, how they can be appended to open courses, for example, or, you know, other online material newspaper article. All of that is ahead of us. And so it's a heck of a time. I want to do two more comments over here and says free speech is free. How do we keep that even if we don't agree with the point of view. Swamp thing, then Emily is asking Casey a question asked that is anybody want to go after the free speech. That's a big question there. That's a difficult one because it calls into the cull thing of censorship and when is an opinion and unfact. It's something written a kind of a rider underneath it saying this is a point of view not a fact. That's tricky. I mean, I don't know. It's a great topic. The very first talk that I gave it for this book was at a law school. And you know this like five star professor of law asked me, you know, as the first question so should we rewrite the first amendment. You know, and I'm like, you're, you're the, you're the law, you know, you're the constitutional scholar here. But I just think, rather than imposing limits on people right away which is our it's sometimes our natural tendencies. We need to accelerate our effort to get verifiable information out there. And that's where our focus needs to be because it's super hard to control people. The current knows and and it's also it's also super hard to have faith in legislative judicial regulations of the sort that we need when the system is currently so corrupted. And I just want to share with you, Peter, that in the meantime, what we need to be doing is give people the tools to be able to document what they're experiencing. There's work within the archival field specifically folks that witness. John Ng is an archivist there who created an activist guide to archiving media, giving people the tools that they need to understand how to record human rights abuses, preserve them and make them available for use as video evidence of, of injustices that people are experiencing all over the world and maybe with more facts more documentation more video documentation, we will be able to better counter those false narratives. So the question part of what makes an archival library useful is the ability to search and find specific information. How do you tackle the enormous amount of metadata and transcription necessary to make audio visual archive, a search for this possible. It's another big question. Yeah, and that goes back to, you know, what is the role of the archivist in fighting fake news and one of our roles has been provenance and provenance is again that you know the chain of custody communicating is the context of what we're presenting and preserving and being transparent about our practices and doing and doing so. Metadata is a huge challenge when you're thinking about audio visual materials. You know traditional archival practice for print materials is you create a finding aid that kind of provides some context on a collection and a collection could be boxes and boxes of paper documents but for audio visual materials as we're digitizing them, each specific item can contain millions of frames in itself. So how do you create metadata about the about such a vast collection that can be made searchable for people to be able to access in the means that they're looking for information and that being search engines that being Wikipedia. Metadata is very time. Time consuming and with limited resources with archives is always a challenge, but there have been, you know, opportunities for looking at artificial intelligence, speech to text tools speech to text being being able to run an audio file through a machine and create a transcript All of that work also results in bias in the output from these artificial intelligence tools because the tools themselves are trained on specific subsets of data that represent a specific subset of the population. We've been creating transcripts about for the materials in our collection using an open source tool called Caldy. And it was trained on Wall Street Journal articles. So if you think about the output of, you know, of what we're generating from such a vast collection that represents many different accents vernacular speech patterns from all over the country. It is very much a challenge but there are also, you know, we're working with Brandeis University right now, their lab for computational linguistics to explore what tools we could use that are in the public domain or open source that we could apply to our collection to create metadata. One example is just being able to detect text on a screen when you're and run run files through the machine to be able to identify. These are the opening credits. This is the slate that appears at the beginning of the program. These are the talking heads. This is the lower third information and being able to programmatically render that information and store it and make it available. There's still a long way to go with using artificial intelligence for archival material and for audio visual material at large but it is an area that we're exploring and I think has potential. A couple of things here. Shannon writes quite a depressing point which is a good one though. Why bother ferreting out information now it's gone off my screen. Why bother to ferre out sources of misinformation if a substantial portion of the population doesn't seem to care of any given statement is actually true. Wow that's rather depressing. I think she's right there. Okay, I'm going to throw out one to both of you. Are you guys optimistic that we can wrestle back control of this kind of monster is good information something we should be willing to pay for. I myself do and think it is, even if it's donating to public television and public radio. If not, how do we ensure the worldwide web becomes a free universal encyclopedia. So they're the two options either we really fund the worldwide web and we create gate posts and good methods of veracity of checking. We might have to resolve and or to paying for the information. Like we know that economist every single fact in the economist is triple checked. I don't know any other publication that does that. But that's really good to know when you read something. It's been triple checked. So, um, I don't know I have some issues with stuff I've read in the economist. I would, I would, if you went when you do another hour on that, but I would say, you know, there's a lot of questions you packed in there, but like optimism. Part of the reason why I, you know, wrote this book also is to profile people who've been exceedingly brave, and sometimes, you know, sacrificed a whole lot in order to follow down some of the past we're talking about today. So I would say, I'm optimistic if if the institutions that we all work at can be brave, or if we can help them be brave when it when a university president is silent. During three years, four years of Trump, that serves nobody forgive me for those people, you know, who vote for Trump who are on this whatever that's a whole other. I'm using that as my personal example and whatever. I think, you know, when a museum is silent, frankly, about this kind of stuff museums are. I work for Sanjay Sarma at MIT vice president for open learning is this phrase about us creating a ziggurat a temple of facts, you know and museums are temples of facts. There's a whole lot of colonial stuff that we also need to unpack there, as in public broadcasting as an archiving what have you but you know we need these institutions and the people who run them to be a lot braver in the face of challenges that are mortal like I cannot underscore that enough these four years that we've just come out of have presented mortal child they're 500,000 people dead in America they're millions all you know who who've essentially succumbed both to a virus and to misinformation one way or another. And that's, that's a shameful situation. So we can't let that happen again and I hope that, you know, I will be as optimistic as as, as, you know, as long as all of us can be brave about it. I say some Trump defied custom in that he didn't give the National Archives records of his speeches that political rallies. So here we have another challenge for the archivist, the invisible president. Yeah. There are records out there that archivists are going to get their hands on at some point. We, we're going to do our due diligence on that one. That's a very optimistic ending. So that that's what we're encouraging everyone to do support their public media, go to their libraries be brave. Any more words of advice. Keep reading. And we're going to mention Peter's book, which is the new enlightenment. There it is. And the fight to free knowledge very interesting. Historically very interesting as well as looking forward a lot of resources in there too. There's a Dutch resource you mentioned. What's the Dutch resource Peter. It's a vision. Yeah, sound of vision. So unfortunately, is there any parting notes you want to say before we close. I know we, there are lots of things we didn't get to but we did cover quite a lot. We made a good attempt. Just one other resource I wanted to share is the environmental data and governments initiative, which kind of goes back to Mary's comment about their archivist are already doing this work where during the Trump administration, you know, information about climate change was disappearing from government websites and archivist captured that information and it is being preserved so wanted to put that resource out. But I'm always inspired when I go to our annual Association of moving image archivist conference there are thousands of us who are doing this work. That's just moving image preservation professionals but I'm inspired by all the colleagues that are within the cultural heritage community and it makes me optimistic for our future. We ourselves are actually digitizing all our old programs which is a big task. We've got hundreds and hundreds of them to preserve their life. Also good frame of reference like in civil rights to see what was said 20 years ago 50 years ago. Fascinating. Well, I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation today. I think we also had lots of good questions. We didn't get to all of them. Yeah, I think there's a lot to learn I'd say get get hold of Peter's book. So thanks for listening today to Cambridge forums discussion of severe information disorder with Peter Kaufman from MIT is learning author of the new enlightenment. I'm Casey Davis Kaufman assistant director of GBH archives project manager for the American archive of public broadcasting. So nothing more for me to add except thank you all for joining us. I hope you learn something. I certainly did. Thank you to our great guests Peter Kaufman and Casey for making the time and see you next time. Thank you.