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UofWinds 435, Week 15, 2026: It's Time to Take Down your Smart Cameras, Free Decimal Correspondence, 'Where Do You Know From?'


Good morning. The cats are basking in sunbeams and I'm sitting at my desk that I will shortly give up to my son once he is awake and ready to study for his next exam, unless he opts to go straight to the library to avoid the distractions of home. The day after my son's last exam on the 18th, my family and I will be embarking on a two week vacation to Vancouver and Vancouver Island. As such, there will be no newsletter from The University of Winds until May 2nd.

I think everyone needs some time and space to recover after the nausea and fear that consumed so many of us this past Tuesday. This is no way to live.

For myself, I am trying to follow the advice that I so frequently pass on to you all in this newsletter: spending time with others and spending time outside in the world. For my first mission, I'm attending my first book club (that I haven't organized myself) to talk about a book that addresses climate change and memorywork.

For the second, I've given myself a side-quest to observe the newly returned beavers of the Detroit River. I need a new quest because last week, I believe that I was successful in my pursuit of observing an extremely rare American Chestnut tree, which has been a goal of mine since UofWinds 349.

It's Time to Take Down your Smart Cameras

It's Time to Take Down your Smart Cameras is a 00:29:28 long YouTube video by electronic sound enthusiast and anarchist, Benn Jordan.

You likely already know the reasons why Smart Cameras like Amazon Ring are bad and you may still have one installed anyway. Maybe because it seems hypocritical when you still subscribe to Amazon Prime? Or you might still have a smart camera because you genuinely find them useful or they give some peace of mind?

I'm sharing Jordan's video because he discusses a facet of cameras that I don't think many people realize, and I think what he shares might give more reason for people to give up their smart cameras rather than a hand-wavy concern about privacy: your smart camera footage can and will be used by your insurance company to refuse your claims or justify increasing your premiums. If you just want to know more about this secondary effect of self-surveillance, I recommend you skip immediately to Chapter 3: Friend or Foe?

Free Decimal Correspondence


This past Wednesday I was invited by the British Columbia Library Association to give a talk for their professional development series dedicated to Ai. My talk was called What if we used AI as an excuse to provide structured open data to our communities? The video and slides from this talk will eventually be made available online.

In my broad survey of Ai adjacent data work that librarians might consider learning more about, I briefly mentioned that my first post-graduation job for the Metro Toronto Reference Library was to create a website called Expanding Universe that organized a collection of librarian selected and classified astronomy websites that used the Dewey Decimal System. I compared this effort with those of technologist Matt Webb's use of Ai to classify over a thousand BBC In Our Time episodes and to create a website to share the results, also browseable using Dewey.

As good, small websites have become once again, difficult to discover, I wonder again if others will also have the impulse to share what they love, using structures that were once only the domain of libraries. If so, I hope these generous folks will discover and use the Free Decimal Correspondence developed by librarian John Mark Ockerbloom for The Online Books Page which, unlike the Dewey Decimal System [pdf], is firmly in the public domain.

'Where Do You Know From?'


I'm sharing 'Where Do You Know From?' – a 2020 essay from Eugenia Zuroski, professor of English at McMaster University – because I was reminded of it after a conversation I had with a friend from high school about how universities don't generally do a good job of acknowledging ways of knowing other than their own.

As I mention in the exercise, the idea initially came to me during a panel discussion at a one-day Summit for Mentoring Indigenous Graduate Students held at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in early 2018, which I attended as a member of the audience. One of the broad recommendations reiterated throughout the day was that settler scholars give serious thought to the ways in which even the most seemingly mundane academic structures and conventions can reproduce colonialist hierarchies of power and alienate Indigenous students in ways that make the university a place in which they cannot learn—a place that is hostile to their learning because it disregards their ways of knowing and being. Minelle Mahtani, discussing her strategies for more inclusive classroom introductions, described how McKittrick taught her to replace the question ‘Where are you from?’ with ‘Where do you know from?’ or ‘Where do you learn from?’

At the end of this essay, Zuroski shares her instructions to Where Do You Know From?: A Guide to Personal Introductions in the Seminar Room. I have found writing down my answers to these questions as a very useful exercise in personal reflection, and perhaps you might as well:

  1. What are your intellectual interests? What do you think about a lot? What have you learned about, and what would you like to learn more about? Do you have a particular research topic you are working on now? Are you involved in personal, family, or community work that has immersed you in certain ideas and questions? Have you read or watched or heard something lately that has lodged itself in your thoughts? We recognise the myriad ways that thinking is inspired and sustained as equally ‘intellectual’ in status.
  2. How did your interests come to you? Intellectual preoccupations come from a variety of paths. Given only a few minutes, how would you narrate what brought you to your ideas, or your ideas to you? Was it something you read, witnessed, confronted? Was it something someone taught you, in a class or not in a class? Was it somewhere you lived or went, someone you met or knew, something you laboured at, something you enjoyed? To whom, or what, are your ideas indebted? Tell us one of the many potential stories of where your knowledge and research questions come from.

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