James Shelley

If you need to use a chatbot to do your job, does that make YOU the robot? In a well known 2015 blog post, Peter Reinhardt argues that Uber workers can be categorized into two groups. One group (the coders and engineers) runs the system and the other group (the drivers) does...

Every time I hear someone (including myself) say that AI makes them more efficient and productive at work, I can't escape this thought... jamesshelley.com/if-you-need-...

I love the vision and the execution. The Open Graph approach is amazing too. Super clever. 👍

Hello, World! The Leaflet Edition Experimenting with a new writing app built on an open social protocol

Exploring @leaflet.pub on the @atproto.com — and it is pretty slick.

Open Social — overreacted The protocol is the API.

i wrote about atproto and why it matters

AI Comes for Academics. Can We Rely on It? By now, the fact that artificial intelligence can hallucinate is, I hope, well known. There are countless examples of platforms like ChatGPT giving the wrong answer to a straightforward question or im...

Move over, ChatGPT. Newer AI platforms are aimed at academics and doctors and they're not supposed to hallucinate citations.

I tested many of them, but especially Consensus AI.

My latest for @mcgilloss.bsky.social.

www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/...

🗨️ “responses are typically predicated on an assumption that AI in assessment is a problem that can be solved if only the right approach can be found. However...we argue that GenAI may not be that kind of problem at all.” www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I'm looking forward to this conversation. The Canadian Association of Research Administrators is hosting a panel on "The Impact of AI on Research Administration in Canada" on November 26 at 12PM ET. cara-acaar.ca/227192

I am presenting a session on “Artificial Intelligence & Automation: Supporting the Exchange of Information Between Researchers and Knowledge Users” at #KTDRR25 on October 23, 3:25PM. Conference is online and free to attend (registration required), so swing by if you can ktdrr.org/conference20...

Big week for new features at @researchmesh.com! The platform‬ now automates RSS feeds for new public research articles from any collection of @orcid.org IDs and provides administrators and readers with a fully browsable index of publications, accessible through its automated newsletters.

Western Research staff eating and speaking to each other in long tables at the Wave Restaurant on Campus at Western University.

Joanna Redden, Lyle Muller and Cristián Bravo Roman on stage with moderator James Shelley speaking to Western Research staff about AI in Research.

This morning, we connected over breakfast with Western Research staff, followed by updates from @pennypexman.bsky.social and a panel on AI in Research with Joanna Redden, Lyle Muller and @cribravo.bsky.social, moderated by @jamesshelley.com.

Thanks, everyone, for a great start to the school year!

Welcome #SSHRC to @bsky.app!

Faculty members, researchers 👋 Need to polish up your @orcid.org profile? A team of us at @westernu.ca are hosting a virtual "ORCID Clinic" on Sep 24 at 12PM ET to help researchers get their profiles connected with trusted databases. @westernuresearch.bsky.social forms.cloud.microsoft/r/zRVJ84t55C

Platform Updates research※mesh update for Monday, August 18, 2025

This is “Platform Updates for Monday, August 18, 2025” …Or, simply, another saga in “The Adventures of Building an App to Automate All of the Post-Publication Workflows in Academia” #researchmesh researchmesh.blob.core.windows.net/mesh/976af32...

I’d highly recommend “Status Game” by @willstorr.bsky.social — it is an exceptionally well-researched and well-written treatment of the phenomenon. Should be required reading for humanity, I think.

Storr hypothesizes that forces beyond us compel us to live in a state of perpetual status anxiety.

Pair with Arthur C. Brooks observation that people habitually and chronically choose “being special” over “being happy”…

Banner image that says: “Let’s Talk AI Club - Beyond the Chatbot: Enterprise AI in Research Administration” by the Canadian Association of Research Administrators

“Moving beyond consumer-grade interfaces like chatbots (ChatGPT, Copilot, etc), our focus here is on the strategic development of enterprise-scale AI projects deployed at an institutional level.” 💻 Wednesday, September 10 at 12:00-1:00PM EST #ResearchAdmin #ai cara-acaar.ca/227183

Author disambiguation is ORCID, so the corpus is basically DOI registries with affiliated ORCID metadata (with a discovery loop to include/reject edge cases coming soon—where affiliated authorship is probable but only algorithmically determined by SKGs). Entire workflow only uses public metadata.

🎥 Feel free to pass this along and/or tag any videographers or media teams who might be interested. | James Shelley 🎥 Feel free to pass this along and/or tag any videographers or media teams who might be interested. (We are especially keen to work with local vendors in London, Ontario.) Are you an all-star videogr...

Are you an all-star videographer, a master of post, and passionate about supporting research communication? Are you in #ldnont? My team has an RFI out, towards creating a shortlist of longterm collaborators for the @westernu.ca Storyhouse program. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Platform Updates research※mesh update for Tuesday, July 22, 2025

research※mesh is a snazzy, lightweight-but-powerful app that unlocks efficiencies across knowledge exchange, research dissemination, stakeholder engagement and research administration workflows. Subscribe to Platform Updates for beta testing notes. researchmesh.blob.core.windows.net/mesh/976af32...

researchmesh: beta testing YouTube video by researchmesh

Are you a researcher or a person who supports researchers? I am looking for a few more beta testers to provide feedback on a new prototype app that automates the workflow of identifying, collating and sharing new research articles. DM me if interested! m.youtube.com/watch?v=DZI8...

The part in Theaetetus where Socrates talks about social media.

It’s got loads of creepy AI slope. It’s got lots of nostalgic blubbering. It wallows in the uncanny valley. It has a silly broadway show tune. It also has a point! My contribution to the @westernu.bsky.social CTL GenAI Summer Challenge is MULTIMODAL at teaching.uwo.ca/genai/posts/...

sharing of ideas among the audience.

Western University’s @jamesshelley.com addresses a critical challenge for universities and other research institutions: the lack of dedicated communication support for departments and research centres. 2/3

SSHRC Storytellers finalists at @swc-can.bsky.social in Fredericton

It’s the enshitification of everything in the age of surveilllance capitalism…when the purpose of an actual cookie is to get a cookie in your browser.

For what it’s worth, I just want to say I’m willing to die on this hill with you. “Vibe coding” described a very specific phenomenon, but has been usurped to sell AI things and diminish AI things.

The warm, peacefully blinking lights mask a frantic effort to comply with the new storage limit reductions for Microsoft 365 Education…

I just built a little AI-powered app in less than two hours. It tracks my… | James Shelley I just built a little AI-powered app in less than two hours. It tracks my expenses. Now I can just drag and drop a PDF of an invoice or receipt to automatically extract the details, add a row to a CSV...

Did a vibe code thing this morning—and it got me thinking about what it might mean if a subset of people suddenly start simultaneously unlocking more available time and purchasing less software. Kinda interesting social ramifications as a thought experiment. www.linkedin.com/posts/jamess...

Fulfilling my obligations as a dad today and convincing the kids that “suspension bridges” are so named because being on them is very suspenseful.

Let me know what I missed!!