My personal digital decolonisation

_posts/2024-02-24-personal-digital-decolonisation.md

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+---
+title: 'My personal digital decolonisation'
+date: 2024-02-24
+permalink: /posts/2024/02/24/personal-digital-decolonisation/
+---
+
+# My personal digital decolonisation
+
+A year ago, I have asked my colleagues to stop calling me "Alex"
+and use only "Olexandr", sharing with them an earlier version 
+of this post. Today, I would like to share this story with you.
+
+## Part 1: Historical background
+
+I grew up in Zaporizhzhia, a regional centre on the Dnipro river, about
+500 km South-East of Kyiv, and 50 km from the Enerhodar Nuclear Power
+Plant, the largest in Europe. In this region Zaporizhian Cossacks
+established their Sich in the 16th-18th centuries. But in my childhood
+it was very much a Russian-speaking industrial city (however, you would
+meet more Ukrainian speakers if you move just some 30 km into the
+countryside).
+
+My parents were born in Donetsk region. Although having no Russian
+ancestry at all, we were a predominantly Russian-speaking family, even
+although before the Second World War, my Grandmother worked as a school
+teacher of Ukrainian. She used many Ukrainian words when she spoke
+Russian, and she fluently spoke Ukrainian when she chose to. 
+
+I studied Ukrainian language at school. Ukrainian was introduced from
+Primary 2. The textbook was called "Ukrainian language". The Russian
+language textbook for Primary 1 was called "Mother tongue". The teaching
+in the majority of schools in Zaporizhzhia was in Russian. There were
+only a couple of schools in the city with population about 800,000 in
+which all teaching was in Ukrainian.
+
+It was also possible to be completely exempt from studying Ukrainian. 
+In my class, half of the pupils were exempt. My parents strongly 
+believed that if one lives in Ukraine, one must learn Ukrainian, 
+full stop. Once my Father said that at a parent council meeting. 
+Apparently, after that he was never invited to the parent council again.
+
+Eventually, after Ukraine gained independence, we became bilingual. In the
+early 90s, we subscribed to several newspapers to read more texts in
+Ukrainian. We watched TV in both languages. And now I can't even remember
+whether we had some movies on videotapes in one language or another. We
+started to insert some phrases or movie quotes in Ukrainian into a
+conversation in Russian, just because they are more expressive and
+better fit into the context. And although in the Zaporizhzhia National
+University, where I worked after getting PhD, the majority of teaching
+was still in Russian (only the official paperwork had to be in Ukrainian),
+at some point I taught several undergraduate modules in Ukrainian. 
+
+But now let's go back to my school years. First English lesson. Pupils
+need to label their notebooks (or "copybooks", as they were called then)
+with their personal details. I was told by the teacher to write my name
+on it in English as "Alexander", and so did I. That sounded good enough.
+So later in the 90s, when I started to use English to publish, communicate 
+with other researchers by email or at conferences, I continued to use
+"Alexander", even though I already had "Olexandr" in my Ukrainian
+documents. That eventually shortened to "Alex", mainly for informal
+communication - and it was faster to sign emails like that.
+
+Eventually this started to slightly bother me. Why did I do that? What
+am I trying to tell or to hide by this? If I have an original national
+name, do I really need to adapt it to match a well known English
+equivalent? But it seemed that it's too cumbersome and inconvenient to
+change this back, and so I preferred to not to worry much about that.
+
+But eventually I was becoming more and more concerned about this. 
+I did not want to have a name which prompts false assumptions about my
+background. For example, like assuming that one can see me for the first
+time and try to talk to me in Russian without asking if I agree to that.
+And then Russia started its full-scale invasion into Ukraine on February 24th, 2022.
+I switched to "Olexandr" as my official name on that very day, starting
+to change all email display settings and signatures. Next day,
+Human Resources amended my "known as" name in their records. Within a few
+hours, Pure – the Current Research Information System
+([CRIS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_research_information_system)) used in St Andrews –
+and [the University of St Andrews Research Portal](https://research-portal.st-andrews.ac.uk/),
+both drawing from Human Resources database, were updated too. 
+I have updated my display name
+on a number of other accounts, such as e.g. [ORCID](https://orcid.org/),
+[GitHub](https://github.com/), [Stackoverflow](https://stackoverflow.com/),
+several Wordpress-based websites hosted at the University (e.g. research
+groups of which I am a member), a dozen of [Slack](https://slack.com/)
+workspaces, and also the office door. 
+From time to time, I was discovering and updating other
+relics such as e.g. my entries in bibliographic databases, professional
+societies, journal editorial boards, etc. I have also eventually updated
+my teaching materials, and never reused past lecture recordings
+containing my old name ever since.
+
+For a while it still seemed acceptable to keep using "Alex"
+in informal communication. Although the name is derived from "Alexander",
+nobody would ever call me "Alex" in Ukrainian or Russian. Thus,
+I thought of it as of a kind of my British name, without negative
+connotations. But then... Kharkiv. Enerhodar. Mariupol. Azovstal.
+Bucha. Irpin. Kramatorsk. Kremenchuk. Izyum. Zaporizhzhia. Kyiv.
+Bakhmut. Dnipro. Just impossible everything here. And after
+each next missile strike, after each new Russian atrocity, I was less
+and less keen to use the name "Alex" as a reminder that it is derived
+from "Alexander".
+
+Finally, I've accidentally met a colleague from another school, 
+who knew me as "Alex" for about eight years, and discovered
+that they didn't even realise all this time that I came to
+St Andrews from Ukraine. That was the tipping point. Shortly
+after, upon inspecting my technical options, I've decided that
+I've had enough, and I need to fix this once and forever. 
+
+That's what I have called **"my personal digital decolonisation"**.
+
+## Part 2: Implementation details
+
+First, I have fixed an annoying inconsistency with my usernames.
+My departmental username at work was `alexk`. My GitHub username
+was `alex-konovalov`. Thus, whenever I demonstrated something on my
+computer while teaching, `alex` was popping up. To fix that, a new
+account was created for me in the School of Computer Science, with the
+name matching my University username. All content was moved over from
+old account to new, and I had to deal with a few minor issues arising
+from that change (updating some scripts; rebuilding some software;
+generating new SSH keys to get rid of old email address included in
+the old public key. After completely deleting the `alexk` account, 
+I've realised that I've accidentally lost access to several Wordpress
+websites hosted by the School of Computer Science, what was quickly
+restored thanks to our school's system administrators.
+
+Then I changed my username on my computer. One of the colleagues suggested to
+either create a new account and gradually move things over, or rename
+it following the instructions provided [here](https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201548).
+After ensuring that I have two latest backups on two external drives,
+I took a chance of doing the latter - it was a matter of minutes, and worked
+seamlessly, with none of the standard apps broken! Some things that
+needed a slight adjustment were paths to ignore for the time machine,
+paths to VirtualBox VMs, some symbolic links and software builds, such
+as e.g. GAP installation - but nothing was fundamentally broken.
+While configuring this, I have also removed Russian keyboard layout
+from all my devices.
+
+I have continued efforts to change my name from "Alexander" to "Olexandr"
+on preprint servers, bibliographic databases and other scientific services.
+There is no standard way of doing that, and in each case it was a 
+a unique experience, for example:
+
+- [zbMATH](https://zbmath.org/) had to disambiguate a number of records
+for people with the same surname as mine, previously attributed to the
+same person (even with different full names or initials!).
+
+- [Scopus](https://www.scopus.com/) happened to pick up two papers of
+someone else named "Alexander Konovalov" and added them to my profile,
+inferring wrong affiliation from their details in an offending way.
+This was reported to Scopus, and was fixed by them within a couple of days.
+
+- Association for Computing Machinery ([ACM](https://www.acm.org/)
+was the only service that asked me to fill in and sign the official
+name change form. After that, they have put this in the queue for
+manual updates of their database. It took them nine months to update
+my name, however, not only on my profile itself, but also on each
+of the papers that I have published with ACM. In the meantime I
+have published another paper under my real name, and they accidentally
+created another profile with that one new paper. Thus, now they had
+to merge both profiles, and set up a redirect from the new one to the
+old one. Luckily, it took just a few hours for them to fix this.
+
+- [DBLP](https://dblp.org/) still displays both my old and new name,
+because "persons are identified in DBLP on basis of the persons name
+string (optionally followed by a four digit number in case of several
+authors in DBLP with the same name)".
+
+- [MathSciNet](https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet/)
+had never replied to me, but swiftly updated my name as requested.
+
+- Changing my name on [arXiv](https://arxiv.org/) did not update my
+identifier `konovalov_a`, but at least arXiv allows me to hide that
+by using an ORCID-based profile link, which does not include the name at all.
+
+- [Figshare](https://figshare.com/) allowed me to update my account details.
+That changed my name on each publication, but not in the list of 
+publications shown under my profile. The problem was reported to 
+Figshare and thanks to them, it was fixed within less than 12 hours after my report.
+
+- For the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences ([OEIS](https://oeis.org/)), 
+I had to create a new account and then ask them to merge it with my old one.
+After that, I had to manually edit the metadata for my mentions in the
+OEIS entries to update the name.
+
+Also, different things may happen with the names shown on the papers in
+my profiles: they may be fully updated, or not updated at all, or only
+updated for papers they publish themselves (like ACM), or not consistently
+updated (like DBLP, who did this, but only for the most recent papers).
+
+The rest of this post is related to my use of [GitHub](https://github.com/)
+and [Zenodo](https://zenodo.org/) for developing and publishing research
+software, and includes a lot of technical details. If you are not using
+these platforms, please feel free to proceed to the last paragraph.
+Otherwise, for [GitHub](https://github.com/), I've discovered that one
+can actually change their GitHub username: see e.g.
+[GitHub documentation](https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-managing-
+your-personal-account-on-github/managing-personal-account-settings/
+changing-your-github-username) and [another page here](https://mskelton.medium.com/my-experience-changing-my-github-username-
+8414e1baa113). Most of my content was migrated seamlessly, including
+all the repositories, submitted issues and pull requests, organisation
+membership, and even unread notifications and gists. However, while
+links to the repositories are automatically redirected, this is not
+the case for links to `@username` mentions, and for websites hosted
+on GitHub pages.
+
+The next step was to update remotes in all repository clones which I
+have locally. Since I have a dedicated directory to keep repository
+clones, it was possible to do this in one go, with some shell scripting
+and `sed` calls to find and fix all `.git/config` files. Another fix
+required for the repositories which used the Git worktree extension:
+some clones had a `.git` file setting up a `gitdir` variable with an
+absolute path to the directory and had to be updated.
+
+Of course, it is not possible to update everything. What's said on the
+Internet, stays on the Internet. For example, old repository commits are
+signed using my old name and email. I can possibly rewrite revision
+history for private repositories, but it's too late to do this for
+public repositories that may have forks and clones. Also, username change
+distorts contributor statistics, showing two contributors instead of one.
+GitHub instructions say "To attribute past commits to the new account,
+add the email address you used to author the commits to the account you're
+keeping", but one can't do that with old commits signed with
+`[email protected]`. But I can live with that, and
+using `.mailmap` file helped to fix this to some extent (it updates
+reports by `git shortlog` but not the way how contributors are reported
+on GitHub). On the other hand, following good software engineering practices,
+such as making the code portable, avoiding full paths in the code
+(as well as in the demos and documentation) paid off: there were only
+several fixes of this kind necessary so far.
+
+My GitHub username was then updated in the [Carpentries](https://carpentries.org/)
+instructor database, and in the Journal of Open Source Software
+([JOSS](https://joss.theoj.org/)) editorial system, both integrated
+with GitHub. I have also updated the URL of my personal website, hosted on
+GitHub pages, in multiple places, including GAP packages and other
+projects to which I had contributed in the past. The GitHub search
+functionality was very useful to discover occurrences of my old
+username, about which I didn't even know in the past - for example, in
+the repositories of Carpentries instructors with whom we were at some
+point teaching together.
+
+Then I looked at my software published on [Zenodo](https://zenodo.org/).
+Because I mostly publish the software hosted in the accounts belonging
+to GitHub organisations, and not in my personal one, that required only
+two new releases to be made urgently (one of which from a repository
+already migrated to another organisation, but never released from there).
+The other projects were dealt with gradually. By now I have also re-released
+all of the [GAP](https://www.gap-system.org/) packages to which I have
+contributed, except one. In some cases, I had to fix contributor names
+manually through the Zenodo interface, to avoid my name being duplicated
+because of the new and old GitHub username.
+
+I am determined to eventually update my details in as many places as I
+can (certainly, some things are beyond reach, such as past conferences
+and journal publications, posts in various forums, etc.). It's a tedious
+process, but I am getting there.
+
+## Conclusions
+
+I have started with some historical background details.
+If you are well informed about Ukraine, perhaps you haven't
+read anything new - yet another personal story illustrating and
+confirming what was already said many times by others (if you
+haven't read it yet, I recommend this article by Sasha Dovzhyk:
+[Mother Tongue: The Story of a Ukrainian Language Convert](https://newlinesmag.com/first-person/mother-tongue-the-story-of-a-ukrainian-language-convert/)).
+Still, while we read about the increasing use of Ukrainian in
+everyday life, I haven't seen anything specifically focused
+on digital communications, especially in the context of academia.
+This is why I have decided to give a detailed technical account
+of what is involved in restoring Ukrainian spelling of my name
+in various digital resources. I am also trying to argue that
+using good research software engineering practices helped me
+to reduce some efforts required. Finally, we can see that the
+design limitations of various bibliographic databases, and the
+lack of widespread adoption of persistent digital identifiers
+provided to researchers by [ORCID](https://orcid.org/) makes
+this process more complicated. 
+
+I hope that this post demonstrates what _is_ possible, and may
+be useful to anyone who changes their name in academia.