Notebook LM for academics (part 2)

Reviewing the literature

Last week’s Friday blog did not happen due to my being at the British Academy of Management conference, where I got stuck in a downpour between buildings on Wednesday, and my laptop got wet. It kept on playing up on Thursday and Friday, and now seems all fine again - just in time to mark many, many MSc dissertations. (I know, this is a bit of a “the dog ate my homework” excuse. Our dog can be selective in what she eats. She eats olives, but not homework.)

Our dog was hard at work last week, facilitating my attendance at the BAM online day

This week, I am a bit late due to the aforementioned many, many MSc dissertations and other work-related issues. But this seemed a good moment to get back to Notebook LM. Part 1 focused quite narrowly on some of the playful elements and just gave one tight example of an article. But Notebook LM is actually a far better tool when dealing with multiple articles.

AI ethical considerations

As I said previously, Notebook LM states that what is uploaded is not used for model training, but I generally try to limit my uploading to Open Access articles. That said, most academic articles have been grazed by AI crawlers through different means, which we already know, so the additional damage through an upload here is probably minimal. Academic publishers increasingly license their content to AI companies, like Wiley (though I am unaware that these additional income streams are passed on to academics or scholarly associations owning the journals and providing most of the free labour…)

In several of the notebooks that I will discuss, I actually used the search function within Notebook LM to help me find related articles — so these are available online already.

Notebook LM for literature reviewing

Notebook LM’s features make it a very good tool to help with literature reviewing, in my opinion. Literature reviewing is, of course, an exercise of getting to know the literature, and that is not something that can be easily outsourced.

However, not all aspects of the literature that are discussed in a review need the same level of close engagement. In my other post about literature reviewing, I used the Venn diagram to highlight how to structure them:

The centre and the overlaps are key to carving out one’s argument and contribution. But the wider circles of the different literatures being brought together, few master all of them to the same degree.

• Maybe you are going back to a literature you read a long time ago and do not remember very clearly.

• You may want to take an idea into a new literature.

• Or you are trying to map out how an idea was translated into a different literature (in which you are not so interested) to see what you can learn from how that was done.

This is where Notebook LM is quite useful.