Open data projects that adhere to archival standards could be designated as “trusted digital repositories” that provide “reliable, long-term access to managed digital resources … now and in the future.”
How do we convince cities and governments that this should be a priority? This has been done in the past with guerilla methods, e.g. the Data Rescue projects.
Yet Kitchin says that “most city open data sites are effectively data dumps,” without even a basic archival infrastructure.
Is this what the Civic Switchboard project is intended to help with?
They oppose the ruthlessly efficient, behaviorist, techno-liberal city, which prioritizes innovation-driven obsolescence, exclusive contracts, and monetization of user data. Librarians on the planning commission will be the ones to ask, why should procurement agreements favor platform providers rather than the citizens who contribute data? Archivists will ask about racial imbalances in data harvesting and push for anonymous and secure preservation of public records. Together, they can be stewards of equity, discretion, interoperability, resilience, and respect for the past — real wisdom, rather than proprietary “smarts.”
This is an incredibly favorable and perhaps naive view of librarians. Yes, many librarians are like this - but not all of them. Librarians are the ones who often think they can't possibly take back the means of production from major publishers, and drive their ever-increasing profits. Being shoehorned into journal publisher bundles and acquiescing with budgets is what got us into a related variety of messes. Yes, some folks are doing it right, but how do you find just these right people for these positions? The job of "librarian" doesn't automatically endow the person with a good socialist sense of morals.
The ideology of data solutionism has taken over city halls, planning departments, law enforcement agencies, and countless other domains of public life — a troubling trend when social technocrats were in charge, and now, with the rise of Trumpism, an alarming one.
Data can provide some insight into solutions if used appropriately and put into the hands of people. Don't just collect data to collect it; collect it for a reason.
"The information commons is messy" Yes indeed.
inappropriately
what does this even mean?
)
"When I say “help,” I mean: less Clippy, more séance."
I love this phrasing here, pulling on knowledge of bad attempts at this ("Clippy") while invoking something that would otherwise seem completely unrelated.
Everyone on the internet?
Hundreds of thousands of Twitter trolls crafting random strings of abuse for women? That's what every single one of those tweets and comments feels like - a random insult, a random threat, predicated on nothing. Is this technology facilitating that?
The animating ideas here are augmentation; partnership; call and response.
Quoted speech, a la Tannen 2007 "when speech uttered in one context is repeated in another, it is fundamentally changed even if 'reported' accurately" (Found in our paper: https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.21/)
non-standard, non-boring datasets
What other cool data sets could there be? Librarians' responses in LibAnswers? Hundreds of thousands of lines of texts from libguides?