You can see that oh, this is this type of lightbox that everyone uses, and it works really well, but I don’t want everyone's lightbox. I want to design my own lightbox, and I want to make my own weird mistakes. It’s because we want to figure out how the thing works and why, even if doing it that way makes the thing slightly less “good” than the established version.
it's about learning, knowing your material (cf Daragh text on this from DIOT)
what is a mockup?
it is an advertisement in itself
the materiality of our (textual) scholarship and its material modes of production, is and should not in any way be separate from a discussion on the content of our work.
If performative publications are the material expressions or incarnations of specific research projects and processes, entangled with them are various other agencies of production and constraint (i.e. technological, authorial, cultural and discursive agencies, to name just a few). What I want to argue is that performative publications as a specific subset of publications actively interrogate how to align more closely the material form of a publication with its content (in other words, where all publications are performative—i.e. they are knowledge shaping, active agents involved in knowledge production—not all publications are 'performative publications', in the sense that they actively interrogate or experiment with this relation between content and materiality —similar to artist books). Yet in addition to this there is also an openness towards the ongoing interaction between materiality and content which includes entanglements with other agencies, and material forms of constraint and possibility.
This concern for the materiality and form of our publications (and directly related to that the material production and political economy that surrounds a publication) is not a response to what elsewhere as part of a critique of certain tendencies within the field of new materialism is seen as a reaction to ‘the linguistic turn’ (Bruining 2013). On the contrary, I see this as a more direct reaction against perspectives on the digital which perceive digital text as disembodied and as a freeing of data from its material constraints as part of a conversion to a digital environment. However, content cannot be separated that easily from its material manifestations, as many theorist within the digital humanities have already argued (i.e. Hayles, Drucker). Alan Liu classifies this 'database' rhetoric of dematerialization as a religion that is characterised by 'an ideology of strict division between content and presentation' where content is separated from material instantiation or formal presentation as part of an aesthetics of network production and consumption (Liu 2004, 62).
A material sustainability issue is “an economic, environmental, or social issue on which a company has an impact, or may be impacted by,” according to New York University, and may also affect stakeholders’ decisions with respect to the company.
Materiality covers issues which the company impacts and is impacted by. The latter is often forgotten by stakeholders outside the company but is equally important to a company's sustainability.
Materiality needs to be defined together with stakeholders, but who are the (local, regional and global) stakeholders for a company?
the substance
Marx uses the expression stofflichen Inhalt, the material or 'stuff-like' content of all wealth. Inhalt is to content as Forme is to form.
Documentality thus serves as a unifying concept to the inscription of acts
ideas tied to materiality
when materiality itself is always alreadyfigured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility?
Is this what Rickert was doing with his discussion of the cave paintings?
he materialities of communication
This reminds me of Barad's focus on an apparatus, how the tools themselves -- "'the materialities of communication'" -- impact our understanding of reality in fundamental ways, actually changing how we understand the world -- the whole light is either a particle or a wave, depending on how you interact with it.
oxymoronic DH
Can DH and the process of digitization deal with the material concerns of objects? I would say YES; marking up a text is one of the best ways to analyze it closely, including aspects of condition, interventions made by owners, marginalia, etc.
hen materiality itself is always alreadyfigured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility?
Is this what Rickert was doing with his discussion of the cave paintings?
Fluidity requires us to look at the dynamics—i.e., thecontinuous and rapid changes in resources—rather thanthe presence or the structural form of the resources.Resources may flow from outside the OC (e.g., pas-sion) or be internally generated (e.g., convergence), sub-sequently influencing and influenced by action (Feldman2004). Resources come with the baggage of having bothpositive and negative consequences for knowledge col-laboration, creating a tension within the community inhow to manage the positive and negative consequencesin a manner similar to the one faced by ambidextrousorganizations (O’Reilly and Tushman 2004).
Fluidity vs material resources
Furthermore, tolink this back to the matter of expertise, we see thatexpertise was displayed through material objects:people wore clothing that was consistent with their identification as equine experts (such asboots and cowboy hats),and the Posse memberswore theiruniforms.At the ranch, onejob was to hand out halters and lead ropesto riders. If riders’preferred materials were not available,their expertise allowed them to adapt to what was at
Linkage of expertise and materiality in the response work
We see how problem definition, work articulation [37], and the materiality of work[27,35] come together to make the work happen in asocially-, spatially-, and temporally-distributed matter[14].
Evokes articulation work (Schmidt and Bannon) and materiality (Bowker and Star; Miller; Zerubavel; Csikszentmihalyi)
The manner in which we isolate supposedly discrete "figures" from their surrounding "ground" is also manifested in the way we come to experience ourselves. 52 It involves a form of mental differentiation that entails a fundamental distinction between us and the rest of the world. It is known as our sense of identity.
Evokes Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton on developing a sense of self.
In sum, we shall say that the fullest development of personhood involves a free ordering of psychic energy at the level of the individual, the wider human community and social institutions, and the total environment. At each level, attention is invested in intentions that should lead toward consistency with each other. Thus the consciousness of the person in itself unifies the pattern of forces within those dimensions of the universe that are accessible to humans. The person who is able to cultivate his or her own desires, the goals of the community, and the laws of nature, and is able to reconcile these patterns, succeeds in establishing a temporary structure of order out of potential randomness. This is the creation of cosmos out of chaos and the ultimate touchstone of what is ordinarily called mental health, or self-actualization. We have called this process cultivation. Cultivation refers to the process of investing psychic energy so that one becomes conscious of the goals operating within oneself, among and between other persons, and in the environment. It refers also to the process of channeling one's attention in order to realize such goals. This, then, is the ideal against which our model of the person can be assessed.
Encapsulation of the treatise of what makes a person
It follows that to achieve a vital community the psychic energy of individuals must be congruently structured. This congruence can result from either historical or environmental pressures, as in Durkheim's examples of "mechanical solidarity," or it can be achieved by intentionally cultivating common values, ideals, or interests. In either case, harmony exists among the goals held by individuals in the community. This implies, in turn, a restructuring of attention, a partial reallocation of psychic energy that will be invested willingly in goals that might not benefit each individual directly.
Personal psychic entropy, at scale, in a community balances out. However, plurality (cites: Hannah Arendt, 1958) in a community allows for multiple forms of intention, attention, goals, and psychic energies to emerge and peacefully co-exist as long as common values/interests/goals are agreed upon.
Phenomenologically, one recognizes psychic disorder because one's attention is split: Psychic energy is focused on conflicting intentions. This reduces the effectiveness of psychic activity, for the two goals interfere with each other. Because inner conflict both introduces noise in the information-processing system of consciousness and reduces its capacity to do work, one may think of it as psychic entropy.
Inner conflict is a form of psychic entropy and impacts capacity for self-control which is an important factor but not essential to a sense of self.
Example: juvenile delinquents that enjoy creating mayhem
inner harmony people can freely choose to invest their psychic energy in goals that are congruent with the rest of their intentions. Subjectively, this is felt to be a state of heightened energy, a state of increased control. The experience is considered challenging and enjoyable. In previous research this state of vital activity and inner order has been described in detail as the "flow" experience (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975, 1976, 1978a,b).
Definition of flow
Personhood depends on the ability to allocate one's psychic energy freely. An individual cannot become a person if he or she is unable to cultivate his or her goals, and therefore the shape that the self will take.
Encapsulated definition of self
Psychic energy has another characteristic to be considered in this context. When someone invests psychic energy in an object - a thing, another person, or an idea -that object becomes "charged" with the energy of the agent.
The interaction of intention and objects.
When socialization is viewed from the perspective of personhood as developed here, some additional aspects of the process become salient -for instance, a person should not only accept uncritically the conventional goals of society but he or she should be able to change them if evidence shows their limitations. This critical element, usually omitted from the accounts of socialization, is the cutting edge of cultivation. Thus by the cultivation of goals through limited attention, individuals become persons.
The interaction socialization and cultivation in the development of self.
Social systems involving more than two people also rely on the same pool of limited attention for their survival. A business company, an army, or a nation exist only as long as people pay attention to the goals of such systems. Thus social systems owe their organization of goals to attention, and in turn these goals structure their members' attention, giving shape to the selves of those who are part of the system. The relationship between social systems and personal consciousness, each structuring and being structured by the other, is so delicate as to appear circular. The process that explains how social systems survive by structuring the attention of individuals-and incidentally, avoids circularity in the argument -is socialization. Whenever a person begins to interact with another individual or a group, at first the respective goals will tend to be out of phase. If the newcomer is to become a part of the already existing system, a reordering of intentions is required.
Definition of socialization
Verbatim from pg. 8
"Socialization proceeds in a similar manner in all such contexts: The interaction between people requires an ordering of consciousness that simultaneously preserves the system and changes it; shaping the person while preserving his or her goals."
A social system is a predictable pattern of interaction among persons made possible by shared structures of attention.
Definition of a social system
Part of the information in consciousness consists of intentions, structured in a hierarchy of goals. These intentions, then, direct attention and as a result, we can interpret information. Without intentions we could have no meaningful information and there would be no consistent change in human affairs except for those produced by genetic evolution. Thus for each person the pattern of information that constitutes the self is shaped by conscious goals -no matter what other factor "below" conscious intentionality determines it.
Attention is influenced by intention which shapes goals and ultimately a sense of self
The actualization of intentions is dependent on the available psychic energy, or attention. Any intentional act requires attention -reaching for a cup of coffee, reading a paper, or conducting a conversation. Only by concentrating attention can we "make things happen." Therefore it is convenient to think of attention as psychic energy, because through its allocation ordered patterns of information and action are created.
Further describes self as intention driven by attention (psychic energy).
Our approach will involve going in the other direction, toward the ends or goals of experience and the means used in getting there. We shall view the self in a context of cultivation (Rochberg-Halton, l 979a,b), a process of interpretation and self-control motivated by goals rather than by origins.
Describes self with respect to goals that morph and thus change interpretation of one's self, rather than a static sense of an origin story.
When we say, "Who am I?" we attend to certain bits of information or signs that represent the "I," and these signs become an object of interpretation. One could never attend to all the feelings, memories, and thoughts that constitute what one is; instead, we use representations that stand for the vast range of experiences that make up and shape the self and enable one to infer what the object of self-awareness is. Because self-awareness is a process occurring in time, the self can never be known directly. Instead, self-knowledge is inferential and mediate -mediated by the signs that comprise language and thought. Selfawareness, resulting from an act of inference, is always open to correction, change, and development. Therefore it seems more correct to think of self-awareness as a process of self-control rather than as a static moment of original apperception.
Evokes Goffman's Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
From our perspective, the most basic fact about persons is that they are not only aware of their own existence but can assume control of that existence, directing it toward certain purposes (cf., Smith, 1978).
Definition of person
Materiality and Texture The second methodological departure point is that. classifications and standards are material, as well as symbolic.
Another way to make infrastructures visible is to envision their physical presence (materiality) and texture (experience).
Metaphors play an important role here.
It would be futile to try to separate out materially works from texts.
Ooh--I've got this sentence! Read Why Zines Matter: Materiality and the Creation of Embodied Community https://barnardzines.livejournal.com/46042.html If you don't have access to the FT hmu.
Indeed, as Chandler (2015: 9) also argues, crowdsourcing of big data does not equate to a democratisation of risk assessment or risk governance:
Beyond this quote, Chandler (in engaging crisis/disaster scenarios) argues that Big Data may be more appropriately framed as community reflexive knowledge than causal knowledge. That's an interesting idea.
*"Thus, It would be more useful to see Big Data as reflexive knowledge rather than as causal knowledge. Big Data cannot help explain global warming but it can enable individuals and household to measure their own energy consumption through the datafication of household objects and complex production and supply chains. Big Data thereby datafies or materialises an individual or community’s being in the world. This reflexive approach works to construct a pluralised and multiple world of self-organising and adaptive processes. The imaginary of Big Data is that the producers and consumers of knowledge and of governance would be indistinguishable; where both knowing and governing exist without external mediation, constituting a perfect harmonious and self-adapting system: often called ‘community resilience’. In this discourse, increasingly articulated by governments and policy-makers, knowledge of causal connections is no longer relevant as communities adapt to the real-time appearances of the world, without necessarily understanding them."
"Rather than engaging in external understandings of causality in the world, Big Data works on changing social behaviour by enabling greater adaptive reflexivity. If, through Big Data, we could detect and manage our own biorhythms and know the effects of poor eating or a lack of exercise, we could monitor our own health and not need costly medical interventions. Equally, if vulnerable and marginal communities could ‘datafy’ their own modes of being and relationships to their environments they would be able to augment their coping capacities and resilience without disasters or crises occurring. In essence, the imaginary of Big Data resolves the essential problem of modernity and modernist epistemologies, the problem of unintended consequences or side-effects caused by unknown causation, through work on the datafication of the self in its relational-embeddedness.42 This is why disasters in current forms of resilience thinking are understood to be ‘transformative’: revealing the unintended consequences of social planning which prevented proper awareness and responsiveness. Disasters themselves become a form of ‘datafication’, revealing the existence of poor modes of self-governance."*
Downloaded Chandler paper. Cites Meier quite a bit.
The creation of time to human design m an atemporal, decontextualized form, as outlined in chapter 5, was a necessary techno-material condition for the use of time by industrial societies as an abstract exchange value and for the acceleration, control and global imposition of time.
Time as a techno-material condition. Tie this back to Miller (2015) on materiality?
Plastic time is described as unanticipated, un-reflexive and fluid, as the “experience of temporal ‘scraps’, of gapsin the schedule”, and as “the negative space of busyness”[p. 233]. Plastic time flies under the radar, being unplanned and non-immersive, and associated with neither productivi-ty nor leisure. It is interruptible, but can also expand until some other activity presents itself.
Definition of plastic time.
Adds nuance to the idea of digital time as plastic -- morphable in some ways. rigid in others, asynchronous but also rhythmic in its own way (especially around the examples of web surfing and TV viewing) when the experience of time is lost.
Does plastic time also hint at kind of materiality?? Time as tangible?
this hal
This resonates with Douglass and the securing of places to speak and write.
come lo public voice
"Come to public voice" is an interesting turn of phrase in light of last week's discussions of materiality.
physical abuse, marital rape, and forced pregnanc
Material abuse.
Douglass's complex rhetorical stance opened new possibilities for rhetoric in the Western cultural tradition.
This is even more true now. As our readings late in the semester will perform, rhetoric is increasingly renewing its interest in the material alongside its longstanding interest in the body. Douglass speaks to these.
Paleo
It seems really provocative to study rhetoric before ancient Greece; it's certainly something I had never heard of, not that that is saying much. Also, I've only encountered materiality and rhetoric in regards to modern technology, so it's really interesting to trace this back waaaay before computers and even books. It's also interesting that this is a time when there wasn't a written, standard language. Other articles for this week discussed delivery and body language, but uses of some sort of standard language was always a focus, so going all the way back to the Paleolithic really stretches the boundaries of rhetoric in an exciting way.
the materiality of our (textual) scholarship and its material modes of production, is and should not in any way be separate from a discussion on the content of our work.
If performative publications are the material expressions or incarnations of specific research projects and processes, entangled with them are various other agencies of production and constraint (i.e. technological, authorial, cultural and discursive agencies, to name just a few). What I want to argue is that performative publications as a specific subset of publications actively interrogate how to align more closely the material form of a publication with its content (in other words, where all publications are performative—i.e. they are knowledge shaping, active agents involved in knowledge production—not all publications are 'performative publications', in the sense that they actively interrogate or experiment with this relation between content and materiality —similar to artist books). Yet in addition to this there is also an openness towards the ongoing interaction between materiality and content which includes entanglements with other agencies, and material forms of constraint and possibility.
This concern for the materiality and form of our publications (and directly related to that the material production and political economy that surrounds a publication) is not a response to what elsewhere as part of a critique of certain tendencies within the field of new materialism is seen as a reaction to ‘the linguistic turn’ (Bruining 2013). On the contrary, I see this as a more direct reaction against perspectives on the digital which perceive digital text as disembodied and as a freeing of data from its material constraints as part of a conversion to a digital environment. However, content cannot be separated that easily from its material manifestations, as many theorist within the digital humanities have already argued (i.e. Hayles, Drucker). Alan Liu classifies this 'database' rhetoric of dematerialization as a religion that is characterised by 'an ideology of strict division between content and presentation' where content is separated from material instantiation or formal presentation as part of an aesthetics of network production and consumption (Liu 2004, 62).
Even though many of the approaches in question charac terize themselves as materialisms, matter can only enter in indirecdy: as mediated. Maner, movement, body, sensation.
Succinct take on why we needed a "new materialism" to differentiate from this historical materialism (rooted in cultural studies rooted in marxist thought).