- Jun 2024
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thepoliticalnatureofthebook.postdigitalcultures.org thepoliticalnatureofthebook.postdigitalcultures.org
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Comment by KamilaKuc: For the changing guises and forms of a book, see The Book Is Alive blog, which displays book 'as an evolving, open and visual medium' that is curated and alive, thus its shape and content can change.
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Comment by KamilaKuc: For the changing guises and forms of a book, see The Book Is Alive blog, which displays book 'as an evolving, open and visual medium' that is curated and alive, thus its shape and content can change.
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should open access advocates on occasion not
Comment by friedelitis: This seems like a much more cautious approach compared to the ones before. I would also argue that not all researchers and academics alike are prone (or even exposed to) to the idea of experimentation (see the points on STEM vs HSS made before). Already complex topics could be mystified and therefore not taken seriously in their findings and arguments. This discussion is in danger of becoming a pointless "either or" discussion where it can and should probably be complimentary (and I see how you argue for that).
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If we miss this opportunity, might we not find ourselves in a similar situation to that many book artists and publishers have been in since the 1970s, namely, that of merely reiterating and reinforcing established structures and practices?
Comment by friedelitis: I see the point - how would you build the case that the reiteration and reinforcement of established structures is a bad thing, though? Is there an argument to be made that questions around authorship, authority, legitimacy, etc., need to be rethought beyond the idea that (academic) work should be openly accessible to the public? And isn't the idea of linking and rethinking even more powerful once more work is openly available?
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the open access book should for the most part still find itself presented as having definite limits and a clear, distinct materiality
Comment by friedelitis: I wonder if this imperative of materiality is not derived from the fact that it is still called a 'book'. A book is in itself regarded to be a (physically) closed, comprehensive representation of a story, a narrative or a question. From a reader's perspective, a book is supposed to 'make sense' on its own, without necessary links to another publication or format. Calling OA books 'books' does therefore not seem helpful if you want to foster a more experimental use of the book.
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thepoliticalnatureofthebook.postdigitalcultures.org thepoliticalnatureofthebook.postdigitalcultures.org
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Comment by KamilaKuc: See for example an experiment concerning gestures of reading and writing, 'unruly gestures.' 'unruly gestures: seven cine-paragraphs on reading/writing practices in our post-digital condition' is a performative essay for 'Shifting Layers. New Perspectives in Media Archaeology Across Digital Media and Audiovisual Arts' edited by Miriam De Rosa and Ludovica Fales (Mimesis International, 2016). In it we aspire to break down preconceptions about gestures of reading/writing that relate to their agency, media-specificity, (linear) historicity and humanism. Informed by Tristan Tzara’s cut-up techniques, where through the gesture of cutting the Dadaists tried to subvert established traditions of authorship, intentionality and linearity, this visual essay has been cut-up into seven semi-autonomous cine-paragraphs, accompanied by text.
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create
Comment by KamilaKuc: It is this idea of critically thinking through making, working through the ideas by employing both critical thinking and making practices and all the processes that are involved in it.
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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).
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In this respect this project wants to emphasise that we should have more in depth discussions about the way we do research.
Scholarly poethics is what connects the 'doing' of scholarship with the ethical components of research. Here, ethics and poetics are entangled and an ethical engagement is already from the start involved in the production of scholarship, it informs our scholarship. Whilst formulating a narrative around the idea of a scholarly poetics—what it would look like, what it could mean, imply and do and, perhaps most importantly, what it could potentially achieve—in relation to our publishing practices, I want to argue that we should pay more attention to how we craft our own poetics as scholars.
Just as we have internal discussions about the contents of our scholarship, about the methodologies, theories and politics we use to give meaning and structure to our research, we should similarly have these kinds of discussions about the way we do research. Thus we should also be focusing on the medial forms, the formats and the graphic space in and through which we communicate and perform scholarship (and the discourses that surround these), as well as the structures and institutions that shape and determine our scholarly practices. This ‘contextual’ discussion, focusing on 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 contents of our work. The way we do scholarship informs its ‘outcomes’, what scholarship looks like. It informs the kinds of methodologies, theories and politics we can choose from, and of course, vice versa, these again shape the way we perform our scholarship. A focus on scholarly poethics might therefore be useful in bridging the context/content divide.
So what then is the altered status of a (digital) scholarly poethics today? Which theoretical streams, disciplinary fields, and schools of thought (inside and outside of academia, connecting the arts and the humanities) have specifically incorporated attention to the practices and performances of scholarship and this internal/external divide? Here it would be useful to look to fields such as design, poetry, science and technology studies (STS), feminist theory, the (radical) open access movement, and—in some instances the digital humanities and in cultural and literary studies—where the way we conduct scholarship can be seen to have been at the forefront of academic inquiries. What can we learn from these discussions and how can we add to and expand them to enrich our understanding of what a scholarly poethics could be(come)? As I envision it a scholarly poethics is not one thing, not a specific prescriptive methodology or way of doing scholarship, it is a plural and evolving process in which content and context co-develop. Scholarly poethics thus focuses on the abundant, and continuously changing material-discursive attitudes towards scholarly practices, research, communication media (text/film/audio) and institutions.
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disseminate
Comment by KamilaKuc: A number of recently curated sources explore this idea in a similar manner. See for example Photomediations: An Open Book.
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technotext
As a term, performative publications have a lot in common with Katherine Hayles’s concept ‘technotexts’. In her book Writing Machines (itself a technotext, beautifully designed by Anne Burdick in a hybrid print and ‘webtake’ version) Hayles introduces the term technotext as an relative and alternative to concepts such as hypertext and cybertext. She defines a technotext as something that comes about ‘when a literary work interrogates the inscription technology that produces it’ (Hayles 2002, 25) and elsewhere as ‘a book that embodies its own critical concepts (Hayles 2002, 140)’. In Writing Machines Hayles then goes on to analyse 3 technotexts, Talan Memmott’s work of electronic literature Lexia to Perplexia (2000), Tom Phillips artist’s book A Humument (1970), and Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves (2000).
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Christopher P. Long.
For Long performative publications are directly connected to the idea of practice, where following the concept of performativity, he argues that ideas should be put to practice, where practice can further inform and enrich ones ideas again. Long applies these values directly to several of his own performative projects. In his book The Socratic and Platonic Politics: Practicing a Politics of Reading, he shows how Socratic philosophy and Platonic writing was designed to cultivate dialogue and community. By digitally enhancing his publication, Long explores how writing and reading can promote community in a digital context, in specific a community of collaborative readers. As Long argues:
If, however, the book is not to be a mere abstract academic exercise, it will need to be published in a way that performs and enables the politics of collaborative reading for which it argues. (Long 2012)
A further extension of this project is a podcast series titled Digital Dialogue which aims to cultivate dialogue in a digital age by engaging other scholars in open conversation online. Long is also involved in the Public Philosophy Journal project, which is specifically set up to crawl the web to find diverse positions on various philosophical subjects and to bring these together in a collaborative writing setting. As Long explains:
The PPJ is designed to crawl the web, listening for conversations in which philosophical ideas and approaches are brought to bear on a wide variety of issues of public concern. Once these conversations are curated and a select number chosen for further development, we will invite participants into a space of collaborative writing so they can work their ideas up into a more fully formulated scholarly article or digital artifact. (Chris Long 2013)
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A performative publication wants to explore how we can bring together and align more closely the material form of a publication with its content.
Fajfer and Bazarnik make some interesting observations on how in liberature the book does not contain the work, it is the work. In this sense they don’t see the material book as a representation of the work but as something that actively shapes and determines the work.
Their focus on liberatic works is both a reaction to a previous literary context and a plea to authors to take responsibility for the future becoming of literature. First of all, as a specific response in a Polish context (but more wider too), it rallies against literary traditions that see the materiality of the book as non-significant, that classify literature as ‘disembodied’. As Bazarnik and Fajfer state:
If I emphasise this bodily, material aspect so much, it is because Polish literary studies seem still dominated by scholars indebted to Roman Ingarden, a Polish philosopher who ventured into literary studies to produce a highly influential theory of the literary work of art in which he denied its “material foundation” (as he called it) any significance. It was to be passed over and not interfere with reading (Fajfer and Bazarnik 2010).
Secondly, they present liberature as a way out of the ‘crisis of contemporary literature’, which they say has its roots in the continued focus on the text and its meaning, while neglecting the physical shape and structure of the book. This is delimiting the creative possibilities for the author, they claim. As Fajfer writes:
I believe that it is his responsibility to consider the physical shape of the book and all the matters entailed, just as he considers the text (if not to the same extent, he should at least bear them in mind). The shape of the book should not be determined by generally accepted conventions but result from the author’s autonomous decision just as actions of his characters and the choice of words originate from him (Fajfer 2010, 25).
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A performative publication wants to explore how we can bring together and align more closely the material form of a publication with its content.
Liberature is a term, concept and genre coined in 1999 by the Polish avant-garde poet Zenon Fajfer, and further developed by his collaborator: literary scholar and theorist Katarzyna Bazarnik. Liberature is literature in the form of the book. Bazarnik and Fajfer define liberature as ‘a literary genre that integrates text and its material foundation into a meaningful whole' (Bazarnik and Fajfer 2010, 1). In the introduction to Fajfer’s collected essays, Bazarnik describes liberature as literary works in which the artistic message is transmitted not only through the verbal medium, but also through the author ‘speaking’ via the book as a whole (Bazarnik 2010, 7). Liberature is therefore a total approach that reaches beyond the linguistic medium, where the material form of the work is essential to its understanding and forms an organic element of the (inseparable) whole. Both Fajfer and Bazarnik emphasise that in liberature, the material book is no longer a neutral container for a text, but becomes an integral component of the literary work.
Katarzyna Bazarnik, Zenon Fajfer, Oka-leczenie [Eyes-ore] (2000), Liberatura vol. 8, Kraków: Korporacja Ha!art, 2009.
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This website and the accompanying posters have been designed by Nabaa Baqir, Mila Spasova and Serhan Curti, 2nd year design students at Coventry University, as part of a project on performative publications run by Janneke Adema. They offer a different take on the article 'The political nature of the book. On artists' books and radical open access', written by Janneke Adema and Gary Hall and originally published in the journal New Formations.
I would like to further extend this practice-based project, both theoretically and practically, by discussing the genealogy and correlations of ‘performative publishing’ with ideas such as ‘technotext’ (Hayles), ‘performative materiality’ (Drucker) and ‘liberature’ (Fajfer), and the ethical and political challenges towards academic publishing these kind of concepts and practices pose.
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ABOUT
This article for The disrupted Journal of Media Practice focuses on performative publications and is itself at the same time a performative publication. Written in Hypothes.is this article will hinge upon specific aspects, fragments, and concepts of the original performative project that it engages, entangling the community’s engagements along the way.
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- May 2024
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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Thus, the archive is not about preserving the past but about modes ofsharing the common.
Definition again
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Conceptualized as this omnipotent and alreadyaccomplished institution, the construction of our interactions with it asexternal and belated actions upon it doomed them to failure in a way thatonly a messianic destruction may appear the right way to resist thearchive. However, when one insists on the array of people’s modes ofinteraction with the archive as the point of departure for conceptualizingthe archive and writing its potential history, when people’s bodies,actions, ideas, achievements, and failures are part of the archive, thearchive as a modality of access to the common cannot be ignored.
Interaction with archive as a commons
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The archive, I have shown throughout this chapter, is a modality ofaccess to the commons and not a shrine of past documents.
Sort of definition of the arhice as a form of access
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Derrida’s account of the archive is schematic and abstract, that is,devoid of human action except that of the guardians.
Derrida does provide a lot of attention to material agency of the archive too. Is that schematic and abstract? I am not sure...
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The soldiers claim the authority to act as archivistsdetermining the value of documents and deciding their fate.
Also reminds me of the fate of Dutch Jews in WW2, who were proportionally the highest percentage of Jews in Europe to be processed in concentration and work camps due to the meticulous Dutch citizen archives, which were appropriated by the nazis
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Joan Scott
Love her work!
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other modes of inscription areneglected
This depends a bit on our definition of the archive.
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I’m concerned here witha twofold question. On the one hand, why is the archive’s claim toobjectivity or neutrality, even though it cannot be sustained, quoted timeand time again in alternative histories in order to be refuted time andtime again? On the other hand, why are different modalities ofengagement with the archive kept apart from the archive, as if its essenceis immune to them?
Main researcg questions
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These different modes of engagement with the archive—opposition,avoidance, disengagement—undermined many of the positivisticassumptions about the archive that recur in its alternative histories.
Summary od types of alternative histories
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Rather than writing alternative histories to what disciplinarypredecessors wrote and have “not gone far enough in addressing,” apotential history of the archive is an attempt to undo imperialdisciplinary grammar and foregrounds its incompatibility withnonimperial grammars. Nonimperial grammar cannot be invented—itcan only be practiced through unlearning the imperial one. Even ifnonimperial dialects of dis/engaging with/from archives are notvictorious, they are enduring dialects and not inventions by individualswho could go “far enough.” Their grammar is founded on the assumptionthat the imperial archive cannot be described from an external or aposteriori position, as long as who we are—citizens or undocumented—is defined and regulated by the archive.
Hmmm, maybe I am missing a point here but this evades politics to some extent.
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Yet thisvignette is still absent from histories of the creation of archives duringthe French Revolution. When such actions of people raging against theaccumulation of papers used against them are included in such histories,it is often with a mourning tone regarding the loss of precious papers
Yes, but compare with nazi and US book burnings though....
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The contention that the archive is not about the past but about thecommons requires a different genre of narrative than the one known ashistory
Very interesting argument
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Restrictions on citizens’ access to documents, which became thehallmark of the violence of state archives, eclipse the denial of access tononcitizens and came to define the goal of civil struggle—gaining (more)access to what is enclosed behind the threshold of the archive, as if thisis the core of the violence of the archive.
Restrictions and the violence of the archive
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That none of these questions are pertinent to the study of thearchive testifies to how very difficult it is to study its ontology.
See narrativism though
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This keeps the archive asclose as possible to its sovereign conception: modes of acting andinteracting are not conceived as part of what the archive is.
Questions around how can we open up and interact with the archive?
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This imperial violation of people’s taxonomies (often devalued asmissing standards and systematicity, values, rules, or habits) is notparticular to an individual actor or to one institution—it is embedded inimperial institutions and the forms of knowledge production that theyenable.
Highlights different modes of knowledge production as disciplined and controlled through archival practices
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its
I love this idea of unlearning the archive by being hospitable to an (imaginary) other.
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- Apr 2024
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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In an era when communication is the indisputable maxim, in which ev-erything is justifi able by its communicable usefulness, research militancyrefers to experimentation: not to thoughts, but to the power to think; not tothe circumstances, but to the possibility of experience; not to this or thatconcept, but to experiences in which such notions acquire power (potenciaconcept, but to experiences in which such notions acquire power (potenciaconcept, but to experiences in which such notions acquire power ( );not to identities but to a different becoming; in one word: intensity does notlie so much in that which is produced (that which is communicable) as inthe process of production itself (that which is lost in communication). Howto say something, then, about all this and not merely exhibit the results ofsuch a process?
Intresting reflections in relation to publishing
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Research militancy is a composition of wills, an attempt to cre-ate what Spinoza called joyful passions, which starts from and increases thepower (potenciapower (potenciapower ( ) of everyone involved. Such a perspective is only possibleby admitting from the beginning that one does not have answers, and, bydoing so, abandoning the desire to lead others or to be seen as an expert.
Affirmative critique is not dissimilar
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Even though there ispotencia, for instance, in the activism that carries out grassroots communi-cation experiments, the potencia in the situation cannot be communicated
See publishing experiments
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Here, Colectivo Situaciones moves away from a certain truism per-vasive in much of contemporary activist culture, both in Argentina and inNorth America: the idea that a certain type of communication (be it the useof the Internet, grassroots filmmaking, or any other medium) has an inher-ent emancipatory effect on people. Communication produces abstractionsof experience. The experience itself can only be lived.
Interesting to connect this to publishing...
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The word experienciaconnotes both experience, in the sense of accumulation of knowledges ofresistance; and experiment, understood as a practice. In this article, whenthe word experiencia displays this double connotation we translate it as ex-perience/experiment
Very interesting connection between experiment, experience, and practice
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Research militancy is a form of intervention, a practice that accompa-nies other practices, or experiencias.
Interesting that they position it here so clearly as a practice. See relationship to practice-based research.
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“We are not autonomists, situationists, or anything ending with -ist,” theyonce told us. Identities have normalizing effects: they establish models, theyplace multiplicity under control, they reduce the multiple dimensions of lifeto the single dimension of an idealization.
Identification and classification
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“Footnotes” refers, literally, to a second level of writing of this article, inwhich the notes do not constitute a complementary set of references, but rath-er a fundamental articulation with the central body of the text
Great
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“We think of our practice as a doublemovement: to create ways of being militants that escape the political cer-tainties established a priori and embrace politics as research (in this case,it would be ‘research militancy’), and, at the same time, to invent forms ofthinking and producing concepts that reject academic procedures, breakingaway from the image of an object to be known and putting at the centre sub-jective experience (in this case, it would be ‘militant research’).”
Love this description
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Again, what is important to us is not necessarily to draw out all the dif-ferent and multiple connections that exist, as interesting as that might be.What we want to do here is draw from these histories, experiences, and mo-ments to ask questions about methods through which social research createsnew possibilities for political action. That also means we wish to explorethe ways in which militant praxis and organizing are themselves modes ofunderstanding, of interpreting the world, and expressing modes of socialbeing.
This is super interesting, wished this intro had focused more on these issues...
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One striking example of this can be seen with the Wages for Houseworkcampaigns that began in the early ’70s. In 1972, Mariarosa Dalla Costa(who was involved in Potere Operaio and help to found Lotta Continua)and Selma James (who was involved with the struggles for independence inthe West Indies and feminist organizing in the UK) published a book calledThe Power of Women and the Subversion of Community.
Ok good, this ommission started to annoy me :)
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The university does nothave any kind of monopoly over insight or theoretical sophistication
I think it is way too easy to focus on the university as the culprit in this scenario, when it is very much community or field practices that keep up certain fashions in research and publishing. But that doesn't fit their anarchist critique of course.
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What follows is a little experiment using the online academicsearch engine Jstor (jstor.org),
LOL
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The result is two different streams of literature.Activists do draw from the academic stream to a certain degree, but theacademics almost never read the other one.
There is so much here that needs to be said about publishing cultures. And peer review...
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Universities were foundedas places for the celebration of art and culture; they still like to representthemselves that way in brochures and promotional literature. Over the lasttwo hundred years, however, they have become ever more focused on eco-nomics and administration
Too many historical inaccuracies here... universities always had an economic function. Generalisations doing my head in a bit...
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This has not changed as much as we’d like to think. Graduate school isnot on the whole meant to foster creativity or encourage students to producenew ideas. For the most part, it’s designed to break students down, to fosterinsecurity and fear as a way of life, and ultimately to crush that sense ofjoy in learning and playing with ideas that moved most students to dedicatetheir lives to the academy to begin with.
Yeah this is all a lot of rhetoric... which is a shame as in my opinion a bit more subtle and realistic critique (less bombastic) would work better to make this argument...
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On the other hand one could just as well ask: why is it we assume thatcreative and relevant ideas should be coming out of universities in the firstplace?
So is the argument similar to what we have read previously in the handbook that militant research is research by activists instead of academics? If so I still find this very simplistic (and both authors are employed by UK universities so there is that).
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Theories that are in effect calls to politicalaction beyond the academy pass by as if they never were.
That's really an overgeneralisation, the whole field of cultural studies would fall underneath this classification, and beyond academia this has also been a very lucrative subject for the publishing economy.
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What we want to draw attention to is that this debate was carried outalmost completely amongst activists. Holloway himself was a bit surprisedon discovering teenage anarchists were taking his book with them whilehopping trains or attending mass mobilizations. “It’s a very difficult book,”he admitted to a journalist who interviewed him in 2002, adding he was“surprised and gratified” that so many young people had taken an interestin it.2 Meanwhile, in the academy, it was as if all this had never happened.Holloway’s book was not widely assigned in courses or read in graduateseminars. In fact, most Marxist scholars seemed unaware that John Hollowayeven existed. Mention his name and one would almost invariably be greetedby blank stares. It was as if the debate was happening in another universe.In some ways, perhaps it was
This is a weird line in the argumentation (if it is part of the argument...), e.g. Empire was both populare inside and outside of academia. Creates a weird moralistic binary.
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True revolutionary knowledge would have to be different.It would have to be a pragmatic form of knowledge that lays bare all suchpretensions; a form of knowledge deeply embedded in the logic of transfor-mational practice
So for me that would be an affirmative practice, not a negative critique as described in the quote above.
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This is not a book that has been designed to sit on a shelf; its primarypurpose is not to be used as a citation or reference in important soundingjournals that no one reads. It is a text intended for use as a tool to gatherexperiences, examples, and materials that can further the development ofthe constituent power of lived imagination that will transform the worldaround us
I really like this phrasing
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- Feb 2024
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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ii. Mosire
Is this research or just activism?
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- Jan 2024
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hcommons.org hcommons.orguntitled1
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While there is a longer tradition of research and writing on utopian collectives, this kind ofpolitical organization has so far remained confined to small, self-sufficient communes or movements,like the Zapatistas. As Mann and Wainwright acknowledge, we needn’t paint too rosy a picture of whatthe future in which these forms of self-organization would become more numerous would look like.After all, most present-day self-sustaining communities exist at the ‘edges’ of capitalism, rather thancompletely outside of it (Grubacic & O’Hearn, 2016; see also Kallis et al., 2020). In this sense, we do notreally know in what form they would continue to exist if it ended – and how, of course.4 This presents aparticular problem for thinking about knowledge production in post-carbon futures.GLOBALIZATIONS 5
Wonder how this relates to something like scaling small...
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- Nov 2023
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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he symbiosis of fast scienceand industry has privileged disembedded knowledgeand disembedding strategies abstracted from the messycomplications of this world. But in ignoring messiness,and dreaming of its eradication, we discover that wehave messed up our world. So I would characterise slowscience as the demanding operation that would reclaimthe art of dealing with, and learning from, what sci-entists too often consider messy, that is, what escapesgeneral, so-called objective, categories.
This is a good summary
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This may be the challenge that slow science shouldanswer, enabling scientists to accept that what is messyis not defective but simply that which we have to learnto live in and think with.
Messiness instead of slow/fast binary, also see Angela McRobbie's work on the messiness of CS
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he eggs leavetheir native environmen
I am getting a bit sick of this eggs mataphor, it makes no sense to me...
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She insists that her only loyalty is, and must be, tothe advancement of knowledge, and thus, as Whiteheadwrote, she is entitled to treat the remainder ‘superfi-cially, with the imperfect categories of thought derivedfrom [her] profession’.
Ah so the distinction is between thought for thought's sake and slowing that down vs more socially engaged science
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hose academics who justask for time to think – who do not name those puttingpressure on them, preferring to address ‘society’ andask for protection – do not feel there is an option at all.They just dream of a past where they, and the so-calleddisinterested knowledge they produced, were respected.The ‘exposing oneself to sniggers’ option requires usto accept that we academics are, among many others,called upon by our role in the creation of the future.We cannot evade that call by pleading that we do notdeserve to play such a role.
Hmm I haven't read the previous chapter but I am not sure about the reasoning here, I think having time to unconditionally think and asking for that is not incompativle with creating a different future?
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My intervention takes ‘slow science’ as a name for thechallenge that is addressed to us as academics. A namewhich also includes a trap we have to resist; namely, thecall for an agreement to go ‘back to the past’
Not regressive
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We now have to tell our studentsto choose subjects that will lead to fast publication inhigh-ranking journals specialising in professionally rec-ognised issues – issues which, in general, are of interestto nobody except other fast-publishing colleagues.
The issue of speed is quite interesting in relation to how this is increasingly monetised in academic publishing, less about being able to publish, more about doing so quickly or quicker...
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- Oct 2023
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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Open Book Publishers does not engage in this kind of practice: it neitherpublishes a printed catalogue nor sends its representatives to book fairsthroughout the world, having a strict no flight policy. Most publishershave not engaged in such low-energy practices; in these cases, additionallayers have to be added to the calculation.
Although of course laudable, many commercial publishers are already making the argument that due to their scale they can be much more environmentally friendly on these kind of aspects, so I think there is a reason to remain cautious about these kinds of arguments.
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Much of the impact related to the production of this book has todo not so much with the production itself, but with the next step: itsdissemination to an audience
Yes!
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it would have been much easier to explain thecomplexity of the di ̇erent layers of representation involved in digitalapproaches to text with the help of a few illustrations.
I think there is a bit of an issue though here in more or less arguing for these kinds of measures on an individual level (which in principle is fair enough) but then not also outlining the more macro levels of environmental impact in the larger publishing industry. There really is a staggering scale difference there and more importantly perhaps, the commercial publishers buy into these narratives too as part of their greenwashing strategies.
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When it comesto environmental questions, my training has been much less systematic— this chapter bears obvious marks of this di ̇erence in training quality,especially in the references that frame it.
To be fair, yes, but with the caveat added underneath.
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This approach was greatly facilitated by the publishing house, OpenBook Publishers, who contributed essential information to the followingpages.2
Amazing, but I would have very much like to see a comparison with commercial publishers too, but maybe that is still to come. A great example though of how scholar-led publishers always pave the way in these contexts.
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While sharedinfrastructures o ̇er the best guarantee for sustainable preservation, theyshould ideally rely more on distributed community-based needs andsolutions, and not unilateral benefit resulting from top-down instructions.
Indeed
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Duplicationmeans that datasets are being archived in at least two di ̇erent locationsthat mirror one another. If one of the locations ceases to work, or burnsdown, or if its hard drive content gets erased or crashes, the other iterationcan provide backup. Relying on one single copy of digital files is a riskybusiness. But the environmental cost of multiplying by two — if noteven by three for a backup of the backup, as is often done — comesdown to asking the canon question anew
This is what I am interested in in relation to P2P file sharing. Also in relation to LOCKSS and CLOCKSS
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This would mean thatarchives, libraries, publishers, and scholars all somehow work with asimilar, standardised, economical workflow.25
The issue is also whose workflow...
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mentation of this standardised, stable, economic way to provide textualand meta-textual information can also be standardised in terms of theworkflows it is integrated into.
Standardisation vs diversity is an intereting topic to look into more from an environmental impact perspective. Might not be that straightforward.
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n others, we will have to make choices. Itwill not be possible to archive everything (not that it was possible before,but digitisation might have given the illusion that it did), and it willnot be possible to archive in as inflationary a manner as we have doneover the past decades.
I think this is a very important argument to make: the issue of overproduction in academic publishing and our tendency to want to preserve everything needs questioning.
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Reducing the time dedicated to an impactfulproductive output has an added advantage of making more time avail-able for activities like gardening, barter, craft, and other socio-culturalactivities that can be recentred at a more local level, and contribute tolowering overall impact.
Hmmm, yeah... or for more excessive consumption...
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For archivists, librarians, publishers, and editors toconceive their activity in such a way that it does as little natural harmas possible, for the largest possible cultural good, it means paying closeattention to at least three elements: natural resources, human activity,and energy consumption.
And greed? (might fall under human activity...)
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Borrowing a book from a friend or alibrary, or sharing a downloaded digital resource locally are all gesturesof reuse that minimise the individual environmental cost for using theconcerned item. The production, use, and end-of-life impact can be splitamong all those who benefit from it, and the part each individual has toaccount for is reduced
Would be interesting to look into the environmental aspects of shadow libraries, not sure any research has been done on this?
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It adds an-other source of pollution to the whole process, and questions yet anothertraditional academic habit.17
If we mention this on an individual academic level, should we also mention the relationship of large commercial publishers with the fossil fuel industry? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/24/elsevier-publishing-climate-science-fossil-fuels https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/elsevier-and-relxs-climate-problem and our universities: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/mar/21/universities-must-reject-fossil-fuel-cash-for-climate-research-say-academics
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On the one hand,someone who has studied extensively comes at a high societal cost sincethey received an education over a lengthy period; however, because theystudied for a long time, one could assume that they will be more eÿcientat working once they have completed their studies than someone whohas not received as much training.
Again, I think this study suffers a bit from not working with (for me) clear parameters.
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This means having to produce more e-readers, and more access to virtualstorage that will be solicited by more people
Is this not forgetting the myriad other things that are done on top of digital text that would need to be discussed here? For example all the data mining of the publishing surveillance industry? Isn't the digital file itself, its production and storage, the mere basic beginning of all of this?
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The technologies I had been using relied on the idea that it wasperfectly sensible to use resources (in some respects, a lot of them) inorder to make what I considered a better text available. In a way, myuse of digital solutions led me to push the boundaries, perhaps even toignore to some extent the unavoidable tension of having to make choices,of having to define limits to preservation, of accepting that resources,room, and time are finite.
This I think is a better argument, and ties in with calls for minimal computing
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In the bigger picture, it leads or will eventually lead to restrictionson their side — electricity shortages, degradation of infrastructures, andmore
I find this quite a strange argument, it is quite a correlation to make and there is far from a clear cause and effect here. I get the point the author is making but I don't find this argument very convincing, when we move out to the bigger picture the general energy consumption of 'more resourced' countries also needs to be taken into consideration.
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- Apr 2023
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pad.programando.li pad.programando.li
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Tal vez la pista para perseguir la traza de esa sabiduría es acaso la tendencia. ¿Hacia dónde tiende, hacia dónde va la búsqueda, la insistencia de la vida en las plantas? ¿Cómo se comportan interpretando su entorno para poder crecer y vivir?
test
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- Jan 2023
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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1. I would like to thank Ned Rossiter, David Berry, Patriciade Vries, Nadine Roestenburg, Niels ten Oever, ChloëArkenbout and Sabine Niederer for their valuable edits andcomments
Where do these references refer to? There are no reference numbers in the text or is that me? Very odd...
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This makes it all the morenecessary to draw up road maps with concrete stepson how the internet can be reclaimed.
I am confused as above he seems to indicate this is futile...
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Extinction Internet is about degrowth, putting an end todata extraction and, yes, about moments when screensfall black and doomscrolling comes to an abrupt halt.
This all flirts too much with accellerationism for me... Not surprising as his influences are Baudrillard and D&G...
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we have already ran out of time to do fundamentalresearch but the least we can do is facilitate artists—and listen carefully to their cosmotechnic ‘cli-fi’imagination.
Not quite sure why these options are presented as opposed though?
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Bernard Stiegler.
This is an incredibly old white male referencing text up to now... quite odd for a professorial I have to say...
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the dark states of the young minds, gluedto their devices.
This sounds way too 'granddad' too me, as if only young minds are glued to their devices...
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the fatigue that we feel in
Is this not also the newness of it and the proliferation of meetings that came with the move to online (socio-cultural causes)? I get tired from reading books too and my eyes prefer the screen (I read a study that many people with bad eyesight prefer the backlighting a screen provides to print).
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In my reading of The ThirdUnconscious, media technologies have entered thebody in such a way that the body and soul can nolonger be separated from the semiotic infosphere.
As I see it they have never been separate...
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The human mind has reached a stateof saturation.
I think every generation feels that though...
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First diagnosis, then restorative care.
This is quite neat
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- Dec 2022
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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Deception techniques I: Anti-bot honeypots
We could have used this for the ACS conference in Shanghai, becuase of the political nature of the event we could only publish the programme a day in advance as otherwise the conference would have been censored etc.
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aucuses provide spaces for people towork within their own racial/ethnic groups.
It might be me but this sounds highly problematic... as it would involve sorting people into racial/ethnic groups in one way or another. I get the intention behind it but it sounds very problematic...
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https://planplanner.com/de/events/internet-tourFrontality
What is meant with frontality?
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- Oct 2022
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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Otherwise put, the role of artworks is no longer to form imagi-nary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and modelsof action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the art-ist.” 80
Prefigurative?
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Amazon bought the Amazon Noir software, and the twoparties settled out of court with a nondisclosure agreement.
I did not know this! How much did they get!
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tactical giz-mology
Did she explain what this is? I might have missed that...
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“Tactical Media are what happens when cheap ‘do it yourself ’ mediamade possible by the revolution in consumer electronics are exploitedby those who are outside of the normal hierarchies of power and knowl-edge.”
Ah! This is informative and resolves my media question
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It istherefore not simply critical license that allows me to see beyond theera of tactical gizmology and to discover a range of new media art prac-
I wonder if she is not just also sidestepping the difference between art and research and art and advocacy/politics? Of course they can all overlap, but maybe these are more tactical art projects than media projects? Not sure why the focus is on 'media' really
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but they do recast it such that “us” and “them” are nolonger permanently situated.
Interesting... not sure what that means in practice though?
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no proffered fantasies of radical systemic change: it exists as apossibility within the realm of the imagination—another technology ofsimulation—but it requires collective action, a “ton of protesters.”
How does this differ from things such as Scholarled and ROAC, COPIM? They don't envision radical systemic change either really, just alternative parallel options. Yet they are more than just tactical interventions? Or is that just a matter of perspective?
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A charming but dated and even fu-tile endeavor, perhaps, hopelessly removed from the real politics and ac-tivities of social transformation? Irredeemably caught up in the kind ofirony that disguises a co- optation by the very system with which oneputatively interacts anew? In what terms can we speak of the efficacy ofcybersquatting?
This is the main question in my opinion: revealing or creating alternatives?
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to provoke and to reveal, to defamiliarize andto critique.
Does this still work in the age of fake news, in a period where still 50% or something of the US voters think Trump was actually elected? Is the 'revelation' still the same now as it was in the noughties or is it simply visualising something that everyone already knows?
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on-the-fly critical intervention: statements, performances, and actions thatmust continually be altered in response to their object, “constantly re-configured to meet social demands.” 9
This seems incredibly time-consuming, what about slow interventions? Does the tactical aspect include a form of temporality?
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the temporary creation of a situation in whichsigns, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinkingbecomes possible. Tactical media operates in the field of the symbolic,the site of power in the postindustrial society.
What media do not operate in the field of the symbolic?
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disruption
Ah damn...
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disturbance
Centre for disturbance media would have been so much cooler...
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My study will not collapse the material distinctions among thesedifferent media projects, but it will articulate them all as instances oftactical media. This is to say that they are all forms of critical interven-tion, dissent, and resistance.
Tactical media: critical intervention, dissent, and resistance. In what way are our publishing projects tactical media?
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persuasive games
Didn't know this, way cooler than 'serious games'
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new media artist-activists
What would be a current term to use for this kind of activism? New media is very noughties...
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Josh On and Futurefarmers’ They Rule (2001/2004) affords us an ex-ample of a new media work that is at once aesthetic design, intellectualinvestigation, and political activism. 1 A work of tactical cartography,They Rule affords users the ability to visualize the myriad and intricateconnections among Fortune 100 corporations and directors. Users canchoose from a list of institutions, people, and companies and build theirown maps from the data the artists have compiled from SEC filings andpublic Web sites. Or they can view the archived maps that powerfullydocument the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of “the tenrichest people” and “the magnificent seven.”
Would be interesting to do something similar around the big 5 publishers....
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- Sep 2022
- May 2022
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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urveillance publishing?
I am wondering whether I have missed the clear connection between surveillance publishing and predictive analytics.
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This article lingers on a prediction too: Clarivate’s business model is coming forscholarly publishing.
Is this a prediction? They are in the business of scholarly publishing?
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- Mar 2022
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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Asan act of resistance to the centralization ofdata, I refuse to include the DOI number inthis citation. A copy of “Excellence R Us”has been inscribed on a cuneiform tabletand has been moved to an undisclosedlocation in case of emerge
This is quite funny :)
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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To quote one of the researchers in the study, “whilethey [Thomson Reuters] agreed to essentially all the key points we made, they didnot want to change anything that would collapse journal rankings, as they see thisas their key business asset” (Bohannon 2016)
This is very similar to critique of the REF, everyone knows it is flawed but then the investments are too high to abandon it now, and the alternatives maybe even worse so we get stuck with these systems as examples of infrastructural failings and inertia.
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I have previously argued that by invoking the status of the impact factor without itssubstance, such organizations reveal the journal impact factor for precisely what it is:a fetishized and vacuous number (Bell 2015
Interesting to classify it is a fetish!
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If it includes a set ofjournals that cite each other, those journals and those scholars by definition become‘significant.’ If it excludes a community of journals and scholars, they thereby remaininsignificant.” In essence, inclusion in the index actively produces the impact it claimsto measure.
The IF is performative and inherently conservative, which is exactly what academia wants.
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which only the journals it indexes can achieve.In effect, WoS operates as a Möbius strip, with no orienting point beyond itsel
It sustains and continuously reinforces itself
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- Feb 2022
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copim.pubpub.org copim.pubpub.org
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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A greatdeal of hope exists concerning the attitudes and habits of researchers, giventhe long tradition of connecting science and society through science shopsin the Netherlands.
I am still not sure what 'science shops' are? Definitely not familiar with a long tradition of them in NL!
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The conference envisaged a renewal in three areas:– Differentiation of career pathways: Universities and University Medical Cen-tres want to provide academic staff with a choice for specific focus areas –teaching, research, knowledge transfer and/or leadership.– Renewal of research assessment methodologies: New approaches to evalu-ating research quality and impact are emerging. The promotion of open sci-ence is integral to this development.– Team science: Alongside recognition and reward for individual accomplish-ments, there is a push to award the collaborative efforts and accomplish-ments of teams with the consideration that they deserve.
I remain very sceptical of this approach, also given the way Dutch funders and science ministers have been big fans of the UK system and the REF. This reads too much like a REF-like system to me in the end. The Team efforts aspects are interesting though, and moves away a bit from a liberal humanist authorship model.
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The major Dutch research funder, NWO,6 is going toimplement a policy of evaluating research based on the quality of publishedarticles, not on where these are published. The number of articles published isalso less relevant than the importance of the individual articles
Also see what they are doing at Utrecht University around this
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On the one hand, most of the governments inLatin American countries invest resources, directly or indirectly, in creatingand improving peer reviewed journals, according to internationally recognisedquality standards. But, on the other, these publications fail to receive recogni-tion of being as valuable as mainstream journals in the research evaluationsystem. This is illustrated in the case of disciplines such as natural sciences ormedicine, where national policies of evaluation of research explicitly requireauthors to publish in journals indexed in Science Citation Index (SCI). LatinAmerican journals continue to be underrepresented in these domains.
I wonder if the same people are involved in both though, i.e. could it be that academics and universities support local journals, where funders and governments promote international metrics?
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Most of the journals’ editors-in-chief and editorial board members are facultymembers of universities who do the editorial work ad honorem
This is still my preferred OA model
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In this environment, a Francophone African platform of open access jour-nals has just been created. The Grenier des savoirs3 is a platform that bringstogether 15 mult
This is such an excellent project
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The idea that service to the community should be included as a criterion forpromotion of academics could be a starting point for the creation of an effec-tive knowledge democracy in this part of the world.
Unfortunately 'service to the community' seems to have been translated into impact in the global north
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This document clearly outlines the importance of publishingin “international” journals or “outside the applicant’s university and country ofpractice”, but does not explicitly mention the impact factor of these journals.
I wonder if language plays a role here too, i.e. preference for english language journals
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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o do so, he suggests academics need to document the failures of market-based reforms, show the public their inadequacies, form alliances to debate, refashion,abandon or derail market policies, and come up with new collective imaginaries for thefuture for HE.
Alternatives to metrics instead of no metrics? Or indeed new imaginaries for the future of HE that are not market-based?
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Forms of resistance may be possible, such as refusal at departmental or faculty level toengage with data analytics demands or institutional dashboard rollout.
This is really hard to do though
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The competition aim is to buildsoftware platforms ‘to ensure prospective students have access to data about theoutcomes of subjects and Higher Education providers’ in order ‘to help them makeinformed decisions about where and what to study’
I wonder if there is any option here for students as 'clients' to opt out of data being gathered about/around them
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The software platforms produced to enact Data Futures will encode governmentobjectives into the core operating system of HE.
very scary
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comparative, and predictive data, using ‘lead indicators’, ‘reportable events’, ‘earlywarning systems’ and other ‘intelligence’ for ‘close-to-real-time’ performancemonitoring.
Missing bit here, but next to ranking and 'student choice' the focus indeed seems to be on monitoring the sector
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Data Futures is due for national rollout to all UK HE institutions in2019–2020, requiring universities to carry out ‘in-year’ reporting of student data usinga bespoke data platform
What kind of data are they really collecting then? I am not sure this is clear enough to me. Performance data? So marks and jobs after the degree period?
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data are being ‘made’ toperform the political work of making the sector more market-focused
great example of measurement for measurement sake. I never understood these nonsense academia.edu rankings but in the end it doesn't matter really what the logic is behind them as long as they rank
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- Jan 2022
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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The move from mapping to indicating also enables us to move beyond an appreciation ofscientometrics in terms of its relational approach to data exploration, which we ourselves in-voked above. Rather than celebrating the methodological contribution of relational methodssuch as keyword co-occurences and citation analysis in terms of the emergent entities thesemethods render traceable, to move to indicating is to welcome the task of actively configuringthe context of evaluation, and the community of interpretation, that we produce our mappingfor (Marres, 2017). This could include identifying prevalent themes and ambitions in AI re-search and innovation, their operationalization, the people and resources that are mobilized,and the outputs this generates. In emphasizing process and engagement in indicating interdis-ciplinarity in AI, indicators may play a role in characterizing forms of interdisciplinarity still information. They may be scripted to enable the negotiation of interdisciplinarity among diverseparticipants, data sources, and methodologies, and amidst multiple epistemic commitments,which are not already congealed into a research community; for example, when interdisciplin-arity involves the creation of new combinations and connections between sciences and hu-manities. To explore different ways in which indicators can be used to enable negotiation, itmay be helpful to start with more open-ended spaces of exploration, such as network visual-izations and forms of relational mapping. Thus, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, if our wideraim is to move from indicators to indicating, it is good to start with mapping. In doing so, newways of indicating interdisciplinarity in AI research and innovation might emerge, which sup-port and highlight exchanges across boundaries rather than suppress them
I have the feeling they should have started with this paragraph...
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One important implication of the participatory approach to mapping interdisciplinarity is thatit entails a move away from the classic opposition between maps and indicators in the soci-ology of science and innovation.
I feel now that I am missing some background field-specific info on what indicators are! I guess I am not interdisciplinary enough...
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MAPPING AS A PATH TOWARDS INDICATING
Ok so mapping is the method then
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the impor-tance of digital mapping—or data cartography—as the methodological framework for indi-cating interdisciplinarity in this area, one that can enable the exploration of transformativeinterdisciplinarity
I am getting increasingly confused about what indicators are... is it a methodlogical tool? Is digital mapping an indicator or a method to determine indicators?
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engaged experts, who take part in formulating the broader projects of ensuring accountabilityand autonomy with which an evaluation is always intertwined
This seems quite idealistic in practice and would to some extent mean a return to qualitative assessment. This really is not how metrics are used in practice.
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This could be taken as a weakness of indicator-based methodologies, but it is also possibleto turn this assessment around: The measurement of interdisciplinarity provides interesting op-portunities to redefine, reconstruct, or reinvent the use of indicators in the evaluation of re-search and innovation
Or from a more negative viewpoint, to make indicators even stronger and more flexible in measuring knowledge production and evaluating it.
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They point out that metrics such as the Klout score—a popular, aggre-gate measure of influence across different online platforms such as Twitter and Facebook—may operate simultaneously in two registers: On the one hand, they perform an epistemicoperation by ordering relations between social media users through mathematical operationsof quantification (producing, among other things, influence rankings). On the other hand, theyenable participation as they assemble users into a dynamic collective, by enabling these users,as well as third parties, to compare, contrast, and relate to one another by way of Klout scores
So hear metrics are used to measure epistemic relations and participation. It is the leap to evaluation here based on those measurements that is problematic. But does this have to be implied? Does measuring always need to lead to regimes of evaluation?
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Rather than deploying scientometric measures to close down the de-bate, the objective then becomes to deploy indicators so as to facilitate exploration ofknowledge in (trans-)formation
Yes, that's fine, but why does this need to happen with a focus on evaluation and including interdisciplinarity within existing systems, instead of using it as a potential basis to question scientometrics and valuation in general?
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pointing precisely beyond the preoccupation with the unification of scientific fields.
Yes, this is interesting
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Scientometrics can help to render visible, and explorable, interdis-ciplinarity as a dynamic space, a space of possible transformation of the relations betweendisciplines, and between concepts, methods, and data. Furthermore, such an analysis of trans-formative interdisciplinarity opens up distinctive methodological opportunities for the evalua-tion of interdisciplinarity.
I don't really understand why interdisciplinarity gets this special treatment as a transforamtive entity, surely every discipline or disciplinarity itself is transformative and relational following this logic? Why is the question from the outset how it can aid evaluation and not for example, critique or complicate it (on a general level, not only for interdisciplinary scholarship)
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ctors located at the margins of or in-between fields
Or what about scholars that inherently inter or post-disciplinary? Is discinplinarity the main thing that defines a research community? what about politics or activism, theoretical or methodological frameworks, communities of practice?
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From this perspective, the key advantage of scientometricsis that one does not have to assume a fixed ontology at the outset of research—say assuming“disciplines”as already constituted ex ante. One can recognize that ontologies are dynamic,so that one cannot only treat as an empirical question what the relevant entities are, whichtheir relations are, and what their attributes are but also recognize that these very categoriesare in question in the empirical realities under study
I like this approach, it provides a good middle point between absolute relativity and a fixated idea of disciplines. However, recognising that entities are dynamic might not in itself be enough to question their existence as categorisations in the first place.
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arry et al. note that interdisciplinarity is best treated as an agonisticcategory. That is, they conceive of interdisciplinarity—and disciplinarity—not just as a givenattribute of existing fields of knowledge but as a contested category: the forms that interdisci-plinary research will take—the division of labor between fields; where key concepts are de-rived from; the relations between data and method—are the focus of disagreement and powerstruggle
Yes, I like this approach that challenges disciplinarity from the onset, disciplines themselves are always already interdisciplinary too.
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the design and deployment of indicators has been identified as apotential site for methodological innovation: Developing indicators of interdisciplinarity couldbe an effective way to counter the devaluation of interdisciplinary research and enable thearticulation and valuation of interdisciplinary research agendas
In light of the previous sentence this shift seems not warranted? Metrics are ignorance producing devices, so let's create more metrics for interdisciplinary research to value it higher? Is this a version of 'let's just play the game'?
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the metricization of research culture (De Rijcke, Holtrop,et al., 2019): The de facto reliance on indicators such as the impact factor in evaluation pro-cesses creates a situation in which scientists, assessors, and policy-makers are encouraged, andbecome more inclined, to value research in terms of quantifiable markers of recognition andsignificance (citation, impact), rather than in substantive terms.
Nice and clear definition of metricization
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Local file Local file
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cation, extraction, and devastation. It would take another book to run with the consequences of such views But I'll offer what I can imagine here. For one thing, truly answering ques- tions about the communality of a text will avoid mete authorial intellec- tual biography (the books read by the author, the universities or gatherings she attended, the music she considered most influential, the names of her ‘most distinguished friends) and focus instead on the material practices that linked the making of an author’ life to the text. Ricardo Piglia once drily suggested that the true history of literature was not to be found in books, but in the history of jobs held by writers as they wrote them. ‘This alterna- Live history of literature, which isthe history of writing, would have to pose questions about the making ofa life, the writers “livelihood” —the “how-to” ‘of her everyday work—and link these answers to the personal system of aesthetic and political decisions that allowed her to create this book instead of a different one, this cultural artifact instead of another. | imagine that the questions won't always seek to illustrate the specific relationships of the ‘writer's material body in her being-with-others—the identity-focused data ‘on lass and race and gender and age, among other things—but will go far- ther: they'll reach into the depths of where their communal brew is con ccocted. The first such questions will have to address the communal labor (mandatory, in-service-of, through language-in-common) that structures and gives life to the text beyond itself, is will involve a history of reading, indeed—but we're actually already talking about something else, as Volodine would say. If reading, as is so ‘often said, is not an act of passive consumption, but rather a practice of ‘mutual “shareng.” a miniscule act of collective production, then what’ at stake here arent just the books people read. So too, and most importantly, are the books people interpret, reactivate, and bring back to life: the books rewritten by others, whether in their own imagination or in conversations (which also constitute, of course, a practice of our collective imagination). ‘What has become clearer and clearer over time is that book-writing in ‘communality will have to welcome the challenge and explicitly address— and embody—the staging of plural authorship. Will the figures of the nar- rator, point of view, and narrative arc remain the same when bearing wit- ness to the generative presence of others in the very existence of writing? Which platform will best adapt to the continual evolution of the palimp: sest and the juxtaposition intrinsic to every writing process produced in ‘communality? What sort of so-called critical apparatus will we use when every sentence, even every word, would have to be accounted for? “Maybe it isnt outrageous to start imagining books solely or mostly made ‘of acknowledgments pages—the place heretofore designed for recognizing ‘other people's participation in the making of a book
Annotating the glitch in the page when I wanted to annotate the communalist books of the future part. Maybe this is again the machinic agency interfering :)
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- Nov 2021
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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Rather, the difference often lies in the artistic contract between the portrayer and portrayed;
Also see Mulvey/The male gaze
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wake work
From blurbs: Activating multiple registers of "wake"—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation.
Sharpe’s methodology takes up the ideas of “the wake and wake work.” Sharpe articulates “that to be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding” (13–14). To perform “wake work” is to labor within the space of paradoxes surrounding black citizenship, identity, and civil rights.
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metadata
Surely not all annotation!
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furnish
Love that :)
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- Sep 2021
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The paranoid trust in exposure seemingly depends, in addition, onan infinite reservoir of naIvete in those who make up the audience forthese unveilings. What is the basis for assuming that it will surprise ordisturb-never mind motivate-anyone to learn that a given social mani-festation is artificial, self-contradictory, imitative, phantasmatic, or evenviolent?
There is something weirdly british about this too, that everyone is aware of something obvious that one is just not allowed to say out loud (let's say about the monarchy) and then when it is exposed there is all shock and outrage. I never really understood this move...
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nowledge in the form of exposure.
The 'got yah' moment
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In this case, as alsofrequently in the case of the tautologies of "sexual difference," the verybreadth of reach that makes the theory strong also offers the space-ofwhich this book takes every advantage-for a wealth oftonal nuance, atti-tude, worldly observation, performative paradox, aggression, tenderness,wit, inventive reading, obiter dicta, and writerly panache.
What lies beyond the obvious
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strong theory
I am still not sure I am understanding what she means with Strong Theory, is she using it in a similar way as Klein's positions? But that it is a wide-reaching position that can take over other positions?
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- May 2021
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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. Yet, putting all our ethical focus on the training of technicians to abide by regulations will always fall short, because technical systems have unpredictable results and because technicians view the systems they build from a particular standpoint.
This is quite interesting also from the standpoint of co-design
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focus attention on emerging complexity
Or on ever changing circumstances and applications
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These approaches moreover treat ethics as a series mandates from the top, to be developed by CEOs and applied by designers. A robust techno-ethics requires that these top-down trends be reversed.
Very similar approach of course in research ethics
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- Apr 2021
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hcommons.org hcommons.orgFCJ Issue 2611
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As a result, in these ‘sneaky moments’ tech activist communities and social justice activist communities, ideally a natural match, come to oppose each other.
I don't think they have proven this point, it seems like they have been trying to extend their argument further than it goes.
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sneaky momen
This concept has gotten a bit lost in this article, I don't understand its relevance really
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This is a significant step away from the culture of secure communications. Practitioners participating in what can be called security design collectives will agree that ‘it takes a village to keep a tool secure’ and that security is a continuous ‘cat and mouse game.’ But this culture is lost on the campaign sites.
Co-design is especially important in the context of security design
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co-designing alternative infrastructures
So basically this is what they are arguing for: tools for secure communication should be co-designed with the communities for which they are intended. Seems quite obvious?
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fibreculturejournal.org FCJ-196 217 Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Jara Rocha and Femke SneltingWhen our cultural-political ecosystems intensify or enter moments of agitation, then our relation to tools tends to fall into the paradigm of affordances. It does not matter how radical the political struggle is, people may succumb easily to work with the available. Dependency on the available plot of technological design is precisely what produces the conditions for a sneaky moment, at the risk of discarding very basic political, ethical, and aesthetic sensibilities. To make these residues of our sneaky moment more tangible, we turn to exploring the secure communication campaign sites.Designing the Divide Between Providers and UsersThe three campaign sites we have chosen are intended to mediate between the worlds of tech activists and social justice activists. We are interested in how they use language, design and tool-selection to bridge distances in knowledge, trust, and geography. If these projects are explicitly developed to communicate between agents that are not physically in the same space, how is a relationship of trust established? What do tech activists do to convince activists for social justice that they are on their side, and that the information and technologies provided are worth their trouble? And in the course of these relevant bridging and translation attempts, how do activists for social change find out if the provided tools are appropriate and safe for their situation? The three projects show similarities and also differences in their approach of how ‘us’ and ‘you’ are imagined.
So basically it is just a study on tool developers and their users and how they can gauge each others needs better?
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To make these residues of our sneaky moment more tangible, we turn to exploring the secure communication campaign sites.
Finally!
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The three campaign websites we survey are cultural artefacts, but they are also convivial spaces where various agencies co-habit with tools, discourses, and languages
I like this phrasing
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When it comes to gender, race, age, class and geography diversity among individual tech activists is less noticeable. This lack of diversity has been criticised from within and outside of the community.
Weird combination of sentences...
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These overlapping identities and positions often shift or are part of parallel lives; in other words, some respondents in our respective research cases consciously divide between their techno-engagements for which they get paid and their other political work that they do for activist or ideological reasons and requires technological expertise.
Here they seem to acknolwedge the overlapping positions more but their point is that socio-technical practices create new divides in sneaky moments? It seems like we are already quite far into the article and I still don't really understand the issue, there is a lot of setting the scene and introduction happening here...
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It is at this juncture that the necessity and desire for a convergence between those ‘groups that wish to use the media instrumentally to draw attention to their political efforts versus those who wish to change the media system itself’ (Carroll and Hackett, 2006) became a matter of urgency. In response, a number of secure and private communication campaigns were launched or revamped, which also served to re-shape the delegation relationship between activists and this select group of technologists.
Why a 'convergence'? It all sounds so heavy?
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We propose that the divide between those engaged in politics of technology and those participating in struggles of social justice are being reshaped during those ‘sneaky moments’ and we argue that this reconfiguration requires reflection.
I am not quite sure I understand the 'divide' at this point, and how you can 'reshape a divide'.
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- Mar 2021
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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It builds relation and community, that is: possibility
Building communities around books as fixed and static print entities will always remain problematic though, as the format/materiality of the book is already inscribed with this individualistic competitive 'writing-without'. So any writing with will also have to include the materiality of the book (as a specific agency).
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what is masked in the ‘ “convention” of publishing wherebyacademics put their own names to works’ is the extent to which it is ‘theproduct of a wider collectivity’
Yes! This is why an acknowledgment of the multiple agencies in knowledge production is so important, but it is still only a gesture, an afterthought really.
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Engaging with inherited worlds by adding layersrather than by analytical disarticulation translates in an effort to ‘redescribesomething so that it becomes thicker than it first seems’
I really like the idea of adding layers, but it still seems a bit disconnected? Annotating in hypothes.is could be perceived quite literally as an act of adding layers but it still takes place literally on another level.
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- Feb 2021
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hcommons.org hcommons.org
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with a view to exploring the wider range ofOA models and infrastructures.
I thought all these different OA models were just confusing ;)
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of a model so heavily influ-enced by the corporate interests OA sought to circumvent.
The author needs to make their mind up on what it is OA activists are supposed to be arguing for. Previously their focus was solely on access, here to serve their argument their focus seems to have been on the profit imperative in schol com.
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and by others as rein-forcing the Northern-dominated publishing ecosystem of clicks and impactfactors by illicitly widening its market.
Widening its market? That is an incredibly cynical view on piracy. So is not having access to in some cases life-saving research preferred then?
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Diamond OA may represent a wayfor societies to mark out a unique path to success in a way that a commercialenterprise that needs to satisfy shareholder value would be unable to match.Perhaps this is part of the future for society publishers’. Greater attentionto the ecosystems of scholarly associations and society journals, with theirnon-profit, cooperative commitment to the service of the scholarly commu-nity, may reveal natural allies for the OA movement within the ranks ofsubscription journals.
These allyships are of course already being explored. Also with university presses for example.
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OA activists also tend to lumpsubscription journals together with profiteering publishers, collectively re-garded as enemies of OA.
Again, such a generalisation!
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Many hard-line OA activists have put their shoul-der behind the gold OA initiatives driven by liberalizing governments, re-search funders and corporate publishers
You really need to put some references here to who does OA activists are, and highlight that many OA activists actively critique this!
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The result has been apolicy paradox in which efforts to liberate scholarly publishing from the gripof corporate publishers has put corporate publishers at the centre of policydecisions about the design of OA
I don't think this was ever the aim of most of the policy makers to be honest!
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The detachment of OA initiatives such as Plan S from Africanresearch realities is reflected in the willingness of research funders to financeAPCs for African researchers, but not the computer hardware, membershipfees or wifi connections that would allow them to participate in the digitalresearch fora their articles would feed into (Bezuidenhout et al., 2017: 45).
This is a strong point.
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This special collection draws attention to the exis-tence of these alternative scholarly OA infrastructures, which often emanatefrom the global South and are geared to meet the varied needs and inter-ests of scholars in diverse and often low-resource environments.
I do think this is creating unneccesary binaires here, many nfp open source solutions (such as probably the most well-know and most-used, OJS) emanate from the global north.
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Digital ecosystems for managing OA publishing tend to restrict partici-pation to those who can meet stringent technical conditions, ignoring localconstraints with regard to resources, capacity, infrastructure, or familiaritywith technical requirements.
I do think this is an important point to make. Within COPIM we are therefore for example looking at minimal technical requirements as much as possible.
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for-profit and non-profit
and open source vs proprietary?
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(Sagonowsky,2020; Sherkow et al., 2020; Wolitz, 2019; Wu, 2020)
I am still not following this argument here, and are these references supposed to represent OA advocates? And what does this have to do with publishing?
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As Mirowski (2018: 178) notes,OA advocates insist that publicly funded academic research should be madeavailable for free, yet they raise no issue when publicly funded research isprivatized by corporations, and sold back to the public for substantial profits.
This makes no sense, that is exactly what OA advocates insist on...
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Thisallows ‘better resourced researchers in the [global] North who have superiorcomputing facilities to mine and analyse data’ of Southern scholars, and topublish the results themselves, as well as to translate or republish an articlefor sale in any context without the author’s permission or oversight
So we shouldn't have any data-mining then at all? What about global scholars data-mining global scholars works? There is also the argument that this is partly scare-mongering, rather than backed up by data. I do think there is a good argument to be made for CC BY-NC but I am not buying the no-derivatives stuff...
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and in scholarly and editorial infrastructure,drive developing-country scholars disproportionately into the arms of blackOA, as indicated in the contributions by Berger and by Sagemüller et al. inthis collection.
I will have to read this article because this makes no sense at all...
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others argue that black OAexploits the epistemic exclusion of Southern scholars.
?!?
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Black OA refers to the OA un-derworld of predatory journals and pirate OA platforms like SciHub
Ehm no, these are not the same! Black OA refers to piracy indeed, not to predatory journals. Please don't conflate the two...
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he unsavoury model
OMG, what happened to not falling foul to ideological red herrings?
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Con-versely, gold OA relies on APCs, effectively shifting journals from a pay-to-read to a pay-to-publish model
Noooo! Gold OA is not a business model!
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Yet, this distinctform of OA existed long before gold OA, and remains the model used by themajority of OA journals (Morrison and Rahman, 2020: 10). In 2013, only32 per cent of OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals(DOAJ) charged APCs (Fuchs and Sandoval, 2013). Despite widespreadpressures to adopt gold OA, to date over two-thirds of OA journals listedin DOAJ still do not charge APCs (Morrison, 2018).
Aaargh I am going to stop now, too much wrongness here...
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refer todiamond OA as a new model (Normand, 2018; Raju, 2017).
It is not a new model but a more recent (than gold OA) term.
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where as the Gold Route is seen as open only at theaccess end. (Wilson, 2007a; see also Tottossy and Antonielli, 2012; Wilson, 2010)
Ugh, no, you are only making it worse here by adopting what it is usually promoted as being and which you at the same time critique!
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