1,199 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2017
    1. Therefore, an implication of digitization of which archivists should become aware is the loss of physicality and the material information that supports archival value.

      This seems like an important but somewhat obvious observation. It kind of reminds me of Benjamin and the idea of aura.

    2. Through an exploration of a work’s materiality by considering the evidence of its manufacture, as well as the work’s origins, history and social existence, it becomes apparent that there is a distinct separation of form and content that leads to a further consideration of the object as a document.

      What is going on here?

    3. She questions how much longer textual models can be applied to visual materials with impunity, and suggests that it is necessary to reach outside of thearchival discipline in order to improve the standard approaches to the processes of appraisal, arrangement, and description of visual materials

      I wonder if some of these ideas could apply to multimedia as well.

    4. The problem with Taylor’s assessment techniques is that he is determining the value of a work of art based on content alone, and ignoring the object’s material qualities.

      What does this mean?

    Annotators

    1. . Opting out of a site like Google would mean opting out of much of online life.

      It's doable.

    2. You should be able to stop the malware on your refrigerator from posting racist rants on Twitter while still keeping your beer cold.

      OMG, this is sci-fi right?

    3. is the world’s de facto email server

      LOL

    4. This year especially there’s an uncomfortable feeling in the tech industry that we did something wrong, that in following our credo of “move fast and break things”, some of what we knocked down were the load-bearing walls of our democracy.

      One sentence that sums up so much. Maciej is such a fine writer.

    1. One avenue of future research isthe dynamic relationship between the people who work in digitization factories andthe machines and materials of their labor.

      Reminds me of Sarah Roberts work on Commercial Content Moderation (CCM). https://illusionofvolition.com/behind-the-screen/

    2. University College London scholarGeoffrey Yeo (2009, p. 59) pinpoints the source of ‘‘secondary provenance’’ in thematerial–custodial history of archival collections. He argues that the interpretationof records is affected by the ‘‘previous selection and aggregation decisions’’ takenby both creators and custodians.

      It's interesting to think about the moments when creator and custodian roles overlap.

    3. Thomassen frees the analysis of the archives to encompass informationresources that are not or never have been a part of a formal archive, including digitalsurrogates.

      It's interesting that Conway finds something new in this piece by Thomassen, who was trying to just give an overview and not posit new things about the archive. It sounds like Thomassen could be an interesting to read.

    4. Generations of archivists, beginning with Sir Hilary Jenkinson (Ellis, p. 197),have rejected the archival nature of surrogates, considering them ‘‘artificialcollections’’ at least one step removed from the original source and therefore subjectto even stricter tests of authenticity and reliability (Smith1999).

      Ahh, so this is counter-position that motivates the argument.

    5. The distinction between digitizing for access and digitizing for preservation, sodeeply embedded in the professional perspectives of archivists and librarians, isartificial and misleading. In the digital world, access is the natural and obviousoutcome of digital transformation, even if access is fully realized only throughfunctioning electronic networks and the legal frameworks that manage permissions.

      Preservation is access, in the future. Apologies to @dbrunton ...

    6. This article will argue—and provide some supporting evidence—thatone of the most significant requirements for the long-term care of collections ofdigital surrogates is to respect these collections as archives in their own right,worthy of management, and maintenance as a record of their creation, organicexistence, and use

      Did anyone ever argue otherwise?

    Annotators

    1. when we reflect on the core of digital libraries weeasily observe that they may be libraries by name, but they are archives bynature.

      This is a great way of summing up why archives matter on the web. I ran across it in Paul Conway's https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10502-014-9219-z

      Aside: It's kind of funny how the conversion from PDF to text transformed "we easily" to "weasily"

    1. All résumé writers in this corpus tended to usecertain types of subcategories of adjectives more than others when constructing their texts.

      Is it statistically different than the use of adjectives in other types of written or spoken language? Is an assumption being made that all these categories should be equal?

    2. Noun Subcategories

      how was this conceptual grouping of words done?

    3. The three most commonly used parts of speech relating to content words in the résumécorpus (1,631 tokens) were nouns, verbs, and adjectives,

      this is not unusual I take it?

    4. same set ofcommunicative purposes

      function

    5. Bawarshi (2003) states: “There are the various social forces that constitute the scene of productionwithin which the writer’s cognition as well as his or her text are situated and shaped” (p. 5) andthat “genres function [for] their writers, readers and contexts” (p. 8). Thus, in addition tounderstanding the linguistic forms of a language, writers need also to recognize the socialfunctions of a text before constructing it.

      The function of text is important for being able to construct it. This is context. It's funny how 'text' is in the word 'context'.

    6. A text type can be considered a genre if there issufficient repetition for the readers and writers to recognize a text as a systematic example

      importance of repetition to defining a genre

    Annotators

    1. If relationships between mainstream archival repositories and the community archives ofthe near future are to be mutually beneficial, then they must be based on mutual respect,flexibility and sensitivity towards the concerns of community archive groups for autonomyand ownership.

      Some good lessons here, for archives not just of Occupy but communities of all kinds.

    2. [t]he relationship between sustainability andautonomy is one of the most important dilemmas...for community archives’

      This is a significant observation ... that the two are interrelated.

    3. Bold argues that the purpose ofthe group ‘should NOT be merely in collecting the objects we determine have worth in thehistory of the movement, but trying to offer a framework in which everyone candefine their history’.

      Good aspiration, but kind of vague really. I much prefer the way @Carter:2017 positions the archive as an instrument of power for these groups.

    4. Just as wide participation is important in theOccupy movement itself as a means of organizing without leaders or hierarchies, so tooparticipation in the community archives of the movement is a means of constructingarchives without hierarchical relationships between professional archivists and a non-professional user community.

      While there may not be a hierarchical relationship there is still a relationship. The nature of this relationship would be useful to investigate further.

    Annotators

    1. While Duranti’s argument centres around the idea of the formal institutional archive as the site of archival power, the idea of ‘archives as a place’ is arguably even more valid for community groups who look after their own records. For these groups, it is the autonomy and freedom of owning their own records and independent space which grants the archive ‘recognition and empowerment.

      This is such a crucial observation, and nicely rehabilitates/humanizes Duranti's ideas about provenance and power.

    2. nstead, there is an implicit understanding that resources are there to be used; the ephemerality that surrounds the archive serves as an invitation for readers to explore the collections

      Love this...

    3. This notion of ‘marking out a space’ is interesting in relation to the archive, as it reinforces the political nature of archival activity as rooted in the struggle for independence; with the emphasis firmly on carving out identity, culture and space.

      It's interesting to note the scale between Duranti's notion of archive as place, and the places that are being described here. The difference in power dynamic is significant, but in both cases the archive empowers.

    4. The archive serves a role as a ‘future-past’54 a way of using history to look forward to a more hopeful future. For Southwark Notes, the archive has to serve this more practical, politically engaged function: ‘if we’re not inspired into the future, then what’s the point? [... if the archive] doesn’t collectivise the people coming together, in a way it’s failed in its historical task

      This is a great quote!

    5. put it out there on the web and let people make of it what they will

      Access & Transparency

    6. ‘the rebellion of the archivist against his normal role is not [...] the politicising of a neutral craft, but the humanising of an inevitably political craft.

      So not a rebellion at all really -- just woke, as it were.

    7. as evidenced by the recent special issue of Archival Science focusing entirely on archiving activism and activist archiving, as well as the ethnographic research carried out by Susan Pell, in which she discusses how housing activist groups use archival power as an ‘enabling force’ in knowledge production

      All good things to read!

    Annotators

    1. I would argue, then, that the DIY institutions of this study are not simply storage sites of popular music’s material past. Rather, DIY institutions of popular music are, like other types of community archives, ‘a mediated social and cultural practice’, in which memory is mobilized to engage with the present and work towards an understanding of the future

      I like this definition. What does it have in common with non-DIY archives? Is there such a thing as a non-DIY archive?

    2. These grassroots archives, museums and halls of fame, sustained as they are by the enthu-siasm of volunteers, are indicative of a community-based desire to control how popular music’s past might come to be remembered. These are communities of consumption with a deep investment in the culture being collected and significant concerns over the way music’s past will appear for the future.

      What would you call this mode of thinking? Is it archival thinking? I almost wanted to say teleological but that's not right.

    3. The notion of the DIY institution is closely related to Andrew Flinn and colleagues’ conceptualization of ‘community archives’.13 Flinn’s framing of the community archive informed the ways in which institutions were categorized as ‘DIY’ in the database.

      It's probably important to follow up on this work of Flinn's in the context of the Documenting the Now grant.

    4. ‘DIY institutions’

      It's interesting/amusing to consider what DIY has in common with the "lone archivist" scenario.

    5. site observations and 125 semi-structured ethnographic interviews with founders, volunteers and other heritage workers,

      Holy fuck that's a lot of interviews.

    6. DIY institutions are akin to community archives; what Flinn, Stevens and Shepherd refer to as ‘any collection of material that documents one or many aspects of a community’s heritage, collected in, by and for that community and looked after by its members’

      This seems like a useful definition that isn't overburdened with too much archival terminology.

    Annotators

    1. he approach alsodecentralises curation to the participants who both contribute to and use the archive. It alsoallows communities and contexts to take form within the archive instead of assuming acommunity as a precoordinated entity.

      But the system selected for building the archive comes with a lot of precoordinated ideas and functionality doesn't it?

    2. articipatory archive assumes no consensus on order, no first order oforder (Weinberger2007, pp. 17–19), just the necessity of keeping information findable.

      This goal kind of reminds me of MPLP.

    3. In wiki systems, the most significantarchival functions-related problem was the unstructured nature of the records and theresulting difficulty of maintaining the integrity of an archive.

      It's interesting that lack of structure is desirable and a drawback...

    4. number of digital library-related software packages weredesigned to house a collection of books or other published digital material. Thesystems did not accommodate storing archival records or archaeological data.

      It would be interesting to dig into this a bit more. What functionality was lacking?

    5. ven though the informants agreed with the benefits of standardised descriptions, theyalso underlined the need to be able to insert data and descriptions as they are.Conventions vary between different scientific disciplines and some preliminary andnew observations may not be formal enough to fit in a standardised descriptor format.Similarly, it was agreed to be more important to capture as much relevant informationas possible than to strictly enforce a formal descriptive scheme.

      This is an important observation I think -- and one that has a lot of ramifications.

    6. Thus, the purpose of the digital archive is to reunite the collection andmake these scattered materials available in a single location on the web.

      Ricky's dissertation topic -- archival reunification.

    7. ualitative document analysis

      A research methodology being used to analyze archival materials. How common is this?

    8. raditionally, the principal group of users has beenresearchers. Researchers, primarily with social science background, are still in themajority, but a significant portion of visitors are at the moment people looking forinformation instead of data.

      Is this an easy distinction between data and information, in the archival context?

    Annotators

    1. Though Prince had no formal role with the Trump campaign or transition team, he presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump to high-ranking Emiratis involved in setting up his meeting with the Putin confidant, according to the officials, who did not identify the Russian.

      There's only one Prince. Blasphemy.

  2. Mar 2017
    1. but the latter is just as important to sustained success

      What does success even mean in this context? And what does failure look like? Are these useful ways of framing the work that libraries do when you are doing broken-world-thinking. As Jackson points out failure is the the site of repair, and of innovation. It is a beginning, and an opportunity to reinvent.

    2. In a sense, bibliographic vocabularies have always been "broken".

      It's important to come to terms with this :-) I kinda wish the whole article was about this sentence.

    3. What does broken world thinking mean for vocabularies? Recognition of the fragility of current systems and preparation for inevitable breakdowns; building maintenance functions directly into tools, workflows, and budgets, and including documentation, preservation, and terms of use from the moment projects are conceived.

      I think it also means surfacing and showcasing this maintenance work as Wikipedia does. Not just the vocabulary designers but the people who use the vocabulary to describe things. Who are the people behind our records?

    4. Note, however, that the principle of vocabulary reuse is not universally valid or held.

      It's also a false dichotomy IMHO. You can do both.

    5. What allows MARC to endure, even while ostensibly better options exist is that MARC is still the basis for the Library Management Systems widely in use. Library vendors have been slow to look at new formats for data and integrate them into their offerings, largely because they represent a significant investment in an environment shrinking rapidly by vendor mergers and acquisitions.

      It's interesting to think of the resistance to move from MARC as a function of the maintenance work that goes into doing description ... as opposed to doing standards work.

    6. The result has been that most activity based on shifting to more Semantic Web practices focuses almost entirely on exposing data on the Web, rather than figuring out how to use data provided by others. This reality has tended to limit creation and distribution of vocabularies not part of the traditional practices of library description.

      It's also a question of dependencies. There are risks associated with making your own data workflows dependent on those of another organization.

    7. Moreover, some of the most consequential innovations involve new workflows for seemingly mundane tasks. Consider the profound impact of Git, for example, on distributed version control or Slack on team messaging and file management.

      And what could be more mundane than standards work, which is where efforts around bibliographic description tends to focus so much of their attention. I wonder though if standards work is the opposite of mundane in the bibliographic world. It is a site of political maneuvering, and where the stakes are the highest.

    8. We suggest that a lack of appreciation for broken world constraints leads to unbalanced priorities, where investments flow largely to novelty projects and prototypes, and insufficiently to persons and protocols that enable maintenance and repair, and thus sustainable innovation.

      This is an important insight for managers of data infrastructures. The trouble with maintenance work is that it is often invisible until it breaks. How can data maintenance work be made more visible?

    1. As part of the process, the software recognised which parts of a page were pictures in order to discard them.Mr Leetaru's code used this information to go back to the original scans, extract the regions the OCR program had ignored, and then save each one as a separate file in the Jpeg picture format.

      Using the OCR data (as represented in the epub) to extract images from images of book pages.

    1. Yeah, I think that’s one of the struggles with this case. It has gotten an extraordinary amount of attention, which Jocelyn can share how that has really energized her father and energized her family. The amount of people that are fighting back. In some ways, that can have the kind of deterrent effect that we know that Donald Trump wants. We know that he wants, as we heard in some of the previous stories, to make people afraid of coming to the United States. To make this country unwelcoming of immigrants. And a case like this getting the kind of attention that it’s got can have that effect, unless we use this case to fight back. Unless we refuse to be desensitized to the kind of horror and trauma that we see in the video that Fatima shot. Unless we use that as an opportunity to mobilize and to fight back and to say, “Not in our backyards, not in our cities, not in our community, not in our country.” We’re going to not be complicit in this kind of brutal immigration enforcement actions from this administration or any administration.

      This is a super important point re: the Trump administration psychological manipulation of the media.

    1. he majority of video archiving solutions today focus on just the default version of a video or the highest resolution version, rather than attempting to archive all editions of a stream.

      Is this a problem, especially in a world where it's difficult to archive video because of storage constraints?

    2. While numerous utilities exist that are able to reverse the streaming protocols used by major video hosting sites, the sites themselves rarely offer officially sanctioned APIs for bulk downloading large volumes of their content as raw video source files.

      Utilities like (the amazing) youtube-dl which works with a lot more than just YouTube.

  3. Feb 2017
    1. Deciding what, exactly, is worth archiving is largely left up to the commander in chief, said Sharon Fawcett, assistant archivist for presidential libraries at the National Archives and Records Administration from 1969 to 2011.

      largely eh?

    1. Almost immediately, this method of traditional, hierarchical arrangement broke down as the university began its relentless shifting of administrative reporting lines.

      What does this breakdown actually look like in an archive?

    2. Robyns borrowed the following elements of the Canadian model to help appraise the relative importance of office functions

      shows that they are consulting the research literature -- one of Ricky's pet peeves when they do not...

    Annotators

    1. Archivistshavecometoacknowledgeandparticipateinsuchdocumentaryactivities,butaprofessionalconsensushasnotemergedabouttheirlegitimacyornecessityasaregularpartoftheresponsibilityofanyinstitutionalarchivist.

      This is an interesting aspect to the work of the archivist. Have things changed in the almost 50 years since this was written? It it possible that other professions have absorbed archival thinking: law, humanities, etc?

    2. Ratherthanaskingwhatexists,thequestionshouldbewhatisthevalueoftheavailableinformationtoprovideevidenceaboutthephenomenon.

      This seems like a key question to ask.

    3. Ratherthanrelyingonsubjectiveguessesaboutpotentialresearch,appraisaldecisionsmustbeguidedbyclearerdocumentaryobjectivesbasedonathoroughunderstandingofthephenomenonorinstitutiontobedocumented.Sincearchivistscannotpredictfutureresearch,thebesttheycandoIstodocumentInstitutionsasadequatelyaspossible.Arepresentativerecordofthefullbreadthofaninstitutionisthebestinsurancethatfutureresearcherswillbeabletoanswerthequestionstheychoosetoask.FunctionalanalysismakesItpossibletoselectsucharecord.

      Focus is on the present. Where we can actually observe and act.

    4. BearmanandLytlearguepersuasivelyfortheuseoffunctions,especiallyfordescnptlvepurposes.

      Could be interesting to look at this work by Bearman.

    5. rofessionalsasdIverseasanthropologists,sociologists,andbusinessmanagersusefunctionalanalysisasadescriptivetechniquetofacilitatetheexaminationofpatternsacrossstructuresandcultures.

      Interesting to see the explicit connection to anthropology and sociology.

    6. HughTaylorandTerryCook,whosuggestthat“thefocusofappraisalshouldshiftfromtheactualrecordtotheconceptualcontextofItscreation,fromthephysicaltotheintellectual,frommattertomind.

      So Samuel's work on Documentation Strategies was done in light of Cook's macro-appraisal work?

    7. whattheinstitutiondoes

      Seems like good work for an anthropologist or sociologist.

    Annotators

    1. eliberately seeks to give voice to the marginalised, to the‘other’, to losers as well as winners, to the disadvantaged and underprivileged as wellas the powerful and articulate, which is accomplished through new ways of lookingat case files and electronic data and then choosing the most succinct record in thebest medium for documenting these diverse voices

      Is this a liberal view, or is it just a holistic view? It speaks back to power, rather than simply re-inscribing power.

    2. The macro-appraisal model, although developed first to appraise the records at thelevel of the nation state (the Government of Canada), finds sanction for archivalappraisal ‘value’ of determining what to keep, and what to destroy, not in the dictatesof the state, as traditionally with Jenkinson and his followers, nor in following thelatest trends of historical research with Schellenberg and his many more followers, asmore recently, but rather in trying to reflect society’s values through a functionalanalysis of the interaction of the citizen with the state.

      It's interesting that macro-appraisal is almost like a research method, but one that has a more sociological bent than a historical bent.

    3. acro-appraisal is thus a provenance-basedapproach to appraisal, where the social context of the record’s creation and contem-porary use (not its anticipated research use) establishes its relative value.

      This distinction is key, it is focused on things that can actually be determined in the present -- no divination or prognostication required.

    4. Then, matching information from the known record-keeping universe for all systemsand all media, the archivist decides which registries, systems and media collectionswill likely have the best records to provide ‘sufficient evidence’ of the function andcitizen’s interactions with it.

      Here, we see the old focus on evidence come into play.

    5. The point is to identify other narratives or stories within the records,where these exist, so that we as archivists may present to posterity a fuller series ofcompeting ‘truths’ about the past that researchers then may weigh for whateverpurposes, rather than our usual predilection in appraisal for preserving the dominantor ‘winning’ voices from the past

      Interesting parallels to Verne Harris' ideas of telling stories. The difference here is that the stories are already told, and need to be located?

    6. When the macro-appraisal functional analysis is completed, the archivist should beable to form a set of hypotheses regarding the appraisal work lying ahead, whereactual records are checked to validate or modify the hypothesis.

      Ah, so the hypothesis formed during the functional analysis is proved by examining records.

    7. acro-appraisal hypothesis

      And how is this hypothesis tested?

    8. the structural site(s)

      Materiality is important here.

    9. he object of the macro-appraisal and records disposalproject

      How is this object identified?

    10. onlythoseOPIs that best and most centrally reflectthe programme’s own functioning, its wider impact and citizen interaction with it.

      What are ways of determining citizen interaction? I'm reminded of the role that the news played in the work of some web archivists I talked to.

    11. Macro-appraisal in short putsprovenance-based context back into appraisal, and pays much less attention to thesubject content of records. Yet as seen, that provenance-based context is not thetraditional one of linking records to their ‘office of origin’, but rather to the complexorganisational culture in which record-creating and record-keeping takes place inmodern institutions.

      I like the sound of this approach, but it is somehow unsatisfying -- how is organizational culture different than the organization?

    12. he theoretical focus remains societal, that is,to appraise (or identify) those records providing evidence of the greatest impact of thegovernment on society (and on government itself)

      How do we measure or even begin to think about what the impact on society is?

    13. These two questions suggest a third: whichrecord creators or ‘functions’ (rather than which records) are the most important?

      Isn't this just a rephrasing of the first question? What functions should be documented?

    14. Suchvalue-based questions are essentially philosophical, for when we ask what givessomething value, what makes it worth preserving and remembering, we are essentiallyasking the age-old question: what is the good?

      I like this tie between appraisal and philosophy.

    15. Appraisal is inevitably a subjective process

      This seems like an important point to stress -- that documentation is not a scientific process.

      What are the best ways of describing this subjective process?

    16. ppraisal theory has no direct relationship with archival theory: indeed, they maybe seen as opposites

      Wow, I thought appraisal theory fit within archival theory generally?

    17. crisis of preserving electronic records

      What is the crisis - that they aren't in archives?

    Annotators

    1. A caller to the (New Zealand) Electricity and GasComplaints Commissioner’s Office is complaining that the electricity company is not supplyingenough power to heat her bathwater.

      Where does this data come from?!

    Annotators

    1. each of the positions at which repair DOES get initiated is a position at which repair CAN get initiated.

      What does this mean?!

    Annotators

    1. the conversation analyst must collect multiple instances of a phenomenon in order to discern the generic, context - independent properties of a practice — the proper-ties, that is, which are independent of some particular instantiation of it.

      I get why you need multiple instances -- but is context independence ever really achieved for an analysis based on language?

    2. Like the cartographers of the 18th century who mapped large sections of the globe,

      Is it interesting that the mechanics of imperialism was chosen as a metaphor for conversation analysis?

    1. Maybe community usage requires different principles — less emphasis on citation and disambiguation and more emphasis of integration into people’s every day lives.

      I think there are strong parallels here with how social media integrates with people's lives. In what ways can the archive participate in this sort of interactive space?

    2. Maybe we need a multiplicity of ways of engaging the past, and bring people in.

      I think this point is really important. How can we tell the story of provenance without having a single driving narrative?

    1. n most cases, property and copyrights are transferred to the Regents of the University of Minnesota on behalf of the Charles Babbage Institute, however, the agreement does not affect the copyrights to previously published works. Transferring copyrights enables CBI to grant researchers permission to quote from the collection.

      What the heck does this mean?

    2. CBI does not collect obsolete product manuals, three-dimensional materials or other artifacts.

      They say what they don't collect.

    1. Ordinary citizens across the Middle East expressed solidarity with Ferguson’s unhappy residents. In particular, Palestinians expressed their support – and even offered handy tips as to how protesters might best deal with attacks by cops using tear gas. @MariamBarghouti advised:

      An example of how protestors around the world were able to communicate with protestors on the ground in Ferguson.

    1. he Chinese students' responses, moreover, wereoften incomprehensible or unforthcoming, suggesting that they wereperhaps unable or reluctant to be aligned with ancestor worship throughincense-burning, and thereby potentially positioned as Asian, alien, non-Christian, and so on.

      Or that the observer didn't understand?

    2. also revealed the pervasiveness ofdisgruntled and alienated studentsÐindividuals and groups who perceivethemselves to be disenfranchised, unvalued, and di€erent from the seeminglymore popular, celebrated, and powerful mainstream.

      Doesn't this require a citation of some kind?

    Annotators

    1. Thissuggests that repositories might be posting collecting polices on the Internetprimarily for potential donors. If this is the case, it is possible that the documentthat is designated as a collecting policy on the repository’s web site is not thedocument that is used for internal decision-making but an abbreviated versioncontaining the information that program staff believes would be most usefulto potential donors. Are these “collecting policies” actually public relations doc-uments rather than policy-making documents? If so, what assumptions do theyreveal about the types of information that archivists believe the public is inter-ested in seeing? In a larger study, it would be informative to contact reposito-ries to ascertain whether the Web version of the policy is the actual documentused to guide selection decisions.

      Who is the audience for the document. This could be interesting to look at from a discourse perspective.

    2. these documents must be suf-ficiently specific to allow for application in practice, that they must be tailored tothe individual repository, and that they must be living rather than static documentsthat are periodically updated to account for collection growth and changing

      Interesting that Ham was so insistent on them needing to be actionable. This is basically what I was looking at in my interviews with web archivists.

    Annotators

    1. Part, but certainly not all, of the success that I had collecting the papersof African American women in Iowa and authors can be attributed to mybeing an African American woman myself. The identity I share with po-tential donors helps to establish rapport and trust, two elements that aregenerally crucial to fostering good donor relations but have been particu-larly important to me as I built the number of collections practically fromscratch. The “insider” perspective often enables me to understand nu-ances specific to African American culture that may appear both in myconversations with donors during field visits and in the papers them-selves.

      This does seem like a crucial element. It almost reminds me of action research.

    2. nce I discovered that the collection’s greatest strengths lie in litera-ture and literary history, it became clear that documenting the lives andexperiences of black authors and other individuals involved with theAfrican American literary scene (such as editors, publishers, book col-lectors, librarians, reviewers, and book club members) was the logicalniche to develop.

      Makes me wonder how DocNow could help assist with this process. Perhaps looking at other media produced by the user, or examining their profile and homepage url?

    Annotators

    1. Registration requests should be sent to the wellknown-uri-review@ietf.org mailing list for review and comment, with an appropriate subject (e.g., "Request for well-known URI: example").

      How to register a wellknown-uri

    1. For instance, technological prowess cannot be acquired second hand; it requires personal investment in time and effort to convert external wealth into an integral part of the person

      This section says a lot about problems inherent in the Digital Humanities.

    Annotators

    1. Theawakening of class-consciousness is often bound up within a process of rehabilitating andrebuilding self-esteem, and reaffirming cultural dignity (Freire, 1970; Giroux, 1983; Hooks,2000). It is transformative in that it inculcates the habitus by forcing the agent to criticallyreflect upon arbitrariness of the symbolic power being exerted upon them. Agents can thenresist this symbolic power, and begin to find ways of using ICT to support the issues that areimportant to their social life situations such as employment, housing, environmental, safety andtransportation.

      This is how the Internet can help with survival.

    2. What does the Internet mean for oursurvival?

      Awesome quote!

    3. WorldGate,the company that served as the ISP ceased to offer its service and the City of LaGrange did nothave an alternative supplier that could provide the service over the same infrastructure. Whilemost residents view the programme as a gift, a few are bitter that the programme has ended.

      dang, wtf!

    4. Toget the ‘free’ system, one must already have or be willing to pay for basic cable TV at a costof $8.70 per month

      It's a way to get people to consume.

    5. You know how a baby has to be breastfed milk. He can’t eat food? Well that’s how I feel. Theyare giving us milk, and this is not enough to feed us. We need to be able to eat food if we wantto get jobs.

      Voice.

    6. city officials, citizens and business owners. In addition, telephone inter-views were conducted with representatives from the cable operator (Charter Communications)and the internet service provider (ISP, WorldGate) to obtain the perspective of these stake-

      No interviews with actual users of the service?

    7. So, ina sense, we are examining social agents who have chosen to learn about ICT and believe inthe ideology of ICT as an enabler of life chances; and while they clearly exercise humanagency, this seems more like an act of assimilation rather than an act of resistance

      While I get this, I wonder if it might be painting with a broad brush. I think an argument could be made that there are liberatory online spaces that people can participate in.

    Annotators

    1. Mypointsofaristhatanalystsdonotneedtoinvokemotivations,intentionsandothermentaleventsfortheanalysisofspeechactsininteraction.Instead,theadvocatedanalyticalpolicyistopaycloseattentionto(a)whereanactionisplacedinthesequentialstructureand(b)howtheturnthathousestheactionanditsimmediatelyprecedingandfollowingturnsarecomposed.

      This reminds me of Wittgenstein (and Rorty's) position concerning internal states and word meaning. Instead of understanding the meaning of words to reflect internal states, the meaning can be found in how the words are used in a particular context, or language game.

    2. Inverybroadterms,speechactpragmaticsexplainshowanutterancewasrespondedtoaccordingtowhattheutterancemeant.Conversationanalysisexplainswhattheutterancemeantaccordingtohowitwasrespondedto.

      This is an interesting way of looking at it. The sequencing is different, but the things are the same: meaning of utterance and response. In speech act theory you define the response in relation to the meaning of the utterance. But in conversational analysis you understand the meaning of the utterance in relation to the response. The dependency is flipped.

    Annotators

    1. What is the purpose of making and keepingrecords? Why do people want them? What will they do with them? What will they dowithout them? Who else besides the formal creators needs the records and why?

      These seem like pragmatic goals.

    Annotators

    1. concepts that served needs of a particular people at a particular moment in time.

      Yes, I like this point.

    2. If the NationalArchives (as well as every state archives) were obliterated tomorrow, the perpetual memoryand public faith inherent in the American legal system would not be affected.

      What is this faith in the American legal system? Aren't Boles and Greene reinscribing a nationalistic formulation of the archive?

    Annotators

    1. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere betweenJenkinson and Schellenberg, with a realization that appraisal must be based onthe needs of the creator in fulfilling their own administrative and legal func-tions, but that an archives which preserved only those records created by gov-ernmental or organizational bureaucracies would fail to meet our expectationsof the role which archives have come to play in providing a sense of nationaland cultural history.

      That about sums it up.

    2. The need for the archivist’s intervention in an electronic environmentis essential, for passivity in this respect may well result in records either notbeing preserved at all, or if preserved, being technologically irretrievable.

      This is a super important point. What do these interventions look like though? Could it be interventions into the operation of the software itself: archival functions being built into tools like Facebook, Twitter, ArchiveSocial, etc?

    3. The archivistmust not, however, act as creator or historian, for as Jenkinson repeatedlywarns, archives are valuable precisely because they have not been created forposterity.

      The idea that the archivist cannot be a creator is at odds with Harris' idea of the archivist as storyteller.

    4. archives: records emerge often by “pure chance” from “a kindof cocoon stage”of neglect, after which, “if they survive,” they reach a point wherethey are once again consulted and “their value for the purposes of Research isrecognized and becomes the governing factor in their preservation.

      This doesn't work so well with electronic records because of their volatility.

    Annotators

    1. Manuscripts are the natural, un-self- conscious, impartial, interrelated

      what could be more self-conscious than selecting material to donate to an archive for the future?

    2. exacerbated in the last two decades by the freedom of infor- mation movement

      I can almost hear the sneer in this.

    3. It is quite clear that, if what qualifies documents as archival is their nature - as Jenkinson believed - the idea of attributing values to them is in profound conflict with archival theory

      aren't there values implicit in jenkinson's ideas about archival nature?

    4. Then he presented the con- cept of evidential value as an exclusive concern of secondary users. By so doing, he prepared the path for the complete di- vergence of American archival practice from that of the rest of the Western world

      How is evidence different from authenticity?

    5. the two fundamental method- ological principles of archival science stress the primacy of origin, structure, and function over content, use, or importance

      Is this two? How is function different than use?

    6. In fact, the task of the archivist is to be the servant of truth, of the simple truth, not of that truth which can please certain persons or serve the views of the one or the other school of thought

      Again the dispute about what constitutes truth. This is the positivist claim.

    7. but for an Adminis- trative body to destroy what it no longer needs is a matter entirely within its competence and an action which future ages . . . cannot possi- bly criticize as illegitimate or as af- fecting the status of the remaining archive

      This imbues the state or institution with impeccable virtue. These organizations are people too!

    8. Therefore, the attribution of value uses as the primary basis of judgment an element, content, that is in contrast with the proce- dural and formal neutrality of the archival whole, and in so doing it undermines the im- partiality and authenticity of its meaning

      so appraisal is anti-archival?

    9. The fact that archival doc- uments are not contrived outside the direct requirements of the conduct of affairs - that is, that they accumulate naturally, pro- gressively, and continuously, like the sed- iments of geological stratifications24 - provides them with an element of sponta- neous yet structured cohesiveness

      But what affairs are worth paying attention to? How do you decide what sediments are of value?

    10. truth

      This conception of truth is where the postmodernists part ways.

    11. Jenkinson, Cencetti, Brenneke, Bautier, and the many others who have enriched the European ar- chival literature of our times.

      She is establishing a lineage here.

    12. The absence of proper care eventually made the documents in the archives-sediment disappear, victims of natural events or human vicissitudes, while those in the archives-treasure re- mained as continuing proof of events past.

      archives sediment vs archives treasure

    13. Rather, the traces of all facts were preserved, their intensity as profound as the effects of those facts had been at the time of their occurrence

      Is this fact or fiction?

    14. Private persons began to deposit false doc- uments in public archives to lend them public faith.

      And the institutions didn't?

    15. As a consequence, not every entity could have an archives; only the persons or corpora- tions invested with sovereign power had the right to establish one in their own ju- risdiction (jus archivi or archivale).

      The archive is linked to power.

    16. Rather, the link was with ideas of continuity (or absence of interruptions), stability (or absence of change), and endurance (or absence of known term)

      How are those ideas different from the eternal? Do they express more of a process?

    17. the fundamental con- cepts of archival theory are rooted in concepts embedded in Roman law, which have lingered for centuries and are so in- grained in our Western culture that we keep perpetuating them even when we can- not remember the reason for doing so.

      err, ok?

    18. quasi-complete silence on the subject in all the other Western countries

      huh?

    19. In the former case, we have appraisal for selection. In the latter case, we have ap- praisal for acquisition

      I don't understand this distinction.

    Annotators

  4. Jan 2017
    1. A second, related, contribution to come from the analysis of grammar ininteraction is the recognition that grammar is knowledge of how to dothings(Bybee, 2002b) and how to do things together(Clark, 1992, 1996) – that is, it issharedknowledge in a very literal sense of the word.

      If you are studying interaction between people isn't this a given? What would the study of interaction look like if there was no sharing of knowledge?

    Annotators

    1. The image of anarchivist as an Indiana Jones-type character, hunting outthe treasures of the past in exciting pursuits, is romanticbut inaccurate; rather, archivists are flawed humanstrying to develop clear and reliable methods for identi-fying records that should beacquired by archives.

      Isn't recognition of these flaws, and working with the, rather than daydreaming about systematic standards for eradicating them, part of the way forwards?

    2. Others have made similar pleas for a socialsensitivity in appraising and collecting,[180,182]but the un-inhibited human nature of collecting works against anykind of uniform approach for dealing with such matters.

      What does this even mean?

    3. It has long been recognized that one of the greatestchallenges is the lack of a national system in appraisingand acquiring records, leading to some early calls forbetter communication about appraisal decisions.

      Would such national standards actually help? What are the pitfalls of expecting there to be such standards?

    4. In themid-1990s a national conference on the appraisal of Ameri-can business records tried to deal with the myriad challengesposed by corporate records, but whether or not it reallyhelped get any closer to developing workable solutions isunclear.

      What is a "workable solution" in this context? What is the problem that Cox has identified? Is it even real?

    5. e do not createthe past like an artist creates a work of art; rather we aim tocontrol the past, or more accurately, to control the docu-mentation of the past, like a systems methodizer, balancingaims, objectives, resources and demand.

      What is the difference between controlling the past compared to creating the past?

    6. The stress between pri-vate and institutional collectors is somewhat modified bythis relationship. Private collectors often create trends incollecting or have the financial resources to build collec-tions; it is often up to institutional repositories to housethem and make them available for researchers.[101]It isprecisely at this intersection between private collector andinstitutional repository that the most dramatic aspects ofthe psychological nature of collecting are seen.

      Why is this individual/institutional distinction so important? Aren't institutions made up of individuals?

    7. “Strict objectivity, totalindifference to partisan issues on the site of collecting,and an unmitigated passion for identifying the truth arethe hallmarks of the collector’s trade

      An archival myth, if there ever was one.

    8. Such stories are often amain attraction for individuals to become professionalarchivists and manuscripts curators.

      How bitter.

    9. Now archivistsare developing methodologies to help them identify cri-teria for dealing with ephemera and other nontraditionalrecords

      Like what?

    Annotators

    1. Itisimportanttodistinguishbetweenmeanings(includinggoalsandintentions)inferredbyobserversandmeanings(includinggoalsandinten­tions)inferredbyparticipants.Analysingdiscourseisoftenmakinginfer­encesaboutinferences.

      Is the researcher herself an observer?

    2. functionalanalysis

      What is language doing. Performative.

    Annotators

    1. Canadian archivists are not contentsimply to discuss the subject of appraisal. They put into practice and test theirideas.

      This is what makes archival science a science!

    2. Luciana Duranti, who believes that it is important to appraiseusing a scale of values contemporary to the period when the documents werecreated

      Isn't this similar to Booms?

    3. n addition, to avoid overly theoretical or disconnectedappraisals, and ones marginal to the administrative needs of an organization,archivists in Québec have established a relationship between appraisal andneeds assessment.

      Who are the people who need something? Archivists, researchers, administrators, all of the above? Whose needs matter?

    4. Must we reject one in favour of the other? Should we not attempt to makethese objectives complementary?

      Such a simple idea, not slavishly following a particular model, but embracing the composition of values and approaches.

    5. For example, Terry Eastwood, professor of archival science at the Univer-sity of British Columbia (UBC), insisted on the need to base an appraisal onthe use of archives.

      Use of the archives as a measure of what should be kept. It's hard to argue with this approach.

    6. Cook advances “macro-appraisal”: appraisingcreator institutions before appraising their documents

      Of course there is still the problem of appraising the institution. But it does seem important to link the record creator with the records.

    7. In 1986, Helen Samuels expanded on this concept byestablishing a clear relationship between archival acquisition and archivalappraisal

      It's hard for me to think of appraisal separate from acquisition, but it's interesting to see that this was a fairly recent discovery.

    8. it is hard to determine whether the authors areactually describing the same realities

      maybe they aren't?

    9. must ultimately offer comprehensive evidence ofsocietal actions and conditions

      Evidence, in the form of more documentation?

    Annotators

    1. cancerous silences

      Did he know he had cancer?

    2. One example, very reminiscent of the oral-history enthusiasm of the 1960s to 1980s,is seeing established archives harvesting significant parts of the Internet, especiallysocial networking applications for various targeted groups in the ‘community’demographic.

      This is the lineage that DocNow is part of.

    3. Communities give themselves the chronicles they need in order to understand theworld, just as individuals create for themselves the stories they need in order tosurvive with a sense of self. . . .A nation that does not take into account themultitude of suppressed memories of the majority of its people will always be weak,basing its survival on the exclusion of dissent and otherness. Those whose lives arenot valued, not given narrative dignity, cannot really be part of the solution of theabiding problems of our times

      I love how this quote connects the individual story with the community and state.

    4. I believed this over 20 yearsago when conceptualizing the citizen–state relationship as the heart of macro-appraisal, and I believe it is even more relevant now for our digital age, when suchengagement is all the more possible technologically and expected socially.

      I'm just noticing now that Cook wrote this just 3 years before he died of pancreatic cancer....

      I think we are still figuring out what the Web means for citizen-state relationship -- the relationship itself is being transformed.

    5. Engaging the citizen

      Citizen still thinks of the individual in relation to the state. But what of engaging people, on the periphery of the state, as they collapse?

    6. we may not, even in a pan-national collaborative network,always acquire them, save as a last protective resor

      post-custodialism

    7. Only after this inter-related ‘whole of society’ or ‘total archive’ landscape is knowncan the archivist target realistically the actual records or series of records likely tohave greatest potential archival value, in a complementary, holistic, integration of thepublic and private, the centre and the regions, the well-articulated voices and themissing voices, for the human or organizational functions or activities under studyduring the appraisal process.

      This sounds like a documentation strategy?

    8. Of course, private-sector appraisal decisions would complement this public-sectoror institutional macroappraisal within a truly integrated ‘total archives’ framework.

      Having his cake and eating it too...

    9. Governance emphasizes the dialogue and interaction of citizens and groups withthe state as much as the state’s own policies and procedures; focuses as well ondocumenting the impact of the state on society, and the functions and activities ofsociety itself; encompasses all media rather than privileging written text; searches formultiple narratives and hot spots of contested discourse between citizen and state,rather than accepting the official policy line; and deliberately seeks to give voice to themarginalized, to losers as well as winners, to the disadvantaged and underprivilegedas well as the powerful and articulate, which is accomplished through new ways oflooking at case files and electronic data and then choosing the most succinct record inthe best medium for documenting these diverse voices.

      Is this focus on the state a bit outdated now. Think of the impact that corporations are having on our lives, societies and planet. Do we just let the off the hook?

    10. Booms suggested that archivists should studysociety directly through reading and viewing evidence of public opinioncontemporary to the records being appraised,

      Again, the lure of Documenting the Now.

    11. Here, archivists try toreflect society (and its values) through appraisal not by gaining some comprehensiveunderstanding of the specific ‘reality’ of what society’s values were and then searchingfor records to represent these values proportionately, which is an impossible task.

      It would be interesting to explore how this is impossible.

    12. If there is indeed anything or anyone qualified to lend legitimacy toarchival appraisal, it is society itself, and the public opinions it expresses – assuming,of course, that these are allowed to develop freely.

      How do we listen to society? I hear America singing.

    13. The focus of archivists shifted from being centered around archives as‘truth,’ evidence, authenticity, defending the integrity of the record, to archives asstory, as narrative, as part of a societal and governance process of remembering andforgetting, of concern about power and margins, in which the archivist consciouslyembraced a more visible role in co-creating the archive, not just being the curator ofwhat was left over.

      A shift from archives as evidence to archive as process.

    14. allowing the creator to determine ‘value’ privileges the powerful and the institutionalin society over the private and the personal, corporations and governments overcitizens and communities, upper-level policy makers over lower-level workersinteracting daily with citizens, those, in short, who have the resources andinfrastructure and continuity and time to create and manage records in an orderlyway, and preserve them over centuries – no mean feat, and increasingly so with vastamounts of digital data – and who have the motivation to do so as a means ofnaturalizing and legitimizing their own on-going hegemony as historically sanctionedin the past and thus validated for the future.

      interesting to consider how this position shifts when creators of social media content are empowered to control how their content is used. Citizens and communities are present in social media, and should be empowered, whereas large organizations are also present, and perhaps should not.

    15. This neo-Jenkinsonianism echoes as well in reactions I receive from someparticipants in appraisal workshops that, with the costs of digital storage shrinking,and the capacity of digital storage expanding exponentially, maybe now we can keepit all, and allow various combinations of software search engines, metadatadirectories, and archival description to separate the 1 or 2 per cent of digital wheatfrom the 98 or 99 per cent of cyber-chaff.

      Reminds me of Vint Cerf's idea of the accidental archive, and how a total archive on the Internet is within grasp.

    16. his idea of appraisal as the missing piece of the archival puzzle evokes, itseems to me, three issues that we need to confront if we are to have a usefuldialogue about appraisal: first, the Jenkinsonian legacy, if I may be so bold beforea United Kingdom audience, that archivists should not do appraisal at all, that itis un-archival; secondly, the related but separate notion that the archivist shouldbe positioned as an objective curator, passive and neutral, rather than asconscious mediator, activist and subjective; and, thirdly, that archival work,including appraisal, may be reduced to a series of processes and procedureswithout attention to the theoretical or philosophical core centered around values

      Three core positions about appraisal to be critiqued.

    17. co-creating archives

      Possible parallels with Jasanoff's coproduction?

    18. ‘by taking upparticular tools we accede to desires and we manifest intentions.

      I should follow up on this quote, since the idea of appraisal tools hits very close to home in the work I'm doing with Documenting the Now.

    Annotators

    1. Custom content library - do all this with your video assets... not just Trump

      Makes sense that you would need to pay to create your own archive.

    1. ## To configure a dynamic IP address auto eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp ## Or configure a static IP auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 192.168.1.14 gateway 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 network 192.168.1.0 broadcast 192.168.1.255

      Maybe this will work?

  5. Dec 2016
    1. The question,then, is not so much one of finding the fundamental technical characteristic of amedium so as to draw some essential cultural characteristic, but to examine itstechnical formation in genealogical terms. As the “network” approach developedby ANT suggests, there is a need to problematize the description of the Web aslayers of technical processes. That is, it is necessary to investigate not only whatforms those layers of hardware and software, but also how they are related to eachother and how they potentially influence each other.

      Nice description of why ANT is important here.

    2. Dematerialization can be taken as problematic and paradox-ical, in that it does not mean the absence of material supports for representation,but rather points to the new material relationships that are established betweencontent and hardware. Computing dematerializes representations through a seriesof calculations in order to make them readable on a range of devices (computers,PCs, or Macs, PDAs, et cetera). A digital picture, then, is not something producedby a camera through chemical processes, but a representation that samples the“real” and that can be easily manipulated.

      This idea of dematerialization could be interesting to put into dialogue with Kirschenbaum's critique of the ideology that digital is ephemeral and fleeting.

    3. Picturing the Web not only as a hypermediatednetwork, but also, and more importantly, as a site of interrelated social and tech-nical processes, opens the way for both an exploration of not only the surface ofthe Web — what appears on our computer screens — but also for a deeper multi-level analysis.

      Nice description of why it's important to look at the processes at work in the architecture of the Web.

    4. To assess the cultural importance of the Web as a medium, it is neces-sary to examine what kind of actions and cultural possibilities are embedded inthose layers, how they influence each other, and how, especially with the rise ofautomated, dynamic, and adaptive forms of communication, they give rise toagents that regulate the discursive possibilities of the Web

      Web as a medium. I was four years late writing Web as a preservation medium it seems :-)

    5. The technicalassemblage that forms the Web is only felt when communication breaks down,when the server is not working, or the browser is not capable of decoding a newlanguage

      Breakdown.

    Annotators

    1. Careful logging of algorithm executions will alsohelp. These detailed logs, such as those collected byaircraft flight data recorders, will enable National Al-gorithm Safety Board investigators to study exactlywhat happened. As best practices for logging in eachindustry become widely accepted, reviewers will beable to more reliably assign responsibility for failureswhile making compelling evidence-based recommen-dations for improvements (20).

      It's interesting to think about what guidelines or best practices for such a logging might look like. I suspect it could potentially border on conversations about data provenance?

    1. If you provide Content to third parties, including downloadable datasets of Content or an API that returns Content, you will only distribute or allow download of Tweet IDs and/or User IDs. You may, however, provide export via non-automated means (e.g., download of spreadsheets or PDF files, or use of a “save as” button) of up to 50,000 public Tweets and/or User Objects per user of your Service, per day. Any Content provided to third parties via non-automated file download remains subject to this Policy.

      This is why tools for hydrating tweet identifiers back into the JSON data are important.

    1. I refuse to entertain my students with mummified ideas and abstract forms of philosophical self-stimulation. What leaves their hands is always philosophically alive, vibrant and filled with urgency. I want them to engage in the process of freeing ideas, freeing their philosophical imaginations. I want them to lose sleep over the pain and suffering of so many lives that many of us deem disposable. I want them to become conceptually unhinged, to leave my classes discontented and maladjusted.

      Yes.

    1. To discover hidden gems in existing stores of human knowledge, Swanson wrote in his 1986 essay, we would need a massive thesaurus—one that describes “all relationships that people know about and then determine, for each search, which among those relationships” are actually relevant. “To build such a universal thesaurus entails no less than modeling all of human knowledge,” he wrote. It would be an impossible task—not least of all because, “to use such a thesaurus, one would have to retrieve relevant information from it, so a second universal thesaurus would be needed as a retrieval aid to the first, and so on ad infinitum. The builder of a thesaurus is, in principle, lost in an infinite regress.”

      This is a satisfying description of language too.

    2. Surviving artifacts, especially anything made from bronze like the mechanism, are even harder to come by. Many such objects were melted down to make weapons and ammunition.

      A grim & necessary thought: how many cultural artifacts have been lost to the machinery of war.

    3. If there is any hope of finding new information about the Antikythera Mechanism—or, for that matter, any additional devices like it—it is likely that machines, working alongside human researchers, will play a pivotal role.

      Alongside, or one inside the other--interpenetrating. Can we imagine our current way of life without the Internet and computerized telecommunications? What would life look after the Internet? We assume a headlong trajectory forward, but perhaps there will be slippage? Some things we have now will be forgotten. What if we cede the open space of the Web to heavily corporatized smart phone spaces. What if we give up computers that run on elbow grease with ones that require a vast network of energy that is destroying the planet?

      Sorry, negative thoughts.

    4. The web was built to be explored not just by people, but by machines. As humans surf the web, they’re aided by algorithms doing the work beneath the surface, sequenced to monitor and rank an ever-swelling current of information for pluckable treasures.

      Lovely description of the sociotechnical space that is the Web, where software processes, infrastructure and people mingle.

    5. “Think how many other types of technology there must have been that we don’t know about,” she added. “What I find fascinating is this: We see this ancient technology and initially it seems it was lost, and we’re like, ‘Where did it go?’ But then you look and you see the threads, connecting it through history—of a sundial or the 13th century astrolabe. So it survived and played a key role in stimulated the tech we take for granted. The way different cultures use things in different ways, technology can become almost unrecognizable, but the kernel of that technology lives on.”

      Love this description of how reuse is central to knowledge.

  6. Nov 2016
    1. In response, Barad (2003) argues for a performative metaphysics that shifts the focusaway from ‘independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties’ topractices,matters of doings/actions that perform particular phenomena. Phenomena, on thisaccount, are ‘ontologically primitive relations—relations without preexisting relata’ thatare enacted in material-discursive practices (Barad, 2003, p. 815). From such a performa-tive perspective, technologies have no inherent properties, boundaries or meanings, but arebound up with the specific material-discursive practices that constitute certain phenom-ena.

      What are the 'doings' in archival appraisal? There could be an opportunity to see how web archives are constructed by examining the doings of researchers, who interact with the content.

      It would be interesting to tease out the doings of archivists at places like the University of Michigan, who seek out web content, with the doings of bots and automated processes at the Internet Archive. How are they different, how are they the same...how do they relate to each other? That feels like it could be the central core of the paper.

    Annotators

    1. The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership.

      What does this actually mean?

    1. During the British campaign, they discovered that a family of bots that had been tweeting around Israeli-Palestinian issues for three or four years had suddenly become pro-Brexit.

      It hadn't occurred to me that bots, once identified, could exhibit trends in content that would reflect the shifts in how they are being paid for.

    1. The millions of files that are currently without any status in the archive will join the millions that do have easy playability. Old or obscure ideas will rejoin the conversation. Forgotten aspects will return. And VLC itself, faced with such a large test sample, will get better at replaying these items in the process.

      I hope this virtuous circle comes to be.

    1. We all need to be able to see who wrote this story, whether or not it is true, and how it was spread.

      Providing provenance is key.

    2. This is not a technological problem.  We are social beings and so we will naturally look for ways to socialize, and we will use technology to socialize each other.  But technology could be part of the solution.  A not-so-radical redesign might occasionally expose us to new sources of information, or warn us when our own social networks are getting too bounded.

      Love this idea of warning when networks get too bounded.

    1. But how many of these are bots? According to Sam Woolley, a researcher from Oxford University’s Project on Computational Propaganda (which has not been peer reviewed), about 50 to 55 percent of Clinton’s Twitter activity—the likes, follows, and retweets she gets—is from bots, which is typical for high-profile public figures. But Trump’s automated Twitter activity, according to Woolley, is a much higher 80 percent.

      These are astonishing numbers, but It's kinda weird to see the likes, follows and retweets lumped together here like this.