This also has the consequencethat the online dissemination of scholarly research may become entangledwith digital advertising markets, trending algorithms, and digital culturesassociated with platforms—a development that is implicitly encouraged andcredentialed through altmetrics for social media shares
And, in the case of Twitter, may become appropriated by the far-right.
open access advancesa “negative” conception of openness focusing on the removal of constraints,rather than more substantive “positive” conceptions of who and what open-access research is for and the conditions under which it might thrive
I wrote something confused about this with regards to open source licensing many years ago: https://blog.simonxix.com/existentialism-and-foss/
crawl themfor indexing, pass them as data to software
Lot of discussion about this aspect of open access licensing at the Open Research Scotland meeting last week since this clearly allows AI to be trained on openly licensed work including corporate AI if under a license that's not NC.
The Ethnography of Infrastructure
Some notes kindly shared by Martin Eve on this paper: https://eve.gd/2020/04/19/notes-on-susan-leigh-stars-the-ethnography-of-infrastructure/
Information systems encode and embed work in several ways. They maydirectly attempt to represent that work. They may sit in the middle of a workprocess like a rock in a stream, and require workarounds in order that interactionproceed around them. They also may leave gaps in work processes that requirereal-time adjustments, or articulation work, to complete the processes.
Systems change behaviour, not the other way round.
One of the flags for our understanding of the importance of infrastructure camewith field visits to check the system usability. Respondents would say prior tothe visit that they were using the system with no problems—during the site visit,they were unable even to tell us where the system was on their local machines.
This sounds very familiar.
For our respondents, the task of using ftp to download the sys-tem was new and thus difficult; for a computer scientist, this is an easy, routinetask. Thus, the step of using ftp made the system less than transparent for thebiologists, and thus much less usable.
I often think of how my decade of technical roles makes certain processes invisible to me that are huge hurdles or impassable barriers to other people. That's why I find it hard to recommend software to others because I have a warped idea of what is easy-to-use.
boring
I get what they're trying to say with this framing but I have the same issue with the annual Boring Conference: it's not boring if there's interesting insights into the human buried in there.
There are much fewer on the effect of standardization or formal classifica-tion on group formation, the design of networks and their import for variouscommunities, or on the fierce policy debates about domain names, exchangeprotocols, or languages.
Systems define behaviour not the other way round. People accept the limitations of their technical infrastructures and adapt their behaviour rather than asking if and how the systems could be changed.
Because of the unceasing nature of CSLI creation and collection, it is perhaps mostappropriate to consider smartphone users as non-consenting or uninformed donors,“individuals,” as scholar Marybeth Gaudette (2003, 21–34) puts it, “whose creations arecontained within a collection without their consent regardless of their knowledge of thatfact.”8
This framing of data creation as co-created authorship is fascinating.
Western jurisprudence is based firmly on individual propertyrights and the very notion of a Western rule of law is thrown into question when propertyrights are perceived as being challenged.
Oh, there we are. That's what I said in the previous annotation.
This case should be resolved by interpreting acceptedproperty principles as the baseline for reasonable expectations of privacy” (Supreme Courtof the United States 2018, 22)
It's wild to me how much property is the core foundation of United States law to a greater extent even than fundamental human rights.
But along with the ability to think critically about how records are discussed andemployed, archivists have a responsibility to act when records are being used as tools ofoppression.
An ethical responsibility or a professional responsibility? Having been involved in the UK's professional body for information workers, there's often a stark gap between what is professional as enshrined by the profession and what is ethical.
For instance, Israeli subject access catalogues material delineating the history ofPalestinian resistance fighters employs the heading “Arab gangs” (Sela, 2018, p. 213).
This links with recent work on Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) to replace outdated subject headings particularly around queerness and neurodiversity.
he United Statesgovernment international travel advisory warns, for example, that “some U.S. citizens ofArab or Muslim heritage (including Palestinian-Americans) have experienced significantdifficulties and unequal or occasionally hostile treatment at Israel’s borders and checkpoints”and describes how American citizens who have traveled to Muslim countries or who are ofArab, Middle Eastern, or Muslim origin may face additional questioning by Israeliimmigration and border authorities (U.S. Department of State 2020)
I have a friend who has to travel around Israel when travelling the region because the Syrian stamp in her passport effectively bars her from entering Israel.
The group abides by the 2005 Palestinian civil society call for Boycott, Divestment andSanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights
Particularly pertinent for Ex Libris, the Israeli company which provides the bulk of university library systems in the UK.
were destroyed,
The kind of passive voice journalism we see a lot w/r/t Israeli atrocities against Palestine.
Article 247 of the Treaty of Versailles (1919) stipulates that works of art, books, andmanuscripts should be returned to the states from which they were taken (Kost, 2014).
There's something interesting here about the influence of international law on archival preservation.
emptying 531 villages and 11urban neighbourhoods
One of these villages is now a technology park that houses the company that provides Coventry University's library management system.
The Argentinean social landscape inwhich the men and women of Situaciones forged their ideas was a desertswept by neoliberal winds
Good phrase.
a few other Italian autonomist thinkers (Paolo Virno,Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Maurizio Lazzarato
Not necessarily a theorist but also Nanni Balestrini.
Since the late ’70s, Situationist ideas, slogans and forms of analysishave become so thoroughly inscribed in the sensibilities of punk rock thatit’s almost impossible to listen for very long to certain strains of counter-cultural music without hearing some catchy phrase taken directly from theworks of Raoul Vaneigem.
Example?
The critical thing isthat universities were never meant to be places for intellectual creativity. If ithappens, it’s not because it is especially conducive to them, but only becauseif you pay enough people to sit around thinking, some new ideas are boundto get through.
It's interesting to see them say this from a left-wing perspective given how the right has seized upon the idea of universities as places for rigorous debate (which is itself a dogwhistle for allowing right-wing academics to be as racist or transphobic as they like). The right have increasingly either played into or deliberately appropriated this idealistic vision of universities as intellectual debating powerhouses.
Instead, for the last fifteen or twenty years, the Americanacademy—or the part that fancies itself to be the radical, critical, subversivebranch of it—have for some reason preferred to endlessly recycle the samebody of French theory: roughly, reading and rereading a set of texts writtenbetween 1968 and 1983
lol
often noting that Holloway seemed to echo anar-chist ideas without ever mentioning them
This has always been my problem with Chomsky: that he claims himself as an anarchist without actually writing about or discussing anarchist ideas.
When we write or when we read, it is easy to forget that the begin-ning is not the word, but the scream. Faced with the mutilation of humanlives by capitalism, a scream of sadness, a scream of horror, a scream ofanger, a scream of refusal: NO
This makes me think of the ongoing situation in Palestine and the public reaction if not the political reaction.
We may only aspire to a different order of things by startingfrom the existing materiality, not from idealistic speculations
Key link to the other piece.
For some, theconcept is about introducing epistemic or methodological changes to ordinary ac-ademic practice. In this sense, the range of dualities involved in the academia-activism distinction (thinking versus acting, passive versus active) contributes tothe illusion of apparent incompatibility or mutual isolation. Thus, while directaction would be possible only through activism, intellectual work appears as theexclusive task of the academy, without intervention in practical problems. Assum-ing the polarity of such spheres leads to a series of arguments that must be con-tested, as the absence of intellectual work within social organizations and move-ments, or the invalidity or nullity of work carried out by university researchers andprofessors in order to achieve radical social change
A succinct explanation. I wish I'd read this piece first.
That is why we consider this love to be a condition of militant research
I find myself uncomfortable with this discussion of love and friendship in the context of research and I think I need to interrogate that: why that expression of and envelopment with emotion in a research context would discomfort me.
In this sense, online learning,working from home, and bread-baking should not be seen as ‘minor disruptions’ to business-as-usual: instead, we they should force us to acknowledge the material and immaterial affordances ofour own knowledge production.
It was working from home that made me think about the carbon I regularly expended on personal transportation: https://carbon.simonxix.com/transportation
A study in 2015 estimated cloud computing is responsible for 2% of global emissions, onpar with emissions from global aviation (Greenpeace, 2015); a more recent report puts it at 3.7%,predicted to grow by 8% annually (The Shift Project, 2019) – and this was all prior to the big ‘onlinetransition’ stimulated by the pandemic
Also made higher by the high-intensity computing required for 'AI' development. I estimate that my own non-green cloud server uses approx. 487 kg CO2e per year. https://www.goclimate.com/blog/the-carbon-footprint-of-servers/
Networks of circulationand exchange of data (pre-print-servers such as ArXiv as well as social media) were quickly matchedby private sector investments or takeovers, compounding the tendency for seemingly ‘free’ knowledgeto become enrolled in the logic of capitalism (Bacevic & Muellerleile, 2018; Kelty, 2014).
Same with 'openness': 'open' access and 'open' source.
For global centres of knowledge production – primar-ily Europe and North America, closely followed by Australia and New Zealand – substantial portionof investment came from tuition fees charged to international (non-domiciled) students. In mostcases, this effectively means cross-border transfer of private funds, where students rely on personalor family income, or take out private loans in countries of origin.
Saw this thread from a Twitter mutual the other day discussing the contradictions of treating UK Higher Education like a business and the impacts on international students: https://twitter.com/KirstySedgman/status/1751569236567204121
I must admit that Ihave spent much more time telling you about fast sciencethan about what slow science would be.
Indeed.
Each profession makes progress, but it is progress in its owngroove. . . . The groove prevents straying across country,and the abstraction abstracts from something to which nofurther attention is given. . . . Of course, no one is merely amathematician, or merely a lawyer. People have lives out-side their professions or their business. But the point is therestraint of serious thought within a groove. The remainderof life is treated superficially, with the imperfect categoriesof thought derived from one profession.5
Reminds me of Ivan Illich's critique of 'professionalism'.
Training public servants to repair the devices they areusing in everyday life, or at least to identify what is to be repaired andproviding workshops to do so, would, on the one hand, reduce materialconsumption and spare natural resources and, on the other hand, modifythe way we think about our material environment.
This means adopting technology that is modular, repairable, and open source rather than proprietary. There are so many devices (e.g. Apple devices) that are designed to not be repairable by anyone other than the manufacturer.
I definitely take for granted that green Open Access, with no barriers and little editorialadded value, is more environmentally friendly than gold Open Access, which canonly be accessed through a paywall with data tracking, relying on tailored hostingsolutions and in-house formats. Depending on their technical setup, diamond OpenAccess options might be closer to green or to gold in terms of their environmentalimpact.
I'd love to read a more thorough assessment of this. Similarly I briefly searched for any assessments of the environmental impact of open source vs. proprietary software but didn't find anything particularly robust.
Both the primary source provider and the infras-tructure will have at the very least rooms in a building, personnel, andan energy consumption that will be dedicated in part to communicatingwith and providing services to the editorial team.
When I worked at the British Library, we worked on archiving with Google Books who required crates of books shipped to their processing centre in UNDISCLOSED LOCATION. The environmental cost of shipping these books would have been significant.
In terms of environmental cost, each of these elements (personnel,building, transportation, IT infrastructure) has an impact
I measure (some of) my own carbon usage here (https://carbon.simonxix.com/) and estimate my personal server to use approx. 487 kg CO2e (kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent) a year.
Upon closer inspection, this perspective restricts accessto cultural heritage in many ways, even when the heritage concernedis simple text and not a complex reconstructed 3D artefact.
It also depends on the choices of libraries and archives as to what they digitise and which manuscripts they focus on which are always political and curatorial choices but are often not framed as such within libraries and archives themselves.
Many, if not all, oral or residually oral cultures strike literates as extraordinarily agonistic in their verbal performance and indeed in their lifestyle. ... Proverbs and riddles are not used simply to store knowledge but to engage others in verbal and intellectual combat. ... Bragging about one’s own prowess and/or verbal tongue-lashings of an opponent figure regularly in encounters between characters in narrative. (p. 43)
It's striking to me how this description of oral cultures applies to contemporary UK politics where slogans are endlessly repeated like proverbs and ritualistic tongue-lashings like Prime Minister's Questions are more important than evidence-based policy.
Crafted by subcultures that embrace the evanescence of digital orality, conspiracy narratives are perfectly attuned to the attention flows of social media. Stories, such as Pizzagate or Qanon, thrive not despite but because of the qualities that make them unpalatable to literate commentators. Considered as positive rather than negative, their features are the same that assure the survival of ideas in preliterate societies.
Different norms and different standards for 'evidence' in what Naomi Klein refers to as the 'Mirror World'.
Despite their huge popularity, these cultural expressions are still written off as youthful stupidities or extreme deviances, similarly to the way in which subcultures ‘are alter-nately dismissed, denounced and canonized; treated at different times as threats to public order and as harmless buffoons’ (Hebdige, 1979: 2)
See the dismissal of conspiracism in the policies revealed at the recent Tory conference.
the world of software
the corporate world of software, no less
Language is not a raw material or an instrument, muchless a natural resource, but a fraught relationship involving bodies in tense,volatile contact with other bodies as they partake of the creation and recreation of our material worlds.
Another link with Čeika's work: the emphasis of the material body and physical (social) relations with the world.
Disappropriation has involved, and still involves, exposingthe mechanisms that permit an unequal exchange of labor: the labor thatuses the language of collective experience for the author's individual gain.Tue comprehensive goal of disappropriation was, and is, to return all writing to its plural origin. In this way, it seeks to construct future horizons inwhich writing joins the assembly so it can participate and contribute tothe common good.
Jonas Čeika offers an interesting related socialist perspective on the language of the collective and the language of the individual and material labour relations in his How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle.
Disappropriation has involved, and still involves, exposingthe mechanisms that permit an unequal exchange of labor: the labor thatuses the language of collective experience for the author's individual gain.Tue comprehensive goal of disappropriation was, and is, to return all writing to its plural origin. In this way, it seeks to construct future horizons inwhich writing joins the assembly so it can participate and contribute tothe common good.
Jonas Čeika offers an interesting related socialist perspective on the language of the collective and the language of the individual and material labour relations in his How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle.
Goldsmith’s template for identity is theatomized consumer, whose self is constantly collaged with the joyful play of web pages,advertisements and mass media.
There's something about the modern online ironist that sounds similar to this but I can't remember the source at the moment.
how can universities be freed from theirGoogle and Microsoft dependency
fire emoji
when open source and free software are morallybankrupt due to their corporate sell-outs and thus nolonger appeal to the next generations?
bit of a generalisation
It’s time for a strike, a strike on optimization.Stop making improvements. No more enhancedefficiencies or increased productivity. It’s time to teachproblem design. Time to dream up provocatypes.
link to what we discussed last time on obfuscation technologies.
DigitalHumanities movement but rather distinguishes itselffrom that field’s tendency to focus on the digitalizationof archives coupled with data-driven analysis sedu-ced by numbers, graphs and scale.
an important criticism of Digital Humanities as currently practiced
how the politics and aesthetics of noise anddistraction impact our mental state, particularly inthe case of the younger generations.
I'm probably too old to be his 'younger generation' but I did just turn on Spotify for more music to listen to while reading just before reading this line.
convinced
Highly subjective and itself open to abuse.
due to its conditional character, this document might actually notqualify as a license
I'm interested in CC4r as a provocation but I struggle with its use for change of material conditions because of statements like this.
Obfuscation invokes an intuitive form of protection
There's a useful list of obfuscatory Firefox plugins here: https://www.tumblr.com/hater-of-terfs/616405431691231232/queeranarchism-afraidofamericans I replaced all my ad-blockers with ones that deliberately 'click' on ads to cost advertisers money and that perform random searches from my browser to obfuscate any real searches.
It’s all fine, just try not to let ithappen unnoticed
Noticing a theme of 'openness' in many of these tactics specifically being open about things that are often left unsaid particularly in "professional" academic contexts.
GAFAM & co
Plus Zoom
operating system
closed source
the Onion Router (TOR), which allows for online anonymity through the combined tactics of encrypting communication and relaying it via several nodes on the Internet to obscure the source and destination
One reason I've been adding onion service versions of every website I look after.
The World Bank (2014, 20) finishes its own macroeconomic report on the value of open data by stating, “While sources differ in their precise estimates of the economic potential of Open Data, all are agreed that it is potentially very large.”
Great.
The uses to which collected data will be put and the meanings it will be given are dependent on future algorithms and political concerns.
We're also sharing with actors in the future with motives that are temporally distant and opaque by definition.
“It could even be argued that . . . the entire internet is fundamentally a sharing technology” (179), he writes, citing the importance of open source software and programming languages, and sharing economies of production, in the development of websites based on user-generated content.
Yes but it's worth noting the military and capitalist contexts around the history of the Internet that may not fit with the leftist and academic use of 'sharing' that we may be familiar with.
Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat
A Hypothesis annotation
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whatever
Morbi quis molestie tellus.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(45, 46, 47, 0.5) !important; }
Annotation annotation
How do you measure the chance encounter at a conference that only five years later congeals into a thesis?
Had a waking nightmare reading this sentence about a future 'excellence framework' where you have to count and log every one that you "network with" at a conference and that somehow determines impact as a researcher and research funding.
1
love this experimentation with form!
problems misperceived as technical rather than epistemological
We see this a lot with Higher Education software (finance software, library systems, CRISs) where technology drives practice and workflows rather than, as it should be, the other way round.
Emerging
Just want to highlight the subtly patronising connotation of 'emerging' in relation to sources outside the Anglo-American context.
They don’t want to buy to own
They're not being given the chance to buy to own.
technologies always bear theimprint of their producers and are designed to habituate users to their demands andrequirements
Software changes workflow and processes rather than, as it should be, the other way around.
collection and analysis of student data
In university IT, we discussed 'data warehouses' a lot which I think is a very telling term that creates connotations of industry and commerce.
HE workflow systems, management dashboards, data-linking,business intelligence, and educational analytics platforms
Many of which are proprietary systems licensed to universities by software companies which charge ridiculous amounts of money for them.
primarily, the aIDS crisis of the 1980s
i don't want to draw out this comparison but it's interesting to parallel the explosion of paranoid online discourse during covid-19 to the paranoid literary queer readings of the aids crisis.
I won'tdenythata personcouldgetnostalgicfora timewhenparanoidgun-lobbyrhetoricsoundedjustplainnutty-a"simpleandrelativelynon-controversial"exampleof"distortedjudgment"-ratherthanrepre-senting theuncontestedplatformofa dominantpoliticalparty.
lol! in the context of QAnon, Covid denial, climate change denial, Trump election claims, etc.
Myownguesswouldbethatsuchpopularcynicism,whileundoubtedlywidespread,isonlyoneamongtheheterogeneous,competingtheoriesthatconstitutethementalecologyofmostpeople.
'popular cynicism' links to the idea of widespread cultural irony.
Theyrepresentaway,amongotherways,ofseeking,finding,andorganizingknowledge.
foucauldian knowledges
hermeneuticofsuspicion
brings to mind rita felski's work on critique and the suspicious / paranoid state of literary criticism.
Andinfactit seemsquiteplausibletomethatsomeversionofthisaxiom(perhaps"Evena paranoidcanhaveenemies,"utteredbyHenryKissin-ger!)8issoindeliblyinscribedinthebrainsofusbaby-boomersthatitoffersusthecontinuingillusionofpossessinga specialinsightintotheepistemologiesofenmity.Myimpression,again,isthatweareliabletoproducethisconstativeformulationasfiercelyasifit hada self-evidentimperativeforce:thenotationthatevenparanoidpeoplehaveenemiesiswieldedasifitsabsolutelynecessarycorollaryweretheinjunction,"-soyoucanneverbeparanoidenough."
this section and particularly the allusion to generational politics with 'baby boomers' reminds me of ongoing online discussions about the online left and the practice of reading every post as uncharitably as possible as part of some sort of moral crusade to have the most correct possible political opinions. paranoia and the death of nuance.