Sarah – Digital Scholarship @ LMU

Week 6: A Process, Social-Tagging, and Some Final Thoughts

The process of generating metadata for these digital objects was one that I found especially challenging. It was not the actual labor of it so much as the sensitivity and precision I tried to bring to this process, which was tempered by the knowledge that this material was someone’s property. By property, I mean much more than simply having physical custody of the object: these documents are the sum total of a community’s history, a record of violence acted upon them, upon their bodies, and being asked to extrapolate from that history “subject terms” or “descriptions” was a process with which I struggled throughout this class. With that in mind, perhaps my process is not one that should necessarily be emulated — perhaps it was too cautious or mentally laborious to be of much use. However, I do think that offering a multitude of approaches to working with this material might potentially benefit the SCL or at the very least that is my hope in detailing my process here.

I began with the “easiest” objects first (though this is not to suggest any of the material was “simple” or “easy”). By this, I mean those documents that were shorter, had clearly identifiable titles, dates, creators, sources, etc., and in their content were focused on a single issue — though as I later discovered, that central “issue” was often bound up with so much more than the explicit content of the document itself. Beginning this way allowed me to ease myself into the process and build up a measure of confidence with the process before moving onto the more challenging documents. I filled in those fields that were contained explicitly in the material itself and did so for every object I was assigned. This meant revisiting my digital objects multiple times, which allowed me to “proof” my work as I went on. After I had exhausted all the information that was readily available from the document itself, I began to intuit those fields that were not as readily available, e.g. “description,” “subject,” “creator,” and “contributor.” Artifacts that did not have titles were prominent among by assigned objects: I negotiated with this fact by creating brief, informative titles that were as grounded in the text of the artifact as possible. My aim was to preserve the language of the material while remaining clear, concise, and descriptive. Subject terms were perhaps the most challenging field to address: remaining consistent across their application (both within my own objects and with my peer’s work); attempting negotiate between brevity and specificity; highlighting those aspects of the artifact that were truly significant while acknowledging that this would mean relegating some issues to the background. I think it would be helpful to have a single set of eyes review all the objects we digitized and look for consistency among the terms to provide a more unified, coherent descriptive language. This process was very labor intensive and often time-consuming. We spent at least a total of four hours of class time working on generating this material and I can personally attest to hours more spent outside of that to make sure that the work I had done in class was up to par.

I’m not entirely sure I ever felt as though I was “done” describing an object — implicit in this process is choosing to foreground some aspects of the artifact and rendering others invisible. A few sentences hardly seemed enough to encompass the disparate, intricate content of some of the objects I was assigned — how can a twenty page journal be summarized in two sentences? This was in my mind the most difficult part of generating metadata: not ever being satisfied, not ever being certain that I was “done” with an artifact. As I type this blog response, I am reviewing my eleven artifacts to ensure that there is a coherent language, style, and tone to my metadata and descriptors. Most helpful in this process was the collaborative nature of our work, the shared spreadsheets, the in-class work, and having a fresh set of eyes to review my metadata. In making this a communal experience, I felt as though I was able to encompass a range of voices and ideas in my metadata that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible. Also helpful were the readings that had been assigned throughout the semester. The ones I would most recommend were Coates’s Between the World and Me, The Fire This Time, and “Metadata for the Masses.” The first helped establish the stakes of the work we have been tasked with, the second helped contextualize the artifacts in light of Watts 1965, and the third helped me flesh out what exactly metadata “meant,” how it is structured, and how it can serve as an organizing principle for a disparate and eclectic grouping of material.

“Metadata for the Masses” — a section of Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web — was invaluable in answering the questions posed in this prompt. Tags can serve as associative, descriptive, or organizational tools: they structure links between resources, aggregate and associate related content, they “label” digital artifacts — and it is a labelling process that has the potential to be part of a “bottom-up classification system” (82). In this way (as is the case of “folksonomies”), tags can establish “ informal relationships” between objects based on “usage patterns” rather than a tightly controlled or regimented set of language (82). The benefit of this is a shift in agency from the people to whom these objects “belong” (i.e. those people who have physical or digital ownership of them) to those who are merely “accessing” the material online. This shift in agency is one that I see as being in line with the SCL’s mission to cater not only to academics who use the archive for scholarly research but to the community itself. While this certainly can be construed as a beneficial consequence of allowing “social tagging,” there are naturally caveats that come with this shift in agency: it is never safe to assume that the people who can and would access this material (and thus contribute to the tagging system) are necessarily part of the community or sensitive to the issues endemic in these objects. The internet, as I’m sure everyone is aware, is populated by people who are prejudiced, racially insensitive (to put it mildly), or simply looking to disrupt productive conversations about race in America. I would then suggest a modified social-tagging system in which the language and tags “available” to the public are decided by the SCL but which tag is assigned to which object is left to the people who access the material online. Tagging has been an integral part of our own work on this material, specifically in terms of “descriptive,” “resource,” and “source,” but a tagging system with “opinion” and “play & performance” type tags would work well alongside the “tagging” that has already taken place (67). It would allow for further collaboration between the library, community, and its users as well as give voice to those people who have been implicitly excluded in this metadata-generating process.

Week 5: More Questions Than Answers

Remarkably for such a central part of our lives, we stand for the most part in formal ignorance of the social and moral order created by these invisible, potent entities. Their impact is indisputable, and as Foucault reminds us, inescapable…Each standard and each category valorizes some point of view and silences another. This is not a bad thing—indeed it is inescapable. But it is an ethical choice, and as such it is dangerous—not bad but dangerous.

What kind of ethical choices are we making and/or what kind of ethical questions should we be asking ourselves?

I think that this is a very important question to ask when assigning / creating metadata to digital objects, as the ethical implications of our decisions are at once subtle and simultaneously so significant. Whether it is the language used in our descriptions, the keywords we choose to associate with certain artifacts, or the very artifacts we choose to digitize — all of these decisions have an impact on the way this digital material is understood, accessed, and organized. The type of questions that I believe we should be asking ourselves are: what does this description privilege or choose to foreground? Does the description not only accurately reflect the content of the piece, but is the information included relevant to a diverse audience with disparate interests? Do the keywords or subject terms allow for a wide range of access? Are they targeted solely at an academic audience or would a member of the community who is not a part of that discourse be able to search for and discover these materials? Disrupting notions of “classification” as a form of science or a matter of absolute precision is key in understanding the ethical implications of this process. This is not Linnaean taxonomy or the logical hierarchy of C++ (both of which have their own implicit ideological underpinnings) but seemingly a much more subtle, complex system in which to work. It is difficult not to view this process as “dangerous” and therefore implicitly “bad” — but rather, in asking these questions and attempting at the very least to answer them; in incorporating those answers into our process; in checking and rechecking that process as it develops: all are measures to improve our work, diversify our language, and disrupt the own hierarchies of information that we ourselves have valorized, allowing those “silences” to perhaps speak.

I think the biggest pitfall that I have encountered thus far is a question of “vocabulary.” Emblematic of this is the question of what to call the events that transpired in Watts in 1965 (though is it really fair to ascribe those events to Watts specifically; was this not really Los Angeles incident?). Watts Riot, Watts Uprising, Watts Revolt, Watts Rebellion and the ever-popular Watts Upsurge — all of these at one point or another have gained traction in popular parlance. “Watts Riot,” though we understand that this is a problematic characterization of the events, is the most widely-used and popular of the phrases. Would it not therefore stand that this should be our preferred keyword or tag, as it would more than likely be the way that the majority of accessors would search for this material? Or rather should we eschew it in favor of more sympathetic, complex phrases like “Watts Uprising” or “Watts Rebellion” (interestingly, the latter has a presence on Google Trends while the former does not) at the risk of limiting access or visibility? Further risks include (the deliberate avoidance of) editorializing — by appearing to be neutral are we implicitly denying our own biases and agendas inside of this process? And further to this, are we doing the SCL a disservice by allowing the material to “stand on its own,” as Youssef has consistently emphasized the need to relate this material to our contemporary moment? How this relates to generating tags or keywords or producing metadata might seem tangential, but I do believe that we must ask ourselves these questions as we work through this process.

I believe self-reflexivity and an openness to criticism / feedback are essential in improving my work on this project. I think that while all of us take pride in the work we do, that sense of intellectual security cannot come at the expense of creating a functional, open, well-sourced and well-index archive of material. I think that in incorporating a multitude of voices in the feedback we receive, we are more likely to make “materials findable to multiple audiences.” The differences in the ways that we speak / think / organize information / develop associations and connotations will ensure that our metadata is exposed to a multitude of voices and opinions. The question of accuracy is problematic and one that I have struggled with when generating metadata for the digital material. Am I the arbiter then of what is “accurate?” Though many of the digital objects did in fact have locatable titles, authors, and dates attached to them, those that did not were assigned names and creators that I ascribed to them. This process was one informed by the material, but it was still one predicated on the decisions I made. Deconstructing a stable notion of what is “accurate,” checking and rechecking the material, consulting with my peers, and allowing the objects to “speak” for themselves as much as possible would all be helpful steps in improving the quality of my work.

Week 4: Black Women — Victimized & Villified

In what ways are women an absent presence in the film? What did you see as the overall effect of the manner in which black masculinity, black male role models, and the black family were discussed in the documentary?

I too was struck by how utterly absent women appeared to be in discussions of the riot as well as Los Angeles’s black community more generally (or, Lohs An-guh-liss as Chief William Parker would call it). I would argue that this absence is conspicuous enough to draw attention to itself — though I am sure this was not the intention of the documentary — and that much can be understood by their lack of voice / presence. To claim however that women are completely absent would be to ignore the brief but significant moments in which they do appear. In example of this, I would like to suggest that there are two instances in the documentary in which women do play a crucial role: the scene in which the woman is interviewed about her domestic situation and Daniel Moynihan’s claim that “about a quarter of Negro families are headed by women.” I see these two examples as dual sides of a single coin — women that serve as sites of sympathy and vulnerability and who are simultaneously indicted for their roles as these familial “heads.” In regards to the former, the woman who is featured in this documentary, carrying her infant, details her struggle to support her five children with the financial assistance she is provided by the government. She is caught in a cycle of poverty (cannot work because she cannot afford childcare; cannot afford childcare because she cannot work) that is, according to CBS, a result of her husband being incarcerated. The viewer, I would argue, is not meant to fault her so much as her “criminal” husband, who left her in this predicament. Thus the blame is not seemingly assigned to the system that relegates single black mothers to live in poverty but to her husband and his neglect of his family unit. “Black masculinity, black male role models, and the black family” are all identified as factors that lead to the unrest in Watts. The need to assert a dominant, masculine front among black males, the vacuum of black male role models, the collapse of the black family unit: all are regarded as underlying causalities for the “madness” that seized Watts in the summer of 1965. Women inside of this, then, become sites of pity, but it a sort of pity that is at once demeaning and almost farcical: rendering black women in this way participates in a narrative of sentimentality and strips them of their agency.

This line of argument is underscored and furthered by Daniel Moynihan’s assessment of the factors that contributed to the “rioting.” Though Moynihan was a lifelong Democrat and sociologist who argued for the advancement of the black community in America, his rhetoric in this segment is deeply problematic. It does not merely suggest that it is the absence of father’s that produces so much crime and unrest in the impoverished “Negro” America, but the very fact that women head these households that precipitates instability and “rioting.” I think that this implicitly goes deeper than merely suggesting that a lack of “male role models” is what caused such a crisis in the black community (and further to this, black identity). Rather women are regarded as inadequate: their inability to instantiate American “values” in the children they are “left” to raise strips them of their agency, the ability to care and provide for their children. This rhetoric participates in the larger disenfranchisement of women (especially single mothers) that pervaded the contemporary moment — in point of fact, “The Moynihan Report” as it came to be known was criticized by the left for its inordinate attention to children born out of wedlock. This fiction of the stable, nuclear family (and its potential disintegration in the 60s) was especially damning for black families:

As a direct result of this high rate of divorce, separation, and desertion, a very large percent of Negro families are headed by females. While the percentage of such families among whites has been dropping since 1940, it has been rising among Negroes.The percent of nonwhite families headed by a female is more than double the percent for whites. Fatherless nonwhite families increased by a sixth between 1950 and 1960, but held constant for white families. It has been estimated that only a minority of Negro children reach the age of 18 having lived all their lives with both of their parents. Once again, this measure of family disorganization is found to be diminishing among white families and increasing among Negro families (“The Moynihan Report”).

This quotation from the government-sponsored “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” (authored by Moynihan) highlights the institutionalized narrative that a fundamental difference between black and white America was the structuring and maintenance of “stable” family structures. The reasons that “divorce, separation, and desertion” are more prevalent in the former are attributed to slavery, (the inadequacy of) the post-Civil War Reconstruction, and “poverty & unemployment,” the “wage system,” and population growth. While there are mentions of the effect that incarceration might have on the black community, it is discussed as a result of the aforementioned social determinants:

It is probable that at present, a majority of the crimes against the person, such as rape, murder, and aggravated assault are committed by Negroes. There is, of course, no absolute evidence; inference can only be made from arrest and prison population statistics. The data that followa unquestionably are biased against Negroes, who are arraigned much more casually than are whites, but it may be doubted that the bias is great enough to affect the general proportions. Again on the urban frontier the ratio is worse: 3 out of every 5 arrests for these crimes were of Negroes.

I would be interested in discussing the question of “incarceration” further in class if time allows: Dr Ryan’s observation that Chief Parker codes his discussion of race in the language of “law and order” is a rhetoric and a line of argument that I mentally align with the Nixon administrations initial “War on Drugs.” John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s “Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs” was quoted in a Harper’s report in April 2016 admitting

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did (Harpers).

If you would like to read more about the way in which the language of “law and order” was codified to indict the black community, I would direct you to the original Harper’s article (http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/). This policy, though arguably targeted at the men of the black community, had significant implications for the way in which black women came to be viewed, understood, and vilified when discussing the “collapse” of the black family unit and the “rioting” resultant from its “instability.”

Week 3: Social Media, “Serious Academic Discussion,” and Compulsory Use in the Classroom

Any digital tool or platform that allows for an exchange to take place (whether it is a social exchange, an exchange of data, the sharing of research etc.) has the potential to facilitate “collaborative scholarly work.” We spent much of last class discussing the inadequacies of certain social media sites and how frankly, most attempts to co-opt them for scholarly use can read as unproductive or contrived in some way. I have been considering this question over the last few days and am not sure I have fully fleshed out how to combat my skepticism towards social media and academic practice. Rather than allowing my ambivalence to limit the potential relationships that might exist in the intersection between the two, I’ve tried to reconsider these sites and services in a more charitable, optimistic, and productive light. Below I have listed several social media platforms and the ways in which they might benefit a collaborative, academic exchange:

Facebook — As I will discuss later in this blog post, my anxiety about the intersection between my private (personal) and public (academic) web presence is perhaps the most significant reason for my skepticism. Though I am by no means a truly “active” social media user, I do enjoy the space I have curated on my account and the freedom to do, say, post, or comment at my discretion, without worrying about reading as “unprofessional.” My solution to this predicament is Facebook’s “Groups” feature. Facebook “Groups” are pages (public or private) in which a community of people can enjoy all the functionality of Facebook without necessarily being “friends” with one another. These Groups contain a wall, a messaging feature, the option to maintain the group as “closed” (an invitation to join the group is necessary to view its content) or open for public viewership. This function differs from a “Page” (i.e. one might “like” Gang of Four’s Facebook Page but would typically not join a Gang of Four “Group”) in that there is a more dispersed power / administrative functionality across all the members. One can see a list of members, upcoming events, share photos and files, post on a shared “wall,” comment on said posts. In essence, it lends itself to collaborative use, allows for a centralized topic or theme to be addressed, but still maintains a “distance” between a private account and the public forum in which it exists.

Pinterest — Though I personally do not use this social media tool any longer, I am familiar with how it works / operates. Often regarded as an aggregation of images ranging from twee bric-a-brac to cliche misattributed quotations overlayed on pictures of whitesand beaches or overly saturated starlit nights, I could see Pinterest being used in a potentially academic manner. The function that “underpins” this site is the ability to collect and organize material (text, articles, images, etc) into different “boards.” Its primary advantage over, say, Google Drive or another file storing digital space, is that one can “pin” anything one encounters on the web without having to visit the Pinterest website itself. Though meant to evoke a series of bulletin boards, Pinterest can also be thought of as a mental map, where one’s current interests, discoveries, and lines of research can be collected, organized, and shared. For instance, were I to do research on certain images in a family of medieval manuscripts or were I researching the illustrations in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience or were I interested in analyzing the rhetoric of midcentury typewriter advertisements, these images could be aggregated, organized, displayed, and shared — offering an insight into my own line of research and discovery as well as allowing for others to “like” or “pin” those same images to their own “boards.”

I don’t really know if I could define the line between “gimmick” and actual “productivity.” Though I have made the case here for two websites that might indeed be beneficial, I know that I personally have little desire to use either of these inside of an academic context. There are other tools that just seem more productive than these, such as Google Docs or email or even Tumblr for that matter. I think all of us in this class are asked to straddle a very blurry line between professional academia and young adulthood — this liminal space is problematic and rather than decisively crossing into the former (a step that I know must be taken at some point), I try to avoid the matter altogether by not mixing my private life as a student and the more public presence the academy seems to necessitate. I’ve gone so far as to use a consistent pseudonym on all my social media accounts (including Facebook who haven’t caught on that I’m using a false name) to further distance my public identity as a MA student and instructor from my personal life. Thus, the way in which this use of social media should be incorporated into a pedagogical / academic practice must in my opinion be voluntary. This might seem like a small, insignificant point but compulsory usage of social media stymies most of the benefits (a sense of collaborative, mutually beneficial exchanges) and instead becomes a coopting of a “popular” tool for the sake of seeming “hip.” If the participants in that space enter into it willingly and with an open mind and a conviction in its benefits, then I’d suppose it wouldn’t matter whether I or anyone else saw it as a gimmick — the people using that space in that way would stand to have a positive experience. Perhaps there is a vacuum in the realm of social media for purely academic spaces in which like-minded people can participate in collaborative work online (though if I remember correctly, there might be?) but regardless this is still an issue with which I am attempting to negotiate.

I find this hashtag to be a much more productive space than #digped: it’s chaotic, diverse, populated, immediate — just as Twitter should be. There are conversations and sub-conversations that one can dip in and out of at will without feeling as though there is a single line of thought or discussion that I have to follow. Pictures of people in their rooms sipping nips of Glenfiddich are interspersed between conference livetweets and links to resources and Voyant-manufactured word clouds. There is an unselfconsciousness and a levity to this hashtag — no one is “performing” a “Serious Academic Discussion” and yet I found the insights and the resources in this “conversation” (though I use this term very loosely) much more accessible and productive. I clicked on a link, read a blogpost, and only after finishing it realized it was part of the Digital Pedagogy Lab (the same group that hosted the digped discussion). HILT2015 was more successful in drawing me into the DPL site than the conversation hosted by them in the first place (http://bit.ly/1tkQIC7). Interestingly I also found a resource that is relevant to my personal, non-academic life as a freelance transcriptionist (a collaborative googledoc that lists 45 different transcription tools). The fragmented, spontaneous, nebulous nature of this “conversation” is what makes it feel more organic, less self-aware, and resultant from that is an enthusiasm and curiosity and willingness to “dig” that I found absent in the digped conversation.

P.S. Melanie, I just read your Tweet about Yik Yak — would love to discuss this today in class with you!

Please share a couple of the sources from your presentation yesterday that you think are particularly insightful:

“Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Langdon Winner (Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? Winter, 1980, pp. 121-136)

“Subversive Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Democracy” Andrew Feenberg (Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 2/3, September/December 1992)

“Moralizing Technology: On the Morality of Technological Artifacts and Their Design” Peter-Paul Verbeek in Readings on the Philosophy of Technology

“Technological Ethics in a Different Voice” Diane P. Michelfelder in Readings on the Philosophy of Technology

Week 2: Technohegemony and a Teen Audience

Before answering the explicit questions posed in this prompt, I’d like to devote some of my response to addressing the issues Dr Noble raised in her essay and the larger issues implicated in a discussion of technology, the hegemony, and the inscription of gender, racial, and socioeconomic identities.

To begin, while I found Dr Noble’s work on this subject to be so brilliant and well-argued, I also found it somewhat devastating. I’d like to think that I knew, that I have always known on some level, that ideology works through all systems and all institutions, and that we are interpolated by every “voice” that speaks through these hegemonic mouthpieces. I’d like to think that I knew that the internet (and technology more generally) is not and has never been a “neutral” space inside of this. And yet, I also know that on some level I was comfortable operating under the fiction (a known-fiction) that whether in its coding or in its hardware, technology might somehow be able to exist outside of the ideologies endemic in these hegemonic systems. Dr Noble’s work threw into sharp relief how misguided and even dangerous a belief in this fiction of technological neutrality can be. I, like many of you, not only use Google, but I actually quite like it as well: its algorithms have lead me to breakthroughs in my own research and it has helped me discover some incredibly productive databases, tools, archives, etc. I’ve only listed its academic uses here, the mundane tasks whose completion is predicated on Google notwithstanding.

All of this in itself induced a sort of existential dread at the realization that (yet again) no space is safe or devoid of the workings of the hegemony (and further, its endemic sexism, racism, classism, all manner of bigotry). I willingly participate in these systems because they are convenient and because I have been conditioned to rely on their use, i.e. I am wholly dependent on them. A sort of malaise lingered for a few days after Dr Noble’s address to the class. I am not mimicking the cynicism the prompt so rightly predicts for rhetorical effect: I felt (feel) all of this and more. So how best to combat this in a “younger, less knowledgeable audience?” I haven’t the slightest idea (though I noticed Gabe posted a very comprehensive response to this question, so I shall have to read his post after I complete mine). I do however have some theories as to how to “translate” these concepts and concerns into a language that young people / the technologically illiterate might better understand (though is it fair to conflate the two?). I see the biggest obstacle to this task is how “normalized” this sort of technology has become. Though I will be the first to admit that I am dependent on Google (and other instruments of the technohegemony) for so many day to day tasks, I can still remember a time before the internet. This is in fact not the case with the freshman I taught last semester. I will use them as my fictional “audience” in this post, as they are the only age group with which I have had any professional teaching experience. The internet (and technology more generally) has become so enmeshed in their social, academic, and professional lives that I believe there must be a process of “defamiliarizing” those technologies. Without exposing to them the inworkings of these platforms, attempting to convince them of their function in maintaining and perpetuating a dominant ideology would be akin to arguing that a toaster or a Kitchenaid is an instrument of the hegemony (which in itself could be the subject of another blog post). This means, yes, “deconstructing” these devices — explaining that while hardware, software, and firmware coalesce in a single “object” (be it an iPhone, Macbook, or tablet), they not only serve distinct functions but each is bound up with its own implicit ideological machinations. This presupposes some knowledge of how these component parts work. I would advocate for the need to teach CompSci classes throughout a child’s education or at least provide some exposure to it. In understanding how something “works” even at a most basic level, I believe one is better able to see and understand the “work” that it is doing.

However, were this audience unable to understand the more technologically advanced cant resultant from “deconstructing” those devices, disrupting the idea that Google is in some way “neutral” would be a necessary first step. Perhaps likening “code” to our own “genetic coding” would be a helpful metaphor: while our genome is a random assemblage of nucleobases and hydrogen bonding, whose “mutations” and “genes” are selected for based on their advantageousness or viability, Google’s “genome” is designed, i.e. its “code” has been deliberately written. And could they imagine if someone — not an infallible deity and not chance, but a flesh and blood person with their own prejudices and assumptions and biases — were to “write their own code?” Would it not stand that what was being “encoded” would be the construct of an imperfect, ideologically-driven mind? Would it not stand that the product of such a mind would carry, however subtly, those same prejudices in its very genes? Andrew Feenberg’s essay “Democratic Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Freedom” posits this another way: “Technologies are selected… from among many possible configurations. Guiding the selection process are social codes established by the cultural and political struggles that define the horizon under which the technology will fall. Once introduced, technology offers a material validation of the cultural horizon to which it has been preformed. I call this the ‘bias’ of technology: apparently neutral, functional rationality is enlisted in support of the hegemony” (147). It is of course not “natural selection” to which he refers but a deliberate “selection” that is guided by “social codes” which participate in and stem from the dominant ideological ordering of the world.

I think the danger here is making this all seem so nefarious, so explicit and intentional: while this audience might resist a the claim that racial bias in Google’s search algorithm is deliberate, they perhaps would be more receptive to thinking of it as something operating outside of or perhaps below intentionality. In other words I believe figuring Google as some deliberately manipulative “Evil Corporation” would be met with resistance because it is such an essential and productive tool, so ingrained into day-to-day processes, that to insult Google would be to insult people’s dependence upon it. Further to this, in discussing the production and reproduction of “ideology,” I think most would assume that this is enacted by means of “repressive” instruments, or that which “prohibits” or “impedes” an exchange of information or belief, whereas Google is viewed by many as an instrument of “liberation” in this regard. It is too easy to eschew subtlety in favor of making powerful, impactful claims, especially when the process of fleshing out those subtleties can prove so daunting, but in making this a complex issue wherein Google at once participates in and reinforces the hegemony (footnote: I fully believe that the “hegemony” is a concept that can be explained to a “teen” audience, as I subjected my nineteen-year-old sister to a discussion of it last Easter break and my Rhetorical Arts class seemed to grasp the concept last semester), but perhaps does so on a level slightly below the deliberate instantiation of hegemonic values might better serve the audience we are attempting to address.

And if they are perhaps not so keen on the “genome” metaphor I’ve constructed here, perhaps it would be best to focus on the assumptions that they have about the way Google indexes websites, to dismantle the “vote and rank” supposition that is so prevalent in people’s minds. Regardless of the course, I think central to all of this is having conviction in the students’ ability to grasp this material. Complex issues, whether they are about technology or ideology or the way in which these two intersect, should not be reduced to platitudes or generalizations. Rather, they should be worked through in a language and with a patience that intervenes in a reductive “Google = Bad” narrative. Not because this claim doesn’t possess value or merit, but because attacking Google as a product or as a service might alienate those who are dependent on its use. Further to this, to suppose there are limits to what individuals are “capable” of understanding merely reinforces those same limits. As I said, I don’t think I can address latter half of this prompt. I’m effected by the same cynicism (though I’m not sure if its cynicism, so much as resignation and exhaustion) after having been forced to confront a fact I already knew to be true. If anyone has any ideas about how to help the “audience” we are meant to be working with here (or myself for that matter), I’d certainly be open to ideas!

Category: Technology

Keywords: pedagogy; programming; ideology; algorithms

(interestingly, the Library of Congress uses Google to search their own cache of Subject Headings)

Week 1: Saidiya Hartman’s Critical Fabulation

Though I initially dismissed the spectral presence of “speculation” in Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts (believing I was under the influence of my own recent engagements with speculative fiction, the speculative turn, the speculative solution to the problem of correlationalism), she explicitly names it towards the end of her piece:

Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive? By advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities), in fashioning a narrative, which is based upon archival research, and by that I mean a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling (emphasis mine, 11).

What Hartman seems to suggest here is the potential for a type of historical speculation or “critical fabulation” as she calls it — the assertion that in speculating about the inaccessible, silenced voices of the past, one might be able to “tell an impossible story” while simultaneously amplifying the “impossibility of its telling” (11). The implications of this act are not merely confined to “counter-histories” but also a “history of the present… the incomplete project of freedom… [which is] a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of violence” (4). Before fully exploring Hartman’s account of the latter, I’d like to work through her own engagement with this type of historical labour, as it has helped flesh out my own uncertainties about what it means to “retell” or “rewrite” the past. The recurrence of the words “impossible” and “impossibility” is difficult to ignore (both feature in this piece upwards of 20 times) and refer to the seeming futility of locating a voice for those “two girls” in the “archive of slavery.” It is simultaneously an act (a search? a voyage?) described as a “refashioning of disfigured lives… [a redressal of] the violence” (2); a “recuperation” and “conjuring” — a “resurrection” (3); a “compensation” and “reparation” (4). Its intent is not however “to give voice to the slave” in the face of the silent archive but to demonstrate “Narrative restraint, the refusal to ﬁll in the gaps and provide closure… the imperative to respect black noise—the shrieks, the moans, the non-sense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility” (12).

The first four pages of Hartman’s essay are filled with questions about the nature of her project, its value, its potential, its price. She offers up her own initial skepticism of a type of “speculative history” — “I feared what I might invent, and it would have been a romance” (8). Wary of the way in which the grotesqueries and acts of violence perpetrated on the bodies and minds of slaves were coopted by the language of spectacle (and how closely enmeshed spectacle and speculation are both practically and etymologically), Hartman in her fist discussion of “Venus” (Lose Your Mother) resists this impulse. But this resolves itself in her decision to engage in “fabulation” in “Venus in Two Acts:”

If I could have conjured up more than a name in an indictment, if I could have imagined Venus speaking in her own voice, if I could have detailed the small memories banished from the ledger, then it might have been possible for me to represent the friendship that could have blossomed between two frightened and lonely girls. Shipmates. Then Venus could have beheld her dying friend, whispered comfort in her ear, rocked her with promises, soothed her with “soon, soon” and wished for her a good return” (emphasis mine, 8).

Characteristic here are the “ifs” of the subjunctive tense, a narrative “fashioned,” a “critical reading” of that archive which had silenced Venus in the first place but also “mimetic” — intended to tell that which is “impossible” but never to deny the “impossibility” of its telling. Whereas before Hartman “chose not to tell a story about Venus because to do so would have trespassed the boundaries of the archive,” “Venus in Two Acts” seems to be her reckoning with those boundaries, an acknowledgement that the archive is just as much a fiction, constituted by “the rumors, scandals, lies, invented evidence, fabricated confessions, volatile facts, impossible metaphors, chance events, and fantasies… [that] determine what can be said about the past” (9).

This drew to mind Pierre Cassou-Nogues’s seminar on how speculative fiction or thought might be the solution to the inaccessibility of the “past.” For those of you who weren’t at the talk, I’ll try to focus on those elements of it that pertain to what I’m discussing in this blog post. Cassou-Nogues suggested that it is through “speculative narratives” that we might be able to answer what Quentin Meillassoux refers to as “ancestral questions” — those “histories” and “bodies” that predate human existence. Meillassoux suggests that because humanity had no experience with those “ancestral” events, it is impossible to truly “speak” about their existence; Cassou-Nouges responds that through a “speculative” act, those bodies might somehow be reclaimed. How this pertains to Hartman might seem tangential (and more than likely is), but I see “Venus in Two Acts” as a localization of this theory in the thread of a human narrative: those “histories” and “bodies” that predate this “modern moment” — “ancestral” in their inaccessibility, in their silence — are opened, retold, reimagined, rewritten, and resurrected within Hartman’s “critical fabulation.” How this might all relate to the original prompt might not necessarily be clear but implicit in a discussion of “speculative narratives” is the “speculative fiction” genre, which includes (as you might imagine) works of science fiction, fantasy, dystopia — narratives that “speculate” about the future of the human race and often seek to induce dread or caution, to catalyze change.

Hartman argues, and I am inclined to agree with her, that this potential for “change” is possible not only in speculations about the future but a speculative engagement with the past. “Counter-histories” and the “history of the present” are “inseparable” as they both touch on an “incomplete project of freedom” (4). Further to this, she believes that “a history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past, and to imagine a free state, not as the time before captivity or slavery, but rather as the anticipated future of this writing” (emphasis mine, 4). I have attempted to unpack this phrase as best I can, and I hold that there is are higher stakes than the mere claim that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The present is “interrupted” by the past — and is it this “interruption” that permits her to “imagine a free state… as the anticipated future of this writing.” At play here is not merely past and present but futurity: “this history has engendered me,” she writes and as a result, “the kinds of stories I have fashioned… bridge the past and the present” (4). She seeks to “dramatize the production of nothing” or rather throw into sharp relief the absence of narrative. That absence defines her, defines the “history of the present” that is currently being written, and in turn the history of “an alternative future” yet to occur (4, 14). “If this story of Venus,” Hartman’s name for her own “critical fabulation,” “has any value at all it is in illuminating the way in which our age is tethered to her” (13).

As to what all this means for our own archival practice in this class, I’m not completely certain. How can I give voice to a community to which I do not belong? How could I dramatize its history? How could I possibly ever “retell” its narrative? If anything, I hope the work we do would involve simply locating some narratives that have been long excluded from “the Archive.” While the SCL is in fact an “archive,” yes, does it somehow stand outside the institutional “Archive” to which Hartman makes reference throughout? If so, and in many many ways I believe it does, making those narratives more visible or audible or accessible might allow them to either “speak for themselves” or help the community to discover and use those narratives to their benefit. Youssef has consistently maintained that the work we do on the material from the SCL must and will somehow inform the community as it stands today. Though I am personally wary of “speculating” myself, the opportunity for others with a more deeply-rooted, intimate connection to this material might potentially (hopefully!) benefit.