I recently visited the Brooklyn Historical Society to conduct an interview with Brett Dion, whose official title is Oral History Project Archivist. Dion received his library science degree from Pratt, and began working at the New York Transit Museum during his final semester in school. He was there for seven years, at first in the archives and then as a registrar (which involved maintenance of the collection and loan paperwork). During his last couple of years at the Transit Museum, Dion began taking workshops at the New York Writers Coalition, and ended up volunteering with StoryCorps. As Dion describes, StoryCorps is a mutated version of oral history, because of the editing and streamlining process: often, when relating a story, people jump around and meander along in the telling. While from the oral history perspective, the narration should be left in its original state, StoryCorps condenses and edits to create a more straightforward version.

When Dion heard of an opening at the Brooklyn Historical Society in the oral history department last October, he jumped at the chance to interview. He wanted to expand his experience in collections, as he had never worked with audio recordings before. He was hired to stay on for two grant-financed projects; he is still working on the first, which must be 70% complete by this upcoming spring in order for the funding to continue. Much of the work done to preserve or archive collections at BHS is funded by grants, so much so that there is a staff member whose sole job is to apply for funds and write proposals. The project Dion is working on now is with legacy oral histories, which date back to 1973 and are stored on audio cassette. He is digitizing, doing conservation work for the tapes that are falling apart, and making the histories more available than they’ve ever been before. Using a system called the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), developed at the University of Kentucky libraries, Dion will put them online and make them accessible in a novel way: the audio will be synched with the transcripts. When uploading an MP3 and a file of the transcript, it is possible to lock them in place and match up the words that occur at every one-minute mark. This entails Dion (or one of his two interns) listening to each oral history within the system. At every fifty second mark, a bell goes off to tell the listener to pay attention; another bell goes off at sixty seconds, which is when Dion or the intern must highlight the word that is being spoken at that exact time. It then jumps to the next fifty second mark, and so on. Dion says that after an adjustment period, the process can go pretty quickly. Before matching up the audio, there must first be an evaluation of the transcripts themselves, which were created when the histories were recorded, back in the 1970s and 80s. Dion and his interns listen to each recording while carefully going over the accompanying transcript, to make sure that the initial transcription was accurate, and to correct any misspellings. Often the narrators of the histories will share their birthdate, but that information must be bleeped out, as a protection against identity theft. The Oral Historian at BHS, Zaheer Ali, wants the year to be left in, so that listeners can have context about what was happening in the world at the time, so only the day and month are removed (in both the transcripts and the audio).

The tapes are composed of sixty-seven interviews (starting in 1973) of Puerto Ricans, most of whom were born in the 1880s, and emigrated to Brooklyn in the 1920s and 30s. As a result, many were trying to get jobs just as the Great Depression was hitting; not only did they have this going against them, but they were very badly mistreated by other immigrants at the time. Dion says the tapes have survived remarkably well, but that as he is doing the transcription and audio work, he is often struck by the scripted quality of the interviews. He notes that it seems clear the interviewers have some purpose in mind, and are guiding the narrators to tell a specific story. This, of course, made me think of “The Ethics of Fieldwork,” by PERCS, and how one of their specifications is to not ask leading questions (p. 6). I was not able to hear the recordings Dion has been working on, but his description led me to believe that the interviewers at the time were not being as ethical as one may have hoped (of course, at that time, the ethics of fieldwork were much less defined than they are now). We can also only hope that the participants were not chosen to be interviewed because they were seen as “exemplified or erotic,” (p.8) and that it was simply because they were new residents of Brooklyn. Zaheer Ali’s philosophy is much more within the ethical framework PERCS lays out: he usually has a certain theme in mind, which dictates who he conducts the interviews with, but his strategy consists of letting those he speaks with tell him about their lives in whichever way they choose. One such theme revolves around the neighborhood of Crown Heights; in 1991, a riot broke out between the Hasidic Jews and African Americans who lived there. Fatalities occurred, followed by days of violence and unrest. BHS went to the area two years later, to find out how people were healing and recovering. As it is now the 25^th anniversary of those riots, BHS is collecting new oral histories, and making the 1993 recordings available to the public.

I see oral histories as giving voice to those who are not always heard, and undermining what Kincheloe and McLaren describe as discursive practices, which they write are “defined as a set of tacit rules that regulate what can and cannot be said; who can speak with the blessings of authority and who must listen; and whose social constructions are valid and whose are erroneous and unimportant” (2002, p. 94). This might be a romanticized view, as the decision of who to interview and why is up to the organization collecting the oral histories; as a result, one person (or, more likely, a committee) is deciding who is worth interviewing. This means that many groups who may greatly benefit from being heard may never get that chance.

References:

Elon University. Program for Ethnographic Research & Community Studies. The ethics of fieldwork module. Retrieved from http://www.elon.edu/docs/e-web/org/ percs/EthicsModuleforWeb.pdf

Kincheloe, J. L. & McLaren, P. (2002). Rethinking critical theory and qualitative research. In Y. Zou & E. T. Trueba (Eds.), Ethnography and schools: Qualitative approaches to the study of education (87-127). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Ever since their onset as a public institution, libraries have been political in nature. After the death of Alexander the Great and the subsequent break up of Macedonia in the Hellenistic age, there was a boom in the creation of libraries as institutions of the state, where previous collections of merit were kept privately by the elite. Kings recognized the value information had in a world that was continuously vying for power and control. In many instances they would go to great lengths to obtain scrolls and works of prominent thinkers, which in turn would draw scholars and the elite to their libraries, only furthering their prestige and power. Most notable of these first state-funded libraries was the Library of Alexandria, which became a “comprehensive repository of Greek writings as well as a tool for research” under the Ptolemaic dynasty (http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-fierce-forgotten-library-wars-of-the-ancient-world). Threatened by the new and growing status of the Library of Pergamum the Ptolemaic kings adopted strategies of war to ensure that the Library of Alexandria would remain at the top of the pedestal, by cutting off trade of papyrus and imprisoning scholars wishing to trade sides. While by no means as violent or even overt in its undertaking, I would argue that libraries and fields of librarianship remain arenas of political advocation today, whether used as such or not. What is born political, remains political. As Birdsall puts it, modern “libraries are the creation and instrument of public policy derived from political processes” (Birdsall, 2). And it would be more advantageous to embrace this sentiment than attempt a detached stance of neutrality or impartiality.

In the vein of the political, libraries have long been heralded as institutions embodying democratic values. Ideals of intellectual freedom, free and open access, literacy, and inclusion have been championed by public figures like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and even Keith Richards, with the library specifically in mind (Bushman, 3-4). Many of these ideals are ones that this country claims to be governmentally founded on, but have not been fully realized or enacted until quite recently. In keeping with this tradition and continuing to break with the structure of white, male, elitist hegemony, librarians are in a position to enact change in a professional and academic setting. Whether it is advocating for more politically correct classification and subject headings through the Library of Congress or using displays in local libraries to address social and cultural issues in their specific community, librarians have a great opportunity to channel democratic values, expand perspective, and seek social justice in seemingly small but penetrating ways. There are many in this field who wish to remain apolitical and would like to keep politics out of libraries altogether. This can be exemplified in a fairly recent comment by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a U.S. Representative of Florida’s 23rd congressional district and member of the Democratic party. In respect to the discussion of the Library of Congress updating the subject heading of ‘illegal alien’ to ‘noncitizen’ or ‘unauthorized immigration,’ she is quoted as saying that the Library of Congress should choose “subject headings without political influence” (http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/07/15/the-surprising-political-power-of-libraries/). I, however, would argue that it is impossible to create an appropriate subject heading for people who wish to be and are not yet citizens of this country without any allusion to politics, just as I would argue that removing politics from the library altogether is impossible. In shadowing both Desmond Tutu and Robert Jensen, the application of neutrality in any professional environment simply does not exist. There will always be a distribution of power and to “either overtly endorse or reject that distribution is, of course, a political choice” (Jensen, 3).  Furthermore, to remain detached from the issue by claiming neutrality is essentially the same as agreeing with the powers that be or the current state of affairs, a specific stance and also a political undertaking. Instead of tiptoeing around this issue or keeping the political nature of ourselves dormant, I propose we embrace it as a catalyst and a much more constructive and productive way to bring about change.

In order to truly and fully express how this can be accomplished, I would like to showcase Jenna Freedman, a blue haired reference librarian at Barnard college, and the work she has done to actively bolster politics in the field of librarianship through her creation of a feminist zine collection at Barnard in 2003. Zines are themselves an anomaly, in that they are an untraditional medium for cataloging in libraries. They are do-it-yourself magazines that run the gamut from handwritten and stapled to professionally printed, serving as a unique form of personal expression on an array of topics and can be considered primary source material about contemporary popular culture. As a self-proclaimed anarchist and punk, it is Freedman’s nature to “critique privileges and challenge social hierarchies,” (Eichhorn, 126) “in favor of egalitarianism and environmentalism and against sexism, racism, and corporate hierarchies” (Eichhorn,126). It is through this lens that she has founded the feminist zine collection at Barnard, which currently consists of more than 1,500 zines in their open stacks collection and over 4,000 zines in their adjoining archive. All of the zines in their open stacks collection are duplicated in their archive for preservation and cataloged in Worldcat, so they are visible to not just Barnard, but the library community at large and available through interlibrary loans (Eichhorn, 128-29). The political and activist nature of this collection is two-fold, encompassing the “actual space of the library and the more conceptual space of the library catalog” (Eichhorn, 129). The fact that Freedman herself is not just a reference librarian, but crosses over the boundaries of special collections librarian, archivist, cataloger, and scholar makes her a defier of professional library tradition within the space of the library. Her decision to catalog the zines was a “way to change the status of the zines,” (Eichhorn, 129) giving them validation and making them as important as any other published material. Additionally, by adding the zines to Worldcat she has given researchers greater access to contemporary feminist material, a “discourse on feminism that, at least until the late 1990’s, was still primarily accessible in private collections” (Eichhorn, 130). There are only a few other collections of zines of this nature, including the Riot Grrrl collection at the New York University and the collection at the Sallie Bingham Center at Duke University. As if this wasn’t enough, Freedman keeps an open dialogue with the producers of the zines in her collection due to the highly personal content in the zines, in the case that they want their name removed or in the case that a female to male transgendered zinester no longer wants their work apart of a feminist collection (Eichhorn 130-31).

In an age where we have just appointed Carla Hayden, a woman and an African-American, as the first person in 214 years to hold the post of Librarian of Congress other than a Caucasian man, it is high time we went the way of Freedman. Her willingness to cross boundaries of librarianship and assert her tenacious beliefs in order to provide greater access to knowledge are most definitely political, as well as something to be admired.

Having worked at the New York Public Library since January 2010, I was only around to see the end of the library’s active partnership with Google on their ambitious Books project. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to recount the entire history and controversy surrounding the Google Books project, from its informal beginnings in 2002 to today. However, I will try to place the project and the NYPL’s participation in context, but more importantly consider whether such a project could be a beneficial tool for use in Siva Vaidhyanathan’s concept of Critical Information Studies, as well as whether it would raise his concerns about copyright issues.

Google Books began with the idea of doing nothing less than scanning all of the world’s books and making them available and searchable online. Work on the project began in secret in 2002. A small group visited some of the more notable, existing digitization projects, including the Library of Congress’ American Memory Project, Project Gutenberg, and the Universal Library at Carnegie Mellon University, to see how they worked and the challenges they faced.[1] Google co-founder Larry Page also reached out to his alma mater, the University of Michigan, site of digitization projects such as JSTOR. When told it would take an estimated 1,000 years to digitize the university library’s seven million volumes, Page said he believed “Google can help make it happen in six.”[2]

It wasn’t until December 2004 that the NYPL became involved with the Books project as an initial partner in what was then known as the Google Print for Libraries project. The Print for Libraries project was the next big step in the Books project, attempting to scan and make searchable the collections of several major research libraries, including Oxford, Harvard, the University of Michigan, and Stanford.[3]

However, it might have been the announcement of this next big step that led to the controversy and lawsuits that would mire the project for years to come. While the agreements Google made with the research libraries would only allow it to “publish the full text of only those library books old enough to no longer be under copyright,” it also stated that for copyrighted works, ”Google would scan in the entire text, but make only short excerpts available online.”[4] Even if they were only making short excerpts available online, though, the fact that Google was scanning entire texts of copyrighted work without first obtaining the permission of the author or copyright holder led to lawsuits. The most notable of these lawsuits were the ones filed on behalf of authors by the Authors Guild[5] and on behalf of publishing companies by a group consisting of McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group, Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons.[6]

What, then, would Vaidhyanathan make of the Google Books project, particularly as it relates to his concept of Critical Information Studies (CIS), as well as his concerns about copyright? Just as it would be difficult, if not impossible, to recount the entire history and controversy surrounding the Books project, it would be just as difficult, if not impossible to include Vaidhyanathan’s possible reaction to each point of history and controversy. Instead, I will try to imagine Vaidhyanathan’s opinion of the Books project around the time of the NYPL’s initial involvement and ensuing lawsuits.

On the surface, a project to scan all of the world’s books and make them available and searchable online would be a tremendous tool related to the first field of CIS as described by Vaidhyanathan in his article “Critical Information Studies: A Bibliographic Manifesto.” Vaidhyanathan believes that people should have “the abilities and liberties to use, revise, criticize, and manipulate cultural texts, images, ideas, and information.”[7] Although not a complete fulfillment, Google Books would certainly have allowed people to use and criticize cultural texts in previously unimaginable ways and scale.

However, in a June 23, 2006 conference hosted by the Library and Information Technology Association entitled “Contracting for Content in a Digital World,” then Andrew W. Mellon Director and Chief Executive of the Research Libraries at the NYPL David Ferriero described two troubling anecdotes that seem antithetical to the second field of CIS, quickly ending any possible embrace of Google Books by Vaidhyanathan. Ferriero described Google as “very private about their scanning operations; we’re not allowed to take pictures; they developed their own equipment, their own software for the OCR, etc.”[8] Such a secretive, proprietary process to digitize the books seems at odds with Vaidhyanathan’s support of open source software as a way to “facilitate access to and use of scholarship and information.”[9]

More damning, however, is Ferriero’s explanation that “according to the terms of the agreement, the data cannot be crawled or harvested by any other search engine; no downloading or redistribution is allowed.”[10] While he did note that “the partners and a wider community of research libraries can share the content,” it still goes against not only Vaidhyanathan’s previously mentioned support of open source software but, more importantly, the second field of CIS.[11] Vaidhyanathan believes that users should have the “rights and abilities…to alter the means and techniques through which cultural texts and information are rendered, displayed, and distributed.”[12] With Google limiting access to their search engine and prohibiting downloading or redistribution, the Books project fails to be an appropriate tool for use in Vaidhyanathan’s CIS.

But what about the issues of copyright raised in the lawsuits filed against Google by groups representing authors and publishers? Vaidhyanathan spends time in his article describing everything from the history of copyright in Europe and the US, famous writers’ interest in copyright, theoretical concepts of copyright, to more recent, controversial copyright laws and cases. Despite that, it doesn’t seem that Vaidhyanathan would have as much of an issue with Google Books, at least regarding the copyrights of authors and publishers. It’s not that he wouldn’t want authors to be fairly compensated for or have no control over their work. But in his commitment to the dynamic, interdisciplinary nature of CIS, Vaidhyanathan exhorts that “every scholar committed to CIS should insist on retaining some of her or his rights to publications and making them available as widely and cheaply as possible.”[13]

Where the question of copyright and the Google Books project might become more concerning for Vaidhyanathan is what Tim Wu described in his 2016 The New Yorker article as a possible “monopoly in online, out-of-print books.”[14] To that I would add that through their partnership with many of the world’s leading research libraries, Google would have access to books that, while they may no longer be under copyright, are rare or difficult enough to access that Google would have an effective monopoly on them as well. Combined with their above described walled garden approach of access to information and it would almost give Google an implicit copyright and ability to make money on any out-of-print or rare out-of-copyright books they can scan.

A plan to scan all of the world’s books and make them available and searchable online at first seems like it would be an ideal tool for the scholarly analysis and debate of such dynamic, interdisciplinary fields as those found in Critical Information Studies. However, the restrictions of access placed on the project by Google itself are antithetical to those fields of study, as well as the abuse of copyright with which CIS often concerns itself.

[1] “Google Books History.” Accessed September 9, 2016. https://books.google.com/googlebooks/about/history.html.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Markoff, John, and Edward Wyatt. “Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database.” New York Times, December 14, 2004. Accessed September 9, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/technology/google-is-adding-major-libraries-to-its-database.html.

[4] Ibid.

[5] “Authors Guild Sues Google, Citing “Massive Copyright Infringement”.” The Authors Guild. September 20, 2005. Accessed September 9, 2016. https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/authors-guild-sues-google-citing-massive-copyright-infringement.

[6] Wyatt, Edward. “Arts, Briefly; Major Publishers Sue Google.” October 20, 2005. Accessed September 9, 2016. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E4DA123FF933A15753C1A9639C8B63.

[7] Vaidhyanathan, Siva. “Critical Information Studies: A Bibliographic Manifesto.” Cultural Studies 20, nos. 2-3 (March/May 2006): 292-315. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals.

[8] Stuivenga, Will. “Contracting for Content in a Digital World.” LITA Blog. July 11, 2006. Accessed September 9, 2016. http://litablog.org/2006/07/lita-preconference-contracting-for-content-in-a-digital-world.

[9] Vaidhyanathan, Siva. “Critical Information Studies: A Bibliographic Manifesto.” Cultural Studies 20, nos. 2-3 (March/May 2006): 292-315. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals.

[10] Stuivenga, Will. “Contracting for Content in a Digital World.” LITA Blog. July 11, 2006. Accessed September 9, 2016. http://litablog.org/2006/07/lita-preconference-contracting-for-content-in-a-digital-world.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Vaidhyanathan, Siva. “Critical Information Studies: A Bibliographic Manifesto.” Cultural Studies 20, nos. 2-3 (March/May 2006): 292-315. http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Wu, Tim. “What Ever Happened to Google Books?” The New Yorker. September 11, 2015. Accessed September 9, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-ever-happened-to-google-books.

If you’re a regular social media user, it can be easy to forget how public the internet really is. “Following” is a typical feature offered on social media sites, letting users choose who to see content from and creating a unique mini network visible on a personal home page. Facebook’s Newsfeed is a famous example of this, showing content that is populated by friends’ online activity. Sites like Twitter and Tumblr follow this same model, but somehow users are more cavalier with the types of things they share and say – perhaps because both networks function using user created pseudonyms. It’s unlikely to see someone post a scathing, detailed rant about their boss on Facebook because there is an understanding that it will be easily traced back to the author, but that same rant on Tumblr can theoretically only be traced back to the pseudonym. Although unique usernames do provide a certain level of anonymity, the vast audience of the internet remains the same. This can foster a false sense of security for users who are so comfortable in their self made networks that they let down guards they would otherwise keep in place.

The phenomenon of feeling like the only active person in a sea of strangers is also common; it is easy for users who don’t get much direct interaction with online peers to feel like they are operating in a void. Twitter user @whateverdude alludes to this during an outage period where the site was experiencing difficulties updating: “twitter is down, so for the next hour, i’ll be scrawling shit on post-its and tossing them out the window,” he writes. People who use their social media accounts like personal journals miss out on (or dismiss) the networking aspects of these websites and behave as if they are invisible. It might feel a bit like a modern, tech infused version of the old adage about a falling tree in an empty forest, except on the internet, someone is ALWAYS listening.

Earlier this year, a teenage girl on Tumblr posted an awkward picture of herself stuck standing in a stacked tower of classroom stools. “I was alone in the art room and had the thought ‘I wonder how many stools I can get over my head,'” she wrote. “Long story short i got stuck and the class walked in to me pathetically trying to wriggle out without being knocked over.” This simple, diary-like post suddenly started rapidly spreading, with other Tumblr users sharing it as a visual joke. What was originally relatively “private” and self-deprecating suddenly became mortifying, and the original poster reposted the photo with the note “stop reblogging this.” This made the joke even funnier, and the photo and its captions were spread even more. Pleading a third time, the poster writes, “Do you honestly think I want to be known as the ‘stuck in stools’ girl[?]”

In a piece for the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Nancy K. Baym and danah boyd speak on the precarious nature of networked publics, saying

“Most of the people engaging audiences and building identities and publics through social media are not […] fortunate. Some develop a sensibility through experience; others find themselves struggling to make sense of and manage their participation in networked publics; some misunderstand the consequences of their actions and make mistakes without realizing it.”

The only kind of mistake made by the teen on Tumblr was sharing too much and taking privacy for granted; the sudden visibility of her post led to embarrassment and therefore was a lesson in discretion. Concrete mistakes with real world implications are a dime a dozen for celebrities on Twitter, however. Posting a tweet from your phone takes mere seconds, and the 140 character limit forces users to make concise statements that can often come off as offensively blunt. The short form of Twitter also makes tweets extremely easy to misinterpret.

“the challenges of differing and sometimes unknown audiences can complicate self-presentation.” Baym and boyd continue. “Having to imagine one’s audience is a fundamental human problem rather than one distinctive to social media. But social media make it particularly challenging to understand “who is out there and when” and raises the potential for greater misalignment between imagined and actual audiences.”

This problem of forgetting about ones audience can be devastating to the carefully crafted images of public figures, giving fans insight into the potential true characters of their idols.  In 2011, actor Ashton Kutcher tweeted “How do you fire Jo Pa? #insult #noclass as a hawkeye fan I find it in poor taste” in response to Iowa State football coach Joe Paterno being fired for covering up a sexual abuse scandal. Fans instantly criticized Kutcher for his insensitive remarks that prioritized athletics over abuse victims. Within a day, Kutcher’s Twitter account was officially taken over by his PR team as he had to scramble to apologize for his error. Apparently he did not know all the details of the news story and had tweeted his immediate thoughts without thinking – a costly mistake that changed some fans’ opinions of him indefinitely.

A more recent celebrity Twitter controversy involved Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift, and was also apparently due to carelessly quick tweeting. After releasing a popular but polarizing video featuring women of color for her song “Anaconda,” Nicki Minaj was hopeful her video would be nominated for a coveted MTV Video Music Award. When no nomination came, Minaj tweeted, ” If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you will be nominated for vid of the year.” Taylor Swift, whose video had been nominated, directly responded to Minaj less than an hour later, saying “I’ve done nothing but love & support you. It’s unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot..” Swift’s tweet was immediately met with confusion from many fans and even Minaj herself, who responded directly to clarify her disappointment was not with Swift. Even more fans pointed out the irony of Swift’s mention of ‘pitting women against one another,’ since the very video that garnered her nomination depicted exactly that. Two days later, Swift apologized and admitted her mistake in thinking the jabs were directed at her, veritably admitting that her tweet was a mistake based upon a quick assumption.  Again, this error proved to be costly as it colored fans’ perceptions of Swift and questioned whether or not her comments (and later, silence) were part of a bigger scheme to cause a stir.  Authentic or not, Swift’s ironically eponymous initial action revealed she did not fully consider her audience or the implications of her post.

“As people engage in and reshape social media, they construct new types of publicness that echo but redefine publicness as it was known in unmediated and broadcast contexts,” Baym and boyd state.  Even though the act of image sharing or tweeting can be performed alone in one’s home, the minute the content is posted it becomes public.  Whether it is the security of a pseudonym or the general ease of sharing that makes users so cavalier with their content, blunders of all kinds will continue to be made online for all to see.

Sources:

twitter is down, so for the next hour, i'll be scrawling shit on post-its and tossing them out the window

— Nate Walsh (@whateverdude) May 8, 2009

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08838151.2012.705200

http://spilled–ink-for-a-stranger.tumblr.com/post/114200321669/catastrophicmisfit-cintiahudsonperry

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2060045/Ashton-Kutcher-hands-Twitter-account-management-Penn-State-Joe-Paterno-posts.html#ixzz3uSVAfPqB

http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop-shop/6641794/taylor-swift-nicki-minaj-twitter-argument-timeline

 

The most interesting topic that came up for me during this section was the history of technology and the evolution of communication. I loved learning about how people expressed their fear and wonder of the new emerging technology that could allow for greater communication. If history is anything to go by, methods of communication have been dominated by those who were powerful enough to control it. Thankfully, today governments and other influential organizations have lost some of the control they once had. Now anyone, with access to the internet or a mobile device, can communicate faster, farther and easier than before.

For a long time the only forms of communication were the spoken and written word. However, neither could reach great distances. For the Greeks and the Romans, town criers would receive the “news” of the town and speak about it.  The invention of the printing press in the mid 15th Century allowed books to be printed and distributed more frequently to those who could read and afford the prices. The invention of the telegraph, radio and then television provided, those with the means to do so, a way to send messages to others far away. Phones, computers, tablets and even the internet, were created to incorporate societies need to communicate quickly and efficiently. Email, text messaging and applications have facilitated the change from letters and telegrams to instant communication.

It was fascinating to read about the fear Walter Benjamin had that governments would misuse technology for their own, possible evil, deeds. In his article, Benjamin writes that,

“If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society.”

During the class discussion however, my group discussed how technology has been able to stop or at least limit how much propaganda governments create. Modern media methods counteract any government oversight. There are sites that allow users to live stream events recorded by people at the events. Its because of these sites that protests from parts of the world that are normally ignored by large media outlets.

Websites and pages on social media are dedicated to speaking out against corruption in other governments all around the world. Even locally, small new outlets, independent journalists and/or bloggers are able to spread socially important stories over the internet that while they may not be important to large media outlets, certainly matter to most of the population.  

Sites like Humans of New York on Facebook have connected people from different backgrounds and parts of the world. In the collection of Syrian refugees, the photographer was able to demonstrate the struggle many went through to escape their war torn countries and the difficulties they’ve faced finding a new place to call home. Millions of followers of the page have helped raised funds for those in need. Some have reached out to the people mentioned on the page to either help with living arrangements or to put them in contact with other people who would be able to help.

The most important aspect of the Humans of New York (HONY) is that it connects people. I don’t think that even Walter Benjamin could have imagined how powerful technology could become or how it could connect people from different parts of the world instantaneously. Thanks to sites like HONY, the photographer, Brandon, has been able to document and shed light on the difficulties refugees face when trying to enter a new country.

Hackers (even though it is illegal)  are able expose corrupt people or organization because of technology. Recently, the group known as Anonymous vowed to expose prominent members of the KKK and ISIS. By using their computers members of Anonymous used the social media as a tool for social justice. Their actions are another example of how the Internet, another element of technology, has been able to help fight against corruption and prejudices.  

While the internet was designed to expand communication between everyone, many people have used the internet to post or dismiss ideas. Facebook itself has become a daily news source where regular people can post “news” about themselves. Cellphones, laptops, tablets, have given media mobility. Live-streaming from mobile devices have allowed people from all over the world to watch and witness protests, speeches, demonstrations, and any other public events from different parts of the country or world.  

Many argue that cellphones and computers are limiting communication. I agree to come extent that this is true. Text messaging is not the same as having an in person conversation. Text messaging doesn’t convey emotion the same way as a verbal dialog. However phone calls and even video messages have replaced letter and in live communication. With a video call a person can be across the ocean and a group of people can have conversation face to face. There are limits to these forms of communication unfortunately. Video calls can only be made by people with computer and Internet access. In a way this is similar to the letters before computers and cell phones. If a person couldn’t write, they couldn’t communicate.

There is even technology that allows people with verbal or textile difficulties to communicate. So yes, technology can be used to spread evil doctrines and hate. However, technology can be used to counteract those actions as well. Therefore, people can argue that technology is neither a positive or a negative. It just exists as a tool in this time.

It’s undeniable that technological skills are highly prioritized in our current world, and that schools seek to maintain relevancy in their lessons while new hardware and software are being produced at an exceedingly rapid speed—laptops and iPads have been introduced into everyday lessons, across many different subjects; students are participating in online, class-related discussion and blogging; websites like RapGenius are pushing the boundaries of how students perform literary analysis and annotation; “educational” computer games like Civilization are often used as supplementary learning materials. [1]

How does this influx of technology actually affect the humanities? Parents continue to express interest in science, “communications”, and math skills being emphasized in the classroom—arts, however, are often overlooked, or even considered unimportant. [2] This problem aligns ideologically with the mission of museums and specialized arts institutions like Poets House to increase outreach and engagement with their respective art forms. Is the answer to both, in fact, to include more of the technology lauded by the general public in these traditionally analog arts environments? Perhaps.

There are many ways that one can combine art and technology. The popular arts nonprofit and New Museum-affiliate Rhizome has created a series called Seven on Seven, where seven artists are matched with seven technologists and charged with the task of creating something new within the span of one day. [3] This kind of program encourages the combination of two different backgrounds— but even in this instance, art and technology are being viewed as separate. Perhaps it doesn’t need to be such a distinction— after all electronic music has been around for years, and the creation of simple illustration programs like Paint have brought about classes like Advanced Digital Painting, which was recently introduced into the curriculum at RISD.[4]

The advances for technology in the study of poetry are still rather rudimentary, but strides are being made with RapGenius’s offshoots of PoetryGenius and LitGenius. But are these websites more or less effective than physical manifestations of outreach programs? Poets House has developed the Poetry in the Branches program with the intention to raise awareness and engagement with the art form in public libraries, and other environments highly trafficked by children, like zoos. This analog approach to outreach has the Poets House staff physically present in order to train the librarians participating in the program. PitB itself also relies heavily on the implementation of in-person interactions with poems and poetry via guest speakers, workshops, reading series, etc., all with the aim to increase public engagement.[5] The physical presence of poetry is also emphasized—Marsha Howard, the PitB coordinator (interestingly, a former NYPL librarian), is quoted as saying “Poetry is most successful when your patrons hear it, see it, hear about it, bump into it, in as many ways as possible…It will be unavoidable if you do a good job.”[6]

This is true enough; as with any skill or knowledge, constant contact with the subject matter leads to learning, and often there are learning by-products of a particular educational activity  (à la Mr. Miyagi’s wax-on, wax-off lessons in Karate Kid). For example, English majors are often celebrated for their general ability to think critically and for their writing skills— by-products of close-reading and a myriad of writing assignments.[7] However, is this the initial aim of the English major? In most cases, certainly not—a love for literature, reading, or writing is usually at the heart of this choice. It just so happens that repeated engagement with the written word leads to a better understanding of language structure and use. (The same arguments can be made in the case of studying Philosophy, Art History, and others, of course.)

What if, along with the “by-product” of critical thinking skills, students of the humanities also gained skills in technology? And if this were to be the case, then programs like Poetry in the Branches would be immensely helpful in fostering an initial love for poetry, leading (ideally) to an elevated study of poetry, and the subsequent gains in critical thinking and technology skills. Perhaps the introduction of more technology-based humanities engagement would lead to more a well-rounded, tech-savvy (read: obviously employable) breed of humanities scholars. Furthermore, this change in tech-implementation could quell the fears of humanities students in graduating without marketable skills (and the fears of parents whose children arrive home for holidays having declared themselves a Fine Arts major).

In today’s world, higher education has taken the unfortunate turn towards vocational schooling— the aim is to find a career, and to gain applicable skill-sets rather than to stimulate the mind into growing, and creating new synapses and modes of thinking. The humanities seem to have developed a reputation as an academic inside-joke where the punchline is unemployment—but why? It didn’t used to be so. As Amory Blaine laments in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, “I may turn out an intellectual, but I’ll never write anything but mediocre poetry.”[8] True appreciation for art is noble, and to be gifted at it is rare. That potential poets and other artists might be discouraged due to a lack of employment marketability is quite sad, and ultimately detrimental to the future of humanity.

Rather than segregating art, science, and technology, let us continue to integrate them and encourage the crossing of intellectual borders; let’s make our poets write in zeros and ones, and have our scientists write sonnets about their discoveries. After all, as Socrates claims: the unexamined life is not worth living, and as celebrated programmer and activist Aaron Swartz said: “Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.”[9] The pursuit of information and data can yield wonderfully creative means of expression, and artistic, often beautiful results. For example, the LinkedJazz Project has created a visual diagram of connections between jazz musicians, resulting in a mesmerizing chart:

The poet Kenneth Goldsmith also incorporates the Internet frequently into his work. In his project Printing out the Internet (which he dedicated to Schwartz), Goldsmith encouraged the public to print pages of the Internet and send them to a gallery in Mexico City. [11]

These are just two projects out of countless possibilities. The acknowledgement of technology and the Internet in artistic forms is an imperative if these art forms are going to survive in an increasingly technological world (or, at least, if they are going to continue to receive funding). We need creative people interested in the arts to be allowed to unabashedly pursue their interests, for the good of art, technology, and humanity.

 

Cited

1. Klopfer, Eric; Osterweil, Scot; Groff, Jennifer; Haas, Jason, “Using the Technology of Today in the Classroom Today: The Instructional Power of Digital Games, Social Networking Simulations, and How Teachers Can Leverage Them.” The Education Arcade. MIT: 2009. Web. Accessed on 13 Dec 2015. <http://education.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/GamesSimsSocNets_EdArcade.pdf>
2. Sara Kehaulani Goo, “The skills Americans say kids need to succeed in life,” Pew Research Center, 19 February 2015. Accessed on 14 Dec 2015. <http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/19/skills-for-success/>
3. Rhizome, “Seven on Seven.” Web. Accessed 14 Dec 2015. <http://sevenonseven.rhizome.org>
4. RISD, “Fall 2015 Illustration Courses.” Web. Accessed 14 Dec 2015. <http://www.risd.edu/academics/illustration/courses/>
5. Poets House, “Poetry in the Branches.” Web. Accessed 13 Dec 2015. <http://www.poetshouse.org/librarians-and-educators/librarians/poetry-in-the-branches/services>
6. Howard, Marsha, as quoted by Marcella Veneziale in “Poets House National Institute Aims to Boost Poetry in Public Libraries.” Library Journal. 8 April 2010. Web. Accessed 13 Dec 2015. <http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2010/04/professional-reading/poets-house-national-instituteaimstoboost-poetry-in-public-libraries/#_>
7. Lewin, Tamar. “As Interest Fades in the Humanities, Colleges Worry.” New York Times. 30 Oct 2013. Web. Accessed 13 Dec 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/education/as-interest-fades-in-the-humanities-colleges-worry.html?_r=0>
8. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. This Side of Paradise. Scribner, 1920. Google Books. Web. Accessed 14 Dec 2015.
9. Schwartz, Aaron, as quoted in Silvia Puglisi’s preface to RESTful Rails Development: Building Open Applications and Services. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2015. Google Books. Web. Accessed 14 Dec 2015.
10. LinkedJazz Project Visual Network. <https://linkedjazz.org/network/>
11. Kenneth Goldsmith. Printing Out The Internet Tumblr. <http://printingtheinternet.tumblr.com>

 

Blog Article #3

The field of Library and Information Science has grown and expanded as the world has progressed. This expansion has extended to online spheres from digitizing archives to online library collections. Coming from Upstate New York, I grew up in the shadow of Kodak and everything relating to George Eastman. The George Eastman House provides a lot of historic options for someone interested in photographic archives. It is because of this that I chose to do my third blog article on the George Eastman House online archives database. I am unable to conduct an in-person observation of the archives as they are a six hour drive but I am more interested in combing the online collections to see how such a vast collection is being translated digitally.

From class discussions, the article that most stood out to me on this subject is Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Due to the digitization of documents and photographs, Benjamin’s article is pertinent in that it offers up the question of whether or not we are losing something in the digitization process. While this article may be a little out of date, having been written in the nineteen thirties, it still provides a valid viewpoint from which to consider the impact technology has on works of art and photographs. What could we possibly lose by digitizing photographic collections that record historic events, individuals, and other such precious time capsules into our past? Benjamin argues that the essence of the moment is lost in the reproduction of the image, “[e]ven the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” (Benjamin) It interesting to wonder if this doesn’t happen almost immediately after the act of taking a photo as the image itself is produced from a negative. On the other hand, as the negative is the pure image, would it technically be called reproduction if the negative is used…”in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision. Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record.” (Benjamin) According to Benjamin’s logic, it would still lose its presence in the time and space in which it was taken so even the act of developing a photo from the original negative would make it a reproduction.

The George Eastman House Online Collections are split up into several categories including collections of negatives, lantern slides and many smaller collections of photographs on historic events and persons. While there is some access to these collections, it is nowhere near complete which the sites recognize. I perused the main collections that the site highlights to judge the general functionality of the online collections. On both the Eastman Museum website and the George Eastman House site, there is a useful “Search” tool which allows someone to pin down a specific collection or photograph. Although this tool exists, there isn’t a lot of free movement between the collections which makes it difficult to compare images unless you open up a new window from which to view the images side by side. The licensing website that houses the collections is organized by general collection (technology, rare books, Civil War, Portraits of Photographers, 19^th Century Streets, Eastman’s Legacy, and Frame clippings). The site recognizes that there is missing material and urges visitors of the site to check back regularly for updates to the collections. There are collections on these two specific sites and both offer different collections, one of the major cons with using these online collections is the difficulty of maneuvering within and between the collections which is a bit cumbersome. The Eastman Museum site recognizes that the database is only a fraction of the photography collection and is not a comprehensive representation of all of the museum’s materials and there is still much work to be done. However, they are off to a good start.

 

 

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

https://eastman.org/

http://licensing.eastmanhouse.org/GEH/C.aspx?VP3=HRender_VPage