IN-CLASS ACTIVITY: We’ll break into groups to create forensic diagrams of some of the case studies below; we’ll map the myriad actors and connections within their information ecologies. Please bring a laptop, if you have one! I’ll bring the craft supplies!
READINGS
Models and Metaphors:
- Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Scientist 43:3 (1999): 377-91.
- Skim Paul N. Edwards, Stephen J. Jackson, Melissa K. Chalmers, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Christine Borgman, David Ribes, Matt Burton & Scout Calvert, Knowledge Infrastructures: Intellectual Frameworks and Research Challenges (2013).
- Benjamin Bratton, “The Black Stack,” e-flux 53 (March 2014).
- Excerpts from Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, “Introduction: An Overview of the Knowledge Commons” in Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, eds. Hess and Ostrom (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007): 3-14 [stop at “The Knowledge Ecosystem…”]
- Consider: what other spatial or conceptual models do we commonly use to make sense of our information “ecologies”? Nets, rhizomes, clouds….
Aestheticizing Information Ecologies:
- Hito Steyerl & Laura Poitras, “Techniques of the Observer,” Artforum (May 2015) [and here’s the NSA Treasure Map to which S+P refer]
Case Studies: Choose two one to read about before class; think about the human, institutional, and non-human actors, hardware, software, protocols, sites of practice, flows, and other entangled infrastructures that compose them, and the cultures and ecologies that supply and sustain them:[1]
- The Alt-Right Web: Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online (New York: Data & Society Institute, May 2017) [the report’s fabulous, but long; you’ll need to skim].
- Data Refuge (preserving endangered federal climate and environmental data): Bethany Wiggin, “How Data Refuge Works, and How You Can Help Save Federal Open Data,” Sunlight Foundation (February 6, 2017
- Documenting the Now (ethically collecting and preserving social media): Kritika Agarwal, “Doing Right Online: Archivists Shape an Ethics for the Digital Age,” Perspectives on History (November 2016)
- Internet Archive (a massive digital library of public domain materials and web archive): Jill Lepore, “The Cobweb: Can the InterNet be Archived?” New Yorker (January 26, 2015); Jonathan Minard, “The Internet Archive” {video} (2012) [13:04].
- Panama Papers (leaked files documenting offshore tax regimes, publicized in 2016 through an international consortium of journalists): Mar Cabra & Erin Kissane, “The People and Tech Behind the Panama Papers,” Source (April 11, 2016).
What other “epistemic communities” or “belief networks” might lend themselves to network mapping? Various conspiracy circles? Supply chains?
Consider also historical information ecologies, like those that Alejandra Dubcovsky describes in the early colonial American South, where, in the days before postal systems and printing presses, oral networks – composed of spies, scouts, traders, missionaries, couriers, hunting parties, shipwrecked sailors, captured soldiers, fugitive slaves – linked together Native American, African, and European communities (Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
A bit too complicated to map in class, but worth thinking about: USGS Earth Explorer (database of declassified US government satellite imagery, aerial photos, and LANDSAT imagery), the Smithsonian/Museum of Natural History Field Book Project (gathering and digitizing field books in various institutions’ collections), and Palantir (secretive data company with interests in counter-terrorism, predictive policing, espionage-monitoring, etc.).
SUPPLEMENTAL RESOURCES
Adam Greenfield, “Commoning Systems: Organize, Don’t Jargonize,” Speedbird (January 9, 2016); Shannon Mattern, “A City Is Not a Computer,” Places Journal (February 2017); Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess, “A Framework for Analyzing the Knowledge Commons” in Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, eds. Hess and Ostrom (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007): 41-81.
Thanks to Twitter friends who helped me identify case studies for this exercise!