Recognizing bias in data visualizations

Alonso Alcocer GuemezOne Comment

After reading Drabinski’s ideas and listening to Kate Crawford I started wondering about how bias manifest itself in data visualization and what are the solutions being presented in order to tackle this problem. Media organizations, businesses and large public institutions resort to data visualizations in order to provide people with access to data, but it is important to remember and understand that data visualization remains a storytelling practice influenced by the perspective of the people who create and design them.

A simple presentation of a graph can drastically change and affect our perception of important public issues depending on how it is designed. An example can be the analysis of monthly change in jobs created by the NYT on 2012 where the authors give us the opportunity to scan the graph with Democrat and Republican lenses.

There are other cases where there is risk of unintentional bias. The usage of certain colors and shapes can alter the ways in which we visualize and understand certain social groups. Take as an example this map of concentrated poverty in Minnesota where the people living in these areas considered that they were being portrayed as an infestation.

The readings for this week reminded me of the importance of leaving room for discovery even when we may have a preconceived notion of how we wish to visualize the data and, above all, the need to develop techniques that promote transparency in our work as designers.

ambiguity and classification

Aarati AkkapeddiOne Comment

I am interested in the seemingly contradictory ideas of ambiguity and classification. Many of the readings this week (particularly Emily Drabinski’s piece) highlighted the idea of fluidity, or the ability for items in the archive to transcend the organizational system within they are placed, as critical in overcoming the inherent inability for a classification system to adapt well to different contexts, viewers, time periods, etc at a satisfactory level/pace. How do we design fluidity into a system that operates on the exact opposite? Although I feel Drabinski’s piece addressed the question, I don’t feel like it offered any actionable alternatives. Another idea that I see brought up throughout the readings and in the structure of both the Prelinger Library and the Cybernetics Library, is this idea of designing for serendipity. I view it as tangentially related to this question of fluidity in that they both embrace a sense of subjectivity instead of seeking unattainable objectivity. Although the Prelinger Library is technically organized by geography, I feel that the novelty of this organization principle warrants a more subjective categorization of the items in the library (in comparison to some other well-established and perhaps more granular system). But the cybernetics library is very much related to this idea of ambiguity/fluidity in that it is literally configured to change over time, and through both the actions of the librarians and the patrons.( I am still a bit unclear on the virtual component of the cybernetics library so I will leave that out of the discussion for now)

I also, had a thought about Kate Crawford’s talk when she mentions that the majority of the Faces in the Wild dataset is male and white. As someone who is neither white nor male, I’m not sure if this is a context in which I necessarily feel bad about lack of representation! My face can stay obscure haha.

Politics of Sound: Listening to the Archive @ Interference Archive, 10/25

shannon

Thursday, October 25, 7pm @ Interference Archive

IA’s Announcement

Interference Archive presents a panel discussion that brings together a group of archivists, oral historians, librarians, and others working with collections of sound. They work in a range of disciplines–from poetry to oral history–all informed by a political approach to sound. We’ll discuss the various ways archiving sound can be a political act, including how sound archives can support organizing work, and how sound collections can contribute to the creation of historical memory, broadening the range of stories that are part of our collective history.

Speakers include Natiba Guy-Clement, Special Collections Manager at the Brooklyn Public Library, home of the Civil Rights in Brooklyn Oral History Collection; Daniel Horowitz, poet who uses sound archives in his work; Samara Smith, Associate Professor at SUNY, who documented the sounds of Occupy Wall Street; and Mario Alvarez and Alissa Funderbunk, creators of Columbia Life Histories, a series of oral history interviews with graduate students at Columbia University.

Classifying Art

Liliana FarberOne Comment

Reading George Perec’s “Think/Classify” made me think of a book I received when I was a child, “The Art Book”.  Phaidon’s best seller claims to be a great Visual Arts introduction, and so, my parents thought of it as perfect gift for a child interested in the arts. However, at a young age, I was confused with this survey and how it portrayed the visual language history. The book main classification strategy is not by theme, cultural framework, or time in history, but by name. Artists are ordered in alphabetical order, each one receiving one page and one image reproduction.

The alphabet, as Perec points out, it’s quite an arbitrary way to classify elements. Classifications, he explains, expose a way of thinking. They emerge from ideology, from the hierarchy of the world they drawn from. Classifications create a view of the world. I wonder why a book that organizes worldwide (as they claim, although is mainly western) visual production in a detached, almost random way, is so popular? A book that suppresses ideological, historical, or formal histories and connections between artworks. Is it with the aim of forgetting Art History as we know it, and allowing retinal experience of the artworks? Is it with the aim of pursuing an objective perspective? Or does this mode of classification transform Art History into shallow trivia material? Does this arrangement commodify visual history into a coffee table book content?

Furniture

Iltimas DohaOne Comment

This weeks readings are very interesting in thinking about last week’s topic of infrastructure. Especially in thinking about the libraries like the Prelinger and Warburg, furniture and organizing ideas are intertwined. The Warburg library infrastructure mirrors the abstract structure, and thus requires furnishing to also match. I think it’s interesting to think about this in light of BILLY bookcases. While the construction and material is quiet shoddy (i too am doubtful of butt joints), it’s accessi-BILLY-ty allows larger participation in thinking about how we think about and display ideas, and how they relate to each other. In that way, it could be understood that IKEA holds great power in what we decided to display and organize, not to mention fuels our need to do so.

Brave Pneumatic World

Tim Murphy

I have a vivid memory from childhood that has stuck with me: I’m in the back of my mom’s car at the drive-thru bank in our town. As she presses a button, a capsule shoots up a clear tube out of sight. A disembodied, telephonic voice emanates from a speaker, says a few words, and seconds later the capsule glides back down the tube, this time filled with money and a lollipop for me, as if by magic. Perhaps it is the image of Jetson-ian ‘tube-based’ movement, or the unforgettable summation of the internet itself as ‘a series of tubes’ by Senator Ted Stevens; something about housing and moving information, infrastructure, or objects with compressed air via (usually underground or hidden) tube networks just aesthetically strikes us as futuristic.

There is a long history of humans envisioning a faster, ‘non-traditional’ conception of movement; always looking for a shortcut, there had to be some system that could bypass the pitfalls of conventional mobility allowing for a faster, unobstructed journey. The pneumatic tube thus functions as both an example of technology and a piece of infrastructure to facilitate technological or information transfer. Susan Stewart mentions in her piece, ‘Plato likens the pigeon to a bit of knowledge’(1); like ‘pigeonholes’, each opening in a pneumatic tube arrangement not only serves to house ‘knowledge,’ whether it be a physical object or document, but to move that particular piece to a specific and purposeful destination. The idealized vision of pneumatic systems was intended to help move humans faster and with less obstruction, and to help businesses move product between locations — and it brought a futuristic expediency to these otherwise banal and unavoidable tasks.

Further adding to the air of ‘futuristic’ or liminality is the concealment of these tube systems: we typically only see the intake/output aspect of the operation before the tubing network vanishes into a wall, or underground. This obfuscation of the apparatus functions in stark contrast to the purposeful design and arrangement of of shelving, as discussed in the Mattern piece: “we put things on shelves, rather than behind doors or in drawers… when they’re sufficiently attractive for display’(2). While these systems of cascading tubes are fascinating, we tend to bury the infrastructural underpinning within or beneath architecture; we see only the initial setup and final product. Preceding our modern conception of ‘instant’, the ability to stick something into a tube in the wall and have it reach its targeted destination almost instantly has a distinctly science-fiction appeal (unsurprisingly, the use of the pneumatic tube in works of fiction is widespread). Fitting with the sci-fi aesthetic, operators of pneumatic systems even referred to themselves as ‘rocketeers'(3).

Chun describes new media as ‘[racing] simultaneously towards the future and the past, towards what we might call the bleeding edge of obsolescence’(4). The pneumatic tube system falls within the realm of technology once viewed as forward-thinking and potentially revolutionary, only to be rendered outdated by new developments. Once these tube systems lose their utility, a skeletal remainder physically remains. The disused pneumatic system at the Brooklyn Public Library looked worn like other machinery we saw, but somehow also out of place, as if from a totally different era. The demise of pneumatic tube systems was brought about by their high cost (as is often the case), and what was once a tangible tool of ‘the future’ swiftly became a relic of dated thought. The New York Times eulogizes the once state-of-the-art New York pneumatic mail system as such:

For the time, the system was thoroughly modern, even high-tech, a subterranean network for priority and first-class mail fueled by pressurized air. Only a few decades later it was mostly a dinosaur, made obsolete by the motor wagon and then the automobile.(5)

Like the payphone or the railway semaphore, a physical monument to the obsolescence of entire networks remains visible with its intended purpose obfuscated. To those not aware of the history, these structures become simply another topographical marker. Much like actual dinosaurs, we are left with only skeletal remains hinting at the magnitude of something lost to time.

We got to personally see a pneumatic system now relegated to an antique at the Brooklyn Public Library. This is the conundrum of the technology: in present day it is both obsolete and yet still somehow reminiscent of ‘futuristic’ ideals. In her piece, Stewart mentions Cornell’s 1952 work Dovecote, which featured colored balls that could be moved from panel to panel via a series of hidden tracks within the frame of the work: “Dovecote…presents an image of memory in a process of disappearance… Dovecote appears as… a forgotten function, a device no one remembers.”(6)  By design we are only privy to the ‘beginning and ending’ of pneumatic systems, unable to see the obscured infrastructure. In this way at a glance, the obsolete systems visually call to mind notions of immediacy, ‘magic’ transportation, and both the past and the present at once.

Pneumatic tube systems are still in place and functional in certain modern settings: banks, fast food restaurants, and somewhat regularly within hospitals to transport samples or medicine to and from labs. The technology has also been applied to scenarios far beyond urbanized environments: Whooshh Innovations has crafted a pneumatic tube system used to transport migrating fish over dams, ensuring the integrity of natural ecosystems and man-made infrastructure (I thought I was clever in finding this, but as it turns out the Jon Oliver show has already produced a ‘viral clip’ about the novelty of this technology).

Perhaps the most well-known modern adaptation of the pneumatic tube system has been popularized by eccentric and ambien-fueled tech entrepreneur Elon Musk. Hyperloop has proposed the development of an underground human-transport system that would allow for coast-to-coast travel at breakneck (hopefully not literally) speeds. Using a combination of a pneumatic system and mag-lev technology used in ‘bullet trains’, initial designs offer yet another iteration of a ‘futuristic’ re-imagining of how to transport things faster than the current paradigm. Like most of Elon Musk’s ideas, Hyperloop attracted a lot of interest with detractors and proponents attempting to reason how and why this system could work or fail. Vox describes the promise of pneumatic travel as ‘part Victorian, part Jetson’(7) (to me, there is an element of Super Mario as well), and there is something undeniably more idealistically ‘futuristic’ about tube travel than even another one of Musk’s conceptions, the self-driving car, offers. Perhaps the immediacy of ‘instantaneous’ travel at some point stops resembling technology and becomes something more like ‘magic’.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GqDRcCvpZYS1a8R136R7CT5G3ov57x_-_MK8VVgWO9w/edit#slide=id.g43bc45247d_0_10

1 http://www.wordsinspace.net/secure/Stewart_Wunderkammer.pdf page 293

2 http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/43/before-billy-a-brief-history-of-the-bookcase

3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sd58w0CXQrM  @1:10

4 http://www.wordsinspace.net/secure/Chun_EnduringEphemeral.pdf

5 https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/07/nyregion/underground-mail-road-modern-plans-for-all-but-forgotten-delivery-system.html

6 http://www.wordsinspace.net/secure/Stewart_Wunderkammer.pdf page 293

7  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sd58w0CXQrM @ 3:11

Dovecote by Joseph Cornell

The Total Archive and Posthumanism

Tress

The Total Archive and Posthumanism

“…The Library is total and its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols … the interpolations of every book in all books.” [1]

In Jorge Luis Borges’s,[2] “The Library of Babel,” he envisions a fictional, seemingly unending and universal library that contains all things that have been written, and will be written. Somethings are sensical and others are nonsensical. This library is one constructed of infinite space and time. It is a metaphorical replica of the universe and depicts the theory of the total archive.

Borges in this literature is undermining the idea of totality. In order for information to be accessible, it must be discernible. But, Borges’s library holds no classification scheme, no decimal system, no form of indexing. The information is infinite, and as such cannot be counted by ephemeral humanity.

The shelves, or containment units, typically represent accessibility of material, but here it is used ironically. Borges describes the specific architecture of this unending labyrinth. There exist an infinite number of hexagonal galleries. Each contains 20 shelves with five shelves per side, except for one. The shelves span the distance from the floor to ceiling, which rarely exceeds the height of the average librarian.

Paul Otlet’s work can be looked at as a more feasible attempt to a total archive as well as a precursor to the World Wide Web. In the Mundaneum, original works were reduced to a system of three- by five-inch index cards placed in filing cabinets, limiting the information stored. “Otlet’s vision was focused on pure information, not objects, and was distinguished by its universality and its emphasis on establishing the connections between bodies of knowledge…,”[3] allowing for a more effective use of space and indexing. Otlet was able to recognize the importance of search and retrieval. This system did not need containers for the original works, for it focused on effective retrieval of information.

The librarians in Borges’s work lived in an existence where they were surrounded by knowledge, and despite the architecture of the library, the openness of the shelves, the heights constructed for them to reach, they still could not find the answers they sought. The useless and the useful cohabit the same space, indiscernible. No book is more important than any other, thus knowledge becomes inaccessible.  

Finally, Borges leaves us with a sentiment: “The Library is unlimited and cyclical.” This in response to the idea that totality is achievable, and in as so much as the library (and the universe) must come to an end. He remarks such a notion is “absurd” and that once one has reached the theoretical end, it would simply begin anew.

Jonathan Basile is a writer and creator of libraryofbabel.info, which is a site that aims to make Borges’s library a reality through the use of an algorithm. The digital library houses 10 to the power of 4,677 books. Even still it represents a much pared down version due to digital storage limitations and parameters as constructed in Borges’s Library, such as page numbers (410) and symbols (22). The site also houses a similar application for images.

Ultimately, he states: “my project resembles Borges’s library only by mirroring its failure.”[4] The fruition of the universal library remains elusive because so long as the universe exists totality is “essentially incomplete.”

Basile’s algorithmic embodiment of the Library may contain all words that have been and will be written, but it lacks intention in its randomness. Humans have not written nor said nor will probably ever say all that can be, making the information meaningless. But what about the future? A future that looks inhuman.

According to N. Katherine Hayles,[5] beyond this theoretical metaphysical total archive, there is a natural phenomenon that limits the practical flow of information; expansion and compression. Borges’s library can be described as a compression. Once one has reached the “end” of the library, the cycle of information repeats in exactly the same order. This creates a lack of randomness to the universe, in other words, a compression. The inverse of this is expansion. “The Aleph,” another Borges work, envisions a photographic archive that contains a photo of itself, which contains a photo of itself, and so on and so forth. Like a set of nesting dolls, one encapsulating another, infinitely growing.

Tangibly, we see expansion and compression as a system of information ebbs and flows through “apparatuses of control,” such as political powers and institutions.[6] As information archives expand or compress the inverse occurs in relative systems. Hayles uses automated storage and retrieval systems employed in libraries as an example of this. These systems allow for the removal or compression of human browsable stacks while inversely expanding the space for utilization of other activities.  

I believe this phenomenon is seen within the internet. It acts as a system that is not only the closest and latest iteration to the Mundaneum but also acts as an expanding archive. However, as we know, server storage capacity is limited, not all permutations exist within it, and the information is transitory. As information expands data must compress, at least for the time being.

Researchers and scientists are working on means to develop information protocols through the use of quantum entanglement in quantum computing, which could mean infinite storage. Though, even this does not address the overarching issue of retrieval. With that issue aside, what if storage and containers are of no limitation if space and time simply do not act as ultimate parameters of archivable information?

Posthumanism can be envisioned as a future where the upper echelon of intelligence no longer belongs to what we now consider to be human. This future includes ideas that are un-human by nature, a world that has transcended the human form. But, how does this future affect current information infrastructures? Does it allow for infinite information storage? Does it allow for navigation? And must this information be transmutable, as seen in Otlet’s archive?

Hayles states in her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, that there are four challenges when thinking of a posthuman future narrative. (1) overcoming anthropocentrism, (2) including nonhumans, (3) accounting for the historical present, and (4) incorporating embodied cognition. Hayles uses the word “becomes” deliberately to illustrate that we are already in the fetal stage of posthumanism. That our interactions with computers act as an extension of ourselves. “We already are cyborgs in the sense that we experience, through the integration of our bodily perceptions and motions with computer architectures and topologies, a changed sense of subjectivity.”[7] Hayles does not mean to say that posthumanism will mark the end of humanity, but rather the “conception of a human.”  

Technologies now include the digitization of information and the container often being “the cloud.” This too is not unlike the system put forth by Otlet, where information changes form (in this case digital) to fit the container (the server). This is a reduction of expanding information, or in other words a compression.

Perhaps posthuman synths or alien intelligent life forms are able to decipher such a Library or at least one of its infinite translations.

The Pioneer Plaque,[8] which uses science as a universal language, were plaques placed on board of the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecrafts, and features a pictorial message providing information about the origin of the spacecrafts in case they are ever intercepted by extraterrestrial life. Though there is controversy about the universality of the pictured elements, conceivably information can be compressed into such dimensions and be written in a singular, universal, infinite language that allows for an ever-expanding consortium of information.

But, again raises the question of how would one index infinity? This may lie in the quantum computational field that I mentioned earlier. A system for post- or trans-humans to infinitely index information as it is infinitely archived. Though I am not an expert in quantum theory. Perhaps it is plausible. Perhaps it is not. And if so, I wonder if containers, boxes, shelves, filing cabinets, rooms, buildings, budgets, politics, bits and bites, hard drives, hardware, overall computational power, and our limited perspective of linear, observable time are necessary barriers. Epistemological barriers that guide the archiving focus towards information that has the ability to ultimately become knowledge.    

Notes:

[1] Borges, Jorge Luis, and Andrew Hurley. Fictions. London: Penguin, 2000.

[2] an Argentine writer, noted for such works as “The Library of Babel”, and “The Aleph”

[3] Molly Springfield, “Inside the Mundaneum,” Triple Canopy 8.

[4] Basile, Jonathan. Tar for Mortar: The Library of Babel and the Dream of Totality. Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books, 2018.

[5] Katherine Hayles is a postmodern literary critic and professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Program of Literature at Duke University

[6] Hayles, N. Katherine,. “Theory of the Total Archive: Infinite Expansion, Infinite Compression, and Apparatuses of Control,” Lecture, Crassh, Cambridge, UK, March 31 2015.

[7] Hayles, N. Katherine,.  “Condition of Virtuality”, p. 12.

[8] Paglen, Trevor. “Friends of Space, How Are You All? Have You Eaten Yet? Or, Why Talk to Aliens Even If We Can’t.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 32 (2013): 8-19. doi:10.1086/670177.

Light as Information

James Dill

As a child, my weekends consisted of sitting pretzel-style below the invasive presence of the wall sized-television set. Below our CRT television were rows of VHS tapes ranging from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Wizard of Oz to A Bug’s Life and Home Alone. As the years went by, those clunky boxes of nostalgia began to fade, along with the VCR player that enabled the tapes’ animation. We witnessed the arrival of a new neighbor on the shelf: the sleek and compact DVD. These optical storage discs, with their ability to refract color when spun in the light, held an aura of opulence in the eyes of a child who was entranced by technology, and with their new technological facades and abilities came new intellectual furnishings and systems that stored and activated their memory.

As Mattern states in her piece “Before BILLY: A Brief History of the Bookcase” “I grew up in a domestic world that seemed to hospitably reconfigure itself around our family’s evolving interests and enterprises.” (2) In the case of my childhood, I relate. I think this is a symptom of the modern world in which we all relate, where our past is caught in an ephemeral sandstorm where memory and time are buried with change and technology.

Our world’s yearning desire to replace the old with the new, the slow with the fast, impacts more than just our storage furnishings and discs, but manipulates the very natural core of our universe, where we have ejected for increased speed and capability. In the case of light, its radiation has been harnessed through the electromagnetic spectrum’s encompassing presence, from the atomical to the astronomical, as a catalyst to the ever-increasing speed in which information is being stored and disseminated. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, in “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory,” examines this increase of speed as being a double-edged sword, one that allows for increased information to be disseminated but with decreased assimilation. (1) It is like the inverse relationship of the wavelength and frequency of light, as the frequency increases, wavelength decreases, with the wavelength representing the assimilated material.

The laws of light don’t just metaphorically relate to the speed of information, but its very properties have been harnessed to disseminate information. Going back to my discussion of the rapid change of media storage formats at the new millennium, the introduction of the optical storage disc, Blu Ray, used a precise beam of light in order to harness and capture the information engrained in its surface, ultimately increasing information storage capability.

Following the creation of the DVD in 1995 by Phillips and Sony, Blu Ray was officially released in 2006. While both DVD and Blu Ray used optic lasers to read and write digitally encoded information onto the disc, the Blu Ray advanced information storage capabilities through dual-layer precision. Blu Ray’s ability to store an increased amount of data stems from the short wavelength of the blue laser that is used to read and write the disc. The wavelength of 405 nm gives the laser more precision compared to a DVD, which uses a red laser with a wavelength of 650 nm. In the early days of Blu Ray technology, each disc layer could only hold about 25 GB of information; the technology has since advanced to 100 GB per layer and can transfer data at a rate of 48 Mbps, as compared to the DVD’s 10 Mbps capability. (3)

According to Kintronics, Blu Ray is designed with the capabilities for (BD-ROM) pre-recorded content, (BD-R) recordable PC data storage, (BD-RW) rewritable PC data storage, and (BD-RW) rewritable HDTV recording. (3) Not only does Blu Ray allow for more storage capacity, but it allows for an increase in user interactivity, including internet accessibility, instant skipping and playlist creation. These features, while allowing for a more user friendly mobility, further Chun’s theory that increased information leads to decreased assimilation. (1)

The information on a Blu Ray is encoded in pits that run from the disc’s center to the edge of the optic surface. The blue-violet laser reads the bumps in-between the pits where the information is stored. When the light hits a bump of information, it is reflected back towards a photo electric cell that detects the information, interpreting it as binary data. (4) The amount of information capable of being stored is dependent upon the size of the pits. Smaller pits allow for larger amounts of information. As compared to a DVD surface that is formed with a larger wavelength of light, a Blu Ray surface has a much larger amount of smaller pits, allowing for more information to be disseminated across the surface.

When it comes to the physical design of the Blu Ray, it has advanced the problematics of the DVD by placing the encoded data on top of a plate of polycarbonate, as compared to the DVD which compacts the data between two plates of polycarbonate, allowing for a birefringence, splitting of the beam and thus risking the disc unreadable. (3) The Blu Ray’s furnishing has advanced disc media storage, past the realm of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang nostalgia and home video and into the ambiguous space of the locus. As Chun mentions, “A locus is a place easily grasped by memory, such as a house, an intercolumnar space, a corner, an arch, or the like.” (1) The Blu Ray thus becomes a locus, a hybrid space between time, space, and light, for high speed media storage and data recording — or is it memory, or memory making? And where does the Blu Ray position itself within the very same rows of once-new media storages that lined my childhood wonderment?

As Mattern mentions in “Before BILLY,” “What were, only a few days before, systematically coded wares in a miscellany of merchandise, are now individuated objects, appreciated for their distinctive functions or aesthetic values, classified and authorized, in part, through their place on the shelf.” (2) The Blu Ray will become yet another marker of our ephemerality, baring a once-advanced infrastructure, while slowly becoming shrouded in a familial dust of the former. And just as our storage furnishings and equipment morph with time and technology, so do the phenomena we exploit for change. The harnessed energy of light we have sourced to capture and reveal information has inversely pushed our desires to reach a point where information can travel at the speed of light. But have we become lost in the shadows of this unfathomable velocity, where our information has become too quick to capture?

 

References:

1.Wendy Hui Kyong. “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory.”Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 1, 2008, pp. 148–171., doi:10.1086/595632.

2.Mattern, Shannon. “Before BILLY: A Brief History of the Bookcase.” Harvard Design Magazine, President and Fellows of Harvard College, www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/43/before-billy-a-brief-history-of-the-bookcase.

3.Mesnik, Bob. “How Blu-Ray Optical Discs Work.” Kintronics, Kintronics, Inc., 1 Mar. 2016, kintronics.com/how-blu-ray-optical-discs-work/.

4.YouTube, Into the Ordinary, 6 Sept. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-jxTzFrnpg.

 

 

 

 

 

Intrinsics of Value and Storage

James DillOne Comment

As Mattern mentions, “What were, only a few days before, systematically coded wares in a miscellany of merchandise, are now individuated objects, appreciated for their distinctive functions or aesthetic values, classified and authorized, in part, through their place on the shelf.” These ideas of the thread of meaning in which is created through position and placement makes me question some of the decisions in which I have organized my own space. Our lives are constantly bombarded with objects, trinkets and materials, inspiring our minds and relinquishing our memories, but the positions they take in space are not random, but are intrinsically tied to their value and form of being. What hierarchies are created that were once invisible? I also wonder how this theory correlates to ways in which we assemble and store information from our computer desktops to our smart phone home screens? Do hierarchies of value exist, and do they matter in our means of locating, disseminating, and creating?

The intrinsic relationship between storage and subject of the xylotheque, illuminated in Laura Tarrish’s Hunter Gatherer, is a unique example of creating storage in dialogue with the very subject in which it houses. It makes me wonder how else we could engineer archival storage filing boxes to be in a direct dialogue with their specific content, thus making it easier to locate as well as reinforcing its archived interior. Suzanne Briet’s theory that a document could propel into forms of natural occurrence, when acting as evidence in support of a larger contextual fact, I began thinking about the ways ecological fieldwork could change in regards to this. If the landscape began to be described as a document, perceived as evidence of climate change, filled with documented signifiers, would it’s  handling change.

Furnishings

Aarati AkkapeddiOne Comment

Across these readings, I’ve pulled a few different threads of thought. One being, the idea of the bookshelf or ‘open/public’ intellectual furnishing as an antithesis to the black box of digital algorithms. The very structure of the shelf can be seen as a display of the classification system at large, both out of functional need and also out of a kind of moral principle. Another thread of thought is the idea that everything can be a document. How do we ‘document-ize’ or ‘shelf’ vastly different objects/data-types? The xylotheque is an amusing example because it literally ‘book-ifies’ the tree as document. And the final thread, and perhaps of most interest to me right now, the importance of ambiguity within a system, or the ability for artifacts and information to transcend the classification system within which they are placed. (“People have a limitless capacity to shake off established categories and forge previously overlooked connections between ideas.” Springfield).

thinking beyond speed

Allie MularoniOne Comment

Unsurprisingly, the spatial arrangement of curiosity cabinets in centuries past aligned with a peripatetic mode of inquiry. I would contend that wandering as a form of cognitive activity continues today (my mom can spend hours on Facebook, if you call that neuronally stimulating). But, as Katherine Hayles notes, our engagement with new media seems to require “hyper” – rather than close – reading. Here, Hayles is not exclusively concerned with the immediacy in digital scholarship, but rather the vast array of challenges digital technologies pose to the humanities. I think this is something Chun points to when she says “we need to think beyond speed.”

As an artist (who no longer makes anything!), I can completely sympathize with the will to singularity. There is something about occupying a physical space that requires what Stewart calls “gestures of care which maintain the integrity of the body.” I think Google attempted to emulate something like the immersive experience of a museum in their Cultural Institute exhibition, but it’s difficult to realize this when all that’s required are one’s visual and finger mechanics.

Dry Wall

Philipp SchmittOne Comment

Shannon Mattern’s “Before Billy” reminded me of one particular afternoon, I was 16 or 17, spent on Vitsoe’s online configurator, imagining my own 606 Universal Shelving System. I would save for one shelf, take it to college, then expand throughout my life — so the plan.

“You will not spend 150€ on one shelf!”, my dad said, “and besides, you’ll have to plaster the drill holes every time you move.” I bought a Billy instead.

Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t get the 606. Mattern writes, “shelves have evolved along with the walls that have supported them.” Since I moved to the US I have lived only in rooms clad in dry-wall, cheap construction making it hard to hang anything, let alone a heavy bookshelf. In New York’s tiny apartments, there isn’t much space for books elsewhere either. So I own fewer books. Perhaps it is dry wall that ‘killed print’?

Analia Saban: Punched Card @ Tanya Bonakdar, through October 18

shannon

Through October 18 / gallery website

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very pleased to present its third solo exhibition with Analia Saban, Punched Card, on view from September 6 through October 18. Throughout the past decade, Saban has developed a dynamic practice that at once investigates and subverts the fundamental elements of artmaking, blurring the lines between what constitutes painting, sculpture, and everyday object. Integrating conceptual depth with a poetic formal sensibility, innovative technical processes and wry wit, Saban’s latest body of work examines the transition and contrasts between analog and digital worlds. Literally weaving together content and form, the artist continues to explore how artmaking materials have shaped the history of art, and further, the role of technology in shaping our culture. The title of the exhibition, Punched Card, refers to both analog and digital methods of information storage. Based on a binary system, punched cards were used to program the first automated looms, much like the 0s and 1s that form the digital coding language of today.

Application: Breast Cancer Campaign Tissue Bank, A Case Study in Building a Biobank Network

Leila L.

One of the central concerns in our course is the question of how the collection, organization and analysis of information lays the foundation for how we then produce knowledge from it. By information, in this class alone we’ve have considered books, manuscripts, images, tweets… In “Middlewhere: Landscapes of Library Logistics,” Professor Mattern takes us to BookOps, a centralized sorting, cataloging, and distribution facility that serves the local libraries distributed all across New York City. (1) We also get a glimpse into the workings of the Research Collections and Preservation Consortium, or ReCAP, which connects NYPL’s patrons to Princeton and Columbia’s resources and vice versa. We learned that if the underlying software that operates NYPL, Columbia, and Princeton can be mutually intelligible, then ReCAP would be much more robust by allowing patrons to do “common searches” across all three catalogs. This is a question of interoperability, and it is also the central concern of my subject today, the Breast Cancer Campaign Tissue Bank, to which I will return after addressing the larger topic of biobanking.

I’m interested in the collection, organization, and analysis of biological information, and that’s what led me to look at biobanks, which are organizations that “collect, store, and oversee the distribution of specimens and data” for institutional, non-profit, or commercial purposes. (2) Biobanks form an important part of the infrastructure for today’s population health research and personalized medicine, or precision medicine, initiatives. I see many overlapping concerns between biobanks and libraries in terms of its infrastructure for collection, organization, and research, including the problem of interoperability. The word “biobank” itself has no concrete definition. Sometimes they are also called “biorepository,” “specimen bank,” and “tissue bank,” or “bio-library.” Basically, a biobank stores biological information, ranging from physical tissue samples to genomic data to various forms of electronic medical records. (2)

In 2009, biobank was named one of TIME magazine’s “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now,” but the practice of collecting, organizing, and then analyzing biological material had begun far before 2009. (3) So what changed? The TIME magazine piece itself offers some clues. The 2009 article cited several European countries’ efforts to build their own “national biobanks.” It also mentioned deCODE, an Icelandic commercial genetics company that has, reportedly, collected over 100,000 Icelandic individual’s DNA, which is 30% of Iceland’s entire population.

DeCODE was founded in 1996; it preceded most public and private population-wide biobanking initiatives, such as the UK biobank or 23andme, by almost a decade. This decade from 1996 to 2006 seems to mark the maturation and stabilization of the technology of mass DNA collection and sequencing. This diagram shows how, shortly after 2007, the cost for sequencing a genome started sharply declining. (4) This is a turning point at which population genomics shifts from a technology problem to a collection and analysis problem.

Biobanks do not only store genomic data, of course. Depending on the type and purpose of the biobank, it may collect your blood, your permission to access your electronic medical records from elsewhere; it may ask you to perform various sorts of physical or psychological tests. It may ask the volunteers to come back months or years later for follow-up tests.  The purpose of biobanks, large or small, is typically to advance research by bringing together multiple forms of data on a huge scale. But if analyzing genetic data–finding correlations between genes and diseases–is not complicated enough, then analyzing multiple forms of data is infinitely more complicated. In Kadiya Ferryman and Mikaela Pitcan’s Data & Society Report on “Fairness in Precision Medicine,” they quote a computer scientist calling genetic data “low-hanging fruit,” as “the methods of collecting and analyzing genetic data are more established than for other kinds of data (such as wearables data), or for analyzing multiple types of data together.” (5)

My case study today is the Breast Cancer Campaign Tissue Bank in the UK, hereafter referred to as the BCC Tissue Bank. UK is the home to one of the earliest and biggest national biobanking initiatives, simply called the UK Biobank. In the U.S., there is the “All of Us” initiative, previously known as the Precision Medicine Initiative. I choose to present on the BCC Tissue Bank because 1) it was the subject of a really neat research paper I found; (6) and 2) unlike the UK Biobank or the All of Us Initiative, (7) the BCC Tissue Bank is not an actual physical biobank that recruits, collects, and stores samples from volunteers; it is meant to be a network with the specific goal of solving some of the interoperability issues that concern biobank-based research.

Around 2010, Breast cancer researchers in the UK identified specific knowledge gaps in the breast cancer research, and to fill the gap they needed “high-quality and clinically annotated samples,” which is challenging because relevant samples are spread out in different biobanks and therefore in different software systems with different terminologies and standards. The BCC Tissue Bank was created in 2010 as an attempt to solve this issue by creating “a single web portal from which researchers could source and request samples from across the network using the terms agreed to in the data standard.” The BCC Tissue Bank, therefore, is built to be a networked information library. (6)

To facilitate data collection between systems, the BCC Tissue Bank decided to create a “plug-in” to be installed at each individual biobank. The “plug-in” was called the “Node.” The researchers call this the “federated” approach that preserves the autonomy and variability among regional biobanks, as opposed to a centralized approach that mandates every bank to use the same system, which will inevitably result in the need for a massive transfer of data for the biobanks who are already using a different system.

Data collection in the case of BCC Tissue Bank actually means data uploads, which can take a number of forms:

  1. Direct Input.

One is to input data directly into a centralized database run by the BCC Tissue Bank. Biobanks can directly input information into the web portal. This has the benefit of the data vocabulary being automatically aligned with BCC Tissue Bank’s vocabulary. While some biobanks that do not have a robust data infrastructure would theoretically choose this options, most biobanks already have their own elaborate information systems, so to do input data separately into a completely different system would prove cumbersome and unrealistic.

  1. Spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets are exported out of one system and then imported into the BCC Tissue Bank system. Spreadsheets allows for mass data transferring, but as anyone who has any experience with migrating datasets across systems would know, cleaning up the spreadsheets so that information from one system can be legible to another system can be also very complicated and time-consuming.

  1. Using JavaScript ObjectNotation (JSON)

Biobanks can use JSON “to automate the push of data from their biobanks’ data systems into the Node.” This is obviously the preferred method for BCC Tissue Bank, as it eliminates the periodic labor involved in upload via spreadsheet or direct entry.

To ensure that the data pushes through smoothly, however, there is still the problem of database-by-database or regional variations in how a term is used. For that, the Node has an module for “mapping,” which maps the term that is used by the central system onto the local term used by the individual biobanks. After the relationship between the local and the central terms are connected, or mapped, researchers can perform searches on BCC Tissue Bank’s web portal using the central terms while the local biobanks can continue to use whatever terms they have been using. Here’s an example of how central terms like post-menopausal is mapped onto the local system that records post-menopausal without the dash.

So here’s the summary of the main approaches BCC Tissue Bank took to increase interoperability between different data systems used by individual biobanks. Similar to how BookOps and ReCAP are meant to facilitate the logistics of running a distributed network, the BCC Tissue Bank is a project that seeks to centralize information spread across a distributed network and embedded in varying standards and definitions. The BCC Tissue Bank is still up and running, of course, although the researcher notes that the preferred method of data transfer is still spreadsheets, as there are just too many technical and regulatory issues with the automatic data push option. This shows how ingrained infrastructure could impede the adoption of revolutionary technology and thus influence the trajectory of the technological medium itself. It reminds me how computing technology co-evolved with punch cards for a good period before punch cards finally became history.  It also makes me interested in the claims about how the blockchain technology will change the way medical records are accessed and shared.

 

References

  1. Shannon Mattern, “Middlewhere: Landscapes of Library Logistics,” Urban Omnibus (June 24, 2015)
  2. Boyer, Gregory J. et al. “Biobanks in the United States: How to Identify an Undefined and Rapidly Evolving Population.” Biopreservation and Biobanking 10.6 (2012): 511–517. PMC. Web. 2 Oct. 2018.
  3. Alice Park, “Biobank, 10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now” TIME, March 12t, 2009, http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1884779_1884782_1884766,00.html
  4. Editorial Team, “The Past, Present and Future of Genome Sequencing,” LABIOTECH.edu, April 9, 2018, https://labiotech.eu/features/genome-sequencing-review-projects/
  5. Kadija Ferryman and Mikaela Pitcan, Fairness in Precision Medicine (Data and Society, February 2018)
  6. Qinlan PR, Groves M, Jordan LB, et al. The informatics challenges facing biobanks: A perspective from a United Kingdom biobanking network. Biopreserv Biobank 2015;13:336–370
  7. All of Us Initiative, National Institute of Health (NIH), allofus.nih.gov

Translating movement

Margaret TiernoOne Comment

The materials this week alongside our two field trips to the New York Municipal Archives and the Brooklyn Public Library provide us with particular glimpses at the sensory possibilities that infrastructure can either contribute to or deny. To take, for example, the Warburg library – much of the “poetic composition” of the library seems to be dependent on the way one moves through the physical space of the shelves, which guide the visitor along lines of an “uninterrupted association of titles, not a linear order with a beginning and an end” (Manguel, 204). Is it possible for a sensory experience to exist in a comparable manner without the aid of movement through physical space? Is it possible for the sensorial exploratory atmosphere created by the geospatial arrangement system of the shelves (Kissinger), the nearness of certain titles to others, the cross-pollinations of images and texts due to proximity, to be transferable to the digital? The question I’m trying to ask is not whether there is a sensorial exploratory aspect to digital collections, as there certainly is. Rather, I’m wondering if it is possible to digitize the original physical arrangement, and its particular sensory experience, of the collection itself. And if it is possible, the question of “should it?” remains. Should a digitized collection strive to induce the same sensory experience as the original physical collection, or can the digitized be allowed to form its own particular sensorium? I ask this in specific reference to Henry Wilhelm’s initial commentary on the Corbis Image Vault as aiming towards preservation, when he laments the deterioration of photographs. Can deterioration exist in the archive without being treated as a spiteful pest?

Autobiography In Arrangement

Tim MurphyOne Comment

 

 

When I came across the quote “Every library is autobiographical” in the Manguel piece, something brought me back to our visit to the Brooklyn Public Library. In particular, the mention of “Lindsay Boxes” – the unremarkable, conventional giant box libraries that were built in the late 60’s. How could librarians craft an “autobiographical experience” in these cheap, bland spaces? Our visit saw us experience a vibrant and bustling community space, only to then become privy to the vast underpinning (literally and figuratively) below that facilitated the use of the building beyond just a public hall.

Manguel later compares the experience of librarian and viewer to that of a poet and a reader. The following pieces on the atypical categorization structures of the Warberg and Prelinger libraries offer a possible “solution” to the drab environment offered by Lindsay Box-like structures. I also wonder about non-traditional library structure with regards to novels and other fiction writing, and what messages could be encoded in their arrangement. Perhaps BookOps can see create custom curated arrangements in branch libraries (if only they had the massive amount of time and resources that would take).

Mothballs and Memory

James DillOne Comment

The potent scent of mothballs penetrates my mind into an overbearing disembodiment, leading me instantaneously back to my grandmother’s untouched mid-century home, and further back into infinite webs of connecting thought and memory. The power of memory to ignite knowledge is fueled within the library. It is a space in which memory spreads out in all directions, curiously absorbing and reflecting the physicality of time and space that lines the walls. The temporality of the library experience, discovery, touch, scent, holds this phenomenon of recollection. But can this fade in flat, digital fields of information? Like Walter Benjamin notes in his book, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, authenticity is lost through the technologically reproduced image. Through digitization, the true essence of a book and photograph is pixelated. Does this refract into our mind, blurring the line between memory and knowledge?

Blurring the Physical and Digital Space

Lena HansenOne Comment

The importance of tactility and the physical space of libraries and archives stood out to me in this week’s readings, particularly after the two field trips. It was interesting to read about Aby Warburg’s library and the Prelinger library, both organized based on the founders’ personal interests and also a reflection of how they see and understand their collections. Megan Shaw Prelinger compares the physical experience of browsing the stacks to the act of exploring a landscape. This informs the geospatial organisation of the library but also draws attention to the fact that physical research allows for connections and associations to be made that digital research currently does not.

In thinking about digital research or digital collections, the idea that the digital could incorporate or mimic the physical experience of the browsing is intriguing. Because digitisation creates greater accessibility, I think adding this element of the physical experience to the digital is worthwhile and could drastically change the process of research. As research and collecting is a subjective experience and act, how would this change the algorithmic digital space?

 

Daunting Tasks & Compounding Distances

Layne WhittedOne Comment

I came away from this week’s readings wondering what it is about ‘the digital’ that seems to preclude the “whimsical, associative order” (Manguel, 197) and “surprising juxtapositions” (Kissane) of (certain) physical libraries. Is it something inherent to the digital form? There’s also the other side of the question – Megan Shaw Prelinger argues that part of what makes the experiences of a physical library irreproducible is the immensely difficult task of digitizing physical collections, though she does not refute the possibility of creating more associative digital library experiences (Kissane). Is it merely the daunting task of digitization that has kept us from creating more surprising, whimsical digital libraries, or have we been restricted by normative assumptions about the digital and what we can do with it?

This is not simply a digital problem – it is also infrastructural. I was struck by BookOps’ suggestion that it doesn’t serve the Queens Library in part because Queens has the “furthest to come to align its systems and operations with those of the other libraries” (Mattern). As with digitizing physical collections, is the task of updating the Queens Library’s infrastructures so difficult as to be unfeasible; so extensive as to be unworthy of even incremental changes? Shouldn’t the fact that it already has the “furthest to come” make it a priority for updates? That distance will only compound with increasing speed and intensity. 

RFP for Creative Residency at Olin College

shannon

More info on Olin’s website

Olin College of Engineering is seeking applicants for its creative residency program, an initiative that’s part of Sketch Model, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to bring artists and other creative practitioners to Olin’s campus to awaken the political and cultural contexts for technology. We’re seeking individuals or collectives whose work is significantly housed in the arts and humanities and whose interests might intersect in provocative and convivial ways with a small undergraduate college where all students major in engineering. The residency is a one-year opportunity for creative practitioners to carry out independent projects, collaborative engagement with students and faculty, and campus-wide events. Practitioners can come from the fine arts, design and architecture, craft, music, theatrical or dance performance, film, writing, new media, and the many hybrid forms of socially engaged and durational practices in contemporary global culture. Women and historically underrepresented communities are especially encouraged to apply. We’re calling for applications for our 2019-20 academic year. Deadline for applications is December 1 at midnight.

More information:
Olin College was established to re-invent engineering education. We welcomed our first class of students in 2002. A small-scale “lab school” with a large impact, Olin is an innovative leader in transformative higher education, welcoming weekly visitors to its campus from all over the world—thus far, over 800 visits from 55 countries since the school was founded. Our curriculum emphasizes human-centered design, real-world collaborations, and co-constructed pedagogies that partner students with faculty for authentic learning. Our presence in the Boston area connects our work to likeminded leaders in higher education, including a formal and active partnership with Wellesley and Babson Colleges. Olin operates free of departments, tenure structure, and traditional disciplinary divisions, and our tiny scale allows for an unusual amount of freedom and genuine community for its 350 undergraduates.

While the majority of our faculty come from fields of engineering and the sciences, our faculty also include scholars with expertise in anthropology, history, psychology, the fine arts, musical performance, design, and more. All students at Olin major in engineering, and they all take a minimum of 28 credit hours in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHS). Our AHS faculty create innovative, project-based, hands-on curricular experiences for our students that pose big questions; their courses are unlikely to be found in a course catalog anywhere else. But our community is hungry for additional and new engagements in the arts and humanities, and in summer 2017, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Olin with a grant to fund three initiatives: hosting creative residents on campus, sending our students as summer interns to arts organizations nation-wide, and inviting arts and humanities scholars to campus to workshop their own STEM-arts curricula for their home institutions.

We call our residency program an opportunity for “Creatives-in-Reference”—a variation on the traditional residency model, one in which we imagine a resident with a more community-facing role. Where traditional residencies often emphasize individually driven, private practice, we’re interested in practitioners who can propose a project(s) that would be inherently social and collaborative: a figure who would be more available “in reference” than a lone creative. (See more information on the role in the Q & A below.)

Funding and Provisions:
The stipend for the year is $75,000. The creative will also have a $10,000 budget for events on campus. If desired, creatives will have access to all fabrication facilities: wood and metal shops, CNC machines, 3D printers, materials science labs, biology wet labs, sewing machines, screen printing tools, and more. Our campus was built in 2001 and is fully and meaningfully ADA compliant. Reach out with other questions you might have about access needs.

Requirements for application:
Submit your application, including links to work, CV, three references, and answers to three essay questions we’ve provided (and listed below).

Using no more than 2000 words, divided as you like:

How might you use a residency year at Olin? Show us the topics, themes, and possible artifacts or events or performances in a project you could pursue. We know these experiences would need to be crafted and emergent in real time! But give us an idea for a proposal that would look like a successful engagement. What might it look like, a prototype that’s being hatched? We know you have to squint a little to see the promise of an idea, but give us the contours, the questions, the energy of the possible in drawings, 3D models, narrative, video, or something else that makes sense for you.

How do you imagine the “in-reference” aspect of the work in your proposed project? This experience would simultaneously be for your independent work and for collaborations in the community. “In-reference” could mean lots of things, depending on the actors involved. How might you shape the definition of the role, when you consider both your own work in the future and the possible futures for engineering education?

What does the experience of your residency look like for a student? You might consider the experiences that you either did or did not have as a creative person in training: what worked and what didn’t? How might you sculpt conditions so that students have a point of entry to your work, and so that students have a way to ask themselves what might be a new path for their future in engineering?