Liminal Research - Mastering Information

Writing

Change the Beat

by August October 18, 2023

Hip-hop sampling as both conversation and citation.

by August October 18, 2023

Beyond these issues of intellectual property, sampling is a valuable form for students to compare to academic writing because it requires creativity in finding and using sources. As a writing instructor, I find that students are less concerned with what they can do with a source than what is the citation format their work must fit. This outlook is a symptom of the way many of us teach academic citation systems, as rigid sets of rules that dictate we attribute all sources to avoid accusations of plagiarism. While I am as frustrated with plagiarism as are other writing teachers, I believe this reverence toward sources puts students at a disadvantage when they are asked to interact with the words and ideas of other authors. When I ask students, even in upper-level classes, why they use sources, the answer is overwhelmingly “to back up my points” or “to show what the experts believe.” Rarely do I hear students talk about engaging in a conversation with their sources, responding to their ideas, or building from the work they have done by updating it, extending it to new areas, or challenging its ideas. Rather than digging for unique source material and seeking out voices that can be applied to their own new and unique topics, I too often see my students opting for overused topics (like abortion, gun control, or the death penalty) where they believe they can find the most sources. These papers tend to be far less interesting and complex than

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Philosophy

Thomas Merton on Contemplation

by August March 25, 2023

Thomas Merton was a Cistercian monk and writer who was active in the American civil rights and peace movements of the 1960s.

by August March 25, 2023

Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart… Hence is it clear that genuine contemplation is incompatible with complacency and with smug acceptance of prejudiced opinions. It is not mere passive acquiescence in the status quo, as some would like to believe—for this would reduce it to the level of spiritual anesthesia. Contemplation is no pain-killer.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Philosophy, Technology

Unanticipated Societal-Level Impacts of Twitter

by August February 27, 2023

I recently completed a workshop where we examined the unanticipated impacts of IT artifacts through a social informatics lens. Social informatics appears to be what you get when IT professionals discover cultural anthropology and sociology, so keep that context in mind while reading the rest of this post. The class was broken up into groups, and our group worked on the currently-flailing social media service Twitter. Though not generally a fan of group work, I was quite pleased with how well we worked together and the work we produced. Below are some of my contributions to our final paper, including references (I won’t post anyone else’s work, because it’s not mine to post). My section dealt with the “unanticipated societal-level impacts,” and I chose to focus on Black Twitter and the effects on existing activist culture. I don’t pretend to be any kind of expert on Black Twitter, and certainly not on Black American culture; my work was rooted in the existing scholarship. Also, I borrowed the “Superficial Solidarities” sub-heading from an article in Logic.

#BlackTwitter

Community formation was anticipated by Twitter, but “Black Twitter” is something unanticipated—sociologist Roderick Graham and criminologist ’Shawn Smith have identified it as a “counterpublic” (2016). Counterpublics were originally described by political philosopher Nancy Fraser (1990), and exist in parallel to the mainstream public. The “public” is a conceptual space that is neither explicitly economic nor explicitly political—in the sense of pertaining to the state—where the members of a society come together to discourse … [continue reading] “Unanticipated Societal-Level Impacts of Twitter”

Philosophy, Records Management

The Metaphysics of Records

by August January 26, 2023

Are the metaphysics of records the metaphysics of empire?

by August January 26, 2023

I’ve started the formal study of records management this term, and we’ve quite reasonably started with definitions and some history. One of my first readings mentioned—and at first I assumed this was tongue-in-cheek, but it turned out not to be—that every generation of records managers must develop its own metaphysics of records. Records management, as a discipline, evolved from archival practice, which itself seems to have evolved from the necessities of an increasingly bureaucratic legal system, and has gone through a series of identity crises since its origins in the first half of the twentieth century. There are ongoing arguments about what a record even is, let alone how to manage one in any given context, and for what purposes. The discussions go from the dully practical implications of housing large volumes of paper to invoking the conceptual properties of spacetime, sometimes in the same paper. It’s utterly bonkers.

Among the most fascinating aspects of records management I’ve run across—and this whole post is a bit of a “drawn on the back of a napkin in a pub” kind of explanation, and is not to be taken as super rigorous—is how culturally specific the very concept of the record is. And I don’t mean that each culture has its own idea of what a record is—though of course memory making and keeping is definitely culture and context-dependent—I mean that the very concept of “records” as artifacts with particular evidentiary functions separate from artifacts with other functions barely exists outside … [continue reading] “The Metaphysics of Records”

Books, Urbanism

The Rise of the Creative Class (Revisited), by Richard Florida

by August November 30, 2022

Cover of Revise of the Creative Class (Revisited)

Richard Florida tells an anecdote at the beginning of Rise of the Creative Class (Revisited) about competing in a pinewood derby when he was a child. He’s given the basic materials—a block of wood, some axles, a few little wheels—and the rest is up to him. Poor Richard put essentially no effort into his little car, and he lost badly. His father, who held some kind of supervisory role at a glasses factory, enlisted the skilled machinists working under him to build his son’s car the following year. And the year after that, and the year after that, and so on. Every year that young Richard was eligible for the competition his entry was professionally designed and machined, so he of course won. Florida tells the reader this as a heartwarming tale about the triumph of teamwork and creativity, but really it’s just a story of a kid using his privilege to cheat. He’s just another kid born on third base who thought he hit a triple. The entire book is that same blend of arrogant and oblivious.

I have neither the time nor the desire to take the whole book apart, but a few issues jumped out at me. First, Florida offers no coherent definition of creativity. He builds his entire argument around the idea that there is a large class of people who possess this quality, but does not—probably cannot—tell us what this quality actually is. Second, his definition of the “creative class” is so broad as to … [continue reading] “The Rise of the Creative Class (Revisited), by Richard Florida”

Policy, Urbanism

Bibliography for My Paper on Data-Driven Housing Discrimination

by August November 21, 2022

Yesterday I completed and turned in a paper about the history and contemporary state of data-driven spatial racism (specifically housing) in the United States for one of my graduate school classes. The paper is called “An Unbroken Red Line: Data-Driven Housing Discrimination in the United States.” The premise of the paper is that redlining was never just a single practice embodied by a set of maps, it was, and is, a stand-in for a whole host of data-driven discriminatory practices that never really ended, just changed their clothes. The paper traces data-driven housing discrimination through redlining and “urban renewal” into the rise of neoliberalism and the contemporary policy landscape with its algorithmic sorting and valuation tools. It also examines how landlords and algorithms construct race and proxies for race, and ends with some examples of contemporary data-driven housing allocation practices that produce discriminatory outcomes. I chose the United States mostly because I only had a few weeks to work on it and Canada is less well-studied and information significantly harder to find. What I turned in was decent, I think, but at 5,000 words really only the skeleton of an idea. The topic deserves much more than the time and space I had to give it. Anyway, I thought some folks might be interested in the materials I drew on when writing the paper. The Julien Migozzi piece in Logic was actually my inspiration for writing the paper, though I never wound up citing it directly.

An Unbroken Red Line:

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Personal

Workload and Learning

by August October 28, 2022

Two opposing approaches to building syllabi.

by August October 28, 2022

I’m only taking two classes per term for my master’s degree because I’m still working full time while going to school. Thus far balancing school work and paid employment has actually been pretty easy. What I want to talk about today is the difference between the two classes I’m taking, and how the professors approach the idea of workload as expressed in their syllabi.

My first class is “Knowledge and Information in Society,” and it’s a kind of general policy and issues class built around understanding the many different facets of this nebulous concept we call “information.” The assignments are very well structured and lead one to the other in a very satisfying and logical way, but the issues we cover are all over the place. Fascinating in themselves, but they don’t really lead to a coherent “story” of what information is, or how it functions in our society from a theoretical standpoint—more of a snapshot of compelling contemporary issues, each with their own competing ideas about these things, seldom in direct conversation with each other. I feel very at home in this course; I own and have read several of the books on the syllabus, I have prior graduate-level training in some of the analytical techniques, and the issues we cover are of significant interest to me. The reading list, however, is huge. It’s divided into four sections: Required Readings, Current Controversy Readings, Worth a Look Readings, and Module Readings. The Required section is self evident, and there are … [continue reading] “Workload and Learning”

Ethics

On Resilience

by August October 17, 2022

Lawyer and activist Tracie Washington has what I find to be the best take on “resilience.”

by August October 17, 2022

Stop calling me resilient…. Because every time you say, ‘Oh, they’re resilient,’ that means you can do something else to me. I’m not resilient.
Tracie Washington, appearing on Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines

Policy

Credit Where It Is Due

by August October 14, 2022

Gentrification is not, and never has been, a process that happens “naturally,” or without government interventions.

by August October 14, 2022

Credit rating agencies are not hands-off investigators or passive reporters of economic prospects. They are ideologically driven activists who meet regularly with municipal governments in the United States and around the world to ensure capital’s reproduction. In New York, credit rating agencies rewarded the city for granting tax abatements and developers in the 1980s, and for reducing benefits for government workers in the 1990s. In Detroit, despite the signs of an impending collapse of the city’s primary industries, municipal credit ratings rose during the 1980s because its government was willing to pursue gentrification as a planning strategy. In the early 1990s, Philadelphia was rewarded for a program of government shrinkage, municipal employee wage freezes and health care cuts.
Samuel Stein, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State

Technology

Function and Dysfunction

by August October 13, 2022

Our relationships to Information Systems and Information and Communication Technologies Are Not the Same

by August October 13, 2022

Information systems (IS), according to my Information Systems, Services, and Design professor, are not technology dependent. They are what people use to gather, store, process, use, and spread information. They are used to enable processes or solve problems, and they aren’t technology dependent. People, he says, have creative and adaptive relationships with information systems. The history of information systems is the history of growing cities and transactional record keeping. Information and communication technologies (ICTs), however, are technology dependent. They are the bits and pieces of hardware and software that we use to execute information systems, and our relationships with them are instinctively dysfunctional. ICTs are computers and telephones and social media, but they are also ships and artillery, and their history is the history of power relationships.