NRJ

Reading Big Data

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Apr 162012

The chron­i­cle pub­lished a piece on open access to stu­dent infor­ma­tion called “Unlock­ing Stu­dent Data Could Lead to ‘App Econ­omy’ for Col­leges”

This is an impor­tant place for “dig­i­tal human­ists” to go about shap­ing the form of infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture. Open data access is a legit­i­mate argu­men­ta­tive tac­tic in the cur­rent age. At this point, the tech­no­log­i­cal and social mech­a­nisms are already in place to make this type of data col­lec­tion pos­si­ble. Resis­tance to open data col­lec­tion is a weak response and a more pow­er­ful tac­tic is to eval­u­ate the access and dis­sem­i­na­tion mech­a­nisms. My sug­ges­tions for those doing work­ing in the dig­i­tal humanities.

  1. Work to build the infra­struc­ture that shapes the type of data col­lec­tion and dis­sem­i­na­tion that fur­thers the work you see valu­able. Teach stu­dents to read against the grain of pop­u­lar infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture. Right now, much of the data col­lec­tion is fil­tered through the back­drop of reces­sion fear. It reads with the same lan­guage that is used to describe the country’s eco­nomic deficits and debts. Gen­er­ate and pro­vide data that is refracted through dif­fer­ent lenses. Instead of focus­ing on the weak­ness of cost-value data, gen­er­ate data that sub­sti­tutes your own ter­mi­no­log­i­cal screens.
  2.  Pre­pare stu­dents to see the data that doesn’t exist because dom­i­nant infor­ma­tion infra­struc­tures fil­ters it. Con­trary to pop­u­lar sen­ti­ments, I think that we are actu­ally in unprece­dented age of data impov­er­ish­ment. Lots of data is being gen­er­ated, but it is being orga­nized by very few insti­tu­tions. Teach­ing stu­dents to see the infor­ma­tion fil­tered out of infra­struc­ture will be a crit­i­cal lit­er­acy skill in a “Big Data” era.
Maybe a good place to do infra­struc­tural analy­sis would be with one of the ads that appeared side-by-side with the Chron­i­cle article.
Chronicle Advertisement

I’d like to know how the object-oriented the­o­rists would approach this topic. They’ve gen­er­ated a lot of buzz in rhet/comp cir­cles, but so far I’m hav­ing a hard time mak­ing out the place of spec­u­la­tive real­ism in the academy.

Posted by NRJ at 8:14 am Tagged with: , , , ,

Design Research as Possibility

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Oct 102011

The con­se­quences of this are legion. It means that pro­to­co­log­i­cal analy­sis must focus not on the sci­ences of mean­ing (representation/interpretation/reading), but rather on the sci­ences of pos­si­bil­ity (physics or logic)… (52)

This is from Alex Gal­loway’s Pro­to­col, which I’ve been reread­ing dur­ing the last few days. Galloway’s book is closely related to the project I’m cur­rently work­ing on. The pri­mary dif­fer­ence is that I’m focus­ing on the rela­tion­ship of pro­to­col and stan­dard­iza­tion to writ­ing and rhetoric whereas his argu­ment focused on pro­to­col and stan­dard­iza­tion through the lens of crit­i­cal social theory.

This pas­sage is sig­nif­i­cant in the way that it turns the inter­pre­tive method on its head. For Gal­loway, pro­to­co­log­i­cal (stan­dards) analy­sis explores pos­si­bil­ity rather than under­ly­ing mean­ing. This type of analy­sis explores pos­si­ble worlds that may not yet exist as a type of research, but are enabled through media, or in my favored ter­mi­nol­ogy: infrastructure.

Gal­loway calls this type of research hacking.

Before read­ing this, I’d formed an uncom­fort­able alliance with design study research, some­thing I’m not trained in, but found use­ful because of the its focus on pro­duc­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties rather than inter­pret­ing exist­ing texts. As I’ve worked on my own research, I’ve found it odd that rhetor­i­cal stud­ies hadn’t fre­quently taken the turn to pos­si­bil­i­ties and text pro­duc­tion more enthu­si­as­ti­cally. Rhetoric had his­tor­i­cally at one point been focused on cre­at­ing heuris­tics for pro­duc­ing new texts, not inter­pret­ing old ones. While a few rhetori­cians pur­sue that idea (Kaufer and Butler’s Rhetoric and the Arts of Design for exam­ple) and oth­ers have sug­gested that rhetor­i­cal analy­sis is pri­mar­ily a heuris­tic for pro­duc­tion rather than inter­pre­ta­tion (like in Dilip Gaonkar’s infa­mous attack on the rhetoric of sci­ence), research in rhetor­i­cal stud­ies in the mod­ern uni­ver­sity has largely remained a crit­i­cal act of inter­pre­ta­tion. I’m not sure why that is, per­haps there is more polit­i­cal power in the human­i­ties for being an inter­pre­tive dis­ci­pline rather than pro­duc­tive one. Any­way, I had taken to read­ing design schol­ar­ship because it embraces pro­duc­tion as research rather instead of the inter­pre­tive crit­i­cal approach.

Galloway’s work is moti­vat­ing because he takes the pro­duc­tive per­spec­tive from within media stud­ies, which is more closely aligned with rhetoric than design is, at least in North America.

Posted by NRJ at 6:59 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

Information Infrastructure and Ecologies of Rhetoric: Thoughts on Collin Gifford Brooke's Lingua Fracta

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Oct 042011

As back­ground read­ing for a book project, I have been work­ing through Lin­gua Fracta by Collin Gif­ford Brooke. I like this book alot because of its genre: it’s the type of the­o­ret­i­cal work I’ve been writ­ing recently.

One part in par­tic­u­lar has stood out as par­tic­u­larly use­ful so far: Brooke’s dis­cus­sion of rhetor­i­cal ecolo­gies. Brooke describes a rhetor­i­cal ecol­ogy by way of the clas­si­cal rhetor­i­cal canons: inven­tion, arrange­ment, style, mem­ory, deliv­ery. An inven­tion ecol­ogy, for exam­ple, is “a per­sonal sen­si­tiv­ity to the con­di­tions under which inven­tion takes place in my own writ­ing” (44).

It’s his exam­ple of an inven­tional ecol­ogy that drew my attention:

I attend a cou­ple of con­fer­ences per year and each time, start­ing about halfway through the con­fer­ence and extend­ing to as long as a week fol­low­ing my return trip home, I am a par­tic­u­larly pro­duc­tive writer. I sus­pect that many peo­ple share this expe­ri­ence .… When I began blog­ging, I noticed a shift in my per­cep­tions of the world around me.… Over time, the sub­tle oblig­a­tion of the weblog has some­times encour­aged me to write when oth­er­wise I would not” (44).

Although Brooke is writ­ing largely about social con­ven­tions affect­ing the writ­ing process, I couldn’t help but think of a Howard Becker book (Art Worlds) in which he explores the infra­struc­ture of musi­cal con­certs. The typ­i­cal con­cert lasts about three hours and sys­tem­atic depen­den­cies like con­cert labor, park­ing space, and occu­pant spaces become hope­lessly entwined into that 3 hour time period. The odds of being able to run an eight-hour con­cert must work against a slew of pre­con­fig­ured and embed­ded con­ven­tions of prac­tice. The time of the con­cert, once estab­lished, lit­er­ally becomes infra­struc­tured into the social prac­tice of the con­cert. When these con­ven­tions become embed­ded within tech­ni­cal sys­tems, this infra­struc­tur­ing process becomes sig­nif­i­cantly more complex.

Mate­r­ial objects are built because of social con­ven­tion but then push back and solid­ify con­ven­tion (ANT the­o­rists will be yawn­ing at how rudi­men­tary that seems). Get­ting back to Brooke and his book, the thing I find inter­est­ing about rhetor­i­cal ecolo­gies is the infra­struc­ture involved in each. Yes, to some extent rhetor­i­cal ecolo­gies are dynamic, but they also con­sist of infra­struc­tured, mate­r­ial tech­nolo­gies. Just to begin think­ing about blog­ging, it seems that one part of the struc­tured ecol­ogy the HTML form field that is used in many con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems as a way to shut­tle text to the server. The inter­face pro­vides an easy way to write a ton of text, but it resists com­pos­ing with some­thing more like a mind map­ping piece of soft­ware. This is to say that it’s hard to doo­dle with bub­bles in a blog. I need to think a lit­tle bit more about this, but stan­dard­ized com­po­nents pro­vide resis­tance to writ­ing and rhetoric.

This is all just a long way of say­ing that I’m find­ing a lot I like about Brooke’s book. It’s smart, and I see some great places to add infra­struc­tural the­ory to his con­cep­tion of rhetoric.

Posted by NRJ at 12:41 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

Malone and Elichirigoity's "Information as Commodity and Economic Sector"

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Jul 102011

Mal­one, Cheryl K., and Fer­nando Elichirigoity. “Infor­ma­tion as Com­mod­ity and Eco­nomic Sec­tor: Its Emer­gence in the Dis­course of Indus­trial Clas­si­fi­ca­tion.” Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Soci­ety for Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy 54, no. 6 (2003): 512–520.

I’m a fan of Elichirigoity’s work. His Planet Man­age­ment book is a cre­ative analy­sis of how ocu­lar tech­nol­ogy boot­strapped the con­cept of glob­al­iza­tion. He looks at how tech­niques drawn from sys­tems the­ory helped to gen­er­ate that idea. I draw a lot of inspi­ra­tion from Elichirigoity because he thinks with many of the same the­o­rists I do.

This par­tic­u­lar arti­cle was pub­lished in one of my core jour­nals, and the sub­ject mat­ter is a lit­tle bit closer to what I study: clas­si­fi­ca­tions, stan­dards, and infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture of the web. I shouldn’t under­sell Cheryl Mal­one, either, who has done some impor­tant research on infor­ma­tion access and pub­lic libraries. I saw Cheryl Mal­one speak at SLIS in 2008 on Eliza Atkins. Mal­one gives lucid, intel­li­gent, and inspir­ing talks. If you’re look­ing for a library his­to­rian to speak, she’s worth get­ting in con­tact with.

This arti­cle is about the adop­tion of the North Amer­i­can Indus­try Clas­si­fi­ca­tion Sys­tem (NAICS). NAICS was cre­ated as a replace­ment for the exist­ing Stan­dard Indus­try Clas­si­fi­ca­tion (SIC) that had been in use in the United States since 1937. NAICS is used by North Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment offi­cials and busi­nesses for gath­er­ing and orga­niz­ing infor­ma­tion on the econ­omy. As an exam­ple, the NAICS is used to col­lect data for the U.S. Eco­nomic Cen­sus that’s given every five years. That data is added to the FactFinder site. This data is used to chart eco­nomic trends and sta­tis­ti­cians and researchers ana­lyze for a vari­ety of purposes.

Mal­one and Elichirigoity show how the NAICS was orga­nized around one cen­tral prin­ci­ple: indus­try would be orga­nized around pro­duc­tion. This isn’t part of their analy­sis, this is just some­thing that the orga­niz­ers aspired to. They saw it as a way to cre­ate a bet­ter clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem (library sci­en­tists would likely give you a dif­fer­ent opinion).

To say this another way, the NAICS was writ­ten so that it could be reduced to one sim­ple rule. To give this idea some legs, con­sider some of the other ways that indus­try could be orga­nized. In the ICS, for exam­ple, some parts of indus­try were orga­nized around ser­vices or busi­ness orga­ni­za­tions. In the ICS, Libraries formed a basic clas­si­fi­ca­tion cat­e­gory. It was listed in ter­mi­nol­ogy con­sis­tent with being an orga­ni­za­tion. In the NAICS, libraries were listed as a sub­cat­e­gory of Infor­ma­tion Ser­vices and Data Pro­cess­ing Ser­vices. In the NAICS, the empha­sis is on the process of work­ing with infor­ma­tion.

Mal­one and Elichirigoity say the clas­si­fi­ca­tion cre­ates a dis­cur­sive for­ma­tion that changes the con­cept of infor­ma­tion and its related economies. They take a Fou­cauldian approach to argue that this cre­ates a new way of know­ing, or regime, of infor­ma­tional eco­nom­ics, one that depends on the orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple of the NAICS. Because the NAICS is so cen­tral for under­stand­ing large economies, this regime has sig­nif­i­cant con­se­quences for the activ­i­ties being classified.

I like this piece, but not because it’s ground­break­ing or new. It com­bines some old ana­lytic con­cepts from LIS and dis­course analy­sis into one think piece about the North Amer­i­can econ­omy. It’s clear, well-written, and about a topic that seems par­tic­u­larly timely given the cur­rent global eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion. It would be great to see this analy­sis extended to include some con­tem­po­rary data, which wouldn’t be too dif­fi­cult since the cen­sus data is made avail­able to the pub­lic. Also, the authors say that this cre­ates a new regime of infor­ma­tion eco­nom­ics — it would have been awe­some if they pro­vided even a rudi­men­tary cri­tique of how that regime was dif­fer­ent than the pre­vi­ous rather than end­ing with that provocative claim.

Posted by NRJ at 6:30 pm Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Bowker's "The History of Information Infrastructure"

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Jul 092011

Bowker, Geof­frey C. “The His­tory of Infor­ma­tion Infra­struc­tures: The Case of the Inter­na­tional Clas­si­fi­ca­tion of Dis­eases.” Infor­ma­tion Pro­cess­ing & Man­age­ment 32, no. 1 (Jan­u­ary 1996): 49–61.

This arti­cle is a lead up to a few chap­ters that ended up in Bowker and Star’s Sort­ing Things Out. I found my read­ing copy in a book called His­tor­i­cal Stud­ies in Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence.

There are sev­eral pay­offs for read­ing this arti­cle. One is that this is an early piece that shows how Bowker was think­ing about writ­ing his­to­ries of infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture. Because the arti­cle is in a bit of a pri­mor­dial state, read­ing it helps to see how Bowker was think­ing dur­ing some of his later work.

This arti­cle also describes sev­eral key terms and con­cepts that are enor­mously help­ful for ana­lyz­ing infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture: imbri­ca­tion, boot­strap­ping, figure/ground, and a short dis­cus­sion of infra­struc­tural inver­sion. “Imbri­ca­tion” is an ana­lytic con­cept that helps to ask­ing ques­tions about his­tor­i­cal data. A good exam­ple from my own work: I’m cur­rently work­ing back­wards through meth­ods of com­puter pro­gram­ming to see which pro­gram­ming con­cepts, clas­si­fi­ca­tions, and tech­niques are passed for­ward to new lan­guages and stan­dards. Com­puter lan­guages (unsur­pris­ingly) bor­row lots from the work that peo­ple have already done. Con­cerns, val­ues, and pol­i­tics of the past are passed for­ward with those concepts.

“Boot­strap­ping” is the idea that infra­struc­ture must already exist in order to exist. Another way to say this is that infra­struc­ture forms an impor­tant part of social con­text. To cre­ate an infra­struc­ture as part of social con­text, peo­ple must already be work­ing with the imag­i­nary con­cepts of that con­text. This becomes par­tic­u­larly messy as an infra­struc­ture is used across large spans of time and space, yet its orig­i­nal design is context-dependent and built with the knowl­edge of the cul­tures that insti­gated the project. So to boot­strap is to build the exist­ing assump­tions and pol­i­tics about what infra­struc­ture is use­ful for into infra­struc­ture while real­iz­ing that the design of infra­struc­ture will simul­ta­ne­ously build those assump­tions and pol­i­tics into other times and spaces as the infra­struc­ture is adopted else­where. An exam­ple might be use­ful here. Bowker’s arti­cle deals mostly with the Inter­na­tional Clas­si­fi­ca­tion of Dis­eases (ICD), which has a rich clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem for cat­e­go­riz­ing death. These clas­si­fi­ca­tions reflect the time that they were cre­ated (more peo­ple dying of tuber­cu­lo­sis at the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tury; fewer deaths can be attrib­uted to mul­ti­ple causes) and the pol­i­tics (why exactly does a state want to know that peo­ple are dying in “acci­dents from trans­port, acci­dents in mines and quar­ries, agri­cul­tural and forestry acci­dents, or acci­dents due to machin­ery” and why is it ok to group those together?).

“Figure/ground” builds on the idea of boot­strap­ping. It’s a way of think­ing about infra­struc­ture that doesn’t see it solely as the prod­uct of human con­struc­tion or as a con­text shap­ing human activ­ity. Infra­struc­ture is both at the same time. When a clas­si­fi­ca­tion becomes a part of an infra­struc­ture, for exam­ple, it is embed­ded by some­one apply­ing agency.That agent is influ­enced by the larger assump­tions of the larger infra­struc­ture. That is, new clas­si­fi­ca­tions and stan­dards only make sense within the larger ecol­ogy of exist­ing infra­struc­ture. That clas­si­fi­ca­tion then simul­ta­ne­ously becomes part of the ecol­ogy for think­ing about the infra­struc­ture. Fur­ther devel­op­ment of infra­struc­tures will there­after have to fight with the orig­i­nal stan­dards and classifications.

Figure/ground is impor­tant for think­ing broadly about infra­struc­ture. It’s not that some­one can’t remove a clas­si­fi­ca­tion such as “died from tuber­cu­lo­sis,” although this could become dif­fi­cult as well if the stan­dards have become widely mate­ri­ally and socially enforced (think elec­tri­cal power lines, pipe fit­tings, or vot­ing procedures) it’s more that the entire infra­struc­ture was con­cep­tu­ally estab­lished as a whole with that clas­si­fi­ca­tion as a part of it. If you’re famil­iar with the parole/langue idea from Saus­sure, figure/ground is an elab­o­ra­tion that has been fil­tered through infra­struc­tural theory.

Bowker calls the sum of these ana­lytic meth­ods infra­struc­tural inver­sion, a con­cept with con­tributes to a good part of his work.

So noth­ing new for infra­struc­tural the­o­rists, but a good break­down and dis­cus­sion of key con­cepts. The arti­cle serves as primer/recap  for those inter­ested in think­ing the­o­ret­i­cally about infrastructure.

Posted by NRJ at 3:19 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,
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