Notes

🔖 Thinking with Linked Data; Representing History –

Given these limitations, historians need to work hard to prevent the data model itself from becoming a site of distortion and misrepresentation that wrongly projects a false degree of stability and permanence. For example, in the community I am studying, information about partner relations between adults comes in many forms. There are few clearly documented sacramental marriages, but many couples are listed together as parents of children, and others are discussed in terms of family units in ledgers and correspondence. In my data model, I have decided to use the Relationship Vocabulary property “Spouse Of” to be the predicate connecting these individuals. That choice signals the likely relationship in question, but it offers us no way to note the precarity and uncertainty of those relationships under slavery. Does the RDF structure lend an impression of stability and fixity to that relationship that likely does not reflect the historical reality? It may. And it is my job as a scholar to adequately make those possible distortions clear throughout the many facets or the project.

🔖 Jen Manion: The Performance of Transgender Inclusion –

But the real reason we need to rethink the place of pronouns in public life is even more significant: the advancement of transgender rights. What a distraction the pronoun go-round has become. I have sat through countless meetings in all kinds of spaces facilitated by well-intended people, often gay, sometimes straight, seldom trans, who righteously assert compulsory pronoun identification on everyone in the room and then never speak another word about transgender issues, rights, or people. It is as if this achievement — making space for pronouns — is the beginning and the end of the needs of transgender people. College students report doing this in meetings of all kinds and not really understanding why they do it. No one is doing anything to educate themselves or each other about the widespread discrimination and violence faced by transgender people, but by golly, every person will have a chance to state their pronoun! Now, if only people actually listened when said pronoun is declared — and remembered it — and used it every time in reference to that person. Then we would be getting somewhere, but that never happens. People cannot hear what you said or they forget it or mix it up with someone else’s anyway. What a thoroughly misguided good intention.

🔖 UCLA Community Archives Lab –

The Community Archives Lab at UCLA explores the ways that independent, identity-based memory organizations document, shape, and provide access to the histories of minoritized communities, with a particular emphasis on understanding their affective, political, and artistic impact.

🔖 ‘It’s Time to Decolonize Environmentalism’: An Interview with Zina Saro-Wiwa –

Another reason indigenous environmentalism is overshadowed I think is because of Pentecostal religion, which has altered Africa’s relationship with the natural world and dampened this connection. Animism, for all its faults as a belief system, described and forged strong relationships between humans and the natural world. For me a Niger Delta environmentalism has to implicate invisible ecosystems, such as spiritual and religious beliefs. We also have to face our own capitalistic desires and manage them. Niger Deltans aren’t anti-capitalist wood nymphs. For want of a better phrase, it’s time to decolonize Environmentalism, democratize the conversation and create a more nuanced approach to environmental challenges.

🔖 Can the San Francisco Bay Be Saved From the Sea? –

A massive wetlands-restoration effort aims to protect wildlife, people, and real estate from the worst effects of climate change.

🔖 Meet the Anarchists Making Their Own Medicine –

For instance, Laufer said that many of the medicines for orphan diseases are made of biological material, such as fungus. … Since biological cells are self-replicating, this would simply require one user to grow a sufficient amount of cells for themselves before shipping some cells to another user who would repeat the process, similar to the way people ‘seed’ a media file on torrent sites.

The question, then, would be how to ship the biological material cheaply and without getting caught. To this end, Four Thieves is investigating the use of books and CD cases as grow media for biological precursors. Mycelia are basically the ‘roots’ of many fungi and feed on cellulose, which is found in abundance in the pages of a book. So Laufer and his collaborators began injecting books with mycelium, which feed upon the pages and grow out of the book. Similarly, compact discs are similar enough to petri dishes that if they’re streaked properly they can be used as a growth medium for bacteria and other biological precursors. The advantage of this is that Four Thieves members using the BioTorrent site could ship these cells using the cheaper “media rate” charged by the US Postal Service for items like books and compact discs while avoiding scrutiny from law enforcement.

🔖 Boot Boyz Biz’s new collab is a tribute to women like Ursula K. Le Guin –

How do you invite people to slow down and spend more time investigating phenomena important to our time? Can we turn closets into libraries which reflect important ideas into a public sphere? Can garments be effective as living mobile archives on cotton? We want to consider the idea of ‘looking back to where we’ve come from to understand where we are now and where we’re heading’, and make it a practice. We want our projects to be reminders that everything is connected and constantly changing. Exploring and digesting ideas improves and expands us. In addition to disseminating information we want to promote the process of critical investigation through making. Any of our projects could live as an individual zine, film, podcast, article, exhibition, poster etc, though we believe garments have a unique potential to translate important information.

🔖 Beyond the Viewer: fragments and links in annotation space –

What we also want to do is freely reuse the IIIF model itself, to describe things in manifests without publishing a new manifest for a conventional viewer to load. And then using these extracts, these collected descriptions, to generate new user experiences. The IIIF model is fantastic for this.

All these millions of published IIIF manifests don’t just exist to be processed by viewers. We can cut up the model in different ways, we can say new things by making new IIIF resource fragments as part of a content editorial process. This might involve making new manifests that can be viewed in a manifest viewer — but it might involve arbitrary creation of annotations, ranges, or alternate sequences, and use of those new resources behind the scenes to generate new user interfaces on the server as well as the client. And extend the familiarity of hyperlinking into digitised content: the creation of linking annotations in and out of IIIF resources.

🎵 Mamaleek - Already There

🔖 Arbella Bet-Shlimon, "Preservation or Plunder? The ISIS Files and a History of Heritage Removal in Iraq" –

Kirk H. Sowell, a consultant who publishes the risk newsletter Inside Iraqi Politics (for which Al-Tamimi is a contributor), initiated an exchange with me in response to a defense of the NYT’s Iraqi critics that I had written on Twitter. He opened with a tweet reading, “Point me to the Iraqi newspaper which does in-depth investigative journalism & I’ll happily read it.” Puzzled by the relevance of this comment to a statement about the ethics of removing archives for private ownership, I asked Sowell, “Just to be clear: your take is that Iraqis should stay quiet about their archives being taken to the U.S. because they don’t yet have the means to establish a [NYT]-caliber paper?” He responded, “Absolutely.” (Callimachi herself “liked” this last tweet.)