new enclosures
-
I’ve been mulling over the idea of registering a RFC 1480-style locality domain under
.usfor a long, long while (think 20 years or more). However, it’s been pretty borked for over a good portion of that time. There’s a reasonable guide to obtaining a locality domain that was updated last year that relies heavily on archived websites (well, text files on HTTP servers) for critical resources.It’s honestly a bit disappointing; if this process were smoother, I’d argue it was a good prospect for a process of commoning aligned with the Indieweb ethos, but instead, it’s experiencing a bunch of obsolescence and subject to organizational failures and privatization. Entirely disappointing, but fundamentally unsurprising.
-
🔖 Paris Marx, "False Futurism" –
The metaverse is a branding term with a similar aim as Web 2.0 — to make tech companies’ efforts to reinvigorate existing business models and carve out new ones seem forward-looking and new, while repackaging their leverage over people to compel them to adopt new products as a kind of benevolent leadership, if not a humility in the face of what people “really want.”
-
Open to All? Creatively Imagining, Realizing, and Defending the Commons in Libraries and Archives
Commons areas have been constituted through history as places open to all. The LAM sectors describe our work using the term. What if our work reflects a history of commodification? We explore the realization of the commons as an interdisciplinary goal and how to creatively respond to threats of enclosure.
-
🔖 Rally to Sell Shares of Rare Declaration of Independence | Art & Object –
Rally … will offer 80,000 shares of a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence to the general public this month. … The copy is a Walsh 15 Broadside—printed in July 1776 in Exeter, New Hampshire … one of only 20 Walsh copies created and currently in private ownership.
Once again, I ask: How have the New Enclosures been worked?
-
On Sourcery, or the enclosure(?) of remote access
In this post, I try to unpack some of my concerns around Sourcery as raised in my Society of California Archivists keynote, and how they relate to the visibility of archival labor, austerity, and enclosure. -
Solidarity, logistics, and infrastructure on Prime Day
July 15 and 16th are “Prime Day,” Amazon’s attempt to drive up sales and artificial demand around things we don’t need at prices they’ve convinced us that we can afford. Thanks to Mar Hicks, many of us heard that workers at a Shakopee, Minnesota fulfillment center are holding a six-hour work stoppage on one of the busiest days of the year. Alongside, many have called for a boycott on Amazon and its subsidiaries (Whole Foods, Goodreads, Twitch, etc.), and others have called for a general strike to protest Amazon’s collaboration with Palantir in aiding ICE. With all of this in mind, I’ve been reflecting on what larger scale industrial actions could look like when we look at Amazon’s simultaneous leveraging of centralization and unreliability of single resources to provide critical infrastructure for the IT sector and its own operations.
-
Evidence of Them: Digitization, Preservation, and Labor
This is a lightly edited version of the presentation I gave as part of as a part of Session 507: Digitization IS/NOT Preservation at the 2018 Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting. The session was overall pure fire, with thoughtful, funny, provocative, and challenging presentations by Julia Kim, Frances Harrell, Tre Berney, Andrew Robb, Snowden Becker, Fletcher Durant, Siobhan Hagan, and Sarah Werner. My heart goes out to all of them. All of the images used in the presentation were adapted from The Art of Google Books.
-
Evidence of Them: Digitization, Preservation, and Labor
This is a lightly edited version of the presentation I gave as part of as a part of Session 507: Digitization IS/NOT Preservation at the 2018 Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting. The session was overall pure fire, with thoughtful, funny, provocative, and challenging presentations by Julia Kim, Frances Harrell, Tre Berney, Andrew Robb, Snowden Becker, Fletcher Durant, Siobhan Hagan, and Sarah Werner. My heart goes out to all of them. All of the images used in the presentation were adapted from The Art of Google Books.
-
Emotion, Archives, Interactive Fiction, and Linked Data
[Edit (Feb 24, 2013): Thanks to the fantastic work of Tara Robertson, the video of my lightning talk is now available!]
I gave a lightning talk entitled “Wielding the Whip: Affect, Archives, and Ontological Fusion” at the 2013 Code4lib conference in Chicago, Illinois. This lightning talk was one of the most difficult presentations I’ve ever given for a number of reasons, including the emotional aspect of the content itself, as well as the fact that several of the ideas I was trying to articulate weren’t fully baked. I’ve been thinking about this for the four to six months in various capacities and with different focuses, especially as I read more interactive fiction and learn more about it (as well as about hypertext in general). This post serves as an expansion of some of the ideas in my lightning talk and as a way to further the discussion around the following question:
Can we write interactive fiction and (semi-/para-)fictional hypertext that leverages linked data to create an emotional connection to the “real world”?
-
Just as plenty of others have, I recoiled in horror when I heard that Delicious (née del.icio.us) was being "sunsetted". Regardless of the red flags that have been raised about its potentially imminent demise, I've still been using it on a daily basis. I've been an active user for over 6.5 years, which is longer than I can say for just about any other web platform or service. I deleted my Friendster and Myspace accounts quite a while ago; I've been on Flickr almost as long as Delicious, but the bookmarking wins out by a good four months or so. I started using Delicious in my final semester of library school, and it shows. I used it for procrastinating as well as a way to organize research materials before I had Zotero. The bulk of the bookmarks from that first day of use (February 24, 2004) were likely imports from my browser, but I quickly showed a facility for adding stuff that I saw as interesting, useful, etc.