tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68417592024-03-07T15:50:46.982-08:00InscapeunimaginableJo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.comBlogger471125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-1799351352182237362016-12-07T04:00:00.000-08:002016-12-07T04:00:00.184-08:00Privilege and Polemic<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">At the Society of Fellows I worked every day
surrounded by intense privilege, privileges few other scholars enjoy in the
length of their career as scholars: the privilege of dining amidst Nobel
laureates; the privilege of not teaching, and that of enjoying research grants free to
pursue any turn of inquiry.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It made me restless, and it made me impatient
with the academy, even more impatient than I was already, which was
plenty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I stated working on bigger
projects, a long history of land reform. I started working on bigger
methodologies — not merely toying around with digital maps but asking questions
about how topic modeling could be turned to archives at scale.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I started talking to historians about what I
was doing; many were resistant, some were supportive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Armitage liked the ideas and encouraged
them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We talked more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Occupy erupted while we were there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Occupy started a tent village in Boston.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My friends were all occupy-ers, there and in
Chicago and New York.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I visited and talked
with folks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We talked about history and
its public uses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A group of graduate
students and post-docs was leading walking tours of privately-owned public
spaces fit for future occupations; I had been writing about the radical history
of the walking tour and I offered to share some history that might help to
orient them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Orientation to time and place, I tell my
undergraduates, is what they can seek from history as a profession.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They should know something about the history
of the institutions that they engage; they should be able to tell something
about the history of practices of democracy and capitalism; and these skills
will help them to know when something is changing around them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Much of the critique of <a href="http://historymanifesto.cambridge.org/">the book</a> that I subsequently wrote with
David Armitage about history has been disorienting — for us as authors and
likely for others as readers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dueling in the footnotes has been inflated, by a few critics, into the charge of being bad historians, of not having understood what we read, of
misapplying big data, and even of breaching professional ethics by hiding our
corrections to the text in a series of open-access releases online.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The open-access release and website were
originally designed to promote accessibility to all readers regardless of their
ability to pay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Thus critics who don’t like the book have gone after our professional credentials as historians.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">I suppose they think we either should not have written it, or that we should have written it in a different way, treating every footnote and datum with the care of a monograph.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">But a manifesto is not a monograph.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">A polemic’s job is to compare vastly different points of view — in our case, the economic with social history; and social histories past with political economy in the present, and earlier methods in the archives with new methods of digital history.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We took on more than an entire discipline; we
wrote a short book about the university as a whole and about the role of
historians inside it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We didn’t make up
our picture of the university; the portrait of public intellectuals engaged
with national and international governance in the 1950s making way for professional
historians sometimes motivated by peoples’ struggles in the 1970s is a story
that has been told by professional historians of the public intellectual, as
well as recited in the memoirs of historians who lived through those periods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We painted with a broad brush about the
discipline of economics and its engagement with climate change, but it is no
exaggeration to say that scholars in economics have proposed, over the last
twenty years, that the free market will spontaneously take care of climate, while
many a historian has worked over the same period to reveal how much our
relationship with the environment has been harmed by centuries of
growth-oriented economics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">For a great many readers, who have spoken to us
in our travels and contacted us personally, that orientation has been useful
beyond measure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What we hear again and
again from our colleagues and graduate students is this: there has not been a
healthy debate about why social science academics do what they do, about the
appropriate methods of turning the social sciences to critically inspect one’s
own political climate or culture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
heard from a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who appreciated
our call to use history to measure possibilities for reform and utopianism in
our own time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">For us, an orientation to the university as a
changing institution was more important, and we painted the picture that made
sense to us: a world where the humanities have been ill-able to defend
themselves against budget cuts, closing, and adjunctification, but a world with
much promise where new methods of modeling text with digital tools may have
applications far beyond the humanities projects where they were born.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Much of what we said about the succession of
the disciplines — the way that economics rose to power in the 1970s,
outstripping not only history but also sociology and anthropology — was
relatively new to public debate and sparked important questions that will lead
other scholars to examine the story of 1968 in more detail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Much of what we said about the possibilities
for using digital tools was also new, if not to debates in the digital
humanities, then new to the history graduate classroom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those are professional contributions to our
understanding of how the university is changing, and they come not out of
laziness, but out of a rapt and ongoing curiosity about how the institution is
changing in our own time, and what exciting possibilities our friends and
colleagues are working on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Ultimately these questions — both of how we
understand the university past and how we release our texts to the public
online — are crucial for making sense of the role of the social sciences in the
university to come.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The reasons for
which we raise these questions extend well past debates about the meaning of
1968 or bureaucratic decisions about when particular revisions to an electronic
text are released and how.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It seemed important to me when I was sipping
moselle at the Society of Fellows while Occupy was formed a few miles away, as
it does now, that historians should work <i>for </i>the cause of a broader
public.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems to me that we had many
exemplary stories of historians past who had done exactly that, and for those
reasons, it was worth writing a first pass at a history, even if the subject
was outside of my specialization, even if others would revise it later.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is still better to orient ourselves, and
to keep in dialogue as we undertake the process of revision, than to simply
never open up these questions in the first place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-75173714933389777022015-04-20T04:44:00.001-07:002015-04-20T04:44:09.400-07:00Amendment<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #500050; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">One paragraph in my 4/14/15 blog post seemed to some readers to suggest that David Armitage was responsible for errors in The History Manifesto. That was not my intention.</span></div>
Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-11469875482342430972015-04-14T04:00:00.000-07:002015-04-14T12:13:51.088-07:00The Challenges of Beginning a Scholarly Debate in the 21st Century<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">C. P. Snow's <i>The Two Cultures</i> (1959)<i> </i>began a critical debate about the role of the humanities in an increasingly scientific world. It was also the receipt of such enormous criticism that Snow later wrote </span><i>The Two Cultures: A Second Look </i>(1963)<i>. </i><span style="background-color: white;"> In the last few months David Armitage and I have experienced a technologically-accelerated version of the same. In the 21st Century, this debate happens not only between colleagues, but also via pseudonymous blogs and retweeted punchlines.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: left;">When we published </span><i style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://historymanifesto.cambridge.org/">The History Manifesto</a></i><span style="text-align: left;"> in October, we
set out to rouse a debate in the university, and in history departments in
particular, about the methods and ambitions of our profession in a moment of
global warming, growing inequality, academic specialization, and short-term
thinking. The debate took off beyond our wildest dreams; usually
positive, sometimes controversial, and even occasionally dipping into extreme ire
as individual personalities took issue with our text, some of them choosing to duel in the footnotes instead of to engage the substantive, positive vision that we wrote to offer. A deliberation
of this variety and passion on all sides is evidence, we believe, of a healthy
engagement by the profession. Like others creatures, when historians are
aroused, they experience emotions, sometimes violently. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">Passion and critique
redound on the internet, mirrored and intensified beyond the bounds of normal
scholarly discourse, where debates are moderated by editors as well as
conventions of reasonable politeness, in ways that can be particularly
dangerous for junior faculty.</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">
In the voicing of criticism
online, the norms of academic discourse disappear. Online enthusiasms
that use heated rhetoric to suggest that an argument has been totally
eviscerated can distract from the question of which data and issues are at the
core of a professional debate, and which are illustrations that can be
overlooked without harm to the major argument.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">T</span>he even-handed, respectful tone of civil debate that we saw in published book reviews in history journals -- the majority of which were positive -- disappeared on Twitter and the blogs.<span style="background: white;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> A journal editor noted in his published introduction how the tone of the unsolicited critique of our book were out of keeping with normal practice at that journal. The norms of scholarly civility were tinged with a form of rhetoric colored by strong pronouncements. </span></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">It is my intention here to raise the question of the degree to which those strong pronouncements pertained to the culture and rhetoric of the internet, where one strand of academic debate originated as a result of our open-access publishing venture. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">Online debates bring particular challenges when they concern the debating of footnotes that this debate has involved.</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;"><a href="http://landscape.blogspot.com/2015/04/of-conspiracies-and-frontiers-scandal.html">In an earlier blog entry,</a> I told the story of an anonymous twitter personality, "Pseudoerasmus," whose critique was cited by senior colleagues in their footnotes as evidence of sloppy scholarship.</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">The critique appears largely to stem from an individual who is unfamiliar with historians’ conventions of writing and footnoting. Where critics pointed to individual footnotes that could be tightened or prose made more accurate, we accepted their criticisms.</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent;">Indeed, many of the most heated critiques that appeared first on on the internet were leveled against details and footnotes rather than the major argument.</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">As we examined the criticism, we found most of it to be taking issue with footnotes that could be fit the text better and summaries of economists’ work that could be made more precise. Very little of the most heated criticism on the internet (or in the printed engagements that quoted the internet) engaged substantively with the larger arguments that we had made about the tradition of a place of political engagement in professional scholarship in the social sciences, or about the questions of time-scale raised by new work by our colleagues, or about how visualization and digital analysis can help to tell stories on a greater scale.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">On the internet, claims that one of these complaints had destabilized our argument circulate like a rumor mill. A provocatively titled tweet ran, for example, "stunning take-down of the #historymanifesto!" The tweet easily circulated among even our friends and colleagues, and not necessarily because they agreed that the take-down was successful. "Retweets" very rarely equal endorsement; I myself have been wont to retweet articles whose headlines I disagree with when I am saving them for myself to read later. </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">Yet even in such cases the headline circulates nonetheless, perhaps because many people thought the text was important enough that a debate should be read. And for those who idly read the headlines on twitter, it was easy to get the impression that a "take-down" had happened. I wonder how many colleagues absorbed that rumor, and dismissed the need to read the book themselves. Even very clever people are sometimes put off by a rumor of that sort. </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">It is hard to debate online in spaces where identity is so
fluid, as it can increase the vulnerability of a scholar up for tenure, while
disguising some of her critics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was
me, the untenured member of our writing collaboration, who was targeted by an
anonymous twitter personality for his original attack, on the grounds that due
to her relative inexperience, it was she, not her senior collaborator, who must
have been responsible for any errors in the text.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> The attack explicitly singled me out as the faulty party, an assumption that revolved around bizarre notions of authorship that certainly did not apply to our collaboration. In the process, standards of authorship circulating on the internet, not in the world of scholarship, were applied to tarnish my reputation as a scholar. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">When scholars at other institutions and editors of journals in my field retweeted the headline of a "take-down," they may have appeared to some readers to be buying into this faulty understanding of authorship and intention. Without paying careful attention to how claims circulated and where, it would be easy for someone arriving at this conversation for the first time to misread the retweets as a vindication of the Manifesto's critics. </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; mso-spacerun: yes;">Effectively, if such misunderstanding as I have construed has happened in the scholarly community, it would mean that the voice of one anonymous twitter personality and a handful of critics were promoted above the dozens of positive reviews published in scholarly journals by accredited peers across the academy. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-spacerun: yes;">This is a dangerous system of ranking, and it represents a novelty in academic practice that we should note and try to understand as a mechanism. The academy has evolved, over time, its own standards for understanding praise, blame, and dissent, culling consensus through the slow-moving process of publication itself as well as the published reviews. Where much academic favor depends on reputation, besmirching rumors started on the twitterverse can do immense harm to the scholar whose career is just beginning. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Internet publishing also brings challenges in the form of the sheer
workload that a scholar must take on in order to stay engaged.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Praise, critique, suggestions and invitations flooded in over the first few months of the <i>Manifesto'</i>s release. We soon found that we were inundated by more than we could, ourselves, respond to in detail. Our critics, while small in number, were prolific writers and tweeters. Their schedule also differed in its intensity from that of traditional academic review, which has some respect for holidays and academic schedules; two senior scholars released their critique the day before Christmas Eve. The intensity of the same writers kept up over formal and informal blog entries that continued over the following months. </span>In the five days after <i>American
Historical Review </i>published our reply to our critics on its front page
together with the editor’s congratulations, one of our senior critics has
released to the internet two further "take-downs".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> When traditional book reviews may take six months to two years to appear, and then tend to take the form of a single reply, the volume of praise and criticism that can meet a text with a life on the internet dwarfs that of traditional scholarly
encounters, and it can be hard to navigate in the midst of the other academic obligations.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">As I described in an earlier blog post, paying attention to which feedback to accept and which to reject on the wide
berth of the internet is more complicated than it is in the format of a
traditional journal or book revision process, where the scholar responds to
criticism from 3-5 pre-selected scholars with expertise in their field. But
readers on the internet do not necessarily share the same expectations of
expertise as the authors, or even as other scholars in the field. As
any scholar who has passed through the process of revising an article for
journal acceptance knows, the process of considering these critiques is
time-consuming. In bulk, without the guiding hand of an editor
familiar with the interlocutors who has his own vision of what feedback to
prioritize, the process of revision can be even more time-consuming.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Online publishing is not a arena that a
junior scholar should enter without caution about the time-consuming nature of
the work, should the debate take off.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /> </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Together, these burdens -- the inflation of trivial critiques, the spread of rumor generated in communities with different standards for authorship and excellence, the weight of time to keep up with a discourse at volume -- generate particular vulnerabilities for junior scholars of any gender who engage with discipline-wide questions on the internet. By engaging in open-access publishing, where the text freely circulates to a public -- and not just a public committed to visiting the bookstore, paying money, or accessing a subscription behind a paywall -- they may inadvertently may place their reputation in the way of anonymous critics, academic incivility, and rumors spread by casual retweets. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The burdens of online criticism also redound differently through the hierarchy of the academy. For me as a junior scholar, the weight of these debates has particular ramifications for the processes ahead of me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> The stakes are, of course, extremely real: rumors of scholarly malpractice or an ethical breach can result, especially in junior cases, in losing one's job. Will the relevant committees and meetings be swayed by these voices from the internet?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no sanitary cordon that shields senior voting colleagues from debate online. When they meet it, will they interpret it as the sign of a passionate debate erupting in the context of a new technology that makes way for more heated debate than past generations of scholars have witnessed? Or will they be alienated by the fervency of the voices of some of our interlocutors and the intensity of their communications? </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">The committees who will try to understand my case have likely viewed few examples of similar cases before. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Public opinion matters in those rooms, and it is not the only thing that matters; scholarly consensus matters, and a range of opinion from the extremely positive to the extremely negative may be a sign of successfully engaging a disciplinary-wide controversy. Engaging with new forms of publishing and critique in the name of helping our institutions (departments, universities, libraries, and publishing-houses) to evolve may be taken as a sign of a commitment to institution-building. How my own case will be read has not yet been decided, although my hope is that they will be cognizant of the importance of engaging the issues at the heart of our discipline that cause such passionate eruptions, as well as the vitality of working with established academic publishers like Cambridge University Press in frontier spaces of innovative publishing. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I would necessarily advise caution, or at least a clear-eyed sense of reality, to younger scholars contemplating the same path. Nevertheless, it is a collective burden that we come to understand the evolving nature of scholarly discourse online, together with the opportunities and challenges it represents. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">My engagement with the discipline of history and new opportunities represented by the digital was commissioned by a series of awards and fellowships, from a Mellon fellowship in Digital History to a later fellowship at the Metalab to my current position as an assistant professor of Britain and its Empire who has been encouraged by senior faculty, my chair, and various administrators around the university to continue research, publishing, and teaching about these new technologies. My opinions and work did not come as a surprise to any of those bodies of scholars.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">For me, the research, teaching, and publishing experiment of <i>The History Manifesto </i>followed seamlessly from the writing, research, and teaching about the digital humanities that I had been pursuing for six years already. My own contributions to <i>The History Manifesto </i>should be read in that light: the fruit of an officially-sanctioned project of research, teaching, and publication. I was the junior partner in a collaboration, offering my experience with digital tools and the possible audiences for history, reporting on an ongoing conversation with a senior partner who happened to be at the time chairing a major department of History. We hardly set out to offend our fellow-historians; instead, we were excited about new possibilities for research methodology, theories of history, publishing opportunities, and even political engagement on the part of history, and we wanted to report on this excitement to our fellow historians so that those who approved could play along themselves. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">We also hardly suspected that the criticism of a few senior faculty would find its way to the front page of the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Chronicle of Higher Education, </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">inflated from a few colorful tweets whose content revolved around editorial suggestions about footnotes and illustrations into a headline about shoddy data and ethical breaches in publishing. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I myself do not believe that these charges would have happened were it not for open-access publishing and our attempt to engage an online community. Senior scholars might have still expressed their displeasure at our conclusions, but their opinion might have been limited to traditional venues, as its circulation would have as well. In other words, we are still very much learning about the opportunities and limits of scholarly engagement online, and about the way that scholarly engagements may open up new challenges for the junior faculty who are first to engage them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The virtue of having a text published online is that it
immediately solicits input from readers. As advocates of rethinking
publishing have noted for some time, online publishing has the opportunity to
make less formal the traditional roles of anonymous reviewer, pre-publication,
and post-publication manuscript. Immediate feedback gives authors the
opportunity to constructively reflect on critique at any point in the
publication process. We have not been shy about singing the praises of
this kind of engagement, blogging in November about constructive criticism of a visualization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In January, we released
a revised version of the text, both online and in hard copy, that took into
account particular online criticisms of our phrasing and individual
footnotes. We tightened ten lines of prose and changed five footnotes to
better reflect the environmental debates in economics, although we did not
substantively change our arguments. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is important for historians, other
scholars, and publishers to contemplate what this new model of ongoing feedback offers to scholarship, raising humanism to the level of a field that can fluidly benefit from ongoing collaboration.
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Some of the praise of online publishing has been overstated. Critics
of traditional publishing in academia like Kathleen Fitzpatrick have argued
that publishing on the internet could potentially free the humanities of abuse
by removing the temptations to abuse that were structural in the blind peer
review system used by academic journals, a system that shields senior scholars
while promoting discrimination against junior scholars, women, and
minorities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Our own experience with
online community criticism suggests that blind peer review possesses a monopoly
neither on anonymity, nor on senior scholars flexing their power to promote and
denounce new ideas, nor on outright hostility. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There is a vein of feminist criticism where “dangerous places”
are viewed as a positive challenge for radical intellectuals. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Indeed, in
the news cycle of the past year, the female game designers and their advocates
were attacked on twitter with threats of gang rape and murder in the
“GamerGate” controversy, demonstrating what an unsafe space the internet can
be. But the women in question rallied, many of them refusing to go
offline, several of them publishing incredibly moving memoirs of their experience.
Some of them, including Anita Sarkeesian and Randi Harper, fought back with
games and code, the tools of the attackers themselves. In so doing, they
have turned a vicious fight into an opportunity for building solidarity between
women in technology and rallying consumers of video games in the direction of
social awareness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Academic attacks are almost certainly easier to endure than rape and death threats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All the same, engaging our interlocutors has been far from easy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the internet, whether we are academics or gamers, we tame unsafe spaces by continuing to show up, and by continuing to insist on high standards for intellectual exchange and civility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We create safety by advocating for the respect due to vulnerable individuals like women, junior scholars and minorities. We have to show up in order to claim the spaces that need to be claimed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="background: white;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="background: white;">Is the internet itself really to blame for these heated emotions? Perhaps not; it might be the nature of manifesto-writing or polemic essays on the state of the academy in general that arouses so much emotion. </span></span><span style="background-color: white;">Writing decades ago, C. P. Snow would’ve recognized that pattern after the flood of articles and letters, “praise, blame…accumulating at an accelerating pace,” that piled in after he published </span><i>The Two Cultures </i><span style="background-color: white;">(1959). “Do certain kinds of animosity lead to an inability to perform the physical act of reading?” he asked. “The evidence suggests so.” </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">Snow’s own conclusion, published four years later as </span><span style="background-color: white;">is rather like our own: the resulting hubbub was about a </span><i>Zeitgeist</i><span style="background-color: white;"> in conflict; the particular acts of vitriol or praise, in the end, “hadn’t much connection with me.” The same might be said for the victims of sexual aggression in many eras, before the internet and including it: they needn't take the aggression personally, for at the end of the day, the emotions come from deep cultural sources around us. </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">On the other hand, the internet is most certainly a new sphere of civil discourse. We might imagine that humans need to learn how to inhabit it, how to behave in public. Perhaps we are only beginning the process of learning what to say in public, and our culture (as well as our institutions) need to be patient as we do so. Just as publishing houses and educational institutions need to come to understand anew the rules for engagement in an age of open-access publishing, just so we as scholars will have to convene to make up our minds about when we accept the word of rumor, twitter, or a handful of internet-published critics, and when we defer to the published authority of our traditional journals.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">On a more individual level, we as scholars or as public intellectuals participating on the internet have ethical choices to make about the tone we take when leveling criticism at a peer. Should we throw out civil discourse because we are limited to 140 characters and are thrilled by the prospect of a retweet of a scandal-mongering headline? Should we target a scholar's reputation as a whole when a complaint is with an illustration, a footnote, or a political point of view? Journalists have done an excellent job of documenting, these last few months, how rumor spreads on the internet, and some have made a case that we are seeing the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html?_r=0">development of a new culture of public shaming</a>, unparalleled, perhaps, since the Puritans.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
Public intellectuals of all kinds today must make up their minds how they participate online, given that a technology for constant circulation of opinion and critique arrives in the middle of a culture that cleaves to event and scandal, that circulates headlines without necessarily agreeing with them. As anyone who has run a seminar knows, keeping sage opinions and even-handed reading is a skill that has to be cultivated alongside an attention to detail. Even hackers online are forming a new consensus <a href="http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline">outlawing "gratuitous negativity"</a> from their boards in the name of promoting more critical thinking.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">The History
Manifesto</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, we argued for the importance of taking the long view on the
university, the environment, and the economy, topics about which we argued that
historians have a great deal to contribute.
If we apply that lesson to our own experience, we might reason that it
takes a long time to develop rules for productive debate in a new social
context. The internet may not be there
yet, even when one’s interlocutors are also respected scholars capable of civil
discourse in many spheres. </span></div>
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Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-40996447066188045972015-04-10T11:01:00.000-07:002015-04-13T09:22:08.154-07:00Open Criticism and the Freedom to Imagine New Forms of Research in the Social Sciences<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Publishing online and soliciting tweets gave ample room for an airing of any
grievance with our manuscript to be heard. As advocates of open
access publishing, we were enthusiastic about providing this opportunity for
dialogue. But some of that dialogue comes in the form of a heated attack,
in a few notable cases, questioning our credentials as scholars in the process. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">When does open-access</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> critique offer useful food for
thought and revision, and when does it overstep the boundaries of scholarly
respect? I will argue here that traditional scholarly standards have
become confused in the midst of hasty communications from our critics. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">One of the features of the most impassioned critiques we heard was
inflated rhetoric about the faultiness of the text as a whole, coupled with
fairly minor critiques of the data we used and our interpretation
thereof. This mismatch has dangerous consequences for debate.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://historymanifesto.cambridge.org/">Our book </a>was not a research monograph
that claimed exhaustive research on a historical era but rather a polemic,
whose purpose was to hold up new methods for research in the social sciences,
drawing inspiration from methodological revolutions of the past. Polemics
like these have an extreme utility in the social sciences and humanities, as
they unify scholars working with new toolsets (for instance the digital
humanities) and propose new possible orientations towards their use. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;">The crux of our
argument about the waning of an age of mid-century public intellectuals who
participated in government debate and the rise of economists rests upon
secondary, scholarly sources that have been vetted in other
contexts. These timelines exist independently of our own work. We
did not pretend to be doing archival research on a monograph that would review
in detail the lineaments of the American academy in the 1970s. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;">I believe that some of
the rhetoric that accompanied our interlocutors’ fastidious suggestions
came because our interlocutors misunderstood the genre in which we were
writing. We were writing a persuasive essay, not a monograph in which we
claimed exhaustive, expert authority on the eras and actors in question.
We were taking on the case of history departments as an exemplary
case of a profession working within the modern university as a whole, offering
a critical stance while arguing positively for the promise of some new
practices that we have seen younger scholars pursuing – including digital
history, working with big data, and engaging the timescale of the
Anthropocene. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white;">My coauthor and myself both work in flagship departments of history where we are routinely exposed to cutting-edge scholarship as well as the ambitions of young scholars. We wanted to write a polemic that would foreground the difference and novelty that characterized the work that most impressed us, pulling positive examples of similar revolutions in historical methodology from the past as points of comparison for how important a methodological revolution can be. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">To lift up such examples in the form of our own manifesto should be seen not as an act of hubris, but rather as an act of the routine service that scholars perform when they write review essays about recent work in the field, introduce a new set of theory, or write their own historiographical and methodological introduction to a book or journal article. </span><br />
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<span style="background: white;">As younger scholars, we cannot match in detail the historiographic richness of a Lynn Hunt or Hayden White, who personally experienced the scholarly revolutions of the 1970s and who published their own manifestos this year. Yet as younger scholars at the beginning (in my case) and height (in David's) of our careers, we are strongly motivated to notice and rank new trends in publishing, big data, and other methods that seem promising, which we and our students and collaborators may borrow as we seek to plow new routes through the field. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;">The purpose of a
polemic, after all, is to stir debate about the ethical orientation and methods
of a field, not to have the final word on any particular episode in
history. To draw these arguments together as a provocation to
professional history is an important task for provoking a debate about where we
are going as a discipline. It is also one of the most ordinary traditions
in the academy, the eruption of such disagreements. </span>Some time in the twelfth century, Peter Abelard got into a dispute with
his own teacher. Things weren’t working out well, so he moved down
the valley, and set up his own tent, and students followed him there, where he
began giving his own lectures. Polemics are like that: they are an
assertion that one body of scholars have begun to see the matter that motivates
us differently than another body of scholars. These moments are creative;
they bring together new bodies of scholars, who by moving apart, begin to think
about themselves and their work anew. Such moments are also polarizing;
not everyone must agree or come along, and those who don't come may well
complain about what the new camp is doing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We wrote a polemic that put distance
between ourselves and the practices of social and intellectual history of the
past in which we ourselves were trained, looking forward to the research that
we are most excited about shaping our own work around and proposing as models
for our students. In our polemic, we talked about how new generations of
historians are separated from the past by the political impulses of their time
and the arrival of new technical methods like the digital humanities. To
disagree with us would mean taking exception to our theory that time-scales in
history have been broadening since 2000; that many great scholars are currently
taking on climate change, international governance, and inequality as their
major foci; that 1968 offers an exemplary moment for understanding how changing
politics beyond the academy has long shaped the way that scholars engage archives;
and that digital tools promise some help in this new longue duree even while
they raise other ethical issues about access to archives. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In an era of open-access publishing,
when critique is extended, open, and invited, it is crucial that we as a scholarly
community do not mistake a criticism of editorial work that could be improved
(and is then improved, thanks to open access publishing) or an ideological
difference in the making with scholarly failure. Nor should we allow
disagreements over critique and genre to cover up a more profound disagreement
about the kind of scholarship, methods, and politics that are new and exciting
in our discipline. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">One cannot expect all scholars to be
enthused about transferring their labored research into the new tools of the
digital humanities, nor should one even expect all digital humanists to agree
about my own take on the most compelling trends in digital history.
However, offering a portrait of some exciting trends served a goal of
unifying some scholars who agree that big data opens the gate to
contextualizing archival research with long time-scales. Those scholars
can now identify more clearly their own orientation, and debate the best
methods and practices available within that orientation, as a result of being
marked out. That some students and colleagues are inspired by thinking
about the tools of big data in terms of periodization and politics has been my
personal experience in teaching, writing, and lecturing about this book over
the last year. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Ultimately the questions at the heart
of such disagreements as these — both of how we understand the university past
and how we release our texts to the public online — are crucial for making
sense of the role of the social sciences in the university to come. </span></div>
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Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-85894291215417041062015-04-09T12:18:00.000-07:002015-04-13T09:22:28.221-07:00Of Conspiracies and Frontiers: The Scandal of Open Access Publishing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Our October book, <i><a href="http://historymanifesto.cambridge.org/">The History Manifesto</a></i>, reached broad audiences. It was a first for academic
history to follow in the trails long ago paved by Radiohead: we put the book
online for free; we started a twitter hashtag; we invited the public in, and
when they tweeted at us, we read, and sometimes tweeted back. But open
access has new rules, and the rules keep one busy. Somewhere in the
midst of watching the commentary and making revisions, we fell afoul of some of
our readers, when we accepted their suggestions and updated our text
accordingly. ><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I believe that we (and the Press) made a
mistake in February by releasing a new edition of <i>The History
Manifesto </i>without announcing that a revised manuscript was
available. There was a new edition of <i>The History Manifesto</i>,
in two parts. A revised version of Figure 2 came out on November 20,
2014. Ten lines of tightened prose and five revised footnotes came
out on February 5, 2015. <span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>Some
readers took this failure to announce a revised edition as evidence of the
intent to deceive. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It's important to differentiate, however,
between an intentional conspiracy to sabotage one's critics and the active,
ongoing, evolving task of experimenting with a new format of publishing. </span>We had no desire to lead our readers astray, nor to cover up the ongoing debate, when we issued a revised edition. Far from it, we believed that
we were living into a commitment to bringing new, online, open-access forms of
publishing into the heart of scholarship. Publishing on the internet opens up the possibility of an ongoing process of revision that is new to publishers, writers, and readers in the academy. I believe that our
experience is an exemplary moment for the institution as a whole to learn from,
and to benefit from, the lively public engagement that the new frontier of
open-access publishing makes possible. </div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The concession that we should have announced the
"revised manuscript" has been backed up by action, a
collective action undertaken not only by us the authors but also by the whole
host of staff at Cambridge University Press. On Monday March 30, a
revised website came out that went go beyond merely remarking a “manuscript of
record” in the way suggested to us in private correspondence by Peter Mandler –
that Cambridge University Press should announce that there has been a revision
posted. On March 30, we listed all of the revisions in detail – the
tightened lines of prose, the footnotes, and the altered illustration will are
available on the front page, where a document describes them exactly as they
were given to the typesetter. Those who select “download” on the
History Manifesto website now have the opportunity to choose between an
“original edition” or a “revised edition.” The process is meant to
be as transparent as we, the Cambridge University Press editors and designers,
could possibly make it. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Charges of an “ethical breach” highlight
larger questions of publishing process that we, as scholars, will have to
reckon with in an era of new technology -- questions all of us must grapple
with. The dynamics of open-access publishing are new, and there is
great utility in establishing a “manuscript of record” to which subsequent
criticism can refer in detail. Some of them have participated in publishing
discussions in higher education that have underscored the importance to the
scholarly record of having a publication of record, noting when particular
parts of the text have been changed. We, and the leadership of the Press,
were persuaded. Revision should not be an unlimited process; there
should be an official “revised manuscript” available to readers alongside an
original version.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Dealing with these issues is new not only for
us but also for Cambridge University Press, a point that was driven home
abundantly in our conversations with senior editors and staff. In
book form, "revised editions" are rarely issued with this level of
detailed annotation. Standard practice for a traditional print book, our
editors quickly pointed out, would be summed up by one quick line on the
copyright page of a standard print book: “revised edition: some text has been
altered from the original.” Even when there have been meetings with
positions drafted and recognized, activities such as these are still new to
Cambridge University Press.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It is also important that scholars understand
that an institutional delay does not signal unethical intention, but is part of
a necessary ingredient of rethinking how texts are released when publishing
experiments are underway and many individuals are involved. <span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>Delay makes room for a minor public
relations crisis in publishing and digital humanities. From the
outside, the two-month delay in clarifying the process of revision smacks of
conspiracy. In reality, there was a two-week-long turn-around between the
time that our critics directly contacted us and the issue of a new statement
online clarifying what had been changed. That two weeks was an
incredibly efficient process, given the number of editors, lawyers, and
in-house web-designers who had to be consulted to make such a change
happen. There was immense good will on behalf of all parties,
scrambling to get the changes clarified as quickly as possible. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Actually effecting the updates to the website
required both time and the work of an entire staff – including a series of
Cambridge editors with book and journal experience, and the Cambridge New York
staff who are responsible for the website. We, the authors, were
happy to post a detailed list of the ten lines of tightened prose and five footnotes
revised in February. The press saw the wisdom of all of this, and
recommitted themselves to clarifying what had been done. But even
when everyone is on board – consensus is formed, the will is good, and everyone
has signed off – it can take a minute to coordinate a dozen people, including
various editors, website curators, coders, and even legal counsels – to make
sure that the act happens. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We are living through a frontier moment of
online publishing. It should be remembered that of the five university
presses who we spoke to initially about releasing the manuscript, none had
released an open-access book in the humanities before; the sole precedents were
works from MIT press like Peter Suber’s <i>Open Access </i>not issued
in the field of history<i>.</i> There are scant precedents for appropriate
habits of keeping readers updated with what version they are
reading. Critique and revision in an online world come bogglingly
fast – indeed they can be consuming for editors and authors who have other obligations. Remember
that these November to February revisions came atop a book that had only been
published on October 2, 2014; in the traditional world of academic publishing,
we would count ourselves lucky to be receiving the first published book reviews
so early.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Other scholars who study digital media have
nevertheless been optimistic about the opportunities that this new form of
publishing holds for revision as a process. In her 2011 book <i>Planned
Obsolescence, </i>media scholar Kathleen Fitzpatrick delivered a positive
verdict on her experience circulating a manuscript for “open review” on the
internet where all readers could comment, instantaneously, on her text. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Because we were persuaded by arguments such as these, we
published <i>The History Manifesto</i> open access (a first for Cambridge
University Press).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>David Armitage and I
had been part of a world of digital humanities conversations in Cambridge, MA
from 2010 to 2014, one where open-access advocates like Margy Avery, Martin
Eve, and Caroline Edwards were in meetings with the History Department, Harvard
Press, the Metalab, and the Harvard Libraries about how and whether Harvard
would move from a digital open repository to more daring attempts at open
access, for example releasing its back catalogue of academic books to a public
readership.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Advocating for open access was, for us, a moral issue of how scholars should negotiate when working with publishers. We believed that we should work with the institutions around us to bridge the gap between the academy and a broader public readership, indeed
global readership, at present barred from much scholarship by the obstacle of
the pay wall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also felt like an
important issue for institution-building, for helping our departments and
universities to adapt to the opportunities of a digital age, and for modeling a form of scholarship that thinks critically about the organs of publishing and dissemination at a moment of technological change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When we took the manuscript for our new book
around to various university presses, we thought of the book negotiations as an
important opportunity for faculty to engage publishers about the ethical and
pragmatic questions of how scholars engage the public.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were pressing for open access because we
wanted there to be a path for engaged scholars to reach a broader audience and to learn from them,
still paired with the credentials offered by a university press. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Like Fitzpatrick, we too have profited from
the particular demands for clarification voiced by Danny Loss and others.
In contrast, how many footnotes in traditional monographs go unread for want of
a twitterverse or blogosphere filled with active, commenting readers?
Most academic monographs are reviewed by three readers, a process that
sometimes extends from months into years and conflicts with timelines for
hiring, tenure, and promotion. Blind peer review for journals is likewise
slow. Our lightening-quick reviews from the public pushed our manuscript
towards even greater standards of perfection than those to which most
manuscripts are held. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">One of the ways that open access invites new
frontiers in publishing is that it opens up a wide window to feedback from the
public, whether scholars or members of the public at large. For the first
four months of the book's life, we were closely watching twitter and the blogs,
reading the praise and blame alike, and noting for ourselves opportunities to
improve the text. It seemed to us that this process might be one of
ongoing receptivity and revision. Thus, at the time, it made sense to
talk about a process of revision rather than to announce a revised edition.
We had already released a general statement about revision as a
process in a blog entry of November 20, 2014 (link: <a href="http://historymanifesto.cambridge.org/blog/2014/11/updating-visualizations-and-power-open-access-review/">http://historymanifesto.cambridge.org/blog/2014/11/updating-visualizations-and-power-open-access-review/</a>)
. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In the process of engaging with our readers,
we closely examined the substance of the critiques, some of which were valid
inquiries into what we meant in a footnote; others of which simply evidenced
that readers on the internet were unfamiliar with the conventions of writing in
the historical profession. For instance, an anonymous twitter
personality whose critique was cited by senior colleagues in their footnotes as
evidence of sloppy scholarship appeared, upon deeper inspection, to be
unfamiliar with historians’ convention of using a footnote to allude to a body
of historical writing that may be useful for further reading, rather than
exactly matching the content of a sentence or paragraph to the conclusions of
the works in the footnote, as is the convention in disciplines like economics.
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is an important moment in terms of
setting a model for engagement by academics with the
public. It is our hope that the model of engagement that we
choose, individually and collaboratively, can remain one that is open to
critique from without, one that bears out the idealism of sharing and long-term
thinking that we talked about in <i>The History Manifesto</i> in
terms of a practice of sharing manuscripts designed to circulate for the long
term. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What Cambridge University Press, as
publishers, and we, as authors, are modeling is a new form of engagement with
open access publishing -- new for the press and new for scholars. We
hope that our commitment to establishing a manuscript of record, and our
ongoing commitment to open-access publishing, will be read in the light that we
intend it: as a positive example of engagement by scholars with scholars, by
scholars with the public, and by institutions with the longue duree and the
collective good.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-50236995122502458092014-07-28T13:46:00.000-07:002014-07-29T06:34:17.179-07:00Finally! Google Begins to Think Big (Big History, That is)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In a <a href="https://medium.com/@EricHysen/lets-build-the-road-network-of-civic-tech-79427d968422">keynote address </a>delivered to the Berlin Open Knowledge Festival earlier this year, Googler <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeyZxsQzes8">Eric Hysen</a> set up some big stakes for Google's future: <a href="https://medium.com/@EricHysen/lets-build-the-road-network-of-civic-tech-79427d968422">Google, he said, has not yet begun to think big</a>. To really think big, Google would need to start thinking about history, and to think about infrastructure in particular. <br />
<br />
How is it that enormous shifts in economics and politics have been executed in our historical experience? The industrial revolution and the creation of the modern nation-state both rest upon the building of physical infrastructure, and in particular, upon the building of roads. If Google wants to really change our reality -- to stand up to promises that the internet can bring transparency to government, that it transform public policy and public health, or that it can actualize democracy through access to information -- then Google would do well to think about how material infrastructure creates revolutions in information, and how the information revolution of our own time is also an infrastructure revolution. All of these points are picked up by Hysen's keynote. He gets it: this is not the first time the world has been transformed by laying pipe and getting people together, and we can learn from the past how to do it better and aim for bigger successes than before.<br />
<br />
What I hear in Hysen's speech is an important trend in the way certain individuals have begun to understand our world anew, a return to long-term thinking. That means using history to map out where we are in the present, and to foreground how we might engage vast processes and macroscopic patterns (for instance, actualizing democracy, as Hysen urges Google to do). <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
...oOo...</div>
<br />
Long-term thinking stands out in contrast with many of the ways that policy-makers and consultants urge us to think big, including measuring employment or bottom-line returns on investment -- both important numbers, to be sure, but often one-dimensional measures which in recent decades have served as a distraction from larger goals like political and market participation, income inequality, and ecological sustainability. <br />
<br />
The history of long-term thinking, what it consists in, how it went away, and why it's coming back is in fact exactly what I've been writing about for most of this summer, as I've been putting the finishing touches on a new book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-History-Manifesto-David-Armitage/dp/110743243X">The History Manifesto</a>,</i> with my co-author, Harvard professor <a href="http://twitter.com/davidrarmitage">David Armitage</a> (you can <a href="http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/armitage/files/rld_annales_revised_0.pdf">already read the pre-release version online</a>, but you'll miss out on the chapters on inequality, climate change, participation, economists and their data -- so make sure to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-History-Manifesto-David-Armitage/dp/110743243X">pre-order</a> your copy of the book). The way we tell it, our society is in a crisis of short-term thinking where almost no institution from the government to the board room to the NGO thinks on timescales longer than twenty years into the future. Thinking longer around the bend than that, we argue, has traditionally required engaging experts who think more than twenty years into the past, and that means engaging with history.<br />
<br />
Eric Hysen is a member of a new generation of recent college graduates whose questions about the future leave them unsatisfied with one-dimensional measurements. Individuals like Eric bring questions about the past to bear on speculation about how world-systems change on enormous scales. <br />
<br />
Indeed, Hysen is hoping to inaugurate exactly such a pivotal change in the institutions around him. Hysen's role at Google is to oversee the development of open voting protocols and open government schemes. His group has established important landmarks for how Google can automate and scale the process of voluntary hacker groups opening up their government's data, including setting up a digital infrastructure for licensing and sharing data across platforms. "We're not living up to our potential," Hysen states, throwing down the gauntlet. He looks back three hundred years, and comes up with the turnpike trust revolution of seventeenth-century England, which, as he states, helped to diminish the length of the average Cambridge student's journey to London from two days to seven hours. To my mind, however, Hysen's talk stops short of its own ambitions, even while it looks in the correct direction.<br />
<br />
In one very important detail, Hysen is looking in the wrong place -- or rather, that is to say, in the wrong time. Hysen's talk explicitly points to the first chapter of the transport revolution, the creation of turnpike trusts by parliament, as an example of how private enterprises working with government support can revolutionize an economic system. But much of what Hysen is interested in -- the standardization of milestones, the straightening of paths, the leveling of hills and filling in of ditches in order to create flat roads and thus shorter journeys -- was actually part of a slightly later revolution, not the turnpike revolution of 1660-1760, but the interkingdom highway revolution of 1785-1848. It's that latter revolution that interested me, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Roads-Power-Britain-Invents-Infrastructure/dp/0674057597/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1405954587&sr=1-1">I wrote a book about it,</a> setting it out in the history of infrastructure from ancient Persia to the internet. The interkingdom highway revolution -- not the turnpike trusts -- was <i>the </i>revolution that gave us the modern economy as we know it today. <br />
<br />
What separates the two revolutions is a difference in scale that changed everything after in the face of capitalism and what we expected it to do. In the turnpike revolution, a hundred road startups appeared and improved transportation for a few wealthy individuals, creating a map of affluent towns with cobblestone roads, kicking back the returns to their happy investors. In the interkingdom highway revolution, those small road startups were bought out and grafted together by a government initiative that had a radical new purpose. It wouldn't be roads just for the few and wealthy any more. Now, roads would be built to the poorest communities, the ones that normally couldn't afford to link up with prosperous markets. Before roads, capitalism was just mercantilism, a trading game for the rich and powerful. After roads, we expected capitalism to flow horizontally. A rising tide would float all boats. In many times and places, that miracle of capitalism meant running water, flush toilets, newspapers, and cheap housing for the poor, all delivered through the miracle of free roads, built by someone else, running straight up to the doorstep of every newborn infant in every modern nation. Without doing anything, without working or deserving it, individuals were born connected. They could opt out, like Thoreau, moving to the woods, but someone believed that they should have the chance to get to market if they wanted it. So new-paved roads came to each newborn baby's door, and most of us spend our lives walking on sidewalks and roads built by other people for our enjoyment, without thinking much about how they get us to places where we work and spend and play. Infrastructure is mutual aid, frozen into the form of architecture. It's the only form of capitalism most of us want any part in.<br />
<br />
Consider the implications for Google. Hysen has smart landmarks -- interoperable data, more regular voluntary hackathon events -- but few of them address this question of reaching people who are on the outside of the normal flow of capitalism. As a result, Silicon Valley money, whether working in California or Berlin or Bangalore, tends to create a bubble world of privileged software developers creating apps to buy and sell bangles or cars or the best bike routes, mainly catering to other privileged folk of their own race and class. Like the turnpike trusts of the seventeenth century, they improve a mile or two of road, serving a smooth ride to the the cream of the population. But for everyone else, life goes on unchanged. <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
...oOo...</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />
So what if Google took a page from history? What if Google and the German national government decided that who they really wanted to serve was the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NumWdYfSkxI">slum residents of Dar es Salaam</a>, or the inhabitants of the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/world/middleeast/zaatari-refugee-camp-in-jordan-evolves-as-a-do-it-yourself-city.html?_r=0">Zaatari</a> refugee camp, or the <a href="http://oti.newamerica.net/blogposts/2013/case_study_red_hook_initiative_wifi_tidepools-78575">citizens of Red Hook</a>, to make sure that they had adequate access to material infrastructure like water-points, toilets, broadband cables and routers, and the tools to govern these systems themselves? What if they decided, as the designers of the interkingdom highway revolution did, that it was worth a cut to their investors at present to build a larger system, one so different in ambition and scale that it would change <i>everything? </i>They would be working on creating a state-change in the kind of capitalism and democracy we know today, as different as the world after the transportation revolution was from the world before it. <br />
<br />
Google hasn't been in this game, but many ambitious activist groups have been -- ones dedicated to building the digital infrastructure for public participation in places where Google does not yet have a constituency. These groups -- <a href="http://gwob.org/">Geeks Without Bounds</a>, <a href="http://taarifa.org/">Taarifa</a>, <a href="http://www.ushahidi.com/">Ushahidi</a>, and <a href="http://publiclab.org/">Public Lab</a> -- are mainly staffed by coders working for the public good. Their model is <i>entirely </i>centered on bringing participation to the excluded -- that is, to teaching geeks how to design the infrastructure <i>after </i>listening to the poor neighbors of Dar es Salaam (who are busy, mind you). The result is some really transformative models of software designed for poor, busy people -- ones that allow folks with cell phones (but no internet) to tell each other when a water point is out of order, and then to pay someone local to repair it, all without the bureaucracy of the World Bank. Global infrastructure enables a state change in local economies. <br />
<br />
However, the efforts here are, much like the era of the Turnpike Trusts, piecemeal. Coders who really believe that infrastructure brings freedom fly to Dar es Salaam or hang out in Red Hook on the basis of a couple of Knight Foundation grants or World Bank consulting gigs, but they aren't doing it for the money. They are essentially voluntary and limited by the good will and idealism of a few western college graduates. As a result, there's a limit to how far they can scale before they run out of funds, time, or enthusiasm, or just need to pay rent or make sure their babies have shoes. A change of scale tends to happen with institutions like these when information is consolidated and centralized and coordinated. <br />
<br />
Here's what I mean by looking backwards to look forwards. The Big Transport Boom of the eighteenth century depended upon centralizing a vision and then training poor people, lots of them, to make roads for other poor people to get to market. If they had concentrated only on rich people, it would have failed. <br />
<br />
Imagine: if Google decided that it wanted to use its hackathons and intern power to regularly boost the power of these service groups. Imagine constructing an infrastructure for training and deploying a thousand slum residents to incubate their own neighborhood-accountable projects. Here's the historical lesson: Poor people build roads for poor people to do other things on. An institution comes in and makes it scale a hundred thousand times over. The economy is utterly transformed, a hundred times over. The lead institution takes an infinitesimal cut on return on investment -- a tiny return, the equivalent of a gasoline tax, not a toll-road return to compensate investors any time within the next twenty years -- and the result is the invention of a new economic system, which pays back all participants on a scale hitherto unfathomable. <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
...oOo...</div>
<br />
The other game that Google hasn't been in is the ownership of <i>material infrastructure. </i>Eric Hysen rightly suggests that a game-changer would be to move on from <i>apps. </i>Move from shiny apps to infrastructure and collaboration, he says, for instance more regular hackathons for open government. It's true, regularizing collaboration would change it. But there's another lesson of history here -- the importance of the material <i>pipes </i>through which information flows. <br />
<br />
In the eighteenth century, those pipes were the roads, which carried state-coaches, which carried mail, parcels, and newspapers, thus generating an information revolution. In the twenty-first century, those pipes are broadband cable. Thus far, Google has been content to stand by while<a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Captive_Audience.html?id=G4KCPGnKFEUC"> Cox and Comcast monopolize broadband across America</a> (practically everywhere except Knoxville, TN and Lafayette, LA) and become pushy in international conversations, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeanchristophe-nothias/internet-governance_b_3435812.html">thus jeapardizing the relationship of the entire Global South to an open internet</a>. In practice, the Cox/Comcast monopoly means profits hand-over-fist for those who own the pipes, with <i>almost no incentive to lay new pipes to poor people. </i>What that means is that there's an upward limit, even with a million Geeks Without Bounds groups in their ilk. You can design all the software you want, but if there's no hardware to reach the poor, then the poor will still be on dial-up internet in the year 2025. <br />
<br />
Fine: Google's is the software biz, not the hardware biz. But if Google really wants a historical revolution of the kind Hysen describes, they <i>cannot </i>get it without a revolution in <i>three-dimensional infrastructure</i>: pipes, cables, servers, routers. So consider claims about transformative nature of software initiatives like open government or open health. Without pipes, the poor will not be downloading open government data in large amounts and doing their own calculations about how government could serve them better. They might submit their information, but it will still only be a few, affluent, full-time researchers in schools of public health who do the calculations, in 2025 as now. That's not an information revolution, it's just another notch in the belt of academia. <br />
<br />
Google has every reason to want to be the force that creates an infrastructure revolution in our time. Coordinating a software revolution between many communities using interoperable data is the first step, and the next step is making sure that that software revolution extends into the majority of the world's communities, which are still underserved and unlinked in real terms to anything like capitalism or democracy. But that infrastructure revolution will be incomplete unless Google, the nations of the world, or the bankers decide to challenge monopoly ownership of the pipes as well. It's time to think big.<br />
<br />
PS Many thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/evgenymorozov/statuses/492664677382778880">Evgeny Morozov</a>
for pulling me into this conversation</div>
Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-69992005900632537952014-01-08T10:47:00.000-08:002014-01-08T10:47:43.075-08:00Can Participatory Mapping Save the Commons?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://www.shareable.net/sites/default/files/styles/blog-header-large/public/blog/top-image/transnet.png?itok=AwDas_rm" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.shareable.net/sites/default/files/styles/blog-header-large/public/blog/top-image/transnet.png?itok=AwDas_rm" height="193" width="320" /></a></div>
Hey friends. I've just published a short article on participatory mapping and the commons -- namely, the idea that participatory maps are already starting to change how we govern land, air, and water in many places, and that they could do more ahead. <br />
<br />
Once upon a time, historians say, maps were the major tool for destroying the ancient village commons, and indigenous peoples' common holdings of land in the borders of empire. But now, the maps is becoming a tool for returning land, air, and water to the public domain. <br />
<br />
Want to know more? check out the story at <a href="http://www.shareable.net/blog/can-participatory-mapping-save-the-commons">Shareable.net!</a></div>
Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-64472490498326281442014-01-07T12:44:00.003-08:002014-01-07T12:44:35.084-08:00Land, Water, and Participation Restored: A Report on the Work So Far<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Two years ago, I argued that little was
known about the last century and a half of international movements to reform
property law for governing land and water.
Over the period of research supported by a grant at Harvard, I wrote three out
of the five chapters for my next manuscript, including chapters on finance
capitalism and the rise of the international squatters’ movement, and the rise
of participatory mapping. I presented
talks on my research at Harvard’s History Department, Land and Power
Conference, Stanford, in Sweden, and at various activist-based
conferences. The research for this
project is now complete. I collected
manuscripts at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Land Tenure, the
Rockefeller and Ford Foundation Archives, and the University of Sussex’s
archives on the history of participation, as well as NGOs like the Center for
Environmental Studies, Praxis, and the Center for Participatory Research in
Asia in New Delhi. The bulk of the
archives I collected have been digitized and I have begun applying my digital
toolset to them, with preliminary results in the form of a heat-map of places
most frequently mentioned in the newsletters of movements for participatory
land use since 1970. This material
together forms a new manuscript, tentatively entitled, <i>The Long Land War</i>, which I expect to publish in 2015, covering
legal reform of property law in British Empire between 1865 and 1914; the rise
of rent strikes in Ireland and north America between 1871 and 1940;
international government and the promulgation of land reform from 1914 to 1972;
the rise of ‘informalism’ and encouragement of international squatters’
communities by the World Bank from 1945 to the present; and the birth of a
movement for the participatory mapping and governance of land and water, from
1968 till now.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">As promised, a great deal of my focus was in
pioneering new tactics for digital history, where the historian would work with
unprecedented numbers of documents, applying the new tools of digital history
to their reading and analysis. I worked
with Matthew Battles at the Harvard Metalab to begin designing the toolkit, and
with help from a Google Summer of Code grant, we recruited Christopher
Johnson-Roberson to the project as its major developer. In the summer of 2012, Christopher and I
released Paper Machines, a plugin for historians’ archival materials
organization database Zotero, which allows scholars to automatically generate
timelines, maps, wordclouds, and comparative charts of topic frequency in
different collections of text. It is a
machine of unprecedented simplicity for historically analyzing large collections
of text. It has generated a great deal
of enthusiasm, at the <i>Chronicle of Higher
Education</i> as well as on the twitterverse and blogosphere. I currently use Paper Machines along with the
scholarly database generated by archival research supported by the Milton in my
lecture courses and graduate training at Brown University, where the software
serves to introduce my students to digital history and to crowdsource the
problem of analyzing the data generated by the archives, thus turning my
students into collaborators in the creation of new knowledge about the history
of property, law, and housing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Reflections on the power of digital research
to extend historical accounts over longer periods of time is now an article
coauthored with Harvard historian David Armitage forthcoming in the French
journal <i>Annales,</i> to be extended into
a book on longue-duree history, forthcoming later this year from Cambridge
University Press. I delivered talks
about Paper Machines at the MITH seminars in the digital humanities at the
University of Maryland, at the HUMLab digital humanities lab at the Umea
University and Gothenberg University in Sweden, at Brown’s Computer Science
Department, at Stanford University’s Spatial Humanities Lab, and
elsewhere. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I wrote the grant to support informal visits
to colleagues in other fields. This
support proved absolutely essential for continuing conversations across the
borders of history and computer science. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Grants that support informal visits are rare. But hanging-out money is incredibly precious to the researcher: it means dinners out, lunches plumbing one's RA's for ideas, and trips to see colleagues in other departments on a whim. Much of the astonishing productivity of the Milton Grant was due to the committee's open-mindedness in supporting such an informal (and ambitious) proposal, one that not only named a dozen archives to visit but also named a dozen digital humanists I wanted to visit <i>just to talk to them</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">As a result of this generous room for informal networking and conversation, the Milton project has also spun off many unforeseen opportunities for research collaboration. For example, I returned from collecting archival material about the history of participatory mapping in India to meet up with colleagues in engineering, who were immediately enthused about what they heard about participatory maps as tools for democratically governing air, land, and water. Those conversations have already generated material for a series of collaborative grants to the National Science Foundation, wherein we propose to continue the historical analysis of the successes and failures of the 30-year participatory mapping movement as a way of informing best practices for the use of crowdsourced mapping platforms like Ushahidi or Google Maps for governing urban pollution and land and water use in an era of climate change. Conversations such as these would have been nearly impossible without the generous support for conversations and meetings provided by the Milton Fund. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">New websites associated with the Milton Fund:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://papermachines.org/">http://papermachines.org</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://thelonglandwar.com/">http://thelonglandwar.com</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Video associated with the project:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #666666;"> “Can Participatory Maps Save
the World?” </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYL4pVUW7Lg">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYL4pVUW7Lg</a><span style="color: #666666;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Global Finance and the Rise of an
International Squatter Culture,” <a href="http://thelonglandwar.com/international-finance-and-the-rise-of-an-international-squatter-culture-1946-2012/">http://thelonglandwar.com/international-finance-and-the-rise-of-an-international-squatter-culture-1946-2012/</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Human Infrastructure,” <a href="http://thelonglandwar.com/video-human-infrastructure/">http://thelonglandwar.com/video-human-infrastructure/</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Topic
modeling and Paper Machines”: <a href="http://vimeo.com/53078693">http://vimeo.com/53078693</a><span style="color: #006621;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-75651386566144342452013-12-20T12:02:00.002-08:002013-12-20T12:58:28.755-08:00Silences About Property Law: What are the Digital Humanities FOR?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<b>The history of property ownership as we know it is one of the best-documented subjects in the university, the subject of concentration by economists, historians, law school professors, philosophers, and anthropologists. It is also a subject with an impressive century-long hole in it, from approximately 1870 to 1980, during which time period a global debate about property ownership happened which almost no one has written about. It is exactly the sort of subject that digital tools for reading massive archives were built to handle: global, massive, almost entirely uncharted, deeply relevant, and open to debate.</b><br />
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In 1870, a historian named James Godkin inspired a newly phase of political resistance geared at the distribution of land by publishing a new account of Ireland’s struggles against England, <i>The Land-War in Ireland</i>, which framed contemporary struggles in terms of ancient rights to land ownership abrogated by colonizing invaders, who since Spenser’s time had used rent and eviction as the major tools for terrorizing the colonized. In the generation after Godkin’s book, Irish resistance changed from guerilla struggles to organized rent-strikes that placed land ownership at the center of their work. The era of the Irish “Land War” had begun.<br />
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In the 1880s and 1890s, rent strikes and other rebellions influenced by the Irish spread to Scotland, England, and New York, where organized campaigns against paying rent became the major tool of urban immigrants in protecting their incomes, successful in many areas where unionized labor strikes were still illegal and their gains meager. More importantly, Godkin had thrown into question the ultimate justice of colonizing powers’ right to land, and made possible the abrogation of claims of property ownership by previously excluded and oppressed citizens, who, in the tradition of the French Revolution, restated their claim to economic and political participation on the basis of universal rights, in this case the right to own property, the right to be free from eviction, typically phrased as “the right of the tiller to the soil.” Through the popular journalism of the San Francisco-born international political pundit Henry George, previous legal traditions of public property were reworked through a broad challenge to the legacy of empire and class privilege. In the writings of Fabian socialists like Annie Besant, land reform became canonized into a new agenda for socialism. In the writings of legal reformers like Frederick Maitland and Paul Vinogradoff, the folk ownership of the land in the middle ages provided a precedent for state collectivization of land in the service of infrastructure and housing for the people.<br />
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This robust intellectual foundation provided the basis for national politics around the reform. By 1914, every political party in Britain supported some version of a land reform agenda in Britain’s Parliament. In postcolonial Mexico, arguments for land reform echoing the Haitian revolution urged on land reforms capable of reversing imperial concentration of the land into haciendas. For similar reasons of reversing aristocratic control, the League of Nations urged land reform upon imperial China in the 1930s. By 1945, national programs of land management, mortgages, and public housing were on the agenda in every developed nation in the world. By 1946, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization dedicated large portions of its administration to the collection of land tenure policies and statistics from the rest of the world, with the agenda of supplying legal and economic advisors to developing nations seeking to emulate land reform in Europe and America.<br />
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The result of so much policy shift was the manufacture, between 1880 and 1980, of masses of documents, historical, legal, and economic, examining the past and future of land reform in every country in the world. Hundreds of historians, sociologists, anthropologists and economists in Europe and North America took the global history of land as their subject for their dissertation research, assured that their work would find committed readerships in international policy.<br />
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Then, precipitously, around 1982, political opinion turned against the land reformers. The Right, influenced by Milton Friedman, argued that land was just like any other commodity, best left to the market rather than the state. The American left repeated Richard Hofstadter’s critique of the “Agrarian Myth” in nineteenth-century American; at the heart of their dismissal echoed something like Lenin’s critique of the peasantry – against decades of Latin American and Asian experience – that the revolution would come from city-dwellers, not from peasants, and therefore by union organization, not by land reform or rent strikes.<br />
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<b>As a result of this about-face, a devastating silence followed, where barely a historian touched the global century or more of land reform for some thirty years. </b> A few aging agrarian economists who had spent their lives working in development wrote memorials to land reform, pondering why it went away when it was doing such a good job of distributing incomes. But most historians pretended to bury the subject, until now. A few years ago, a few brazen Britons, Paul Readman and Matthew Cragoe, began to unpack the English example and to show that land reform really had mattered. <br />
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But no one dared to touch the global question – what was land reform, and what happened to it? It was a formidable question, for it aims straight at a broad consensus in political science and economic policy that has a stranglehold over world events at the moment, not least the global political stagnation around environmental regulation. <br />
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The more we know about land reform, the more we realize that there is abundant political and legal precedence for broadcast regulation of land and water in the service of the people. Foundations of modern economic consensus begin to fall apart, namely that private property is an unchanging, easily formulated category; that it has ever been so and has always been apparent; that a golden age of pre-welfare-state capitalism existed in the glorious years 1880-1920 that we should turn back to; and that private property and land and water in particular cannot be made into public utilities without destroying the entire market economy.<br />
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Pursuing questions such as these is methodologically as well as intellectually difficult. It is hard for a few historians with to take on a subject whose archives stretch over decades, let alone transnational centuries. There is far too much paper to read. And that makes it ideally suited to a methodological innovation at the heart of the American university right now. At the root of the questions of digital methodology – of which tools and data we collect and how – are questions about how we address silences such as these. If we use digital tools to address long-term questions, we raise the possibility that a mere historian (a <i>humanist</i> mind you, schooled in reading and writing and the digital, not in STEM), can beg to tangle with economists, indeed with a consensus all the way across political policy today. <br />
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<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>In the era of big data, we face methodological opportunities for placing the long-term analysts and the short-term analysts in conversation with each other.</b> This is particularly appealing to those of us embarking on a digital turn in which questions of big data and their analysis are at the forefront of our activity. In an era in which the manipulation of large-scale aggregate data over space and time has become easier than ever, scholars in disciplines with adverse proclivities to short- and long-term storytelling face the option of allowing their data to speak to each other. The question of long-term or short-term history has a methodological aspect in the digital humanities, and it is this tension that governs the rest of this chapter.<br />
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Under the domain of the short in time come the intensive digitization and analysis of a perfect corpus -- the poetry of Gertrude Stein coded for different types of speech acts, the plays of William Shakespeare coded as to the gender of the speaker, maps showing speech acts next to demographics in the pre-Civil War South, county-by-county. Into this category fall the digital editions favored by the Society for Textual Scholarship and a great deal of beautiful digital cartography. Deep studies informed by many documents, they are short merely in the number of lifetimes under study.<br />
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Of the longue-durée type there are far fewer. There's the theorizing by the occasional maverick like Franco Moretti, whose Maps, Graphs, and Trees forced a hundred studies of the novel over five- and ten-year periods into a synthesis of a hundred years. There are the trade maps of the long eighteenth-century made by Ben Schmidt. There are collaborative projects like the Enlightenment of Letters. We might add N-grams, allowing as they do the imagination to analyze the use of the word "fancy" over three hundred years. These projects, like those in the first category, are also intensive in terms of corpus, but their analysis tends to be whittled down to one question -- the social network, changes in word frequency, or the shape of geography.<br />
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<br />
<b>We need to question the prioritization of short-duree over longue durée, to hold up to question the advisor's mandate that narrowing to an appropriate question requires narrowing over time. </b> Digital methods, with their powers of mass aggregation, raise important questions about how these tools are best put to use -- whether in reading the entire corpus of a single author of a single nation. Perhaps the frontier of doing history is bigger than any category we yet understand, slipping into questions of comparative empires, comparative debt regimes, comparative social protest methods, stretching across centuries as well as continents.<br />
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Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-3705112956472138562013-11-23T08:06:00.000-08:002013-11-23T16:09:40.410-08:00The Cartography of Love: Adventures in Twenty-First Century Bohemia<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style= font-family: inherit;">I got an email this morning from a friend who studies transition towns. She lives among the permaculture farmers, street medics, and other radicals of Vermont, an idyllic existence from the outside, and she's visiting Paris for a conference this weekend. On the Champs Elysees, she was having trouble focusing on architectural splendor due to blisters erupting over her shoulders, a "stress rash," she said. She was stressed out, a <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=XqBMAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=%22the+tired+radical%22&source=bl&ots=GcwFvOZUFu&sig=PMrdIcht5HvIP2GfeAKur5h_MY8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=p86QUqffPM7noATElIB4&ved=0CEgQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22the%20tired%20radical%22&f=false">"tired radical"</a> of the kind that Weyl described in 1921. Except that my friend's tiredness revolved not so much around the conferences, international travel, or sheer brunt of protesting against international finance capitalism and its ravages on her community (although I'm sure that those played a role). Chief on her mind was a subject we'd talked about many times, about how stressful she had found dating.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style=>Two of the most credentialed radicals I've ever met were married early. </span><span>When I lived at the Harvard Co-op, my room was downstairs for a time from Rick and Jacqui. Rick and Jacqui were different from the rest of the Co-opers in several respects. The first was that they were slightly older -- 25ish I think, when the rest of us were 20 to 22. That meant that they'd traveled slightly more, and taken classes outside of Harvard, and they had nothing but disdain for the watered-down theory and apolitical teaching they found offered on the Harvard schedule of courses; they were there to use the university's support to make films, and they already knew why they were making films and about what. While we were living together, their first film came out</span><span style="color: #222222;">, about families in gangs in New York and gang life as pride and survival in the face of racism rather than as criminality and license. For all those reasons, they shone out among the other Co-opers; they had a sense of a political economy larger than white privileged feminism, and a sense of how their lives and careers would interface. It took me another ten years to get anything like that same clarity for myself.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But the second thing that was different about them was their relationship to family. Their relationship was exceptional in the radical community I knew at that time. They were <i>married </i>at 25, and they were also the <i>only</i> married couple I knew at Harvard. As we got older, no one I knew was married by 25, especially among the radicals, so Jacqui and Rick still continued to stand out in my mind (the only Harvard marriages we knew at 25 in my circle were the most tepid, the least political folks who found a spouse much like them and moved back to the suburbs). The marriage was a source of solidarity, a source of radicalism -- it's been fifteen years, and we haven't been in touch, but I've continued to see Jacqui's name near Rick's on their reports from Iraq for radical news networks, or on publicity about their new documentaries. What I learned from hanging out with them, as I recall, was that at least some of that solidarity was modeled on family relationships from Rick's parents, who were left, and had several offspring, at least two of whom became radicals in different ways, who stayed in touch with each other, and who seemed to generally support Rick and Jacqui as well. And Jacqui, when I knew her, described her new family as a safe haven from a world of fundamentalist religion and political conservatism in rural Alberta, where she had grown up. Marriage, in her case, had meant the possibility of choosing a new family, even through migrations from Canada to Boston and then around the world. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">All of this is an outsider's hazy vision, badly pieced together from stray details, and surely invested with my own idealism. I have no idea what Rick's relationship to his siblings has been since then, or whether that aura of mutual support continued. I hope it did. I should say again -- I never knew them terribly well, and whatever normal vicissitudes relationships or families go through, I can't speak to them. But it's clear that the marriage and the family did something important for them both, at least for some period of time, and it may well be doing that still for all I know, driving a spear of radical solidarity deep into the future. At least, according to the <i>Democracy Now </i>website, that's what they're both still doing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Jacqui and Rick's relationship could not have been more at odds with the radicalism I was learning from Harvard, where there was (as they complained) little political economy, little global politics with a perspective from below, and instead, a great deal of queer and feminist theory that insisted on the oppressive nature of the family and the potential for abuse in <i>any</i> set of relationships. We read Kristeva and Foucault and Lacan, deconstructed the self, and learned that multitudinous, polymorphous forms of creativity or demands for freedom were more liable to appear in repetitious repairing and rebonding with strangers. Nomadism and independence was what was preached among the women who took Women's Studies classes of my generations (yes, and a thousand other feminisms besides, but that's where the real action seemed to be taking place). Nomadism and independence were what I heard preached in San Francisco when I lived there, at least by the people most eager to talk about the dynamics of sex and dating. The mantra goes like this: when in doubt, seek sex, nomadism, and independence. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What we were learning at Harvard, I understand now, was a form of radicalism perfectly well suited to the genesis of certain kinds of bohemia, with a long pedigree stretching back through Greenwich Village, San Francisco, Paris, and London. It was particularly helpful for certain young men and women trying to shrug off the memory of paternal authority in another world. The insistence on nomadism, on reconfiguring relationships, on constant travel, was particularly appropriate to young men of means and an experience of outsiderdom, who in the 60s were rejected by their families and found a few institutions around the world offering a happy home. Those stories of personal liberation come down to us through decades of exploration by people with the means to support numerous households, to support breakups and reconvergences. Most importantly, they had the time, energy, and income to support mutual exploration with their many partners. As a life-long public advocate of polyamory once told me, polyamory is probably for the rich. Working-class friends at Ida in Tennessee would disagree, but they chose a back-to-the-land rejection of consumerism altogether -- utopia, not reform.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Reformers, whether in the media or academia or politics or science, seem largely to choose pair-bonding. There's a geographical dimension to that choice. In professional circles -- say left professional circles like tenure-track academia, where plenty of us are married and have left leanings -- plenty of people talk about pair-bonding, planning cohousing movements together, or introducing young single people who want to change the world with someone else by their side. All of those conversations go on in professional circles, but they can be very hard to get to from the Bohemian art-and-protest scenes of Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, or New York. Plenty of people in radical worlds pair-bond and have children, but then they tend to move to a place with cheaper rent, like Portland or Philadelphia. All of which increases the perception that radicals in Brooklyn and San Francisco must choose nomadism and independence over family.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In Boston and Chicago I found entire ghettos of lonelyhearts queer folk, single straight women, and single straight hipster men, many of them with dedicated activist projects and deep streaks of radicalism. Most of them were too tired, after running whatever marches or food justice initiatives or cyberjournalism, to handle more than one lover at a time. When I lived in San Francisco, I found myself in a world of smart, middle-class women with activist tendencies and radical ideas, who entered relationship after relationship, looking for some stability, only to be preached to again and again, by an articulate minority, about the sovereign value of nomadism and independence, which had come to stand in for radicalism itself. Many of my single women and men friends in these cities complained incessantly about wanting to be with someone, and dated frequently, often using the internet. And a good many of them felt bad about themselves for not being nomadic and independent, or for wondering about the end of their fertility if they were women. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The "feeling bad" here bothers me, because we've created a dynamic in which the high premium paid to <i>sexual</i> or <i>gender</i> radicalism in conversation promotes extra emotional labor for merely feministic men and women radicals of a different sort. I'm struck by the numbers of radical friends who second-guess themselves when they start to think about the solidarities they need to be happy in life, including someone loving at their side. In my experience, living with Zach has boosted my abilities to think about the future, to plan, to do my work, to write, to hang out with friends, or anything else, just because I have a partner around who's there, with me, to explore what it means to be human in rest and labor. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The mantra of self-work, independence, and nomadism through multiple, changing partnerships works deep magic for some people. But it's a mantra: it's recited again and again in some cities, in some parts of Bohemia, and ignored entirely in others. At Burning Man there are so many workshops on polyamory and polyamorous marriages and so few meet-and-greets for young radicals trying to pair-bond and create radical change together (because that would be so counter-revolutionary?). These days, one wouldn't expect anything else. In these conversations, radicalism and solidarity are sometimes <i>confused </i>with nomadism and independence, as if having multiple lovers were a precondition of doing radical work battling Wall Street or racism or global political economy. So when we talk as if pair-bonding is <i>anti-radical</i>, we add a great deal of emotional labor to the plates of radical activists that might otherwise be filled with a very different genre of conversation, one that insisted that relationship give comfort, relaxation, and solidarity to activists who are often doing other things than talking about sex, for example making international documentaries about political economy. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">These days I find myself thinking about Jacqui and Rick and other kinds of mantras that I might offer to a younger version of myself. I might tell her: Humans need other humans. When in doubt, seek out the relationships -- friendships, love relationships, and homes -- where you feel most comfortable, most welcome, most easily able to talk, and keep returning there. Find people who aren't afraid of <i>family</i> as a word, and talk to them about the kinds of families they'd like to see, which because they're your friends, will probably also be families of kindness, justice, solidarity, and political awareness. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Humans do need other humans. We like talking in the morning about what the plan for the rest of our day looks like. We like talking in the evening about where we went, what we did, and what we thought about it. We're designed to tell and listen to stories, to relate to each other over time, to build up trust and respect for each other in a way that is deeply relaxing to the entire system. In broken and oppressive relationships, we can't relax into the delights of mutual respect or regular storytelling. But without relationships at all, we can become exhausted by the very process of searching for a place to share stories.</span></div>
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Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-65964523373343635902013-10-31T06:24:00.001-07:002013-12-20T12:51:44.671-08:00Upcoming Talk at Brown<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h4 style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; direction: ltr; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 1.4375em; line-height: 1.4; margin: 0.2em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">
Jo Guldi "Can Participatory Maps Save the World?" </h4>
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<em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit;">November 7, 2013 • 5:30 p.m.</em></div>
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This talk will audit the experience of appropriate technology and map-making in particular back as far as 1968, when maps were first trumpeted as a way to overturn lines of class and culture, and up to 2013, when lightweight Indian startups promise to deliver infrastructure for cities like Bangalore and Kibera that lack the centralized bureaucracy to manage water and sanitation in traditional ways. This event is free and open to the public.</div>
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Rockefeller Library, Digital Scholarship Lab, 1st Floor.<br />
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Youtube recording: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYL4pVUW7Lg&feature=youtu.be">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYL4pVUW7Lg&feature=youtu.be</a></div>
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYL4pVUW7Lg&feature=youtu.be"><img alt="Jo Guldi: Can Participatory Maps Save the World?" border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibZzlYIbj7-4rSNnkuR3iBCauRcdA3CBvnk8-8ey40vOMd2yL4K412Ug06tPsX5iQ1VYjzJzzhCtQbtnwhgpj7wT_ATuxyQPxKaGIF8lA7WDvpCl9cRBkVOFoXF2lW54PH3j9AnA/s320/10.29.13joGuldiPoster.jpg" width="203" /></a></div>
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Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-62344854825168026292013-10-13T09:03:00.001-07:002013-10-13T09:04:11.710-07:00Upcoming Talks! Can Participatory Maps Save the World? Maps Before and After the Smartphone: A Global History, 1968-2013<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I'm showing up at Stanford Oct 24 to present a talk called "Can Participatory Maps Save the World?", an audit of the successes and failures of crowdsourced maps and appropriate technology between 1968, when Marxist development officers started using participatory maps to help villages in India manage their water. <br />
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I'd love it if you could come, bring folks, and share the announcement! Hope to see you soon!<br />
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<br />
AT STANFORD<br />
"Can Participatory Maps Save the World? Maps Before and After the Smartphone: A Global History, 1968-2013"<br />
Thursday, October 24, 2013, 4:15pm, Lane History Corner (Building 250, room 303), Stanford University<br />
<br />
"Introducing Paper Machines"<br />
Friday, October 25, 2013, 12pm, Lane History Corner (Bldg 250, Room 307), Stanford University<br />
A talk on Paper Machines, my digital toolkit for analyzing large corpora of digitized texts. The organizers have asked for RSVPs as lunch will be served.<br />
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<br />
AT BROWN<br />
"Can Participatory Maps Save the World? Maps Before and After the Smartphone: A Global History, 1968-2013"<br />
Thursday, November 7, Time TBA, Rockefeller Library, Brown University<br />
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<br />
<br />
<br />
"Can Participatory Maps Save the World? Maps Before and After the Smartphone: A Global History, 1968-2013"<br />
<br />
A talk by Jo Guldi, Asst Prof. of History, Brown University<br />
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Since 2006, the New York Times has boasted that participatory technology is on the cusp of solving the problem of access to city government. Questions about the allocation of infrastructure, the riddles of which have been one of the primary stamps of the failures of the infrastructure state since the eighteenth century. <br />
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In these debates, technology often appears as the magic cure for these problems, promising to deliver democratic consensus into the process of infrastructure building promises to correct nothing less than the problems defined by Timothy Mitchell as the "rule of experts," the inherently hierarchical structure of decision-making that has governed civil engineering and urban planning projects since the invention of those professions in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. But what works? And what fails? Can maps actually reverse dramatic failures of participation, and dissolve the barriers of privilege between rich and poor? <br />
<br />
This talk will audit the experience of appropriate technology and map-making in particular back as far as 1968, when maps were first trumpeted as a way to overturn lines of class and culture, and up to 2013, when lightweight Indian startups promise to deliver infrastructure for cities like Bangalore and Kibera that lack the centralized bureaucracy to manage water and sanitation in traditional ways. </div>
Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-80121343464185067482013-06-20T15:12:00.001-07:002013-06-20T21:12:39.641-07:00How Information Won’t (and Will) Save the Climate: The Perspective of History<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 10pt; text-align: left;">Each profession has its approaches to climate
change: scientists ponder why, despite the marshaling of data, nothing has been
done, their arguments subjected to public doubt and legislative apathy.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; text-align: left;"> </span><span style="font-size: 10pt; text-align: left;">Economists and political scientists mull over
"tit for tat" strategies and "free rider problems,"
tinkering towards some hypothetical consensus that would persuade all
constituents, industrialists, consumers, poor countries, and rich ones, to
implement solutions for dealing with climate change.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; text-align: left;"> </span><span style="font-size: 10pt; text-align: left;">Meanwhile,
historians look backwards and wonder: will more data actually do anything?</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; text-align: left;"> </span><span style="font-size: 10pt; text-align: left;">Is it actually in the power of tinkering
legislators to reframe climate initiatives in some perfectly persuadable
language?</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; text-align: left;"> </span><span style="font-size: 10pt; text-align: left;">Made skeptical by their knowledge
of failures past, historians question the collection of data, reformist
legislation, market solutions, and mass mobilization as equally impotent
against the problem of climate change.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">Stories about reform movements past give us
reason to pause.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Three generations ago,
historians like Oliver Macdonaugh thought that merely amassing more data could
solve any problem and they talked about the successive reform movements of the
nineteenth century -- getting the children out of the mines, increasing
literacy, combatting alcohol, legislating workmen's compensation -- as a
history of data-gathering in the service of progress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, we have become more wary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seems as if too much data-gathering by
experts may itself obscure the issue: we write about "information
overload" that afflicted botanists in the early renaissance and
geographers in late Victorian empire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
write about "unintended consequences" of "expert rule," for
instance when British engineers on the Suez canal dismantled local systems of
water management and so accidentally initiated the massive spread of
malaria.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our understandings of the
urgency of climate change issues come at the tail end of a long list of late
twentieth-century failures of reform movements -- including the never-adopted
human rights campaigns of the 1970s, the Green Revolution with its failed
promises for international food security, and indeed projects of world
governance and the role of the United Nations in general.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Twentieth-century organs of government have
been, it seems, particularly awful at getting things done at a global scale.
Historians agree: climate change is not unique, not merely a difficult
intellectual problem, not simply another issue requiring more data.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If history is any rule, the news is bad: no
magical groundswell is coming in politics to destabilize the status quo, for
the overwhelming reform movements characteristic of the nineteenth century are
a thing of the past, coopted by party politics and back room deals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No amount of data accumulation by scientists
will change how business is transacted, as data accumulated by science is just
as likely to be used by big business for greenwashing or to limit returns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A swarming of business solutions through tax
incentive programs will create low-emission zones of clean air for the rich,
while dirty forms of manufacturing and energy production are shipped offshore,
and carbon levels continue to rise, imperiling our collective future.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">But historians make a habit of thinking about
drastic changes in the institutions of governance, of the kind signaled by
transitions out of feudalism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Climate
governance of the kind imagined by environmentalists -- gigaton solutions,
geoengineering, massive transformation of transportation -- is similarly an
alternative paradigm of collective care for land, water, and air as a
commons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It requires new institutions
and new forms of governance, ones likely resembling the common-property
institutions described by Elinor Ostrom in her latitudinal survey of successful
fisheries, forestry management programs, cooperative housing associations, and
grazing commons around the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">The nearest historical precedent for such a
shift towards communal management in the modern world comes from the
late-nineteenth century land reform movements that gave us a wholesale plan of
collectivizing the <i>urban</i> environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Reformers pioneered the creation of public utilities, rent control,
public parks and playgrounds, allotment gardens, and public housing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They argued for the opening up of private
foot-paths to the public. Once forgotten, these movements are again attracting
scholarly attention, for in their ambitions of equitably distributing the
management of land and water, our ancestral movements resemble those among
environmentalists today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">Then, as now, environmental crises were linked
to an overwhelming array of interconnected problems, patched over by interim
work of part-time reformers, wealthy patrons, and corporate do-gooders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the end of the nineteenth century, concern
over interwoven problems of urban cities -- unemployment, overcrowding, public
health, and poverty -- generated the invention of new forms of governance for
the collective management of the urban environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the heart of these transformations were
new interpretations of law, city and regional government, and the visualization
of data.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Likewise, ahead for today's
environmentalists are transformations of law, regional and international
government, and the instrumentalization of data, capable of responding to
already-visible groundswell movements demanding change.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">Data <i>is </i>essential to this horizon, as is
the creation of a data architecture that enables institutions capable of
democratic rule.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In economists' speak,
these institutions highlight the <i>externalities</i> involved with our
collective dependence on the vast, difficult-to-measure benefits of the
ecosystem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The laws that Ostrom
discovered replace a law of short-sighted protection of single-owner property
-- the kind of logic that creates what Garrett Hardin called the "tragedy
of the commons" -- with the collective monitoring of common-pool
resources, a kind of decentralized panopticon where participants monitor their
collective resources as well as each other, thus prohibiting resource
exhaustion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">History tells us a great deal about attempts to
reinstate commons and their successes and failures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Debates about climate change and the
administration of forests as commons began in the late 1970s and 80s, when
Ostrom was first collecting her case-studies and indigenous people around the
globe began well-orchestrated protests against their deracination from the
land. At the same time, radical development economists began to theorize how to
reinstate the commons, renew local institutions, and turn forests and aquifers
over from civil engineers to local, democratic bodies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">The major tool developed by these movements for
renewing the commons were a new kind of map: a crowd-sourced map made by a
dozen or a hundred participants, which allowed participants to synthesize
information about the way they related to the environment: where in the village
they lived, how they used water, whether they had access to existing
institutions around them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Organizers
would descend on a village, summon the children, elders, women, and extremely
poor, and spend a day with the community talking and drawing maps of the
village on the ground.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They reversed the
paradigm of colonial governance: instead of the expert surveyor and civil
engineer mapping the ground to administer it from afar, now the people in the village
created a map for themselves which would serve as the basis for community
conversations about how best to reorganize the governance of land and water.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">Today, similar crowd-sourced maps have been
deployed to create a groundswell of community-originated information about
pollution, sanitation, and responsibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In Kerala, India, high-school students map flower and frog species on a
google-based map, charting biodiversity in relationship to excreta dumped into
the lake by tourist boats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The maps
point to those responsible, and have enabled successful lawsuits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Tamil Nadu, mapping has helped farmers
target tanneries whose effluents were polluting the aquifer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the Philippines and Thailand and Canada,
groundswell indigenous movements armed with GIS have crowd-sourced folk
knowledge about territory to create multi-authored maps that stand, in court,
as proof of the tribe's claim to an ancestral property rights on the land.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The crowd-sourced map has become a tool of
community administration of ecology, facilitating the targeting of irresponsible
behavior, the identification of a geographically-based collection of
stakeholders, serving to mobilize them with the power of graphic visualization
and offering a form of political and legal testimony deeply persuasive to the
judges and officials who see it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">This summer, I visited a dozen nonprofits
involved with mapping water management, fisheries, forests, irrigation works,
small farmers, transport, and city waste across India, some of them thirty
years old, some armed with smart phones and GIS.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are all doing good work, and many of
them are remarkably successful in terms of organizing local political campaigns
and lobbying city government.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="color: red;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">We found two problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One was a lack of ambition to scale.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The historic initiatives were village-based,
with few ambitions to go further.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now,
empowered by modern GIS tools, the Gandhigram Rural institute is embarking on a
project to map 10,000 water-bodies in Tamil Nadu, and ATREE is mapping the 5th
largest lake in India.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These initiatives
highlight the possibility of undertaking large-scale projects with these
techniques, but no one thinks larger than the size of an Indian state - at the
level of the nation or beyond.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is an
information architecture problem: the creation of a crowd-sourced map capable
of enabling political movements at larger and larger levels, contextualizing
local and state action within a global framework.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">The second problem was a questionable
commitment to democracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What we found
in India was a disconnect between the older generation of participatory mappers,
fiercely dedicated to equal distribution of economic benefits, and the newer
generation of internet-focussed mappers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>On the one hand are individuals now in their 60s or older who spend
their youth with squatters, mapping their residences in the Bombay slums so as
to petition local government to turn over property rights, or working with
indigenous tribes in the mountains to force the government to recognize their
occupancy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their commitments to
democratic processes are unfailing; they know volumes about incorporating women
and working-class people into a mapping session, producing a new consensus
about administration within a village, or organizing a new institution to
administer water or pollution on the level of a watershed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the other hand are a new generation of
Stanford-and MIT-educated CS or business majors, returning to India with the
promise of Google Maps and venture capital behind them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They too hear the promise of rich data about
the environment to adjudicate complex questions like the availability of
water.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But they know almost nothing
about the previous generation's work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Their training in economics leads them to optimism about how the
market's invisible hand will allocate water to the very poor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The tools they design are tools for enabling
cell-phone users equal opportunity to purchase water.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More rarely do they think about learning from
India's political maps in the 1980s, and creating a smart-phone app that would
enable Americans to map their involvement in the globe's dirtiest
supply-chains.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">Both of these, the problems of scale and of
democracy, are issues of information architecture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They can be solved with the power of
visualizations driven towards political organization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But mapping and code by themselves are not
enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Climate change demands the
creation of new institutions of governance that follow Ostrom's paradigm of the
commons, with its understanding of collective responsibilities. These
institutions must be democratic, and served by an information architecture
stamped with participation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">For this to happen, the mapping, code, and data
collection must be allied to a sense of memory: both memory of the reasons why
expert rule in the past has gone so wrong, and memory of the amazing potential
that maps have had when allied to grassroots organizations among indigenous
people around the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For those
reasons, scientists, coders, and entrepreneurs can help, but they need the
power of memory, the service of historians.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Memory is necessary, in order that we keep sight of and overcome the reasons
why environmentalism has thus far failed: the risks of information overload,
the corruption of privilege, and the inefficacy of expertise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Memory of the powers of information to unite
communities, the importance of democracy, and the successes of institutional reform
before us can thereafter be our guide.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">(at the NSF-funded UC Davis workshop on Climate Change and Governance, Lake Tahoe)</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> </span></div>
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Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-586012694878748872013-05-26T22:41:00.000-07:002013-05-27T04:37:22.373-07:00The Riddle of Kerala: How radicals secured water rights where capitalists have failed<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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In Kerala, there are standing ruins of state-organized production cooperatives for local handicrafts and terra-cotta tile and coir, once organized with a vision of deploying newly-Independent India's richest resource, labor, in the form of that most free and egalitarian and beneficiary of institutions, the worker-owned cooperative. The cooperatives are rotting now, their letters faded, hidden behind chained fences, their long modernist horizontals in reinforced concrete besmirched by lacrimal black stains of mildew weeping down the facade.</div>
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The ruins are victims, my local friends tell me, of Kerala's success. A program of mass education was begun in the early twentieth century here by Kerala's benevolent ruling elite. After Independence in 1947, the freely-elected communist party, the world's first, continued the tradition of strong local schools, and began touting another problem: the "unemployed literate," found everywhere in Kerala. Free-wheeling capitalism does not necessarily reward virtue; it employs the poor only where wages are smallest and restrictions the least, and leaves the learned behind unless they take the initiative to make their own future. So the Keralans did just that. Worker-owned cooperatives sprung up, organizing local production into units that generalized profits to the workers themselves. Then famine hit in the 1970s, and Kerala's new cooperatives were too poor to generalize profits. So Kerala turned to that other tool for generalizing wealth implemented by left-wing governments across India and South America in the 1970s, land reform. </div>
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The sweeping Keralan land reforms were a more progressive measure than those executed in Mexico in the 1910s or Peru in the 1960s. Rather than concentrating on the breakup of traditional feudal land-holdings, Kerala broke up all concentrations of land, even some considered merely middling or grand only by local standards. This "land ceiling" created a province of smallholder farmers.</div>
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Land ceilings in other parts of India were ringed with corruption and left behind a legacy of resentment. Elites with large estates transferred the land before its seizure into the names of cousins, while Americans muttered about how such dispersals were stymying the progress of Green-Revolution-style industrialized agriculture. </div>
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But in Kerala, dispersed land-holding combined with high rates of education prompted an economic miracle. Within a generation, Keralans became among the richest of the Indian provinces. They joined the service sector, sending legion nurses to work in Dubai. The worker-owned cooperatives of yore have been updated, transferred away from the main road. They still sell homespun silk and matted coir for the roofs of traditional houseboats . But now Kerala's major net export is labor: it sends highly-educated labor to other parts of the world, importing workers from other parts of India to run its booming construction industry. </div>
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<b>It's routine for economists to dismiss the history of land reform as a failure, pointing to corrupt militarized land distribution under dictatorships like Peru and Ethiopia at the same time. Democratic land reform, however, has a historic record linked to economic development and education. </b></div>
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The longer legacy of Kerala's democratic project remains in its success with providing water to a majority of its people. With its history of democratic experimentation, Kerala has become the site of some of the most successful experiments in mass water provision in all of India.</div>
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One such experiment is Mazhapolima, a north-Kerala-based consultancy to the district collectorate of Thrissur, whose name means, "the richness of water." Mazhapolima is the project of Jos Raphael, an LSE-educated PhD in Development Studies, who concentrates on "water literacy" classes where he preaches the benefits of recharging groundwater through connecting the traditional open dug wells, found in every plot in Kerala, to rainwater catchment roof systems, arrays of tarp and pvc pipe that local plumbers install for around $60 a house. </div>
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Another such experiment is a groundswell political organizing effort for lake-water management at Vembanad Lake organized by Dr. Priyan Rajan, a biologist and native Keralan at ATREE foundation in Bangalore. The Vembanad Project has successfully organized fishermen, clam-collectors and farmers to organize a new, democratic entity for governing salinity and pollution in their lake. Now, with the help of the Delhi Institute for Rural Research and Development (IRRAD), they're looking into systems of sand filtering for water appropriate for mass, decentralized adaptation across south Kerala.</div>
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Rainwater catchment experimentation is nothing new to India, where investigating indigenous techniques of rainwater harvesting and water recharge has been a national agenda since the 1980s. Kerala's experiments, however, are stamped with the democratic imprint of its long experiment with communist and socialist politics. By contrast, in Rajasthan, Tarun Bharat Singh's experiments with water harvesting commandeered the unpaid labor of landless peoples to dig wells. In some cases, charismatic leaders hinted that the poor would have access to water after the wells were dug. It didn't work out that way. The wells became the property of local elites, and the poor, for their labor were promised seasonal jobs in lieu of water. Insecure water rights were a product of being nomadic workers, with no rights on the land. The ordinary burdens of itinerant labor worsened in the case of water. </div>
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Kerala's experiments with water have been more democratic. Because of the land reform, even poor Keralans whose landholding is the size of a single bedroom, have rights of access to groundwater through their ownership of land. Unlike in other parts of India, where the poor are dependent upon public wells or enormously overwhelmed public utilities, the poor in Kerala have <i>private</i> water rights, made secure by the egalitarian redistribution of private rights to land under a communist government in the 1970s. <b> Land reform did for Kerala what decades of water-pump-distribution and charismatic organization could not do for other regions in India: land reform secured the people's rights to the water below the surfaces they walked. </b></div>
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Moreover, the distribution tradition in politics continues to insure that Kerala's experiments with water harvesting reach the region's poor. Kerala's socialist government continues to take seriously its mandate to participation in land and water. At the moment, that's done by the government delivering clean drinking water by truck and by boat to Kerala's many remote residents, an expensive and unsustainable stop-gap expression of a government convicted of its responsibility to provide water to all its citizens. In embracing the mandate of land and water for the people, Kerala stands apart from other districts in India, including the slums of Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore, where the poor have to purchase water delivery by truck from private vendors. But the land and water mandate also means that Kerala is dedicated to exploring other avenues of water provision. </div>
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An unintended consequence of land reform has been another form of water security as well, one linked to buying power. Economic success means water dominance, the net importing of products of water farming elsewhere. One of the most fertile regions in India, Keralans have themselves largely left agricultural production behind, becoming importers of mangos and coconuts from drier and rockier Tamil Nadu. With broadcast economical success as the result of decentralized development and land reform, a majority of Keralans can afford to import their water in the form of mangos and melons from far away. </div>
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<b>With its inheritance of systems of rights securing the power of people over their land and water, Kerala's radical traditions have succeeded around water security where capitalists have failed. </b></div>
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That connection between land reform and economic development is the hinge of a moral paradox. In some sense, Kerala's progressive image is falling victim to its own success. Birth rates have fallen, in keeping with economic development in many places, even as Kerala's educated worker-citizens migrated around the world to high-placed jobs in medicine and research. Fisherfolk, farmers, and migrant construction laborers remain. But will future generations be able to benefit from earlier land reform? The answer is unclear. In a booming market, land prices for the many broken-up smallholder plots have escalated. Kerala is becoming a province of rich, secure retirees, occupying sumptuous new houses, boasting carved teak brackets in the traditional style of temples. Around Lake Vembanad, some of the most expensive resorts and spas in all of India have risen up, their soaring buildings dwarfing nearby temples. The success of education and land reform has meant development, and development, to a large degree, works against the decentralizing effect of land reforms. Land, in Kerala, has become expensive as a measure of success, and no one speaks of breaking up such precious land again with another land reform. </div>
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There's a paradox here that's emblematic of the experience of democratic legislation in land around the world. In nineteenth-century western Massachusetts, transcendentalists decided to pursue a policy of welfare-for-the-poor, education, and agrarian development that froze the place in time. Later, Community Land Trusts set aside large plots of the region for cross-class housing development, securing the houses against higher property taxes and insuring the continued ability to thrive of the people who lived there. Rather than pursuing industrial development at scale, it gradually improved its nineteenth-century clock towers and eighteenth-century white-washed church steeples. Those from poor families who stayed continued to thrive. Land prices rose around them, but western Massachusetts stayed stuck in time. Outsiders could only move in at great expense. </div>
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Are examples like Kerala and western Massachusetts examples of success? They insured the development, education, and welfare of a generation of their own poor with greater success than regions characterized by rampant industrialization and exploitation. In the end, they close their doors to outsiders; the land becomes too expensive. Land reform is a victory for economic development, but is it a victory for moral welfare? That question remains open. On the other hand, the question of land illuminates the problem of water. There are unintended consequences to an egalitarian ethos, a democratic attitude towards land and water, which are vital for us to learn about in a coming age of water scarcity.</div>
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</div>Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-42185923555427935932013-05-17T03:23:00.002-07:002013-05-17T03:25:08.905-07:00Chennai Walkabout<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiygGACO7yP3bzGTCh-9mhC0zPQeF1YA5RPv5B8RlNW004_7JLpBNew6w865q4S96P-Y3H6L8v8VTlVJUmhy_yOKX5PXuJI09Jlk3qdzW_U9nEj0Pt4Af8kEOKM8r0lHHlkP-hFkg/s1600/20nxg_p2_tanyaart_gtu3j795c120nxg_ward4.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiygGACO7yP3bzGTCh-9mhC0zPQeF1YA5RPv5B8RlNW004_7JLpBNew6w865q4S96P-Y3H6L8v8VTlVJUmhy_yOKX5PXuJI09Jlk3qdzW_U9nEj0Pt4Af8kEOKM8r0lHHlkP-hFkg/s320/20nxg_p2_tanyaart_gtu3j795c120nxg_ward4.jpg" /></a>
<br /></div>Mapping produces unintended consequences. We go out mapping with some volunteers, undergraduate majors in social work and economics from a local women's college, who are fulfilling a credit requirement of work with a local foundation as part of their course. They're tired from an intense day of mapping the day before.
<p>Today, we're counting shopfronts and apartment buildings, trying to get a rough count of how many residences are in an area so that they can make some informed assertions about community composting, waste collection, and water management. Matching the Google satellite views with houses on the ground, one of the researchers notice that the streets in the image don't line up with the streets on the ground. We do a little bit of detective work and realize that a dead-end has been filled in by a new building with a dress shop, and a through-street became a dead end when a new house was constructed. They interview the neighbors. Who remembers when these buildings went up?
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Chennai has no mechanisms for overseeing the basics of community control of its streets. There is no centralized office capable of taking in the wealth of information generated by a rapidly expanding city. If <a href="http://www.transparentchennai.com/">Transparent Chennai</a> becomes the arbiter of information for the city, then the NGO stands to replace many of the traditional functions of city government. Would volunteers be numerous or rigorous or committed enough for tasks as diverse as counting the census, or watching houses? Will Transparent Chennai be replaced by private city accounting firms, watching over water points and manholes? We spend the evening talking about the future of government, wondering what the experience of other mappers will tell us about their successes.
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Volunteers go into the ward for 2-8 hrs every day. The 8 hr days are exhausting in Chennai's damp heat: three hours from 8 to 11 in the morning, a break for lunch, another three hours in the afternoon, and two more after a break in the evening.
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The paper maps are printouts of satellite photography available via Google Maps. The volunteers draw directly onto the maps, noting uncollected garbage, water points, toilets, the number of dwellings on every building on a street, or shop fronts. They've conducted "walkability" surveys of neighborhoods in Chennai, where sidewalks are broken and huge holes gape into unsculpted pits of mud beneath, where loose electric wires hang from the trees above, where scooters and cars parked on the sidewalk force pedestrians to walk in the busy carriageway, facing down auto-rickshaws and scooters and busses flying by a few inches away. They note the speed of vehicles, the number of obstructions, the materials used in making sidewalks, the condition of the walking path, amenities such as seating, trashcans, and toilets, parking on the sidewalks, crossing points, and so on. They map the distance that people are walking to cross the road. They mark trees, storm water drainage, the number of driveways, manholes, utility boxes -- which in Chennai are in the middle of the sidewalk. Their questions are ultimately urban planner questions. Paper maps are then inputted to ArcGIS.
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That morning at the office, the staff of researchers and activists have questions about the scale of mapping appropriate to different kinds of political action. When are paper maps appropriate, and when is GIS appropriate? When is it enough to map water for the neighborhood, and what sorts of questions require them to map the whole of Chennai, or the region, or indeed India, to draw together the sort of argument they need? They are in the process of matching technology to larger questions.
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These are exactly the sorts of problems that the next generation of infrastructure will have to answer, questions about mobilizing political will, using information to do so, and the appropriate scale for working in such a way as to include all the constituents of a community.
(Photo credit and further reading: "<a href="http://www.go-nxg.com/?p=11469">Civic Sens(E)itivity</a>" by Zara Khan and Tanya Thomas.Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-23704264030966956352013-04-01T11:15:00.000-07:002013-04-01T11:17:37.751-07:00Taking Land and Water Public: Interventions In and Outside the AcademyAt the forefront of many disciplines, a </b></b><b id="internal-source-marker_0.5426687328144908" style="font-weight: normal;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.5426687328144908" style="font-weight: normal;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.5426687328144908" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">dialogue is emerging about the concept of common property</span></b></b></b><b id="internal-source-marker_0.5426687328144908" style="font-weight: normal;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.5426687328144908" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. <b id="internal-source-marker_0.5426687328144908" style="font-weight: normal; text-indent: 570.8333129882813px; white-space: normal;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Converging conversations in the social sciences, applied sciences, humanities and arts </span></b>have been driven by contemporary political questions like the urbanization and simultaneous water crisis in the global south, the decline of public investment in infrastructure and flood control in the global north, and more recently, more recently, the financialization of land and water as commodities as expressed by the American subprime crisis and the African land grab. At the same time, new technologies of GIS and crowdsourced mapping have driven scholars to experiment with plotting their data on a map. In fields diverse as economics, psychology, history, anthropology, and literature, a <a href="http://spatial.scholarslab.org/spatial-turn/what-is-the-spatial-turn/">“spatial turn”</a> has been heralded where abstract theory has centered around questions of our common responsibility for land and water and the techniques by which we come to knowledge of the space around us. Disciplinary discussions have included histories of cartography and land surveying, economic debates over the uses of land titling to enfranchise the global poor, anthropological studies about the deracination of indigenous societies from control over their land and water, archival investigations about how GIS-located archives can be mined for information about nineteenth-century cities, and technological explorations around the possible application of GIS to creating self-governing commons in land and water. </span></b></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I firmly believe that abstract philosophical understandings of property, economy, and land are at their most powerful when in conversation with the creative expressions of art, technology, and activism, interacting with the public across a range of mutual interventions. For that reason, I'm in the course of organizing a conference and edited volume that would bring together some of the technologists, activists, archivists, and artists at the forefront of mapping practices and spatial activism. The list of invited participants includes activists like <a href="http://twitter.com/lizbarry">Liz Barry</a> of <a href="http://www.publiclaboratory.org/">Public Laboratory</a>, who trains environmentalist neighborhood groups to map instances of polluted rivers around them, as well as archivists like <a href="http://www.nypl.org/blog/author/matt-knutzen">Matthew Knutzen </a>of the New York Public Library, whose many mashups of nineteenth-century maps allow historians to identify all sites of toxic pollution from centuries past. The academic, artistic and activist practices represented at the conference will refract ideas of common responsibility for land and water through bridging abstract ideas of joint responsibility for land and water with ordinary experiences of the everyday lots and yards of the city around us. The weekend workshop, where participants will meet each other and review drafts, will produce an edited volume of scholarly work, an online video series bringing informal versions of the papers to the public, and a series of material interventions engineered by Brown public humanities’ masters students. The edited volume, workshop, online videos, and material exhibits will directly relate socially-engaged scholarship to the ordinary urban places around us, thus generating a powerful series of exchanges between the university and its public. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Psychogeography -- conceived of as the exploration of land use through physical walking, interdisciplinary conversation, and creative exchange -- has deep roots in several avant-garde revolutionary movements in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire’s figure of the </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">flâneur </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(saunterer), the Letterist International’s unitary urbanism, the Situationist International’s ideas of </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">dérive</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (wandering) and </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">détournement </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(reappropriation), among others. However, the word itself was first coined by Guy Debord in his 1955 essay “<a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bopsecrets.org%2FSI%2Furbgeog.htm&ei=wctZUdfTHa3F4APCsYGQAg&usg=AFQjCNFrCEJbWONQckdMGmeG27uTEJSGwg&sig2=sEbi9e9rbYkltXlhNfILng&bvm=bv.44442042,d.dmg">Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography</a>,” where he defined it as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the decades since Debord and his situationist colleagues walked Paris together, scholars have been grievously unable to keep pace with the spatial thinking that has flooded popular culture. Google Maps, emotion maps, social media geotagging, and a broadening culture of outdoor protest, art, performance, and urban farming. These phenomena, driven largely by the world of technology startups, art practice, and activism, have much in common with themes explored in urban history and the history of cartography. However, scholars in the social sciences have been slow to make clear connections between their work and the emergent possibility of crowd-sourced mapping of the urban environment, with the result that important questions have gone unasked. What does it mean to attend to the emotions of people displaced by interstate highways, or to notice the spirituality of activists following GIS across a landfill? How will the ability to crowdsource oral history in the city change the collection of data within the disciplines of sociology and history? What does it mean to walk through a city while also walking through an iPhone tour of its radical history? How may these new experience change our fields, and who we conceive of as the audience for our books and articles about cities, land, and the public?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Brown’s Public Humanities Center makes a natural home for the Psychogeography conference asn experimental dialogue between abstract scholars of land use and activists in the field. The program in Urban Cultural Heritage & Creative Practice, with its commitment to helping the public understand relationships between economic and technological growth in the city fabric. So, too, the many scholars at Brown whose scholarship focuses on the exclusions of the working poor and racial minorities from access to housing and infrastructure in the urban environment. If the conference is able to secure funding at Brown, we will expand the initial draft of scholars recruited to an edited volume to especially target Brown scholars whose ideas interface with questions of land use and responsibility. We intend to specifically target social scientists such as <a href="http://brown.edu/Departments/History/people/facultypage.php?id=10100">Robert Self</a>,<a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbrown.edu%2FDepartments%2FHistory%2Fpeople%2Ffacultypage.php%3Fid%3D10099&ei=fstZUYC-H6rl4APTxIDAAg&usg=AFQjCNE4u9zEuoVdDAkd2lzVjvR2JuVWZA&sig2=cw_6W_ebttox7Wu880S1Qw&bvm=bv.44442042,d.dmg"> Seth Rockman</a>, <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.brown.edu%2FDepartments%2FHistory%2Fpeople%2Ffacultypage.php%3Fid%3D1248110582&ei=jctZUZLUA-fC4AOLjYHYAQ&usg=AFQjCNFqeSFFkiT0CCqD24TILkMjTrg1sQ&sig2=L5Yf9WZQky6sX3HmHekYRA&bvm=bv.44442042,d.dmg">Linford Fisher</a>, <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&cad=rja&ved=0CFIQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.brown.edu%2FDepartments%2FSociology%2Ffaculty%2Fjlogan%2F&ei=nMtZUceEMYXk4APs84D4Cg&usg=AFQjCNFnZ4YjAGGWVOp2g21bqwnqZs_q9g&sig2=MVMvV-4ExCNGlTOq72uexA&bvm=bv.44442042,d.dmg">John Logan</a>, and <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&sqi=2&ved=0CDAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.brown.edu%2FDepartments%2FSociology%2Ffaculty%2Fhsilver%2F&ei=rctZUexm2MXgA9SsgOAE&usg=AFQjCNH7udsl4l5K958PQ1TGNjIHH6x_tA&sig2=9c2P1jmHiQY4zdGS3nsOSw&bvm=bv.44442042,d.dmg">Hilary Silver</a>, powerfully involved with conversations about social justice and the city, as well as new media scholar <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bopsecrets.org%2FSI%2Furbgeog.htm&ei=wctZUdfTHa3F4APCsYGQAg&usg=AFQjCNFrCEJbWONQckdMGmeG27uTEJSGwg&sig2=sEbi9e9rbYkltXlhNfILng&bvm=bv.44442042,d.dmg">Wendy Chun</a> and other</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> scholars at the forefront of exploring spatial experience through the use of new technology.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The notion of a “dream field” invokes, in poet Jorie Graham’s turn of phrase, a unified field where the abstract sciences of philosophy, law, and mathematics meet the down-to-earth observations of poets walking the surface of the earth and musing about personal responsibility for nature in the tradition of William Wordsworth and Wendell Berry. Our “dream field” too will bridge abstract conversations with down-to-earth investigations, inviting students, members of Brown’s faculty, and the local public to join academics, activists, and artists working broadly on the question of land use, its exploration, and common responsibility. </span><span style="color: #2f2a20; font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The meeting of strangers upon common ground, will, we hope cross-fertilize many adjacent practitioners, arming cultural practitioners like artists, journalists, and activists with the documented social science of anthropologists and historians, exposing both to new technologies in the participatory, digital mapping of common land. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Students will be invited to participate in taking the scholarship back into the landscape, working directly with scholars visiting Brown for the occasion of the workshop to foster a radical new experience of land that draws out the themes of land and water responsibility through an intervention in some public site around Providence. For example, we might invite a Brown masters student to collaborate with property law historian David Armitage at the site of Roger Williams' homestead, putatively the "first fence" in Rhode Island. The public humanities student might think about how to rebuild the fence, in some symbolic way. A public humanities student might reconstruct the first fence (with warning labels? with invitations to reinscribe the commons? with yarn boundaries suggesting the previous, alternative, indigenous songlines and common field lines that were displaced by the coming of the fence?). Or they might gather a crowdsourced, digital map of contemporary fences that matter to the Providence public, using the conference as an opportunity to explore the legacy of exclusions from land.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Such public interventions, with students and senior faculty working together on a single site, give an opportunity for redacting emergent scholarship and drawing out its implications for nearby fields. Armitage has argued that seventeenth-century property law meant a fully embodied, psychological, and environmental intervention in the context of contemporary experience —a charge that has never been fully taken up in the context of British history, which is disciplinarily bound to diplomatic and intellectual historiography. </span><span style="color: #500050; font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Arguments about the historical and constructed nature of the boundary line around personal bodies and personal property, however, bear far more weight in the context of material history and new media theory. His scholarship is all the more relevant when read in conjunction with contemporary debates over the future of the commons in public land and the environment. In presenting a legal history in the form of a new media intervention for the public , a senior scholar like Armitage will have the opportunity to catapult his theories out of their disciplinary setting and into a place of direct relevance for adjacent fields. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The expertise of Brown’s <a href="http://www.brown.edu/academics/public-humanities/initiatives/urban-cultural-heritage-and-creative-practice">Public Humanities</a> and <a href="http://s4.brown.edu/">S4</a> students in community-based curation of humanities resources and in understanding spatial contexts will be key to the success of this conversation. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We expect this interdisciplinary conference, together with the video and student collaborations, to push theoretical ideas from the university disciplines into an even more articulate, engaged, and interdisciplinary level of expression.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-20120378754448590862013-03-06T14:25:00.003-08:002013-03-06T14:33:07.949-08:00Water Temples and the Romance of Participation: India's ancient heritage?Running parallel with this history of participatory surveying are
interrelated stories about other technologies that raise similar
questions about when and how participatory self-governance becomes a
reality. <b>India's historical experience with infrastructure has provided stark
examples of both redistribution and exclusion. </b>In the nineteenth
century, British engineers plowed the Deccan Plateau with canals that
protected many communities from drought, while simultaneously netting
food distribution into centralized networks of railroads, markets, and
taxation that penalized local communities and proliferate famine. In
resistance to the British pattern of exclusion, post-independence
intellectuals labored to invent a form of governance characterized by
participation.<br />
<br />
<b>In the 1970s, a number of anthropologists sympathetic with notions of
indigenous or ethnic wisdom began working on material relationships
under the influence of E. F. Schumacher and Gandhi wondering about
historical precedents for a small-scale, village-based political economy
in the control of self-directed communities.</b> One of these anthropologists was Steve Lansing, an American anthropologist whose work in the 1970s on Balinese water temples was taken up by Elinor Ostrom as a source of inspiration for her work on the commons. In 2012, Lansing's presentation, retooled from a thesis in the history of archaeology to a metaphor for the spontaneous emergence of order on the internet, spiralled to the top of the Poptech talks.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><br /></b>
When this work was new, in the 1970s, it was embraced by civil engineers and nonprofits rather than internet startups as a possible guide to resilient, decentralized systems. <b>Many drew inspiration from these romantic accounts of India's
village past. </b> In the 1980s, Indian environmentalists like Anil Agarwal
began to lobby for the revival of medieval temple tanks for water
storage, drawing on a British anthropological tradition of describing
India's heritage as an ancient commons dedicated to protecting the
rights of all.<br />
<br />
<b>The power of this myth had a profound effect on
legislation.</b> By the 1990s, most major towns in India had passed laws
mandating rainwater catchment on all buildings. By 1996, participatory
organization was officially mandated for all activities supported by
the Indian state. These acts enshrined the conception of the ancient
commons, as revived by British anthropologists, Gandhian political
economists, and modern-day environmentalists, as a fundamental good.<br />
<br />
<b> Powerful though this commitment is, however, its results in practice are
questionable. </b> Recent observers have reported that decentralized
interventions like temple tanks, rainwater catchment, and local
neighborhood groups had problems in recharging a groundwater table on a
regional scale. Temple tanks were revived sporadically and rarely
maintained; unfunded mandates were insufficient to provision the city
with rainwater catchments. Neighborhood groups spend their energies
currying favors with local political parties to maintain water
connections, rather than lobbying for broadcast change in the water
allocation system at large. These stories suggest the challenges of
negotiating resources at different scales. <b>What can we learn from
India's massive experiment with participatory technologies? Are
decentralized water collection mechanisms capable of creating meaningful
environmental interventions on a regional and national scale?</b>Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-77103821168335328122013-03-05T19:19:00.003-08:002013-03-05T19:26:03.083-08:00A Brief History of Participation <b>For all that we speak of Web 2.0, peer-to-peer dynamics, and interactive everything, the nature of participation remains quite elusive. </b> Indeed, even its basic timeline remains shrouded in mystery, for instance, the origins of the participatory map. <br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #3c3c3c;"> </span>One author presents an origin story of participatory mapmaking
that begins with participant research methods invented by anthropologists in
response to postcolonial movements during the 1970s, and the first maps were
invented by Herlily in the 1990s. Another emphasize the role of the internet in interactive
maps tend to date a participatory mapping revolution to the advent of the
"mashup" in 2004, associated with the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in that year, and nearly simultaneous
appearance of Open Street Map (2004) and Google Maps (2005) soon thereafter. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In fact, t<span style="color: #323232; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">he
idea of participatory governance has its origins long before the internet. </span>Experiments with decentralized governance extend backwards
over the twentieth century, and indeed crowd sourced mapping appeared first in
the early 1970s. Indeed, since the
1980s, political theorists have urged the adoption of participatory measures
and succeeded in legislating the adoptation of participatory organization since
the 1990s. The current boom in crowd
sourced maps, characterized by startups and NGO activity around the Ushahidi
and Taarifa platforms, rides atop a far longer movement invested in seeing
participatory mechanisms transforming the state. In that climate, the arrival of mashed-up
maps in 2004 was looked to to cure a host of ills, including government
corruption, homelessness, famine, and water shortage. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This story is
strewn with the wreckage of technologies for participation past. Many are the mapping projects that sent
faciliators and programmers to the developing world, produced a trial run
showing where a few toilets should be located, then called the program off. They
include a history of legislation without mandate and maps in the service of
price sensitivity or other data collection on behalf of elites. All of them, originally, made similar claims
-- to create a more informed citizenry, to free expertise from the constraints
of disciplinary prejudice, to incorporate the poor and disenfranchised in the
political process, and to thereby enliven society. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Remembering
the long trajectory of this process is important to discerning the difference
between the hopeless reiteration of bad methods past and radical tools for
transforming society.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>The roots of
suspicion towards centralized government are long. </b>The early medieval church's policy of
subsidiary, or putting culturally-inflected decisions in the hands of the local
bishop rather than the papacy. Criticism
of centralized bureaucracies typical of the modern nation-state is at least as
old as the centralized state itself. In
the 1830s and 40s in Britain, a mere generation after that nation saw the
appearance of the first modern Post Office and Highway system, a
counter-movement appeared calling for a revivification of decentralized
government. Authors like Joshua Toulmin Smith called for a localist uprising against the centralized
bureaucrats, questioning the nature of civil engineers' claims to authority,
and extolling the virtues of face-to-face government in the traditional parish.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #323232; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">In
the late nineteenth century, the expansion of the vote and mass education
generated many questions about how the knowledge of the many could find its way
to the organs of administration. </span>In Britain, for instance, the
advent of the vote for working people (1867 and 1883) and mass compulsory
education (1880) was accompanied by the rise of populist politics that insisted
on the creation of socialist measures like land reform and health insurance
designed to distribute the benefits of industrialization to all the nation's
citizens</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Self-rule
had been theorized by anarchists and syndicalists like Peter Kropotkin, who
recognized in the working men's unions of Switzerland a resilient form of local
politics characterized by the active equality of all its members. In <i>Mutual
Aid</i> (1902), Kropotkin urged a vision of decentralized, small-scale economic
production coordinated by local political bodies. In <i>Words of a Rebel </i>(1904)<i>, </i>he
denounced banks and the civil service as
a parasitic form of centralized authority that prohibited peasants from
realizing their full political potential.
"The
taxes that crush you are devoured by bands of bureaucrats who are not merely
useless but positively harmful," he clamored. "Therefore we must suppress
them." He urged his readers,
"Proclaim your absolute independence, and declare that you know better how
to manage your affairs than these gentlemen in gloves from Paris." Kropotkins denunciation of bureaucracy and his praise of local knowledge
was mirrored later by many intellectuals on both the right and the left,
reappearing in postcolonial contexts to condemn the exploitation of authority
by empire. The positive aspect of
Kropotkin's vision, however, consisted in observations about the power of local
community to come up with solutions that expanded upon the potential of all of
society'e members. The vision was
embraced by Patrick Geddes, who encountered Kropotkin during the latter's stay
in London.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #323232; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><b>By
the 1960s, these precedents for retooled governance, influenced a body of thought rethinking
governance assimilated into a holistic political theory of self-rule applicable
to urban planning and the administration of everyday life.</b></span><span style="color: #323232; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"> </span>Driven by mass youth movements,
enormous gatherings in public, the dissemination of ideas through mass media,
and contentious political ideas around civil society in an era of racial
integration, a new theory of "democratic participation" drew out old
ideas about decentralized governance into a renewed vision of democracy. A participatory democracy was one in which the
many would have a voice. it would depend
upon inclusive definitions of citizenship and a commitment to decentralized
self-governance.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #323232; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><b>Through
the action of new institutions like the World Bank, the developing world became
a laboratory for these participatory methods.</b></span><span style="color: #323232;"> </span><span style="color: #323232;">In
the young discipline of development economics, open-minded scholars adopted the
1960s' theories about political life, reinterpreting them into a call for newly
nationalized former colonies to include their poorest citizens in the production
of a truly democratic state.</span><span style="color: #323232;"> </span>At the University of Sussex,
economist Dudley Seers argued that the practice of foreign aid, with its
traditional linkage to charity and to the corporations favored by western
empires, did little to build up local industries at home. Seers'
complaints echoed those of Gandhi and Gandhi-influenced economists in India,
who complained that British industries had drained resources from the country
without building up a resilient economy that enriched the poor. Beginning
in the 1970s, another member of the Sussex faculty, Robert Chambers, began to
develop techniques for creating a crowdsourced map. The
crowdsourced map was thereafter used to protect territories by indigenous
people from logging</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Participatory
maps thereafter had a long and complicated trajectory. Chambers
was sought out in the 1980s and 90s by Indian students who saw in his methods
the possibility of retailoring Indian democracy in the shape of participation. Chamber's
student Neela Mukherjee became a consultant for the World Bank, working first
in Thailand and the Philippines on plans to help poor farmers come to their own
discernment about which crops to plant and when. Eventually, Mukherjee returned to India and
began training students in the principles of making participatory maps and
authored a textbook called <i>Participatory Methods. </i>Chapter 5 on walking foregrounds walking territory as a key
to participatory learning about farming, local plants, local history and
infrastructure for farmers in the developing world seeking greater control over
their own land and especially food sovereignty. In the 1990s, a team of American geographers centered on
the University of West Virginia used GIS and mental mapping to facilitate
community conversations about equitable land decisions, land access to water,
and ethnic memory of customary land rights in post-apartheid South Africa.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The
theme of participatory ownership of the city, pioneered in discussions about
urban planning in the West, remained strong in the context of the developing
world, and even grew in a context of spiraling urbanization. In
India, the Philippines, and much of Africa and Latin America, postwar economies
pushed peasants off of the land into cities, where the poor availability of
housing required the poor to squat on land and build their own homes out of
cheap building materials.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At
first, the governments of these towns collaborated with the World Bank to take
out loans to provide expensive, high-rise public housing units. But increasingly, the World Bank drew upon
the advice of western advocates of squatter settlements, who saw in western
squats the potential benefits of self-governance without interference from the
state. In the hands of the World Bank,
this theory of self-directed, self-built, self-governed housing projects became
a justification for defunding public housing.
From 1972 forward, World Bank reports commended squatters for their
ingenuity and resourcefulness and recommended giving squatters titles to their
properties, which would allow them to raise credit and participate in the
economy as consumers and borrowers. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>These
activities were not always congenial to the program of government reform
towards democratization. Many of them
used participatory methods instead to net poor peoples into networks of debt
and reliance on hierarchical authorities. </b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="p2">
<b><span class="s1"></span> The reasons for the failures of participatory technology are actually quite specific. </b></div>
<div class="p2">
Participation was appropriated during the 1970s as a means of cheap development without commitment of resources from above. The theme of participatory ownership of the city, pioneered in discussions about urban planning in the West, remained strong in the context of the developing world, and even grew in a context of spiraling urbanization. In India, the Philippines, and much of Africa and Latin America, postwar economies pushed peasants off of the land into cities, where the poor availability of housing required the poor to squat on land and build their own homes out of cheap building materials. At first, the governments of these towns collaborated with the World Bank to take out loans to provide expensive, high-rise public housing units. But increasingly, the World Bank drew upon the advice of western advocates of squatter settlements, who saw in western squats the potential benefits of self-governance without interference from the state. In the hands of the World Bank, this theory of self-directed, self-built, self-governed housing projects became a justification for defunding public housing. From 1972 forward, World Bank reports commended squatters for their ingenuity and resourcefulness and recommended giving squatters titles to their properties, which would allow them to raise credit and participate in the economy as consumers and borrowers. </div>
<div class="p3">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span"></span><span class="Apple-tab-span"></span> Participatory mechanisms installed by the Indian government to deal with water tanks after nationalization depend on principles of accountability at the local level that were invented under colonial rule. They install the duty of the locality to take care of people without necessarily providing the means with which to do so. </div>
<div class="p3">
<span style="font-weight: bold;">We need developers who can learn from the history of futility, and historians who have the courage to constructively encourage a more informed kind of development. </span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->
<!--EndFragment-->Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-90712056977677301122013-03-04T12:20:00.001-08:002013-03-04T13:22:51.961-08:00I Miss Delicious.com<i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.333333969116211px;">"</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">The people, and the collective sense of the commons, were in the end more reliable than the market."</span></i><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.333333969116211px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.333333969116211px;">After years of keeping my links there, I managed to tune out in the six months during which Yahoo bought the company and the accounts were wiped. I didn't migrate my links. I've made peace with the fact that they might be gone forever, but on occasion, when I've told this story, geek friends have urged me to contact the company, reminding me that there's always a backup *somewhere.* But rounds of emails and tweets have gone nowhere so far.</span><br />
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.333333969116211px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.333333969116211px;">
I'm about to publish a bunch of essays I wrote back in the day under your influence about the importance of social networking sites, some of which hold up Delicious as a model for how academics and members of the public should work together --- BUT my examples were largely about stuff that was in my own account, http://delicious.com/joguldi, no longer functioning. For the moment I'm just deleting those parts of the essay, but I'd rather be able to use my account and talk about Delicious as a happy story rather than a sad one.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.333333969116211px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.333333969116211px;">
Obsolescence is a reality on the internet, and we all have to choose the software we use and how we share our data carefully. Zotero makes a more trustworthy case, as their cloud-based storage is mirrored on any computer on which one downloads their software, stored in text-files, pdf's, and my-sql databases that should remain interoperable for some time to come. <br />
<br />
Once upon a time, I wrote:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<o:p> </o:p>Delicious is the Rome, Jerusalem, and Paris of my existence
as an academic these days. It's where I make my friends, how I get the news,
and where I go to trade. All this from a little server that does nothing but
share bookmarks in public.<br />
<o:p>...</o:p>For two years I've been using Delicious as an information
organizer. It's produced an impressive encyclopedia of the most interesting
information, images, articles, citations, books, and subjects on the internet
to which I might want to refer. Consider my <a href="http://del.icio.us/joguldi/dissertation">dissertation</a> tag,
under which are a wide variety of online images and Google books that I'll be
using for my research. Not only can I come back to them, but I can also find
related subjects—<a href="http://del.icio.us/joguldi/walking">dissertation
material related to walking</a>—and navigate seamlessly from one to
another. As an improvement on the index card system—or on my own terrifying
piles of articles, even now ornamenting my bookshelf, or even on the folders
within folders within folders of word documents—this represents a definite
improvement.</blockquote>
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<o:p>-- and so on. filled with enthusiasm for a culture of sharing that I saw emerging, for the strangers I met and the bibliographies I pillaged there. Delicious was, for many years, my much-preferred place for wisdom over Google. If you were looking up hot springs, for example, Google returned the most obvious result, but only Delicious would get you to<a href="http://timwu.org/hotsprings.html"> Tim Wu's list of the best hot springs in the world. </a></o:p></div>
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But it takes time to build up one's participation in such a community. Delicious worked so well for me in part because of a network of connections I'd built up carefully over time, from reading other users' annotations and connecting myself to the most insightful among them. Could I find them again? Perhaps. But broken trust -- like the wiping out of accounts -- goes against the trust necessary to make that commitment to finding a community and sharing things with them. Having lost my own history, now I mistrust the service. </div>
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In theory, an active community of users is the most important economic foundation of the sales of Facebook stock or any other company. But what's to prohibit the evaporation, overnight, of all we've placed on Flickr, Instagram, or Facebook? Our data is not ours, as privacy activists keep reminding us. And market wisdom was not enough, in the case of Delicious, for Yahoo to protect the community of users. </div>
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Instead, a valiant attempt was made at the grassroots. Delicious users heard about the coming purge and instructed each other on rescuing their bookmarks. One of them launched an alternative, free site called <a href="http://pinboard.in/">Pinboard</a>. The people, and the collective sense of the commons, were in the end more reliable than the market.</div>
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Where was I when users were helping other users transfer their accounts and save their links and notes, where was I? Finishing a dissertation or a book manuscript? Moving house, again, to a new city? Probably. I missed the boat, half-aware that something was going on. I knew better, even at the time. I'd blogged about <a href="http://landscape.blogspot.com/2008/10/obsolescence-and-scholars-tools.html">obsolescence</a> and data before. But I didn't heed the warnings... the flood came... so sad. <span style="font-size: 13.333333969116211px;">I understand the warnings about markets, data, sharing, all of it. But I find myself regularly returning in thought to that intelligent community that once was. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.333333969116211px;">The corporations can have my data. I want my community back. I just miss waking up to the news the way we did together in 2007, annotating the most interesting articles with people I'd chosen purely for the beauty of the kinds of sites they liked, sharing them intelligently in a place where we could find them again. Those are both qualities that Facebook has never offered. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.333333969116211px;">There is nothing like Delicious out there in terms of an community for finding grass-roots curators and beholding their careful, discerning brilliance over time. Not twitter, where we all snark meaninglessly; not tumblr, which buries precious information beneath a flood; not Zotero, where it's nearly impossible to browse strangers or follow them from afar. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 13.333333969116211px;">In the end, I don't care that the people were more reliable than Yahoo, or that corporate America destroyed my intellectual commons. I miss you, Delicious. Give me my library back. </span></div>
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Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-55254801795618213292013-02-25T11:17:00.003-08:002013-02-25T11:37:06.198-08:00Audience-Driven Storytelling<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">When you write an abstract for a project, retweak it every time you tell someone about it. </span><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">That way the story gets retooled at the speed of thought, matching your community and all the information you take in from them. </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">Every time you retell the story for someone just on the edge of your social circle, you entertain another body of knowledge. How would this story sound to scientists? to working-class folk? Try to hear their thoughts in advance and tell them a story they'd find meaningful. Then see how they actually respond, and take on what they know.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">This advice particularly applies to graduate students at the end stage of a dissertation. Retooling your methods won't work, but once you have your data, it can speak to many questions.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;"> </span><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">Most book manuscripts that come out of dissertations suffer by responding to too shallow a literature, too narrow a public. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;"> When you sit down to write the introduction and conclusion to a project, remember the best books you've read, the smartest people you've talked to, the most compelling conversations about changing the world.</span>Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-78176312191922618092013-02-21T09:52:00.000-08:002013-02-21T10:41:32.267-08:00Project Summary: "Learning From India: The Modern Commons in Land and Water", May-June 2013<br />
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"Learning from India" is the collaboration between a historian of infrastructure, Jo Guldi, and an environmental engineer, Zachary Gates. Because of its traditions of decentralized self-governance and appropriate technology post-Independence, India is arguably the nation in the world with the widest experience of rainwater harvesting, DIY-sanitation, small-scale irrigation, participatory mapping, and other coordinated small interventions, reproduced at scale, that seek self-directed, community-governed, participatory solutions to market and government issues of the allocation of scarce resources like land and water. Our research trip will seek out cases where community map-making has been successfully applied to the allocation and self-government of limited natural resources.</div>
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Radical political theorists in the West like Colin Ward and David Graeber suspect that the small-scale, decentralized solutions formulated by local communities in lesser developed nations may hold solutions more egalitarian and sustainable than the top-down, centralized solutions devised by centralized states in the modern era. Meanwhile, observers like Ananya Roy and John Harriss have been more skeptical, pointing to the cooptation of poor peoples' movements by middle-class NGOs, and the increasing alienation of poor people from state-protected rights to land and water. Nevertheless, thanks to the efforts of community organizers, NGOs, and inventors, India has a rich experience with community map making, DIY technology, and participatory organization going back through the 1970s. On our travels, we're hoping to learn about systematic small interventions from rainwater catchment to community self-governance, collecting the best set of tools to promote a genuinely self-governed, sustainable urban ecosystem.<br />
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Our travels are motivated by questions about truly participatory governance of scarce resources, a problem not limited to the developing world. As a foot-soldier in the battle to restore New England's industrial landscapes, Zachary Gates witnessed first-hand the limits of private-sector initiatives to channel investment against future flood and water shortage to the benefit of all. Facingthreats of both flood and water shortage, America's cities have much to learn about the possibility of self-governance. Can maps and community meetings really promote egalitarian consensus around the administration of land and water? Where have modern efforts to effectively allocate land and water at scale represented the community as a commons? In the tradition of Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and Elinor Ostrom, we look to the power of history to help us design resilient environments that enable natural instincts towards community, mutual aid, and the preservation of natural resources. <br />
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Our choice of India is the culmination of ten years of historical study on modern administration of land and water. In her first book, Roads to Power, historian Jo Guldi concentrated on the rise of the professional civil engineer and the infrastructure state and its role in mediating access to trade for communities that became increasingly dependent upon centralized bureaucracy for their well-being. Guldi's work in "Learning From India" will form a part of her next research project, The Long Land War, which concentrates on the problem of people's movements to restore local control over land and water, from the Irish Land War of the 1870s through the Latin American and Indian land reform movements of today. Chapters include the creation of a global consensus around rent control c. 1890, the post-1946 attempt by the UN to engineer a global land reform movement as a peaceful path midway between capitalism and communism, and the rise of an international financial market in real estate after 1974 and the creation of global squatterdom. These stories concentrate around the global swarm of radicals, intellectuals, and activists moving between Ireland, Scotland, India, California, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, whose movements created a global flow of technologies for the allocation of land, including surveying, financial instruments, and forms of political organization. </div>
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A key chapter in this story highlights the development of participatory mapping as a tool for community self-government and awareness of land ownership, tracing its origins from the walking tours organized by British radicals in the 1920s through the promotion of Rural Rapid Appraisal and participatory mapping by development expert Robert Chambers at the Institute for International Economic Development in Sussex and his Indian followers. In their work, participatory map-making was championed as a way of giving sovereign land-rights to indigenous communities, of promoting self-government through egalitarian forms of consensus, and of holding outsider experts responsible to the realities and desires of the local community. By the 1980s, participatory mapping was spread to India, where economic scarcity and Gandhian ideologies of self-governance prepared elites to embrace decentralized tools for self-direction. By 1998 the World Bank itself was promoting training in participatory map-making. Since then, progress in GIS and map-making online has provided the backbone for community self-mapping of forests, toilet allocation, water availability and squatter settlements. For these reasons, India has become the site in the world where participatory surveying has the greatest institutional support and the widest array of precedent. On our visit, we will be collecting and curating a representative range of maps, from hand-drawn maps of indigenous peoples' forest territory to GIS-enabled maps for allocating urban water distribution. We will be asking the maps' organizers about the intentions for which the maps were assembled, the degree of participation encouraged, and the maps' successes as instruments of political consensus and political reform.</div>
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Many of these forms of participation are, in practice, extremely corrupt and their actual involvement of communities limited. Maps have been used in some instances merely to collect information on how much a community is willing to pay for a pump installation, rather than as a tool for questioning the allocation of water between industrial agriculture and the urban poor. Elsewhere the aims of map-making are rather more grand. In Bangalore, a Public Laboratory-affiliated mapper has been creating maps of GMO's and their relationship to traditional crops. Can those community-sourced maps be used to generate a broader conversation about ownership, responsibility, and the public good? Is the map by itself a technology for creating ongoing debate and resolving issues of management and maintenance? </div>
Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-43635408329542973002013-02-20T10:02:00.001-08:002013-02-20T10:04:24.530-08:00Sample Teaching Module on Participatory Mapping<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyYDkb2AvO1aus1-UfnH9bX3TT1L0PQ62Num7dAMqlI7eVZZo2eG8ADbPzmkjR__8Obsa8lqwBn6iNv8OB0OIKzHTdHY4xZLzCqztSwgOqhRWKkeJd7jTyzWflBhhiR-_X02Curg/s1600/walking+papers+university+of+virginia+guldi.tiff"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5707260388740190194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyYDkb2AvO1aus1-UfnH9bX3TT1L0PQ62Num7dAMqlI7eVZZo2eG8ADbPzmkjR__8Obsa8lqwBn6iNv8OB0OIKzHTdHY4xZLzCqztSwgOqhRWKkeJd7jTyzWflBhhiR-_X02Curg/s200/walking+papers+university+of+virginia+guldi.tiff" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 153px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 200px;" /></a><br />
Some time ago I had a great Skype call with Thomas Steele-Maley, one of the great forces in the deschooling movement. He was interested in some of my historical work on the uses of participatory mapping since 1920, and we started talking about what an out-of-the-box starter kit for kids (7th grade to 12th grade) (or for that matter undergraduates) might look like.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Meeting one:</span>Discussion of landscape as an object of made history. Chapters on following "lines" (power lines, railways, roads) to understand the geometry of power from John Stilgoe, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=oOjQFnr2L4oC&dq=isbn:0802775632">Outside Lies Magic</a>.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Meeting two:</span>1-page handout on radical walking tour. The radical walking tour invites people of different generations and at least two different economic classes to participate in walking through a one of the city's older neighborhoods together, collaboratively building a story of what used to be there, who owns the land, who used to live there, who lives there now, and why. Participants should expect to tell the story based on particular buildings, using clues such as brick work, stone work, cemeteries, infrastructure, and property lines to talk about how the place was divided and by whom. In preparation for the radical walking tour, the teacher should acquire at least three different maps of the neighborhood from three different points in its history, teaching the students basic skills of map reading and providing some. Teacher should read <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/History_in_the_open_air.html?id=7fYxAQAAIAAJ">Henry Randall, History in the Open Air</a> (hard to find), or his article "<a href="http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/008/Ant0080005.htm">History in the Open Air</a>" (gated access), as well as perhaps the chapter I wrote, "<a href="http://www.ice-pops.org/articles/16709809721/place-and-landscape">Landscape</a>," in Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire, eds., <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Research_Methods_for_History.html?id=pfXMYgEACAAJ">Research Methods for History </a>(2011). Also consider the two-paragraph summary of the Boston group of Interested Critical Explorers of Publicly-Owned Private Spaces, "<a href="http://www.ice-pops.org/tours/">About Walking Tours</a>."<br />
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Meeting three:<br />
Students use <a href="http://walking-papers.org/">walking papers</a> and/or their cell phones to tinker with the technologies of changing a collective map. They might then upload their traces to <a href="http://www.blogger.com/www.openstreetmap.org">Open Street Map</a>, the shared, open-source version of Google Maps, which allows communities to annotate in enormous detail the parks and community gardens and other recreation spaces around them (check out Berlin for a really well-annotated city). The "hello" moment is typically one like the one I had a few years ago, where in an hour-long ramble with some librarian colleagues, I downloaded a new program onto my cell phone and used it to map three of the ornamental gardens at the University of Virginia campus. Two hours later I was gobsmacked to realize that putting a squiggle on a map, indeed a public and shared map, was as easy as writing a paragraph for a blog entry. <br />
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The red squiggles here were ornamental walkways actually walked by me, cellphone in hand. Here they are, and you can look them up and glimpse them for yourself by looking up the University of Virginia at Open Street Map.<br />
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Technologies such as these are a new form of writing, a new means of communication, and ease with them is one of the defining features of literacy of the digital age. It's experiences such as these that allow the teenager vaguely aware of urban policy issues to turn into a <a href="http://hshm.yale.edu/rankin">Bill Rankin</a>, for instance, accomplished mapper of <a href="http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?chicagodots">race in America's cities</a>, among other things, who got his start as a boy scout sketching maps of the encampment for his fellow scouts to use. Map literacy is the tool of those who have it, and in their hands it becomes the means of entering conversations about privilege, access, and poverty in ways that put to shame more unwieldy forms of textual description.<br />
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Meeting four and after:<br />
a collaborative project w Mapping Main st or million dollar blocksJo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-57523584170393764592013-02-04T10:06:00.003-08:002013-02-04T10:29:20.117-08:00Two courses for Brown University, Fall 2013This summer I will close up shop at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where I've enjoyed three years of uninhibited research time, and return to the life of teaching as Assistant Professor of Britain and its Empire at Brown University in Providence, RI. I'm immensely looking forward to the transition. Research time is fantastic, but teaching is generally where our best ideas and most rigorous thinking comes from. Students, even more than colleagues, challenge us to remain relevant, to take opposing points of view seriously, and to witness directly to voices from the past. <br />
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The History Department at Brown takes its undergraduates seriously, and I've been urged by my colleagues to offer courses that will attract non-majors from a variety of fields, and to overtly engage with my commitments to land and water use and the history of capitalism.<br />
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In my time as a researcher, I've visited leaders in land reform and international infrastructure investment and worker cooperatives who have emphasized how hard it is to find undergraduates sensitive to both ecology and governance, and how important the lens of history is to their work. In particular, I've found myself in conversations about the future of land use around the globe, which entertain the challenges of driving investment towards clean water and sustainable cities (consider this <a href="http://t.co/OoLbU7hU">map of coming water crises</a> prepared by NASA). Investors, governments, NGOs, and community groups all need to hire students prepared to understand how flows of capital and participation have failed to serve communities in the past. History majors, far more than economists, political scientists, or area studies majors, are prepared to understand the wider shape of institutions, the long legacy of colonialism and bureaucracy in general, and the challenges of capitalism, both its potential to reform and its potential to exclude. I hope to raise up an army of undergraduates who understand how to look at contemporary crises, from the environment to economic breakdown, from the perspective of institutions in our shared past. <br />
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The traditional categories of the history discipline are at work here in an emphasis on the story of institutions, social movements, capital flows, how their nature changes over time, and what resources are necessary to understand them. The History of Britain and its Empire remains a subtext in the range of examples that will appear in both classes. Examples for the histories of cities and the rise of infrastructure and back-to-the-land movements and environmental and organic successes and failures will be drawn disproportionately from the realm of British historiography, which remains, for reasons of geographical spread and political innovation, an excellent place to examine transitions to modernity in all its forms. Digital history will be urged in the form of text-mining and mapping exercises, which will support student-driven explorations of aggregate movements over time, for instance, geoparsing World Bank reports with <a href="https://github.com/chrisjr/papermachines">Paper Machines</a> to show how patterns of intervention in infrastructure vs informal development have progressed over time. There will be a lot of critical reading in the history of economics as well -- Adam Smith is almost always a figure on my syllabi -- and a good deal of recent reading in the history of recent flows of capital, likely including <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/jan/08/jersey-tax-haven-nicholas-shaxson">Nicholas Shaxton</a> and <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=dHVGqxVrCbcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=wendy+wolford+this+land+is+ours+now&hl=en&sa=X&ei=X_0PUbe-N6a5igLelICQDg&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA">Wendy Wolford</a> among others. I hope to instrumentalize the traditional tools of historical analysis to look at the world around us now, to understand how it differs from the challenges of environmentalism in Rachel Carson's era, or the challenges of floods in the early modern Netherlands -- and to give students the confidence and tools to commit similar forms of analysis themselves.<br />
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<b><i>Utopias and Other Wastelands </i></b><br />
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<i>Advanced undergraduate/grad student seminar.</i><br />
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Radical thought has urged upon us a return to utopias and alternative geographies, both in the form of living movements like the MST (Landless Workers' Movement), World Social Forum, Occupy, or StrikeDebt, as they proclaim, “Another World is Possible,” and in the form of intellectual treatises affiliated with this movement that explore the agency of “heterotopias” or “Temporary Autonomous Zones” as geotemporal sites of utopian agency. In general, historians have been skeptical about the role of utopias to trigger social change, viewing them at best as escape valves for privilege during economic downturns, at worst dangerous experiments in surveillance. Yet from generation to generation, social movements have challenged the world around them, imagining the transformation of particular retreats, cities, and nations as a laboratory for experimentation with the future.<br />
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What factors are necessary for a social movement to grow? Where have international coalitions of reformers or rebels exempted themselves from the contemporary world system, or forged tools for reform and resistance, or carved out a temporary autonomous zone for critique? We will look at the international Progressive movement, appropriate technology, trade unions and cooperatives as examples of modern movements that, doomed in one nation, occasionally flourished elsewhere. Themes will include the esoteric and geographically isolated examples like back-to-the-land movements and psychological/sexual reform movements, as well as mainstream movements that began as utopian plans for remaking the world: democratic reform, scientific collection and curation of a more abundant or sustainable agriculture, Fabian socialism, and the welfare state. We will interpret the conservative utopias of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman alongside the radical utopias of Theosophists. Twentieth-century stories will trace the fates of these utopias through the rise of organic farming, cooperativism, civil rights, Gandhi’s Satyagraha, the Green Revolution, and human rights. We will be looking into the alliances of professionals, experts, national legislators, capitalism and the organs of world government, trying to understand the alignments of power that caused some of these movements to flourish and others to falter. The class will raise questions of agency, asking when individuals and collectives have the opportunity to change the world around them and how we measure their success across the grander sweep of historical time.<br />
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<b><i> Land Use and Capitalism, 1350-2060 </i></b><br />
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<i> Undergraduate introductory lecture course, no prerequisites.</i><br />
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We live in an era of enormous storms, ecological genocide, evictions, and pollution. While all cultures interact with the territory around them, modern political institutions have developed the means to transform landscapes at an unprecedented scale for the purposes of political security and economic growth. How are the failures to relate to our environment continuous with those of earlier civilizations?
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This course offers an overview of major traditions for analyzing landscape in political economy, theology, literature, and anthropology, asking how the imaginary landscapes of the mind become the material realities of farm and highway. Themes will include the rise of modern, surveying, engineering, cities, infrastructure systems, and land reform. It will ask how historic models of government have played out in an era of environmental disaster, famine, mortgages, and evictions. The course will explore tensions between political centralization and heterotopias, nomadic and settled people, peoples' movements and finance, exploring questions about the spiritual, economic, aesthetic, ecological, and political relationship of people to their territory.Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-60354379782296910032012-06-06T11:40:00.002-07:002012-06-06T11:46:47.734-07:00The mysterious case of the disappearing archiveThe course of my current project has taken me to the workings of the Land Tenure Center at the University of Wisconsin, the Workshop on Political Economy at the University of Indiana, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome, three para-academic institutes that began, after 1946, commissioning research reports and evaluations from academics, graduate students, and their affiliates embedded in peasant movements across Latin America, southeast Asia, and Africa. Framed within a logic of postcolonial independence from fascism and economic development, the research initiatives were designed to institute a network of communally and cooperatively-run farms, distributors, and research centers that would foster peasant independence and indigenous political movements. Grounded in the late nineteenth-century radical critique of property law as a social construction, these research centers aimed to develop global knowledge of communal, cooperative, state-subsidized, or other alternative forms of community organization.<br /><br />These centers from the beginning were designed as information clear-houses, as paper machines designed to collect research towards the transformation of global political economy. Their designers leaned heavily on the promise of information and the modern university to transform society, dreaming that through the proliferation of information, they could foster political independence and cooperation on a global scale -- by making knowledge of Spanish and English property law available, by talking about Roman and Irish tenant revolts available to contemporary peasant movements, and by keeping Latin American peasants apprised of Gandhian economic theory. The result was the collection of hundreds of standing steel vertical files, each of them filled with hundreds of folders and hundreds of articles, reports, case studies, and field notes, documenting the workings of an international utopian movement for the reform of property law, designed to give control over territory to the people living there.<br /><br />In April, I went to Wisconsin to attend the 50-year reunion of the Land Tenure Center and revisit its archive. There, I enthused about the paper machines to the Center's 60- and 70-year-old alumni, now consultants at the World Bank, some of whom began to talk about other archives with me. In the emails that followed, I heard a tale of disappearing archives -- of conservative political administrations' attempts to downsize the archives at the United Nations, about the jettisoning of thousands of unique case-studies documenting land reformers' work with peasants and cooperatives in the 1950s and 60s. In the 1980s, as US State-department land reform activity fell under critique by Jesse Helms-era Republicans in the Congress, the FAO archive was ordered downsized, and much of the "grey literature" -- published nowhere in official journals -- was reclassed as "insignificant material" fit for downsizing. I immediately contacted the current librarian at the FAO in Rome and asked if I could schedule a preliminary visit to the archive. She told me to hurry, for the archive was again scheduled for downsizing, and the remaining grey literature was on its way out.<br /><br />It needs some preservation unit of guerilla librarians who could snatch this precious archive from the moment of destruction. We'd all like to think that the era of digital preservation is a moment of cheap digitization, where precious archives can be not only preserved but also disseminated to possible readers. But there are unforeseen complications with modern archive, particularly copyright. I've spoken to the University of Wisconsin librarians about the possibility of preserving their library -- now housed in the upper floor of a periodical library on the edge of the humanities campus, rarely visited, never updated. They have a digital infrastructure in place. Could it be scanned? They worry over ownership of the material. Much of what's in the vertical files was published elsewhere, in unofficial newsletters and journals around the globe. It's all post-1930, and the copyright belongs with the author or the journal. It'd be another entire labor to secure free copyright for all the material, and the library doesn't imagine being able to do it.<br /><br />There are alternative courses of preservation too. Another course of action would be to privately scan and preserve the archive for university-campus-use only. Still another course of action would be to scan everything and gradually secure open copyrights from the authors and their estates. At the University of Indiana, Elinor Ostrom's staff wrote grants and did just that, and the result is their online <a href="http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/">Digital Library of the Commons</a>, thousands of articles and grey literature reports preserved and made available for the public. It can be done, if only there were institutional will to preserve the papers. <br /><br />I'll be in Rome in two weeks, and I hope to learn more about the fate of the FAO archive then.</P>Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6841759.post-18373704882942443352012-03-19T07:35:00.002-07:002012-03-19T07:38:11.947-07:00Understanding paper machines...macroscopes for parsing power and resistance in the utopian twentieth century, an opportunity to hack...<br /><br />A team of techy humanists are looking for a creative computer scientist to co-create with us a digital tool that brings large corpus of historical paper to life. Our mission is to parse through large number of traditional and non-traditional documents and extract the story of the utopian twentieth century. The project would be ideal for someone interested in exploring ground for their own visualization or information masters or phd thesis project.<br /><br />We're hoping to engage a creative, visual mind to capitalize upon the array of pre-existent, open-source tools for parsing large stores of textual data. These tools will be applied to a hand-curated, 6000-pdf library of texts about the rise of utopian movements in the twentieth century, where we hope to stress-test the tools against questions about what's important in the large paper archive; to play, experiment, and fail; and to collaboratively come to new questions about what's important in the data and what a savvy computationalist can extract therefrom. These algorithms set us up to work with large bodies of texts, immediately finding all the diagrams, suggesting connections among different texts, showing connections between different authors, cataloguing citations, creating databases out of extracted information, and analyzing word choice. <br /><br />We want our computer expert to be able to dig for data, play and experiment and break these tools, to experiment with different ways of analyzing and portraying results to maximize the intuitive capabilities of the human user against the large-scale analysis of the computer, to explore how creative visualization can enhance textual analysis, and together draw from these experiments creative solutions to historical problems that are beyond the reach of human-driven research power in the world of history.<br /><br />On a historical level, our task is to address questions about utopian projects in the twentieth century through the major artifact they left behind: paper. I'm interested in the broadcast but lesser-known radical movements that permeated government at the United Nations, USAID and the World Bank, that is, the movements identified as land reform, agrarian reform, and appropriate technology, which together aimed to open up the question of holdings in land, the balance of economic power between rich and poor, and the role of engineers in redistributing wealth.<br /><br />Some of the questions about the life of these utopian projects can be answered analytically and quantitatively by finding new ways of measuring the amount of paper these movements produced (data held in card catalogs and extracted by the opensource application Stackview). Paper has been both a tool to broaden conversation, and also an instrument to overwhelm. Initially, paper facilitated the inclusion of multiple voices and created unlimited flow of information. It was a tool of record keeping, preserving information, and disseminating ideas to far away places. But, in modern history revolutions in<br />bureaucracy and the limitation of political participation has frequently been a reflection of the number of pages of paper which<br />experts produce, a social and political clout, with which to disarm and outrank their political opponents. In debates where peasants with oral traditions are faced down by civil engineers with reams of paper, the civil engineers always win. In the 1950s and 1960s, as the rise of NGOs came to ring conversations about urban planning and international development with coordinated institutions—all of them creating more paper—even the process of finding one’s way to the beginning of an argument became a labor reserved for the few and privileged. Introductory texts to these problems increasingly included an organizational flow-chart, a diagram borrowed from business texts, which served as a map to tell would-be activists<br />where, in the vast continent of NGOs, banks, and government organizations, they entered the conversation. In short, the power<br />struggles of the twentieth century have produced a mass of paper, too much to be read by a single scholar or even group of scholars. The secrets of the paper archive are the record of the power-struggles that determined the rise and fall of utopian movements in the twentieth century. The larger questions I'm interested in are thus ones about power and struggle. Was so much paper produced as to make participation by non-elites in the developing world and the wrong side of town nearly impossible, thanks to the disproportionate time of education and reading required to sort through so much paper? That is<br />a historical question, and it can be answered by solving a quantitative question in the stacks: How much paper was produced and by whom?<br /><br />The experimental application Stackview allows a user to visualize the production of paper in a certain subject area as the width of volumes in a stack. It does not yet allow the comparison of different subject areas by time. There is no method to compare the amount of pages produced in town planning between 1900 and 1950, or those produced in economics textbooks printed in India and South America against those printed in the West. I want know what can be gained by visualizing and experimenting with the abundant data hidden in the world of paper.<br /><br />Further steps beyond Stackview include other forms of data extraction and analysis that lean more heavily upon the ability to extract data from a large pool of pdf's -- for instance the question of which utopians influenced each other and which ideas they shared, a problem that can be solved by tracing connections in the text of the digital versions (a social networking question that requires digging data from a pile of pdfs. The tools we imagine starting with are open-source and already tailored to work with text and library databases -- among them the paper-width-measurer Stackview, the image-extractor Filejuicer, the<br />named-entity extractor Open Calais, the geoparser Textgrounder, and the terminology calculator Bookworm. Some combination of expertise in Python, Java, and C++ is required. The ideal collaborator for this project can dig data, do batch processing, work with APIs competently, experiment with a variety of out-of-the-box, open-source visualization scripts that deal with texts/images (including geoparsers, named entity recognizers, and NLP analysis). <br /><br />At a conceptual level, we hope that this tool will be a powerful resource in examining large quantities of information and allow<br />knowledge seekers to consider a broader, richer, often ignored corpus of text. In doing so, we hope to enlist the power of digital humanities to tame the pile of paper, and redistribute the power that “official” paper took away.Jo Guldihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08314226220044323074noreply@blogger.com0