A Research Proposal
How do we
decide what information is or is not? Is the way we treat information
constructed around our immediate goal? Is there some other pre-existing ideal
or active agency that guides what we do? This is clearly a complex question
that we can approach from multiple viewpoints, but at least one perspective is
that we can take what we see as major innovations in information management and
compare them with their immediate precursors, in some sense seeing what the
effect is of holding them side by side, a method derived from "compare and
contrast."
Historically, the
primary avenue for the presentation of information has been what we understand
as analog—printed and bound books, newspapers, magazines, and the like—and
within these categories one of the most central informational formats has been
the encyclopedia. As many are aware, the advent of Wikipedia has constituted a
step change in how encyclopedias are created, maintained, and accessed, so that
in fact web-based encyclopedias seem to no longer have very much relation to books
at all. They are constituted by a far more dynamic information flow, one that
might change from one day to the next. Information gathering and presentation
has obviously taken new routes, and perhaps this is just right, the way it
should be.
But this
project will not go comprehensively through a point by point comparison of the
"old" versus "new" information systems as much as build an
understanding of each version of encyclopedic knowledge through looking not
only at defining aspects of the two—using The
Encyclopedia of New York City as a representative sample—but also at how we
process the difference between them. What is important here is engaging not
only how information is characterized by (a) what we experience in the present—for
example, as Wikipedia—as well as (b) how information was constructed in the recent
past—for example, as a print encyclopedia—but also (c) how our sense of
information might be complemented by considering the gap or movement between
these two, or how each might contain the other in sociotechnical continuum. The
conclusion points to the work of Rosi Braidotti as a major information theorist—while
incorporating the work of many others—and what she calls a "conceptual
personae," or informational environments that contain a component of the
non-informational, something that precedes but is fundamental to its current circulation.
Yesterday's
Knowledge
The Encyclopedia of New York City (ENYC) was first published in 1995 by
Yale University Press. Priced at $65, it is a single volume of about 1,300
pages and conforms to a model of encyclopedias that goes back to their modern
origination in the mid eighteenth century. Not to state the obvious, an
encyclopedia takes a single topic, here New York City, and attempts to include
explanatory articles, often drawing on multiple contributors, about any
substantive aspect of the topic. In the case of the ENYC there are
approximately 800 articles by over 600 contributors. The articles range in
length from about 200 words, a single short paragraph, to about 6,000 words, a
few pages of the book. Articles sometimes include illustrations, tables, or graphs,
and they often contain cross references and short bibliographies. What does a
book like this mean to us now? It is a form of archive, information as
historiography and memory, but one that is, since it's last iteration was in
1999 and right before encyclopedias went fully digital, "just over the
line," from another era, analog, not digital in the way we know it now,
when for a variety of reasons encyclopedias in book form are, again, obsolete.
What we'll want to investigate is exactly how that obsolescence functions.
A number of
histories of Wikipedia exist, notably on Wikipedia's own site.[1]
Essentially however, we note that not only is the site free but is also
publicly generated, on an ongoing basis, and edited, at least nominally, by
nonexperts. Since the static nature of print encyclopedias is no longer a
determinant of behavior around information, no longer decides that what is said
needs to have a certain perpetual accuracy, the editor and author positions are
displaced and the inherent recursiveness of information is brought to the
surface, made noticeable, usually part of the reader's consciousness when using
the encyclopedia. This means that a certain acceptance of potential error is
the norm for any Wikipedia reader, as well as that reader's awareness of their
ability to correct that error, or to check the errors of others, readers in
effect receiving the promise of becoming an encyclopedia editor, a role
reserved in the ENYC for proven experts.[2]
These are quite specific affordances introduced by web technology and become
the basis of both a new attitude to information—an attitude that, again, takes
into consideration its tenuousness and potential for error—as well as the way
in which, perhaps unlike any other web-based phenomena, Wikipedia accesses what
we could designate as the "exponential," the degree to which its
format engulfs world information consumption beyond print encyclopedias. The
statistics now show about 40 million articles in Wikipieda globally, with about
27 billion words. An encyclopedia this size in a print edition, with immediate
and free access globally, is effectively unthinkable. In this way, we can look
to Wikipedia as a defining component of any general idea of how information
work, of the living embodiment of information itself.
Modalities of
Access
We can look at
the ENYC from the perspective of information's promise versus information's
failure. We can note how the book is not doing what it purports to be doing,
that is, what any "encyclopedia" would do, provide a comprehensive
summary of information about any of its entries. A case in point is the entry
on the World Trade Center. The ENYC pre-dates September 11, 2001, when the
buildings that made up the trade center were destroyed, and that entry has a
distinctly ghostly quality, particularly as it ends with a reference to the
1993 car bombing of the Twin Towers. But obvious anachronisms influence our
reading here in two other major dimensions. First is the city itself, one of
the most active and actively transforming in the world. Perhaps unlike any
other place, the futility of settling on a uniform body of knowledge related to
New York City seems as monumental as the city itself. The complexity of the information
the book attempts to capture, and fails to capture, is exponentially exceeded
by the complexity of the march of ongoing changes that take place in the city,
even in a single day. Second, the gap between what is presented in the ENYC and
what we know to be the case is an inherent limitation of the book format
itself, the printed and bound book, seemingly static and immobile, fixed,
almost forgotten in its inadequacy when it comes to the promise of the internet
and portals like Wikipedia. Of course there is no reason at all to purchase the
ENYC, at any cost, when accessing Wikipedia is an option, as it is for anyone
using the internet, which presumably includes anyone who might purchase the
encyclopedia. For instance, rather than a single, archival paragraph on the
World Trade Center, Wikipedia carries an extensive, nearly book-length article,
with updates as recent as March 20, 2017.[3]
Nothing so
very surprising to any of this. But by considering the material artifact of the
ENYC we are able to trace this gap. The clearly situated series of decisions
that were settled on as motivation for the material object now have a
particular obsolescence, one that defines a kind of pre-history of how information
was understood and operationalized before what we are living through as, for
example, the "digital age," in which the global North defines itself,
in many ways, by access to websites like Wikipedia. And we can explore these
categories just defined as ways to investigate the history or evolution of
information. For instance, how should we read the ENYC, knowing what we know
now about entries like "World Trade Center"? How much of how we read
the present is invariably characterized by the historical capture of more or
less static media? Second, what kind of references are we saying are
informational if their object is as amorphous as the city itself? That is, even
now, how stable does what is designated as information need to be before it can
be used "as information"? And finally, to treat the last aspect of
this gap, this enabling failure, how do we characterize informational form, or
how do we see ourselves vis a vis the affordances of how we compile the
"basic facts"?
Once these
areas are treated, and they would be the bare minimum of examples, we seem to
move closer to an aspect of information that assumes greater and greater
relevance: how much of anything we deem as information resides in this category
of uselessness, how much of it that we see now as "dead" is in fact
forming not only the historical basis for our perceptions and experience of the
contemporary but also puts the contemporary in play as itself?
A Posthumanist
Methodology
Here I'd like
to pick up the guidelines Rosi Braidotti outlines in The Posthuman (specifically, pg. 163 ff.), so that the research
project operates according to following parameters.
We will first build
an accurate map of the "power locations" involved in print and
digital encyclopedias. These structure our subject position and "account
for one's locations in terms of both space (geo-political or ecological
dimension) and time (historical and geneaological dimension)." The work
stresses the situated structure of all knowledge as it arises out of either
format. Our reading of the ENYC would then investigate, including both human
and nonhuman actors in a trans-disciplinary mode, the importance of New York
City itself and how it came to be the subject of an encyclopedia, the material
specifications of the book, who purchased the book when it was published,
reviews in the academic and popular press, assessments of its contributors, the
role of the publishing company, the resources brought to bear by printers, advertisers,
and distributors, sales figures, granting agencies that funded the project, and
so on. We would also look at how New York City fits into the history of cities
overall, the American city, the global city, and then how and why the ENYC fits
into the larger encyclopedic tradition, what a stand-alone encyclopedia brings
to a topic that a more general encyclopedia does not, and so on. We would bring
as many aspects of the encyclopedia into play as we could, with where possible
a parallel process being conducted for Wikipedia, capturing different elements
but also building comparisons between things like numbers and types of
contributors, digtial crowdsourcing tactics as they related to finding
contributors for the print volume, readership for Wikipedia overall and
specifically for articles that are also found in the ENYC, with to some degree
a geneaology of the internet itself becoming relevant as well.
These
comparisons would begin to build a picture of the gap or move between the
different incarnations of information managment represented by print and
digital encyclopedias. As these power locations were mapped and situated we
would then look for "alternative figurations" or "conceptual
personae" that emerge for the uses and character of information as it mobilizes
itself from one era to the next. Here we would build this personae with an
awareness of both the restrictive qualities of power locations and of their
affirmative qualities. This discussion would center on, for example, the three
areas already mentioned, the anachronistic quality of old information, the
amorphousness of the city as subject, and the outmoded affordances of the book
form. What we would do here is progressively build a conceptual personae by
designating what characteristics actually survived the transition from the
earlier format to the latter. As Braidotti writes,
A
figuration is the expression of alternative representations of the subject as a
dynamic, non-unitary entity; it is the dramatization of processes of becoming.
These processes assume that subject formation takes place in between
nature/technology; male/female; black/white; local/global; present/past—in the
spaces that flow and connect the binaries. These in-between states defy the
established modes of theoretical representation because they are zigzagging,
not linear and process-oriented, not concept-driven. Critique and creation
strike a new deal in actualizing the practice of conceptual personae or
figuration as the active pursuit of affirmative alternatives to the dominant
vision of the subject.
Thus our
method will treat as a binary the two poles of a "dominant vision" of
the encyclopedia, ENYC/Wikipedia, and map what emerges in the "process of
becoming" from one to the other, exploring the "spaces that flow and
connect the binaries."
Literature Review
There is a panoply of previous research that
directly influences this project, from a number of perspective. The project
draws on major theoretical categories in information theory, in many cases
reinterpreting them in light of the premises and methods raised in this
project. While each area has deeply informed the project from its inception, I
will reposition some basic tenets of each pre-cursor—primarily the work of
Bowker and Star (2000; 2016) and Warner (2005)—to investigage how they
undergird the project's conclusions and primary methodology, which relies on
the work of Rosi Braidotti.
Infrastructure
Much of this project is related to
infrastructures, as defined by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (Bowker
2000; Bowker 2016). When we look at the ENYC versus Wikipedia we have two
infrastructural systems. As Star writes, we don't ask what an infrastructure
is, but when it is, since it is
constituted by a "web of usability and action" (Bowker 2016, pg. 379).
What this paper does is transpose this web onto Braidotti's "power
structures," again looking at the movement between the ENYC and Wikipedia.
To use Star's categories (Bowker 2016, pg. 380), basic qualities of
infrastructure are as follows, and each of these keeps its relevance within
this analysis, as well as links to other areas of pertinent research as listed
herein.
· Embeddedness: we look at the "other structures, social arrangements, and
technologies" within which both the ENYC and Wikipedia are
"sunken," or out of which they necessarily emerge.
· Transparency: we look at the way both encyclopedias rely on pre-existing
technologies, the way they do not need to be "reinvented."
· Reach and scope: the way each format has spatiotemporal implication beyond its
immediate purpose.
· Learned as part of
membership: here we can map infrastructural and power
structure implications by looking at the construction of each encyclopedia by
experts (ENCY) and mostly nonexperts (Wikipedia), with rubrics such as learned
peripheral partcipation becoming significant. The work of Bryan (2005),
Panciera (2009), and Lave (1991) are foundational for this part of the project,
which also draws on Vygotsky (Wertsh 1988).
· Links with conventions
of practice: we look at the different communities that
surround each encyclopedia, communities that include large numbers of scholars
and professional publishers for the ENYC and an evolving community of writers
for Wikipedia. Here we can assess how expectations about information built up
during the long traditions behind the print version are part of the
construction of the web-based encyclopedia.
· Embodiement of standards: particularly important for Wikipedia, this aspect of infrastructure
shows how it "plugs into other infrastructures and tools in a standardized
fashion" (Bowker 2016, pg. 380). Here we look at what aspect of Wikipedia
"plug into" the already established infrastructure of print
encyclopedias, with the work of Lawrence Lessig on regulatory systems becoming
relevant (Lessig 2005).
· Built on an installed
base: again we can focus on this key element of
infrastrucutre by showing the "installed base" provided for Wikipedia
by the print encyclopedia tradition. Relevant to this discussion as well is the
"technological unconscious" as discussed by Nigel Thrift. Thrift
designates "spaces of anticiaption" with a "powerful
infrastructural logic" (Thrift 2005, pg. 212).
What is derived from the infrastructural
analysis is the way each encyclopedia functions as a culturally emebedded power
structure, both shared, one leading to the other, and distinctive, each having
a nominally separate character. This analysis is rooted in theories of how
categorization operates, and must necessarily take linguistic aspects into
account (Lakoff 2008; Suchman 1993), particularly in light of the text-based
nature of both encyclopedias.
The Poetic Counterpublic
A second major aspect of the project is its
ability to measure the containment of an anti-informational force within the
overarching informational mandate of either encyclopedia format, ENYC or
Wikipedia. For a model of this dialectical form I turn to Michael Warner's
concept of the counterpublic and its associated dynamic both within public
discourse and as containing an additional poetic force (Warner 2005). The idea
here is that any given informational discourse starts off as a
"public" discourse as Warner defines it: "In a public,
indefinite address and self-organized discourse disclose a lived world whose
arbitrary closure both enables that discourse and is contradicted by it."
(Warner 2002, pg. 81) He describes the tendencies of public discourse further
by stating:
There is no speech or
performance addressed to a public that does not try to specify in advance, in
countless highly condensed ways, the lifeworld of its circulation. This is
accomplished not only through discursive claims, of the kind that can be said
to be oriented to understanding, but also at the level of pragmatics, through
the effects of speech generes, idioms, stylistic markers, address,
temporalitiy, mise-en-scène, citational field, interlocutory protocols,
lexicon, and so on. Its circulatory fate is the realization of that world.
(Warner 2002, pg. 82)
Here we find a number of echoes of Bowker and
Star's infrastructure—in terms of advanced "lifeworlds"—and Thrift's
technological unconscious, as well as the linguistic roots of categorization
found in Lakoff, along with Suchman. These attributes, we can note, apply to
both ENYC and Wikipedia. But Warner goes further and outlines another characteristic
of publics (which again we are reading here as informational discourse itself).
He invokes a force that echoes Braidotti's figuration, or the roots of her
"conceptual personae," by hypothesizng a "consitutively misrecognized"
world-making quality contrary to yet hidden within public discourse as
generally accepted. He writes:
This constitutive
misrecognition of publics relies on a particular ideology of language.
Discourse is understood to be propositionally summarizable; the poetic or
textual qualities of any utterance are disregarded in favor of sense. (Warner 2002, pg. 82, italic in
original)
Again, what we have here is a typically
informational (reliance on sense) understanding of the public and public
discourse, within which is a type of counterforce that is understood as both
being misrecognized and poetic. I'll quote Warner directly one last time as we
try to understand what he means by "poetic":
Public discourse, in
other words, is poetic. By this I mean not just that a public is
self-organizing, a kind of entity created by its own discourse, or even that
this space of circulation is taken to be a social entity. Rather, I mean that
all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world
in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and
livable shape, and attempting to realize that world through address.
What Warner wants to posit is that any
discursive or informational system does two things. First, it relies on the
sense and practices of the world as it is. Second, it poetically projects
another world, one that must be "made," that is yet to come, and that
is "oriented to the poetic-expressive dimensions of language" (Warner
2002, pg. 83). One of the conclusions of this paper is that any version of an
encyclopedia, old or new, ENYC or Wikipedia, is structurally defined by its
reliance on the first of these worlds, on making "sense," indeed on
"sensemaking" as discussed by Weick (Weick 2005). However, this world
is also constituted by its own counternarrative or counterpublic, its
dialectical opposite or what we could therefore call the non-informational. It
is the break, interval or transfer between the worlds that makes perception of
the poetic world, the conceptual personae, possible.
Conclusion
We've taken a complex turn through an attempt
to construct a type of identity for information as a general category active in
contemporary culture, yet active by virtue of "earlier" or opposed
versions of itself. Our primary way of understanding this quality of
information is as a "conceptual personae" as defined by Rosi
Braidotti, a process of the dramatization of becoming, an intersical actuality
that reflects "both sides" of its binarial provenance while at the
same time producing a third entity that moves among them. What sits behind this
process are a collection of elements and ways of understanding how information
comes to us, how we decide what information is and how to use it. These
elements include infrastructure and counterpublics, concepts that reach through
major moments in information theory and constitute the makup of the conceptual
personae in important ways. Primarily we can see components of the conceptual
personae through infrastructural dynamics like embeddedness, transparency,
scope, and standards operating through language. Information also carries an
implied poetic emergence in the sense in which it functions as a type of public
discourse. In many ways Wikipedia, and perhaps information and web culture
itself, might be seen as emergent from book-based informational cultures,
leaving us to look for patterns of emergence for future outputs or modalities
of informational discourse.
Finally, once we locate and demarcate what a
conceptual personae is and how it operates in the institution of informational
discourse, we need to ask how that discourse sees itself historically, since if
archival or dead media reappears as a kind of genetic, immediately active
presence even (and especially) in what we see as our most advanced notions of
computer aided or produced communication, then what is it to assign use value
to one form of discourse over another? In the pursuit of an accurate
description of how information actually functions and flows through society, it
may be that "personae" is quite fitting since it brings implications
of a type of biological ecology, a living and dying, an appearance and
disappearance contained within each other, to the overall portrait of the
contemporary moment. But one of the most compelling aspects of the conceptual
personae as well is that it demands an in-between status, a refusal to be compromised
by an absolute assocation with one side or the other in what we've outlined
here as an informational dialectic, but stays constantly in suspension and
active negotiation between elements.
Works Cited
Bowker,
Goeffrey C., et al. 2016. Boundary
Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star. MIT Press.
Bowker,
Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. 2000. Sorting
Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. MIT Press.
Braidotti,
Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Polity.
Bryant, Susan L., Andrea Forte, and Amy
Bruckman. 2005. "Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a
collaborative online encyclopedia." Proceedings of the 2005
international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work. ACM.
Jackson, Kenneth T., ed. 1999. The Encyclopedia of New York City. Yale
University Press.
Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated
Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press.
Panciera,
Katherine, Aaron Halfaker, and Loren Terveen. 2009. "Wikipedians are born,
not made: a study of power editors on Wikipedia." Proceedings of the
ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work. ACM.
Thrift,
Nigel. 2005. Knowing Capitalism.
Sage.
Warner,
Michael. 2002. "Publics and Counterpublics." Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 49-90.
———.
2005. Publics and Counterpublics.
Zone.
Weick,
Karl E., Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld. 2005. "Organizing and
the Process of Sensemaking." Organization Science 16.4: 409-421.
Wertsch, James V. 1988. Vygotsky and the Social
Formation of Mind. Harvard University Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment