tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-130990972024-03-17T22:47:39.234-07:00stunlawphilosophy and critique for a digital ageBerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.comBlogger111125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-49687643364579791252024-03-17T16:46:00.000-07:002024-03-17T17:08:51.267-07:00From the Archives: A New Approach To Warwick (~1964)<div class="separator"></div><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc_hAqdrOQjS0xjLnEpjwTgFPsjC5fO54rYHnmV9St1MexouXhR7iXi9eqX5AgjTGE9fk-vvqZowQAV3HEYQqgewlqEr1yWQJPBaxTdbnGFZ2paH6SXR02FdcTDiUeTCeOtzQB7UzcLlty9XxIY2KC_ZAncfBcfD54ZWsiTe7jfYC6gZLM4boc/s1702/A%20New%20Approach%20to%20Warwick.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1702" data-original-width="1206" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc_hAqdrOQjS0xjLnEpjwTgFPsjC5fO54rYHnmV9St1MexouXhR7iXi9eqX5AgjTGE9fk-vvqZowQAV3HEYQqgewlqEr1yWQJPBaxTdbnGFZ2paH6SXR02FdcTDiUeTCeOtzQB7UzcLlty9XxIY2KC_ZAncfBcfD54ZWsiTe7jfYC6gZLM4boc/s320/A%20New%20Approach%20to%20Warwick.jpg" width="227" /></a></div><br />A rather wonderful find in my archival research on the Plate Glass Universities. Currently being converted (and corrected) from rather badly reproduced typewritten pages to the digital. Strangely far-sighted in its vision for higher education, this parody was written by a professor involved in the original design for the University of Warwick in 1964. Enjoy! <br /></i><div><h3 style="text-align: left;">A NEW APPROACH TO WARWICK (~1964)</h3><div>The deep disappointment of the Executive Committee at the 'dull', 'unexciting' and 'uninspiring' suggestions of the Academic Planning Board necessitates a re-thinking of the whole basic problem. It is no doubt natural, as one of the Committee has expressed it, that a bright new City of Coventry with Its bright new Cathedral needs its bright new University to be concerned with bright new subjects which are cognate with the bright new needs of a bright new society. In an attempt to ensure that the new foundation is 'with it' in these respects the following new basic plan is put forward under a series of headings encompassing some of the main problems mentioned at the joint meeting.<br /></div><div><h4 style="text-align: left;">1. The Vice-Chancellor.</h4>It is a truism that the desirable characteristics of a human being which conduce to a successful Vice-Chancellor are so many that the field of choice is obviously limited. It has certainly been an outstanding lapse on the part of the Academic Planning Board that it has failed to bulldoze, browbeat or blackmail a candidate of the required calibre into accepting the post. Luckily, however, a little more thought makes it amply clear that the whole problem can be resolved in a new and most exciting manner. <b><u>The solution is to establish a mechanical Vice-Chancellor. </u></b>This simple statement immediately opens up vistas of opportunity, The compatibility with the technological ethos of Coventry is too obvious to need stressing. The cost to the new University need be minimal if the component parts of the Vice-Chancellor are donated by local engineering firms who would respond enthusiastically to an appeal couched in such terms as 'Donate a piece of the new Vice-Chancellor'. It would ensure that such firms would have a personal stake of the most concrete type in the launching of the new institution. It would be a most happy arrangement if the actual construction of the Vice-Chancellor were to be handled by the Lanchester College of Technology, thus ensuring from the outset the strongest of links between the two establishments. Such a robot Vice-Chancellor would have immense advantages over the human incumbents at present in general use. He would not need to be paid and, in addition, the cost of a Vice-Chancellor's lodge would be saved. The problems of retirement and replacement would never arise. Again the maddening inconsistency of the human prototypes would be eliminated, a Vice-Chancellor suitably programmed would give the same answer to a similar problem at any time in a manner independent of the department involved. The new university and its new Vice-Chancellor would grow in stature in a completely co-ordinated manner. Expansion of the former would automatically be accompanied by the addition of a suitable printed circuit to the latter. <span> </span>Administration with maximised efficiency could give Warwick an enormous pull over all other Universities. This advantage could be rubbed in and well publicised by the establishment for university staff elsewhere of conducted tours round the Warwick Vice-Chancellor at servicing periods; the response would be overwhelming in view of the frequent, forcibly expressed ignorance as to what goes on inside a Vice-Chancellor.<br /><br />The greatest advantage of the scheme is undoubtedly its pioneering novelty; Warwick would have the first fully-transistorised Vice-Chancellor in history. <br /></div><div><h4 style="text-align: left;">2. Finance.</h4>The present Treasury-induced stringency makes it imperative to seek considerable funds elsewhere. The appeal to local (mainly engineering) industry is of course on the stocks but it would be only realistic to recognise Its limitations at present. Not only are profit margins shrinking but the impending impact of the Common Market provides an unanswerable basis for a regretful proffering of good wishes unaccompanied by a more substantial token. Once again, however, an apparently intractable problem vanishes directly a new view is taken. One industry is booming today and will continue to boom in a manner virtually independent of the normal economic fluctuations. It is an industry intimately intertwined with modern society, especially with regard to the younger generation. It is an industry in direct touch with all the bright new features of modern living. Most important of all, it is an industry with immense financial resources which constitute a virgin source hitherto untapped by any educational establishment. <b><u>This treasure trove is, of course, the advertising industry.</u></b> Its immense wealth is coupled with a yearning for status as a learned profession and its resources would be poured out unstintingly to a new University willing to open its heart to this laudable ambition. The manner in which this collaboration could be achieved is dealt with in more detail below.<br /><br />Enough has been said to set the stage for the second highly novel feature of the Warwick project. <b><u>It would be run on company lines and would make a profit right from the start. </u></b>The reputation of its shares as growth stocks in the Bourses of the world would establish Warwick as the first academically-directed financial combine in its own right, the full flowering of those seeds sown so long ago by Keynes.<br /><br /><b>3. Student Intake.<br /></b><br />The uninspiring idea that we should admit students much as other Universities do is surely a counsel of despair. This attitude would inevitably mean starting with a small number of students not all of whom would be of the highest quality. Warwick could by-pass this question of limited numbers and at the same time make a dramatic contribution to the solving of one of the key problems of modern society by another simple yet profound idea. <b><u>Admission to Warwick should be restricted to juvenile delinquents. </u></b>This entrance requirement should be interpreted very stringently; thus, although admittance in the first your could be granted to these on probation it would have to be understood that a conviction would have to be achieved before the end of this year. It should not be difficult to arrange with the Coventry Judiciary that such sentences be phased with the long vacation.<br /><br />This type of student would have the effect of keeping Warwick permanently in the news and from the public relations point of view would be invaluable in many ways. At present it costs the country £800 per annum for each incarcerated juvenile delinquent. Warwick could thus charge a full economic fee for each student (say £500 per annum) and still provide a considerable financial rebate for the grateful taxpayer. Truly Warwick would be permanently lapped in the warmth of public approval which would be kept eternally on the boil by the never-ending vigilance of our industrial sponsors.<br /></div><div><h4 style="text-align: left;">4. Buildings.</h4>The above arrangements lead directly to many advantages in respect of the permanent erections needed for the new University. One has already been mentioned, namely the obviation of the necessity for a Vice-Chancellor's Lodge. Our industrial sponsors close links with commercial television point directly to an even more far reaching simplification. <b><u>The only permanent buildings needed on the site will be student residences, exhaustively wired for sound and colour television.<br /></u></b><br />Students will no longer have to leave their rooms to attend lectures which can be delivered straight from the staff's own houses or, better still, by means of pre-recorded video-tape. Lecture courses could be run on completely standard ITV lines with the natural breaks filled in by advertisements in the usual way (a further lucrative source of revenue for Warwick). The need for laboratories is removed by a judicious choice of subjects, the nature of which is discussed in the following section.<br /><h4 style="text-align: left;">5. Schemes of Courses.</h4>One of the most severe strictures of the Executive Committee concerned the triteness of the subjects suggested by the Academic Planning Board, which were much the same as those of any other University. It is difficult to avoid naming these subjects once again in the following discussion but, to avoid giving offense, they will be put inside quotation marks where they occur. One again, with a little thought, these unexciting topics can be readily replaced by a related theme which possesses the merit of rabid public interest combined with the maximum advertising potential. The coining of new names is a pre-requisite to ensure the necessary impact. Thus the place of 'Physics' may most suitably be taken by Spatial Ballistics. The new 250-acre site has ample roon for a small rocket launching pad and the primary task of the new professor will be to prepare for the launching of the first student into space. To parry any aesthetic objections Sir Basil Spence would be commissioned for the design of the gentry. 'Mathematics' would be suitably covered by the establishment of the Littlewood Chair of Applied Probability. The application of its research school to problems connected with pools, bingo, chemin-de-fer and the Stock Exchange would lay the foundations for a further augmentation of revenue. The holder of the Kinsey Chair of Human Biodegeneracy will have charge of a far reaching programme of selective human breeding, a project long envisaged by eugenists, but one which no university so far has had the drive to instigate. The results of this investigation will be published, not in the usual unintelligible learned Journals, but in certain selected Sunday organs of the press (at a suitable high fee). Closely allied to this project will be the department replacing 'Chemistry', which will be concerned with the two linked subjects aptly described by the appellation Cosmetico-contraceptics. With such handpicked students the 'Social Sciences' have enormous field-work potential right on the spot and, in view of the worldwide nature of the juvenile delinquent problem, these studies could be telescoped with 'Modern Languages' to produce such impelling subjects as <i>Blousonnetteri</i>, <i>Halbetärkewisenschaftlichkeit</i> and <i>Stilyaginudnik</i>. In view of the impending dedication of the new Cathedral to the Greater Glory of Coventry, the early filling of the Mervyn Stockwood Chair of Theopublicity is imperative. In these second Elizabethan times this subject might well come to be known as 'the virgin queen of the sciences'. It would obviously be jejune to attach this study to any of the more familiar sects and it is therefore proposed to restrict it to Mormonism. The combination of this study with the previously mentioned topic of Biodegeneracy would certainly produce that characteristic of cross-fertilisation so ardently desired from modern university education. <br /><br />It is surely unnecessary to point out the immense support that our sponsors could offer in encouraging these subjects and ensuring wide cognisance of the pioneering spirit of Warwick. It would be a fitting tribute to them indeed if the very word 'University', a stale tern uned over-long in this context, could be jettisoned at last. As the new venture is dedicated to producing an <b><u>anima</u></b> for the advertising profession, let the new conception of the ANIMADVERSITY OF WARWICK be blazoned forth in the full sweep of its breathtaking originality.</div></div>BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-75366705486143816732023-10-13T06:24:00.001-07:002023-11-15T03:46:33.386-08:00Towards a Design for an Undergraduate BA Digital Humanities Degree – some thoughts<p>This post is a thought experiment to try to think anew about what a digital humanities programme might look like at undergraduate level. At the moment, most universities consider a BA in Digital Humanities an unviable option, particularly due to the lack of knowledge by students about the field and the relatively recent coinage of the term. Some of these modules could easily be incorporated into an existing BA Media and Communications, especially as options for students. However, it is an interesting idea to explore, even as an imaginary, and balancing out the different demands for such a degree. This is a first draft really, so it is aimed to start a discussion, but I am interested to discover what I have forgotten, or others consider necessary to add, augment or replace in this proposal. </p><p>This particular proposal for a Digital Humanities degree program has been designed to foster a dynamic and innovative education. The idea is that it balances the development of both "close reading" and "distant reading" skills. In this it is greatly influenced by the ideas of the founders of the University of Sussex, and the notion of "new maps of knowledge" proposed by Asa Briggs in the early 1960s. By intertwining close reading, which involves in-depth analysis of individual texts, with distant reading, focusing on broader patterns and trends across vast datasets, the aim is to cultivate a well-rounded set of cognitive capacities – being able to understand both the general and specific in cultural and social contexts. This approach empowers students to examine texts and cultural artifacts with a detailed analysis while also seeing the overarching landscape of the digital milieu, specifically transcending the disciplinary boundaries of traditional humanities.</p><p>In the digital era, an attention to what I have called elsewhere "critical digital humanities" are, I believe, key to include. This program integrates this aspect to ensure students critically assess the implications of digital technologies on culture, identity, ethics, and society. In a landscape overflowing with information, students engage with questions of media specificity, digital humanities theory, data-intensive approaches, digital privacy, ethical dilemmas, and the political and social repercussions of digital media. This holistic perspective allows them to embrace both the practical aspects of digital humanities—such as data analysis and archiving—and the critical reflections necessary to grapple with the profound changes digital technologies have brought to society and the cultural sector in particular.</p><p>This proposed curriculum is designed to prepare students for both further academic work at the master's level and for vocational roles in various sectors. Whether aspiring to advanced academic research in digital humanities or seeking a career in the media, the public sector, museums, archives, or other cultural realms, students should emerge with a multifaceted skill set. They can apply their close and distant reading abilities to dissect complex issues, generate innovative insights, and effectively communicate their findings. The graduates would be equipped to bridge the gap between technical skills and critical analysis, ensuring they contribute meaningfully to the future of digital culture and heritage in academia and the broader cultural sphere.</p>
<style type="text/css">
table.tableizer-table {
font-size: 12px;
border: 1px solid #CCC;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}
.tableizer-table td {
padding: 4px;
margin: 3px;
border: 1px solid #CCC;
vertical-align:top
}
.tableizer-table th {
background-color: #104E8B;
color: #FFF;
font-weight: bold;
}
</style>
<table class="tableizer-table">
<thead><tr class="tableizer-firstrow"><th>YEAR</th><th>SEMESTER 1</th><th>SEMESTER 2</th></tr></thead>
<tbody>
<tr><td><b>1</b></td><td> <b style="background-color: #fcff01;">1. Module: Introduction to Digital Humanities: Theory and Practice</b><p>Description: This module introduces the foundational principles of digital humanities, examining its historical evolution and core principles alongside practical skills.</p><p>Assessment: Reflective essay on the role of theory in shaping digital humanities practices (2000 words).</p><p><b style="background-color: #fcff01;">2. Module: Digital Media, Culture, and Society</b></p><p>Description: This module explores the intersection of digital media with culture and society from a critical perspective, focusing on concepts such as digital identity, online communities, and the digital public sphere.</p><p>Assessment: Critical analysis of a contemporary digital media issue (2000 words).</p><p><b style="background-color: #fcff01;">3. Module: Digital Ethics and Privacy</b></p><p>Description: This module critiques the ethical and privacy dimensions of digital culture, analyzing privacy policies, data protection, AI/machine learning and digital rights.</p><p>Assessment: Ethical analysis of digital privacy dilemmas (2000 words).</p></td><td><b style="background-color: #fcff01;">4. Module: Foundations of Data Analysis and Visualization</b><br /><p>Description: This module provides a theoretical framework for understanding data analysis and visualization, drawing on semiotics, data ethics, and critical data studies.</p><p>Assessment: Practice analysis of data visualization techniques (2500 words).</p><p><b style="background-color: #fcff01;">5. Module: Theories of Digital Storytelling</b></p><p>Description: Students explores theoretical perspectives on digital storytelling, examining narrative structures, digital narrative ethics, and the impact of digital technology on storytelling.</p><p>Assessment: Theoretical and Practical analysis of digital storytelling in contemporary media (2500 words).</p><p><b style="background-color: #fcff01;">6. Module: Digital Curation and Preservation</b></p><p>Description: This module explores the theoretical and practical aspects of digital curation and preservation, focusing on strategies for preserving digital heritage.</p>Assessment: Critical analysis of digital curation strategies (2500 words). </td></tr>
<tr><td><b>1</b></td><td> NO OPTIONS</td><td> NO OPTIONS</td></tr>
<tr><td><b>2</b></td><td> <b style="background-color: #fcff01;">1. Module: Digital Culture and Critical Approaches</b><p>Description: This module deepens the exploration of digital culture, applying critical cultural theories to digital contexts. It will focus on key aspects of digital culture, including artificial intelligence, algorithms, digital identity, digital culture and digital media. </p><p>Assessment: Theoretical exploration of digital culture (2500 words).</p><p><b style="background-color: #fcff01;">2. Module: Digital Advocacy and Public Engagement</b></p><p>Description: This module emphasizes the role of digital humanities in advocacy and public engagement, exploring strategies for communicating digital research to diverse audiences.</p><p>Assessment: Public engagement project showcasing the application of digital humanities in public contexts (2500 words).</p></td><td> <b style="background-color: #fcff01;">4. Module: Foundations of Digital Humanities Research Methods</b><p>Description: Building research skills, this module applies critical perspectives to digital humanities research methods, emphasizing reflexivity, data ethics, and research design.</p><p>Assessment: Theoretical exploration of ethical considerations in digital humanities research (2500 words).</p></td></tr>
<tr><td><b>2</b></td><td><b>CHOOSE ONE OPTION FROM:</b> <br /><b><br /><span style="background-color: #fcff01;">3. Optional Module A: Approaches to Text Encoding and Analysis</span></b><br /><p>Description: Building on text encoding skills, this module focuses on theoretical aspects, including text encoding as a semiotic act, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. Some elements of programming (coding) will also be introduced. </p><p>Assessment: Practical analysis of text encoding in the digital humanities (2500 words).</p><p><b style="background-color: #fcff01;">4. Optional Module B: Theories of Digital Humanities</b></p><p>Description: Building on foundational modules, this module focuses on critical approaches to digital humanities, including engagement with questions regarding distant reading, patterns, artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithms and digital infrastructures. </p><p>Assessment: Essay (2500 words).</p></td><td><b>CHOOSE TWO OPTIONS FROM:</b> <p><b style="background-color: #fcff01;">5. Optional Module A: Perspectives on Digital Archives and Curation</b></p>Description: This module explores the theoretical underpinnings of digital archives, considering topics like cultural memory, ethics, and accessibility, digital ontologies and encoding strategies.<br />Assessment: Theoretical examination of digital archive curation and its cultural implications (2500 words).<br /><br /><b style="background-color: #fcff01;">6. Optional Module B: Digital Media and Society</b><br /><br />Description: This undergraduate module offers a comprehensive exploration of the dynamic relationship between digital media and contemporary society. It delves into how digital technologies have transformed communication, culture, and social dynamics. Students will examine the impact of digital media on various aspects of society, including politics, identity, ethics, and the economy. Through a combination of lectures, discussions, and case studies, they will gain a deeper understanding of the ways digital media shape our world.<br /><p>Assessment: Critical analysis essay examining a digital media phenomenon, such as a social media trend, a digital activism campaign, or an emerging technology, and critically analyze its societal impact. </p><p><b style="background-color: #fcff01;">7. Optional Module C: Digital Humanities and the Environment</b></p>Description: This module examines the intersection of digital humanities and environmental issues, exploring how digital technologies can be applied to address environmental challenges and document ecological changes.<br /><p>Assessment: Analysis of digital humanities applications in environmental research and advocacy (2500 words).</p><blockquote style="border: medium; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p></p></blockquote><p> <b style="background-color: #fcff01;">8. Optional Module D: AI, Machine Learning and Digital Humanities</b></p>Description: This module examines the intersection of digital humanities and artificial intelligence, exploring how digital technologies can be applied to address digital challenges and help with creating, researching and exploring culture and the humanities.<br /><p>Assessment: Analysis of artificial intelligence and machine learning (2500 words).</p></td></tr>
<tr><td><b>3</b></td><td> <b style="background-color: #fcff01;">1. Module: Ethics and Privacy in the Digital Age: Critical Frameworks</b><p>Description: This module critically examines ethical and privacy issues in the digital realm, applying ethical theories and principles to digital contexts. This will include aspects of the political economy of the digital – and how these pressures shape digital infrastructures, regulatory structures and companies. </p><p>Assessment: Essay, applying ethical and political approaches to digital dilemmas (3000 words).</p><p><b style="background-color: #fcff01;">2. Module: Critical Approaches in Digital Research</b></p><p>Description: This module emphasizes critical perspectives on digital research, including critical theory, political economy, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory.</p><p>Assessment: Theoretical paper applying critical theories to a digital humanities research question (3000 words).</p></td><td><b style="background-color: #fcff01;">4. Module: The Digital, Power, and Ideology: Critical Analyses<br /></b><br />Description: Investigating the intersection of the digital, power, and ideology, this module critically applies theoretical frameworks to analyze, for example, digital platforms' influence on society through a political economy and cultural studies approach and the rise of artificial intelligence.<br /><p>Assessment: Critical analysis of the impact of the digital on power structures and ideological narratives (3000 words).</p><p><b style="background-color: #fcff01;">5. Module: Digital Humanities Dissertation</b></p><p>Description: The culmination of the degree, this module allows students to undertake an independent research dissertation, emphasizing the application of theoretical frameworks within digital humanities/digital media and the use of research methods to shape the research design.</p><p>Assessment: Dissertation (8000 words) applying critical theories to the chosen topic, contributing to the field of digital humanities/digital media. </p></td></tr>
<tr><td><b>3</b></td><td> <b>CHOOSE ONE OPTION FROM:</b> <p><b style="background-color: #fcff01;">3. Optional Module A: Building a Digital Humanities Project</b></p>Description: This module explores developing the digital artefacts in a digital humanities project, including digital objects, images, diplomatic versions, TEI texts, databases, OCR and web/app design elements.<br /><p>Assessment: Practical project creating a digital portfolio applying digital humanities approaches to a project outcome (~2000 words + digital portfolio).</p><div><p><b style="background-color: #fcff01;">4. Optional Module B: Critical Code Studies</b></p></div>Description: This module is designed to immerse students in the critical analysis of code as a cultural and intellectual artifact within the realm of digital humanities. It introduces the notion of "Critical Code Studies" (CCS), a discipline that approaches code as a form of human expression, a cultural product, and a textual object. Students will engage with various programming languages and software systems, gaining a deep understanding of the inherent socio-cultural, historical, and ethical dimensions of code.<br /><div><p>Assessment: Critical analysis of a selected piece of code, applying CCS methodologies (3000 words). </p></div></td><td><p><b>CHOOSE ONE OPTION FROM:</b> </p><p><b style="background-color: #fcff01;">6. Optional Module A: Media Archaeology and Digital Humanities</b></p>Description: This module explores into the interdisciplinary field of Media Archaeology, which investigates the historical and cultural significance of media forms, technologies, and communication channels. It explores how different media have shaped and been shaped by human societies throughout history. In the context of digital humanities, this module focuses on applying medium archaeology to digital media and technologies. Students will learn to unearth the cultural, social, and technological layers of digital media, from early computing to contemporary social platforms.<br /><p>Assessment: Essay in which students explore the historical and cultural dimensions of a digital medium of their choice, with a focus on digital humanities (3000 words). </p><p><span style="background-color: #fcff01;"><b>7. Optional Module B: </b><b>Cultural Studies and Digital Humanities</b></span></p>Description: This module explores into the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, which investigates the cultural meanings and practices of digital forms. It explores how digital media and content represent and influence cultural values, identities, and narratives. This includes investigating digital cultural practices, such as fan culture, online activism, and remix culture. Case studies on digital storytelling, memes, and online communities.<br /><p>Assessment: Essay in which students apply cultural studies approaches to digital media or digital humanities objects, practices or representations (3000 words). </p><p><span style="background-color: #fcff01;"><b>8. Optional Module C: </b><b>Programming for the Digital Humanities</b></span></p><p>Description: This module is tailored for students interested in merging programming skills with the study of the digital humanities. It introduces the fundamental programming concepts and practical coding skills required for digital humanities research and projects. Students will explore how programming languages and computational methods can be applied to analyze, process, and visualize humanities data, such as texts, images, and cultural artifacts. The module emphasizes hands-on programming exercises and real-world applications in the context of the digital humanities.</p><p>Assessment: Programming Assignments (70%): Students will complete a series of programming assignments that apply coding skills to humanities data (30% critical reflection essay, 1000 words). </p></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3 style="text-align: left;"><br /></h3><div><i>David M. Berry, 2023</i></div>BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-88935762319820027652020-06-21T04:33:00.003-07:002020-06-21T04:53:07.919-07:00On Primary Computation<br /><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpI9cbtyUDnyj9kmCq0uzVQ4kcR5UgKyqWe7dbjCi-lVPCQWw7Wn_mkThR1Q4dxMgb0PH4NG2juPVc-5S9Mzx4KuFOynMbbeyeKCtm-RjeHaMbYprTQ5P-fY3LfzsHqwLKYhki/s800/intel-4004-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="592" data-original-width="800" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpI9cbtyUDnyj9kmCq0uzVQ4kcR5UgKyqWe7dbjCi-lVPCQWw7Wn_mkThR1Q4dxMgb0PH4NG2juPVc-5S9Mzx4KuFOynMbbeyeKCtm-RjeHaMbYprTQ5P-fY3LfzsHqwLKYhki/s320/intel-4004-1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Primary computation is not a particular kind of being. Nor can it be identified with being in itself. Primary computation is potentiality and considered in itself it is pure potentiality. Here I am thinking of primary computation in a similar way that Aristotle explains that "by matter I mean that which, not being a 'this' actually, is potentially a 'this' (Aristotle, Aristotle Book VIII). For primary computation alone has only potential existence and that without form there would be nothing but mere primary computation. Primary computation is not a 'this', it is only ever potentially a 'this'. Primary computation is, therefore not a thing – a substance without form cannot be said to exist. As Aristotle argues,</div><blockquote>Since the substance which exists as underlying and as matter is generally recognized, and this that which exists potentially, it remains for us to say what is the substance, in the sense of <i>actuality</i>, of sensible things (Aristotle, Book VIII, Part 2). </blockquote><div>Aristotle is arguing that a substance without form cannot exist as without form there would be nothing but mere primary matter. Similarly, pure computation without form does not exist by itself, since it is not an actual being – only potential. We can turn to Aquinas, who argues in relation to primary matter, but which I think also applies to primary computation, "primary matter does not exist by itself in nature, since it is not actual being, but only potential. Hence it is something con-created rather than created Nevertheless, primary matter even as a potentiality is not absolutely infinite, but relatively, because its potentiality extends only to natural forms" (Aquinas 1997: 439) </div><div><br /></div><div>As pure potentiality, primary computation is completely formless – it is pure indetermination. But potentiality is always for something, so the question is, what is pure potentiality potential for? What is pure potentiality relative to? In this case, pure potentiality is relative to form and in the case of primary computation it is not merely potential relative to form – it is nothing but potentiality, in itself lacking any actuality. So whatever being or actuality primary computation has is conferred upon it by form and hence primary computation is nothing but the possibility of receiving form. Pure potentiality can then be said to be the 'essence' of primary computation. On the other hand, as a composite material thing, the essence must include a formal element. </div><div><br /></div><div>So we might conclude that pure potentiality or primary computation is equivalent to nothing. But this is not correct. Rather primary computation has no reality <i>apart</i> from form. Which is saying that primary computation does not exist alone. If it could exist alone, then it would have to be determinate in some sense or another. But only form can provide this determination. Therefore, it would be a mistake to hold that primary computation has any existence apart from form. Primary computation is, then, equivalent to nothing only if it is considered as being apart from form. Since that is impossible, it is also impossible for primary computation to be equivalent to nothing. But it does not follow that because primary computation has no character of its own <i>apart</i> from form that therefore it has none <i>distinct</i> from form. Primary computation is different from a composite substance in being one of its constituent elements. It is different from nothingness because, although not a being in itself, it is a principle of being. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSKLd09P9NydAV-qOZunj3-qWJng3sxGQdNCXoP_CQwKLSMgrFr16yctffvZaJa5tQyH_7XAOq30Et_dzCQLYYTOp6QVtsdnI_MBu0Sv-UGeSfFp4gvflsBpAfFzv_igJ0Xx8A/s1200/silicon+wafer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSKLd09P9NydAV-qOZunj3-qWJng3sxGQdNCXoP_CQwKLSMgrFr16yctffvZaJa5tQyH_7XAOq30Et_dzCQLYYTOp6QVtsdnI_MBu0Sv-UGeSfFp4gvflsBpAfFzv_igJ0Xx8A/s320/silicon+wafer.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>So we can see that a key characteristic of primary computation is its capacity to receive forms. This would be impossible if primary computation were nothing at all. In its capacity to receive forms it is purely passive – because of such absolute passiveness, indetermination, and formlessness, primary computation can be said to be infinite. What makes anything in nature finite is its form, for form limits and determines. Primary computation, in itself, being absolutely indeterminate is not thus limited and finite, and hence is infinite. However, to be clear, infinity attributed to primary computation, is not the same as, say, infinity attributed to God. God is infinite as to pure form and as pure act, and is not relative in any manner that is determined by the potentiality caused by matter. Primary computation is infinite in the sense of absolute formlessness and absolute indetermination. This infinity of primary computation is the infinity of imperfection rather than perfection. We might say that perfection is proportional to actuality and that imperfection is proportional to the lack of actuality, the lack of form and determinateness. Pure potentiality would be pure imperfection, and vice versa. </div><div><br /></div><div>Primary computation is, therefore, the necessary condition for the existence of individual computational things. Without primary computation there could be no change of motion in computational things. And when computational form is thought of in complete abstraction from primary computation, such form is irrelevant to space and time. Primary computation, although not identical with, is certainly the foundation for the specialisation and temporalization of computational forms. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-88005813121293532362020-03-26T03:30:00.013-07:002020-09-08T09:59:48.117-07:00The Idea of a Digital-First University<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN2a-HKrQXgg5lEtvpwcfqjr0zkj8OR1XbmGnVy_IpQwGoCF_1E5ugdYY0goFsl_RB-cQxLuxqQMV9Jao0I_HD1ecNBolGkdnrICIuKAByUPcYf0W5W1lnbtaq-AG1fsYygsor/s1600/South+West+View+of+Lincoln+College+%2526c+1823.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="859" data-original-width="1090" height="251" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiN2a-HKrQXgg5lEtvpwcfqjr0zkj8OR1XbmGnVy_IpQwGoCF_1E5ugdYY0goFsl_RB-cQxLuxqQMV9Jao0I_HD1ecNBolGkdnrICIuKAByUPcYf0W5W1lnbtaq-AG1fsYygsor/s320/South+West+View+of+Lincoln+College+%2526c+1823.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Lincoln College, Oxford, where Mark Pattison </i></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>developed </i><i style="text-align: center;">a radical new research agenda for the </i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i style="text-align: center;">University of Oxford in the 1840s</i></div>
</div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Shifting forces in the UK Higher Education sector call for a new distinctive role for a university to enhance its prestige and intellectual endeavours – a new idea of a university. But at the present moment there is also a need to manage what appears to be a new landscape opened up by huge exogenous forces, such as the coronavirus, together with the disruption caused by digital technology. I argue that a new idea of a university should help the university to sustain and augment the existing institutional character of the university but also provide new orientations and give an impetus to a set of new long-range commitments for the university. This short post argues for the need to create a special role for a university in relation to its environment, cultural milieu and to provide a distinctive university in relation to others in the sector. Rather than retrench under the difficult conditions required in what might appear to be both an economic contraction and an education crisis the university should seize this opportunity to reassert its commitment to research and teaching and accelerate this capacity. I therefore introduce a notion of an idea of a university drawn from a "digital-first" orientation which would naturally have institutional implications in terms of the shape or pattern of the university. This proposal therefore advocates the development of the idea of a digital-intensive mission for any university that wishes to become a digital-first university. I take the term "digital first" from <i>The New York Times</i> which, struggling with the advent of digital technology and the internet, proposed a digital first strategy to help in trying to come to terms with severe disruption in the news industry (Benton 2014, NYT 2014a). One of the most important things that their Innovation Report identified was that <i>The Times</i> "must be willing to experiment more" such as through "repackaging old content in new formats" (Benton 2014, NYT 2014b). It was also striking that they highlighted that the newspaper was "woefully behind in its tagging and structured data practices" and that it stuck to its existing practices "because it is work that is comfortable and familiar to us, that we know how to do" (Benton 2014). It was only with a clear concerted push to embrace digital <i>ways of doing</i> and digital <i>ways of seeing</i> that <i>The Times</i> was able to identify and transform the way it created the news using digital technology in innovative and creative new ways. Until this point many commentators had argued that the news industry and journalism was in a vicious circle of declining readers, advertisers, income and legitimacy. However today, it is clear that the identification of a digital first strategy saved <i>The Times</i> from further decline and transformed it into a global internet newspaper. <br />
<br />When we translate this notion of "digital first" into the university it is key that we are reflexive about the differences between higher education and the news industry. In terms of their political economy alone they are radically different – one is about creating readerships and selling the news, the other is about creating new knowledge and teaching. But with these caveats I think it can be interesting to think about how, by changing the focus of a university from its strongly physical assumptions of how teaching and research is done, a new way of thinking about the university might be possible. However it is critical to emphasise that although the "digital-first" university will be different in many ways from its predecessors, it will nonetheless have important continuities. For example, internationally recognised academic professors, excellent student teaching and support, and an environment conducive to learning and discussion. It remains true today, as it was true in 1856, when George Templeton Strong argued,<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">"It seems certain that we shall effect nothing lasting or important except by and through teachers of the first order and the highest repute. They are not merely necessary to the vigour of the institution but conditions of its existence. Whether the experiment succeed or fail depends mainly on their presence or absence. With professors of respectable mediocrity or a little above it, a college will languish, but may subsist indefinitely. But a university cannot be planted and long sustained in life without professors of splendid name and ability, especially in a community where such institutions are unknown and where general mediocrity of attainment and aspiration is the obstacle to be removed and the evil to be remedied." ("Statement of George Templeton Strong Esq.," in <i>Statements, Opinions, and Testimony Taken by the Committee of Inquiry Appointed by the Trustees of Columbia College</i> (New York, 1865), pp. 20.)</span></blockquote>
<br />
<b>Introduction</b><br />
<br />
The last major change for the universities could be said to be the shift to the modern research university in the 1800s. This grew out of the notion that research, as an experimental procedure conducted in a spirit of discovery, could form the basis of a mission for the university. This emerged in German universities in the nineteenth century and became known as the Humboldtian university. The German universities developed the notion that integrating teaching and research within the same institution could be intensified to improve both teaching and the research process. Professors increasingly began to teach methodological skills, greater analytical and theoretical knowledge and tools as part of their courses. This included a growing reliance on field-work, maps and graphs, catalogues, and lists of specialised data to explain to students’ recent scientific advances and ongoing research work. However, it was the American universities that would take these ideas and develop them by creating an ideal of combining and integrating teaching and research which resulted in the modern research university.<br />
<br />
These new American research universities (John Hopkins, Chicago) had a strong commitment to basic research, to contextualized and applied research and to training researchers. These pioneering universities had a great influence on others, such as Harvard, which soon embraced this new idea of a university. This created a distinctive American institutional structure for a research university which was extremely successful during the twentieth century. This modern research university subsequently became the reference standard for the idea of a university and there can be little doubt that American universities are in a class of their own in terms of their ability to produce world-class research. By continuing to undertake teaching, these universities have been able to develop an important role in contribute new knowledge to the economy and to various organizations and firms in the industrial sector. This also created an expectation that teaching would be up-to-date and incorporate new knowledge. The institutional structures of the modern research university gave it the capacity to institutionalize and organize the proliferation of specialized knowledge into departments which were successful in undertaking high quality fundamental knowledge and practical research discoveries. At a time of rapid change and the need to take on global challenges, such as the coronavirus, these interdisciplinary skills and capacities are crucial.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitxt30p9_reRToJvpS-h9hlKX_I9PIRuqwtn6KwRIXntk2nE0VLCrvWgosLOUzLoKLtH2HOrLcyE7rUGVghPjt3lZpqZuPOiCdw-rnY9n37-qlJGyENJ3tABkQqAx-hGYTclCw/s1600/Mark+Pattison+RECTOR+1861-1884.png" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1238" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitxt30p9_reRToJvpS-h9hlKX_I9PIRuqwtn6KwRIXntk2nE0VLCrvWgosLOUzLoKLtH2HOrLcyE7rUGVghPjt3lZpqZuPOiCdw-rnY9n37-qlJGyENJ3tABkQqAx-hGYTclCw/s320/Mark+Pattison+RECTOR+1861-1884.png" width="246" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Mark Pattison Rector of <br />Lincoln College, Oxford, 1861-1884</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Today we are on undergoing a very similar transformatory event in contemporary societies. The university under the conditions of a society that is based increasingly upon digital knowledge and its economic valorisation will have to be very different to the industrial university. Post-industrial societies are structured around using knowledge and new knowledge production through computational technologies and related techniques and methods. But although these societies have produced unprecedented prosperity for certain parts of society, these rewards have not been equally distributed. At even the most basic level, inequality of access to the benefits of computation are still unequal, and social, cultural and political disruptions persist. Additionally, science and technology policy lacks even a rudimentary capacity to confront the complex implications of a computational society. The acquisition of new digital skills and these new knowledges are now fundamental drivers of innovation in and around an economy based on data, information and digital techniques. As such the university has a continued key role to play in the undertaking basic research, a highly concentrated output of academia, but also in building capacity and radicalising its use and innovation. The key research challenges in the 21st century lie at the integration of sub-disciplines and disciplines, often by bringing together knowledge from multiple levels of knowledge communities, into an organizational structure that can only be done through the mediating capacities offered through computation and particularly digital media. This digital-first strategy would need to impact not just research and teaching, but also the governance of the university by contributing to what has been called by David Palfreyman the “governance triangle” of the university.<br />
<br />
We could say that there are two essential platforms for the university in this new economic environment,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
(1) the creation of new knowledge (both increasingly mediated through the digital), and<br />
(2) the capacity for the transformation of knowledge into new forms of invention and innovation (again using digital tools and methods). </blockquote>
A university’s future growth, and even its survival, will increasingly depend of its ability to integrate and transform these new knowledges, compelling it to equip itself with new institutional structures for research and teaching. This new formal structural capacity is fundamentally reliant on digital processes of the creation, collection, experimentation and analysis in research through digital tools, methods, and techniques, combined with a critical capacity to assess theoretical and methodological foundations for such knowledge claims. As such these structures, combining the structural and the digital, enable a digital-first research university to flexibly adapt to the kinds of shifts in the needs for research and teaching for university sustainability and growth.<br />
<br />
I want to suggest that under these conditions, a new orientation for a university might be as a ‘Digital-First Research University’. This would mean that a university is not only a research-intensive university, in the traditional sense, but also a data-intensive one. The digital opens up new ways of seeing and enables new methods for undertaking research. As such, a digital-intensive university supports efforts to ensure the spirit of discovery and the promotion of research through radicalising its internal use of digital technologies for the creation of theories, methods and tools. By this reorientation there would be a transformation of the culture of departments in a university in the greater use of the digital both tacitly and explicitly in undertaking their research missions. <br />
<br />
This could be carefully articulated as a new mission for the university, including:<br />
<br />
•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A new research agenda that by adopting a digital-first strategy works to create a new culture of research around the transforming potential of digital approaches across all disciplines. This includes new research into and investment in digital infrastructure (cyberinfrastructure) to support the digital transformation of research activities and to create a culture of digital-intensive research. This would include the creation of an Institute of Advanced Digital Studies which is distinctively oriented to the edge of research questions made possible in and through digital transformations in knowledge and to feed back this knowledge into future planning and research questions.<br />
•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Seeking to connect to and transform teaching as a contribution to “redrawing the map of learning” (Briggs) through digital approaches in teaching and research. This could include a move from spatial metaphors (“maps of learning”) to a temporal and dynamic ones (“trajectories of learning”, “dynamic learning”, “postdigital methods”). Developing a digital-intensive teaching environment would need a radical reconceptualisation of the forms that are the base of the diversified pyramid of teaching programmes in the university from undergraduate to those at graduate level. This would facilitate active digital learning, that is critically using and adapting information rather than passively receiving it. For example, the use of augmented "digital teaching plug-ins" could mean that differing levels of learning ability could be added to the class to support different learning styles and speeds.<br />
•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Aiming to refresh and strengthen service in relation to the notion of a public (or civic) university (e.g. creating the conditions for a new kind of “data citizen” educated critically about the digital in relation to civil society and democracy, enrolling and contributing to the local economy and culture). A crucial contribution that a “digital college” could provide (see below).<br />
•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Contributing to industrial strategy (through ideas, people, infrastructure, business environment, and places) by strengthening “digital thinking” about these problems. By positioning itself as a digital-first university, an institution can harness its mission towards its own growing research capacity and also to the digital skills of its students and thereby the wider labour workforce (e.g. sharing its digital platforms, creating drop-in learning, greater collaborations). This includes creating a “digital college” open to extramural learners in the local community and which could scale dramatically for the local community (see below).<br />
•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Supporting the creation and criticism of culture, for example by supporting and developing new forms of digital culture, but also in the digital transformation of existing culture heritage, histories and traditional forms of knowledge. This would also involve new digital collaborations (such as sharing digital platforms) with external cultural organisations, such as the GLAM sector.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>A Digital-First Research University </b><br />
<br />
I see this notion of the “Digital-First Research University” as a key contribution to helping to shape and develop a universities research capacity. Especially through the development of working on these “trajectory streams” which are future-oriented “digital problems” (for example, digital divides/inclusion, social and culture challenges of a digital world, new technical and engineering technologies, economic challenges, global or postcolonial questions, understanding big problems such as climate change through digital techniques and living labs, shifting questions over identity and representation in a digital age, Europe, digital literatures, philosophical and ethical questions about the digital, legal issues, politics in a digital age, and problems of “digital poverty”, automation and deskilling – especially relevant to the local economy).<br />
<br />
In this formulation intensity of research is not just about inputs of grants and outputs of publications, it also includes the capacity to create and maintain the digital-intensive environment of a digital research infrastructure (sometimes called a cyberinfrastructure) that facilitates and supports the cutting edge of research across the disciplines in a university.<br />
<br />
This orientation would include exploring problems of a digital society more generally, and help concentrate the university’s limited resources in an area rather than trying to be all things to all people. This proposal is not calling for a specific programme as such, rather it is a theme, in terms of an idea or philosophy, to help direct the university and set the tone of the university more generally. Most notably this is not a proposal that teaching should become “virtual” or “digital”, rather that these new methods of teaching can flow out of the research agenda of the wider university towards a postdigital strategy for teaching.<br />
<br />
To move forward under the terms of this proposal, the following tentative goals for a university are suggested:<br />
<br />
1.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Strengthen undergraduate admissions policies to attract students seriously committed to thinking and using the digital in new ways so that the university is not in competition with other local universities. Concentrate on attracting students to as a distinctive university with a "digital-first" mission, with a particular institutional character – a university that understands and seeks to shape the digital future. The digital-first research university.<br />
2.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Consolidate the current tendency toward multi-school system so that duplication of effort is avoided, especially in terms of administration. Use this to create more opportunities for interdisciplinary work that uses digital technology in new ways across cognate disciplines, each organised as departments (giving a vertical institutional structure based on discipline) with a manageable faculty size (perhaps within Colleges to share common administrative tasks). Through the use of digital structures a university could seek to create new horizontal “Schools” of knowledge (giving a horizontal institutional structure based on research theme or area) that can act as “pop-up fields” enrolling staff across the university in new experimental research areas, e.g. digital studies, biosemiotics, computational thinking, automation. These “Digital Schools” could be reminiscent of the original notion of “Schools of Study” in the founding structures of the University of Sussex, which likewise were horizontal fields of knowledge that extended beyond subject areas.<br />
3.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The “Digital-First Research University” theme would be adopted as a new institutional character for the university seeking to challenge the American Research University as a particularly institutional type.<br />
4.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Upgrading the quality of programmes and to ensure they all provide the groundworks for a “digital” education and preparation for thinking and working in a digital age. Situate expertise jointly in a “digital college” to share ideas and practices (this could lead to a potential for validating outside courses).<br />
5.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Increase and concentrate a significant proportion of a university's energies towards graduate and advanced professional training with digital-first approaches prioritised, particularly in relation to the challenge that digital ways-of-doing will have within these professional spheres.<br />
6.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>With faculty recruitment concentrate on obtaining more staff with some element of advanced training in relation to the digital, whether that be methodological, data scientific, critical, or creative.<br />
7.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Structure organized research units (ORUs), such as institutes, centres and groups of teams and laboratories, as horizontal research strata outside of traditional academic structures of departments and faculties. Create sunset clauses in their constitutions to prevent them outliving their function, perhaps with a “living will” to allow them to be easily closed, but also ensure rotation of posts every three years to prevent the inevitable decline in their research energies and capacities.<br />
<br />
<b>Initial Concrete Proposals</b><br />
<br />
A digital-first research university needs a “centre” to the university. The chapel or the library no longer provide that function, instead it is suggested that a site/building that houses both a digital college and an institute of advanced digital study would replace them.<br />
<br />
a.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Create a “<b>Digital College</b>” which is a ‘virtual’ undergraduate teaching college in the university and to which certain modules are associated. These modules which are in effect “digital electives” which can be added to the student’s underlying degree programme so that they graduate in their subject area but with “Honours from the Digital College” or “With Digital Honours”. Some thought might have to made as to how much credit would be required, perhaps another 20 or 30 credits, but this could be through an additional 15 credits at level 5, and again at level 6. These modules should be delivered completely digitally using video chat augmented with digital platform support. It would be expected that the more ambitious and hard-working students would be interested in taking this additional work, and I am thinking about the way in which the American honors programmes work as a model. The digital college could experiment with new forms of preceptorial teaching, using digital methods to augment the independent reading, discussion in small groups, and individual meetings with the lecturer. Some examples that could be incorporated include collaborative or contributory digital annotation, data sprints, collaborative video essays (sometimes known as film essays), thick data methods, living labs, and student hackathons. By a digital college I expressly do not intend to mean the use of distance-learning or the various poor quality e-Learning systems currently in use across a number of universities. Rather digital-intensive teaching means that a postdigital learning environment is encouraged whereby the digital and the physical are mutually constitutive of an experience of learning that is digital-first. This is a strategy that values being-together as a learning community on campus even in the use of digital methods. With the digital college acting as an experimental laboratory for digital teaching, successful approaches could then be transferred out into the more traditional teaching methods but also open to extramural learners.<br />
<br />
b.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Create an “<b>Institute of Advanced Digital Studies</b>” which is directed to address the problems of advanced study using digital methods across the sciences, humanities and social sciences, but also the study of the digital itself through a set of research question. This would itself be very distinctive at the level of IAS’s, and would provide a university with a high-prestige world-class institute from which to articulate and develop research agendas for the university more generally, but particularly in relation to a guiding compass for further digital work. The actual constitution of the IADS is a subject for a later paper, but this could be framed in structure in a similar way to other IAS’s such as Durham IAS, Cambridge CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities), or the School of Advanced Study (SAS, University of London), offering a space for advanced work through residential fellowships for both internal and external academics. The IADS would be an incubator for ideas within the theme of the digital-first research university, and provide leadership in terms of the intellectual agenda, state-of-the-art and collaborative potentials of working within and around the questions raised by computation, software, algorithms and the digital. It could additionally provide a forum to collaboratively support the decisions by which the university incorporates digital platforms, advise on ethics, privacy considerations and generally provide academic leadership into digital technology purchasing.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>This work was funded by the British Academy (ref: MD160052) "Reassembling the University: The Idea of a University in a Digital Age". </i><i>This research is currently being developed as part of a monograph titled "The Remote University"</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<br /><br /><b>Bibliography</b><div><br /></div><div>Benton, J. (2014) The leaked New York Times innovation report is one of the key documents of this media age, <i>Nieman Labs</i>, <a href="https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-innovation-report-is-one-of-the-key-documents-of-this-media-age/">https://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-innovation-report-is-one-of-the-key-documents-of-this-media-age/</a></div><div><br /></div><div>NYT (2014a) Moving Toward ‘Digital First': A Talk With the Day Editor, <i>The New York Times</i>, May 29, 2014, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/05/29/moving-toward-digital-first-a-talk-with-the-day-editor/">https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/05/29/moving-toward-digital-first-a-talk-with-the-day-editor/</a></div><div><br /></div><div><div>NYT (2014b) Innovation Report, <i>The New York Times</i>, March 24, 2014, <a href="https://www.scribd.com/doc/224608514/The-Full-New-York-Times-Innovation-Report">https://www.scribd.com/doc/224608514/The-Full-New-York-Times-Innovation-Report</a></div><div><br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-84190517831679634892019-12-17T06:51:00.002-08:002021-08-19T15:14:15.971-07:00The Explainability Turn<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">I want to explore what is at stake when we ask: what are the effects of the disruptive technologies, networks and values that are hidden within the black box of a computational system? In this paper I aim to explore how, when we ask this question – which calls for an explanation – we inadvertently highlight the contradictions within the historically specific form of computation that emerges in late capitalism. These contradictions are continually suppressed in computational societies but generate systemic problems borne out of the need for the political economy of software to be obscured so that its functions and operations and the value they generate are hidden from public knowledge. Why should this fundamental computational political economy be concealed? One of the reasons is that an information society requires a form of public justification in order to legitimate it as an accumulation regime and further to maintain trust. Trust is a fundamental requirement of any system, and has to be stabilised through the generation of norms and practices that create justifications for the way things are. This is required, in part, because of computation’s rapid out-of-control growth into a central aspect of a nation’s economy, real or imaginary. We might also note the way in which computation destabilises the moral economy of capitalism, creating vast profits from exchange and production processes that might be considered pre-capitalistic or obscenely inegalitarian, such as intensive micro-work or fragmented labour in the gig economy. Further, many of the sectors effected by computation are increasingly predicated on the illegal manipulation or monopolisation of markets or are heavily data extractive. These effects threaten individual liberty, undermining a sense of individual autonomy, and destroying even that bulwark of the neoliberal system, consumer sovereignty. Profit from computation also often appears to require the mobilisation of persuasive technologies that cynically but very successfully manipulate addictive human behaviour. We might therefore need to re-phrase our question and ask: how much computation can society withstand?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Google, at least at one point, internally understood this distinction in terms of what it called a “creepy line”. Within the line, public acceptance of computation generates huge profits (good computation) and outside of which computation is able to create effects that would be politically or economically problematic or even socially destructive but which might generate even larger profits (bad computation). The founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, gestured towards this in their famous paper from 1998, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” where they warned that if the “search engine were ever to leave the ‘academic realm’ and become a business, it would be corrupted. It would become ‘a black art’ and ‘be advertising oriented.’” As Carr describes,</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That’s exactly what happened — not just to Google but to the internet as a whole. The white-robed wizards of Silicon Valley now ply the black arts of algorithmic witchcraft for power and money. They wanted most of all to be Gandalf, but they became Saruman (Carr 2019).</span></span></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder and chairman of Palantir, described a similar process in which he identified the importance of software companies securing a monopoly, which he termed as a movement from zero to one. The one, of course, representing the successful monopolisation of a niche or sector of the economy. Whilst this is not necessarily a surprise, the candour with which the Silicon Valley elite advocate for these economic structures, which are contrary to neoliberalism, let alone social democracy, should give us pause for thought. Indeed, Thiel goes so far as to argue that he “no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” (Thiel 2009). But whilst the exploitative organisation of a capitalist economy is not new, of course, what is new is that these processes are now intensified at a level not seen before and at all levels of society. It is no longer just the workers who are subject to processes of automation but also the owners of capital themselves and inevitably their private lives. That the millionaires and billionaires of the technology industry should feel a need to protect their own families from the worst aspects of computation, with Steve Jobs famously withholding computers from his children and Larry Page, one of the co-founders of Google, managing to keep his personal life and even his children’s name secret, is ironic given Google’s mission “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Unfortunately, this disconnectionism is not an option available to the majority of the population across the world – even as it becomes a bourgeoise aspiration through digital detox camps and how-to-disconnect-guides in national newspapers.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The contradictions generated by this new system can be observed in discourse. Concepts carry over from the computational industries and spread as explanatory ideas across society. This might be most clearly seen in the way in which computation is described simultaneously as both transparent and opaque, open and closed, augmentation and automation, creating freedom and subjugation, resistance and hegemonic power, the future of the economy and its destruction. Indeed, we see principles from software engineering offered up for social engineering, with open source identified as an exemplar principle of organisation, platforms as future models for governance, calculation substituted for thought, and social media networks replacing community. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If we focus on the important difference between two of these discursive categories, augmentation and automation, we can see how they are used to orient and justify further computation. As far back as 1981, Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, famously called computers "Bicycles for the Mind", implying that they augmented the cognitive capacities of the user, making them faster, sharper and more knowledgeable. He argued, when humans "created the bicycle, [they] created a tool that amplified an inherent ability.... The Apple personal computer is a 21st century bicycle if you will, because it's a tool that can amplify a certain part of our inherent intelligence.... [It] can distribute intelligence to where it's needed." This vision has been extremely compelling for technologists and their apologists who omitted to explain that these capacities might be reliant on wide-scale surveillance technology. But whilst this vision of bicycles for the mind might have been true in the 1980s, changes in the subsequent political economy of our societies means that computers are increasingly no longer augmenting our abilities, but might rather be automating them. Algorithms then become Weberian "iron cages" in which citizens are trapped and monitored by software, with code that executes faster than humans can think, overtaking their capacity for thought. This distinction between (i) augmentation, which extends our capacity to do things, and (ii) automation, which replaces our capacity to do something, are key legitimating concepts for understanding this struggle for the future of society. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Information economies are founded on an attempt to make thought subject to property rights – principles of reasoning, mathematical calculation, logical operations and formal principles likewise become owned and controlled. But these forms of thought also become recast as the only legitimate forms of reason, feeding back into a new image of thought. Data is increasingly associated with wealth and power, linked explicitly with the computational resources to submit this data to rapid computation and pattern matching algorithms through machine-learning and related techniques. Humans can now purchase thinking capacity whether through pattern-matching algorithms or the augmentation possibilities of personal devices. Information processing is now so fast that it can be performed in the blink of an eye, and the results used to augment, if you can afford it, or else persuade and potentially manipulate others who cannot. Depending on the price one is willing to pay, digital technologies can either increase or undermine reasoning capacities, substituting artificial analytic capacities that bypass the function of reason. For some, they literally buy better algorithms, better technologies, better capacities for thought. For the rest, algorithms overtake human cognitive faculties by shortcutting individual decisions by making a digital "suggestion" or "nudge". When it comes to cognitive functions, such as thinking, reasoning and understanding, the process of computational automation may replace important human capacities of those who cannot afford to defend themselves against it. A new inequality thus emerges in a moment of neuro-diversity created by augmenting or automating thought itself, potentially undermining democratic and public values.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It will not come as a surprise to anyone here that the actually existing informational economy is built increasingly on software that has steered capitalism towards a data-intensive form of extractive economy – what Zuboff has termed surveillance capitalism and Stiegler has identified as the Automatic Society. This has been achieved through surveillance, arbitrage, and the manipulation of markets but also crucially through facilitating monopolies of knowledge – whether through digital rights management, copyright or patents. But the contradictions at the heart of computational capital cannot be continually kept in check without the mobilisation of a set of justificatory discourses, and ideology. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One way in which this has happened is through what comes to be seen as two aspects for knowing computation. These are represented by an epistemology of computation that fetishises the surface – the surface refers to knowledge in and through the interface of a computer, in effect from the computed results of computation which may be represented visually, aurally or through haptics and which becomes commonly accepted as the computational. The definitive representation of computation has become the network, which obscures as much as it reveals. We might understand the network as an “apparatus of the dark” comparable to the lightning which Emily Dickinson memorably described as generating ignorance of what lies behind in “mansions never quite revealed”. In response to the poverty of the network, attempts to understand the mechanisms of computation has signalled a turn to stacks, infrastructure, materiality, code, software and algorithms to try to uncover aspects of the computational that have been hidden. However, I argue that the illegibility of the information society’s systems is necessary for it to function and must be generally accepted as a doxa of modern society – even as a desirable outcome. It has certainly justified the proprietary structure of copyrights and functions through notions of object-oriented design, in which knowledge must be kept obscured or hidden in software through a technical division between source code and execution. I argue that these two aspects of knowing computation are a result of this underlying political economy which generates a surface and mechanism split – a fundamental bifurcation in knowledge. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This division in knowledge is often justified through concepts of simplicity, ease of use or as convenience – most notably by the technology industries, especially the so-called FAANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google). I argue that one of the outcomes of this is the turn to “smartness” as a justificatory discourse through “operational functionality”, that is that “smart” results justify the opacity of the dark aspect of this epistemology. Smartness and opacity are therefore directly linked through an epistemological framework that establishes a causal link between data and “truth”, but not through a veracity that requires the material links in the chain of computation to be enumerated or understood. In other words, ignorance of computational processes is, under this epistemology, celebrated as a means to the ends of smartness. One of the results is to locate data as the foundation of computational inequities or computational power. Injustice is strongly linked to data problems, which can be addressed by more data, ethical data or democratising data sources. Much effort, both social, political and technical is then spent on ensuring the minimisation of bias in data, or in the presentation of data results in a manner that takes care of the data. We can therefore summarise this way of thinking through the notion of bad data in, bad data out, or as commonly understood in technology circles, garbage in, garbage out. As a result, this often means that it is generally difficult for a user to verify or question the results that computers generate even as we increasingly rely on them for facts, news and information. This confusion affects our understanding of not just an individual computer or software package, but also when the results are generated by networks of computers, and networks of networks. Thus the black box is compounded into a black network, a system of opacity which nonetheless increasingly regulates and maintains everyday life, the economy and media systems of the contemporary milieu. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One response has been to link computation intimately to the user through the computed results, through the presentation of information painted onto their screens. Computers and smartphones are not just information providers, but increasingly also windows into marketplaces for purchasing goods, newspapers and magazines, entertainment centres, maps and personal assistants, etc. This has increasingly become intensified as an intimate relationship between ourselves and our device, our screen, our network. But the way in which the personal interface of the smartphone or computer flattens the informational landscape also has the potential for confusion between different functions and information sources. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Secondly, there is also a temptation for the makers of these automated decision systems to use the calculative power of the device to persuade people to do things, whether buying a new bottle of wine, selecting a particular politician, or voting in a referendum or election. Whilst the contribution of data science, marketing data and persuasive technologies to the Trump election and the Brexit referendum remains to be fully explicated, even on a more mundane level computers are active in shaping the way we think. The most obvious example of this is Google Autocomplete on the search bar, which attempts to predict what we are searching for, but similar techniques have been incorporated into many aspects of computer interfaces through design practices that persuade or nudge particular behavioural outcomes. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Thirdly, the large quantity of data collected, the ease with which it is amassed, and combined with new systems of computation, means that new forms of surveillance are beginning to emerge which are relatively unchecked. When this is combined with their seductive predictive abilities, real potentials for misuse or mistakes are magnified. For example, in Kortrijk, Belgium, and Marbella, Spain, the local police deployed "body recognition" technology which use the walking style or clothing of individuals to track them and across the European Union at least ten countries have a police force that uses face recognition. Even with 99% accuracy in face recognition systems, the number of images in police databases makes false positives inevitable. Indeed, a 1% error rate means that 100 people will be flagged as wanted out of 10,000 innocent citizens. In the Netherlands, the police has access to a database of pictures of 1.3 million persons, many of which were never charged with a crime, in France, the national police can match CCTV footage against a file of 8 million people and in Hungary, a recent law allows police to use face recognition in ID checks. The lack of transparency in these systems and the algorithms they use is a growing social problem. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fourthly, we see the emergence of systems of intelligence through technologies of machine learning and artificial intelligence. These systems do not merely automate production and distribution processes but have the capacity to also automate consumption. The full implications of this are not to proletarianise labour, but to proletarianise the cognitive workers in a society, making many formerly white collar jobs redundant, but they also directly undermine and overtake the human capacity of reason. We also see this in both the monopolisation of vertical and horizontal dimensions of the market, which elsewhere I have explored through the notion of infrasomatization – the creation of cognitive infrastructures that automate value-chains, cognitive labour, networks and logistics into new highly profitable assemblages built on intensive data capture.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">These technologies use the mobilisation of processes of selecting and directing activity, often through the automation of stereotypes, clichés and simple answers (Malabou 2019: 52, Noble 2018: 50). But the underlying processes that calculate the textual results, and the explanation as to how it was done is hidden from the user, whether they are, for example, denied a loan, insurance cover, or welfare benefits. This explanatory deficit is a growing problem in our societies as the reliance on algorithms, some poorly programmed, creates potential situations that are inequitable and unfair, but also with little means of redress for citizens. Unless addressed, this will be a growing source of discontent in society, but also serve to delegitimate political and administrative systems which will appear as increasingly remote, unchecked and inexplicable to members of society. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Understanding the way in which the computational generates and magnifies uncertainty and a feeling of rising social risk and instability is also in my mind connected to a social desire for tethering knowledge, of grounding it in some way. We see tendencies generated by the liquidation of information modalities in “fake news”, conspiracy theories, social media virality, and a rising distrust towards science and expertise and the rise of relativism. This is also to be connected to new forms of nationalism, populism, and the turn to traditional knowledge to provide a new, albeit misplaced, ground for social epistemology. I also think this is linked to the temptation for explanations using new metaphysics of the computational which rely on formalism and mathematics as an attempt to understand computation through axioms, mathematical or computational notations and rules far removed from concrete experience. This new search for ground or foundations whether through identity, tradition, formalism or metaphysics is, to my mind, symptomatic of the difficulty of understanding and connecting computation and its effects across scales of individual and social life. As a result of these problems becoming politicised and matters of concern for the wider public, if not addressed, computation would begin to suffer a legitimacy crisis.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As a result of new forms of obscurity in the use of artificial intelligence, automated decision systems and machine learning systems, a a new explanatory demand has resulted in a very fascinating constellation which we might understand as the social right to explanation. This has come to be called explainability.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The European Union General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679, known as the GDPR, is key to help us to understand this. This regulation creates the right "to obtain an explanation of [a] decision reached after such assessment and to challenge the decision" (GDPR 2016, Goodman et al 2016). The GDPR creates a new kind of subject, the "data subject" to whom a right to explanation (amongst other data protection and privacy rights) is given. Additionally, it has created a legal definition of processing through a computer algorithm (GDPR 2016 Art. 4). In consequence, this has given rise to a notion of explainability which creates the right "to obtain an explanation of [a] decision reached after such assessment and to challenge the decision" (GDPR 2016 Recital 71). When instantiated in national legislation, such as the Data Protection Act 2018 in the UK, it creates what we might call the social right to explanation. Thus, I argue that explainability is not just an issue of legal rights, it has also created a normative potential for this social right to explanation. Explainability can potentially challenge algorithms and their social norms and hierarchies and has a potential to contest these platforms. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the context of computational systems, the first important question we need to consider is what counts as an explanation? Explanations are assumed to tell us how things work and thereby giving us the power to change our environment in order to meet our own ends. Thus, explainability and the underlying explanation are linked to the question of justification. I call this the "Explainability Turn". </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hempel and Oppenheim (1988) argue that an explanation seeks to "exhibit and to clarify in a more rigorous manner" with reference to general laws. Some of the examples they give include, a mercury thermometer which can be explained using physical properties of the glass and mercury (Hempel and Oppenheim 1988:10). Similarly, they present the example of an observer of a row boat where part of the oar is submerged under water and appears to be bent upwards (Hempel and Oppenheim 1988: 10). An explanation therefore attempts to explain with reference to general laws. As Mill argues, "an individual fact is said to be explained by pointing out its cause, that is, by stating the law or laws of causation, of which its production is an instance" (Mill 1858). Similarly, Ducasse argued in 1925 that "explanation essentially consists in the offering of a hypothesis of fact, standing to the fact to be explained as case of antecedent to case of consequent of some already known law of connection" (Ducasse 2015: 37). Hempel and Oppenheim therefore argue that an explanation can be divided into its two constituent parts, the explanadum and the explanans (Hempel and Oppenheim 1988: 10). The explanandum is a logical consequence of the explanans. The explanans itself must have empirical context, which creates conditions for testability. In this sense of explanation, science is often supposed to be the best means of generating explanations (Pitt 1988: 7).</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">However, this causal mode of explanation is inadequate in fields concerned with purposive behaviour, as in computational systems, where the goals sought by the system are required in order to provide an explanation (Ruben 2016). Therefore we should ask: How long did it take? Was it interrupted at any point? Who gave it? When? Where? What were the exact words used? For whose benefit was it given? It makes sense to ask: Who created it first? Is it very complicated? (Ruben 2016: 6). </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the case of computational systems it has become more common for reference to purposive behaviour, such as in so-called machine behaviour, to be given in relation to "motivations" and therefore for teleological rather than causal explanation. Thus, the goals sought by the system are required in order to provide an explanation. Teleological approaches to explanation may also make us feel that we really understand a phenomenon because it is accounted for in terms of purposes, with which we are familiar from our own experience of purposive behaviour. One can, therefore, see a great temptation to use teleological explanation in relation to AI systems, particularly by creating a sense of an empathetic understanding of the "personalities of the agents." In relation to explanation, therefore, explainability needs to provide an answer to the question "why?" to close the gap in understanding. This raises a new potential for critique.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Crucially, this connection between an explanatory product and the legal regime that enforces it has forced system designers and programmers to look for explanatory models that are sufficient to provide legal cover, but also at a level at which they are presentable to the user or data subject. This of course leads to the temptation of creating persuasive rather than transparent explanations or a "good enough" explanation. The concept of explainability, and the related practices of designing and building explainable systems, also have an underlying theory of general explainability and a theory of the human mind. These two theories are rarely explicitly articulated in the literature, and there is an urgent need to bring them together to interrogate how explainability cannot be a mere technical response to the contemporary problem of automated decision systems. We need, therefore, to place explainability within a historical and conceptual milieu through a deeper understanding of the political economy of the information society. Many current discussions of explainability tend to be chiefly interested in an explanatory product, whereas I argue that historical understanding of the explanatory process will have greater impacts for education, society and politics.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span>I argue that the concept of explainability can help to critique a particular form of thought which is justified through the universalisation of a historically specific form of capitalist computation: where thought becomes computation. We must continually remind ourselves that the current information economy is historical. It owes its success and profitability to a legislative assignment of creative rights to the automatic operation of computers that emerges in capitalism (as automation). This legal structure is required to make the information economy profitable through copyright, and to a lesser extent patents. Other computations are possible, and different assemblages of computation and law might generate economic alternatives that mitigate or remove the current negative disruptive effects of computation in society. It is crucial to recognise that there is no “pure” or metaphysical computation. Indeed, through the mobilisation of concepts such as explainability the underlying contradictions of computational capitalism can be laid manifest and more importantly challenged and changed. This suggests that a rethinking of computation is needed to move it away from its current tendencies, from what I have called neo-computationalism, or right computationalism, which is geared towards some of the worst excesses of capitalism, and rethought within a new conception of left computationalism.</span><span>[1]</span><span> This would need to be developed through education and the capacity-building of explanatory publics that in using explainability as a critical concept create the conditions for greater democratic thought and practice in computational capitalism.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>This is uncorrected notes of a paper that was given at <a href="https://recherchecontributive.org/enmi-2019/">International, Internation, Nations, Transitions: Penser les Localités dans la Mondialisation</a>, ENMI 2019, l’Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation, Centre Pompidou, Grande Salle, Paris, France, 17-18 Dec 2019.</i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Notes</b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">[1] By left computationalism and right computationalism I am gesturing toward left and right Hegelianism. I hope to develop this idea in a future paper</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Selected Bibliography</b></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Carr, N. (2019) Larry and Sergey: a valediction, http://www.roughtype.com/?p=8661%0D</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Darpa (n.d.) Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), https://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial-intelligence</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ducasse, C. J. (2015) Explanation, Mechanism and Teleology, in <i>Truth, Knowledge and Causation</i>, Routledge.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">GDPR (2016) General Data Protection Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Goodman, B. & Flaxman, S. (2016) European Union regulations on algorithmic decision-making and a "right to explanation", https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.08813</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hempel and Oppenheim (1988) Studies in the Logic of Explanation, in Pitt, J.C. (ed.) <i>Theories of Explanation</i>, OUP.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Kuang, C. (2017) Can A.I. Be Taught to Explain Itself?, <i>The New York</i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Times</i>, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/magazine/can-ai-be-taught-to-explain-itself.html</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Noble, S. U. (2018) <i>Algorithms of Oppression</i>, NYU Press.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mill, J. S. (1858) <i>Of the Explanation of the Laws of Nature, in A System of Logic,</i> New York. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Pitt, J.C. (1988) <i>Theories of Explanation</i>, OUP.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ruben, D. H. (2016) <i>Explaining Explanation</i>, Routledge.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sample, I. (2017) Computer says no, <i>The Guardian</i>, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/05/computer-says-no- why-making-ais-fair-accountable-and- transparent-is-crucial</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Thiel, P. (2019) The Education of a Libertarian, <i>Cato Unbound</i>, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 22px; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-9439880194011349382018-10-02T06:22:00.002-07:002021-01-14T02:54:41.692-08:00Explainable Aesthetics: Explainability and the Aesthetics of Explanation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9IoixC4ODpQYNRhxE8Jvsy879whyphenhyphenm8hUgsWlWC3PEmhKXGxmweMkCLunx3Tr-ox64EondCNp36UAlU9LQX1X80-nFrvg5JBp3s6wPNJM2HCgvN5WTs0OgXg8ANMsEZCvw6Jej/s1600/Screenshot+2018-10-02+at+14.21.42.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1120" data-original-width="1103" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9IoixC4ODpQYNRhxE8Jvsy879whyphenhyphenm8hUgsWlWC3PEmhKXGxmweMkCLunx3Tr-ox64EondCNp36UAlU9LQX1X80-nFrvg5JBp3s6wPNJM2HCgvN5WTs0OgXg8ANMsEZCvw6Jej/s200/Screenshot+2018-10-02+at+14.21.42.png" width="196" /></a>Computation combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning has raised interesting questions about authorship, authenticity, post-human futures, creativity and AI-driven aesthetics. Many of these debates foreground the question of the human, whether as post-human technologies or as challenges to the privileged status of humans as intelligent, thinking or creative beings. However with the recent Data Protection Act 2018 which was the enabling legislation in the UK for the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) a new right has been created in relation to automated algorithmic systems that requires the "controller" of the algorithm to supply an explanation of how a decision was made to the user (or "data subject") – the right to explanation.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[1]</span> This has come to be known as the problem of explainability. More particularly, under the GDPR Article 22,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
the data controller shall implement suitable measures to safeguard the data subject’s rights and freedoms and legitimate interests, at least the right to obtain human intervention on the part of the controller, to express his or her point of view and to contest the decision (<a href="https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/" target="_blank">GDPR, Art. 22</a>)</blockquote>
The GDPR has a number of interesting effects, firstly defining a new kind of subject, the "data subject" to whom this right to explanation about an algorithm (amongst other data protection and privacy rights) has been given, this is defined as follows,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person (<a href="https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/" target="_blank">GDPR Art. 4)</a></blockquote>
Secondly, this has created a particular legal definition of what processing through a computer algorithm is, in this case processing,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
means any operation or set of operations which is performed on personal data or on sets of personal data, whether or not by automated means, such as collection, recording, organisation, structuring, storage, adaptation or alteration, retrieval, consultation, use, disclosure by transmission, dissemination or otherwise making available, alignment or combination, restriction, erasure or destruction (<a href="https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/" target="_blank">GDPR Art. 4)</a></blockquote>
Brought together this creates the notion of a "data subject" with a range of very specific and unique rights as a "natural person" which distinguishes that person from the artificial intelligence, machine-learning system or algorithm. Indeed, one might read this definition as a <i>post</i>-posthuman subjectivity creating and reinforcing a boundary between human and machine. The full range of rights are:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><a href="https://gdpr-info.eu/chapter-3/" target="_blank">Rights of the data subject</a></b> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Section 1<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Transparency and modalities</b>Article 12<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Transparent information, communication and modalities for the exercise of the rights of the data subject </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Section 2<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Information and access to personal data</b>Article 13<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Information to be provided where personal data are collected from the data subject<br />
Article 14<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Information to be provided where personal data have not been obtained from the data subject<br />
Article 15<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Right of access by the data subject </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Section 3<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Rectification and erasure</b>Article 16<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Right to rectification<br />
Article 17<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’)<br />
Article 18<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Right to restriction of processing<br />
Article 19<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Notification obligation regarding rectification or erasure of personal data or restriction of processing<br />
Article 20<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Right to data portability </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Section 4<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Right to object and automated individual decision-making</b>Article 21<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Right to object<br />
Article 22<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Automated individual decision-making, including profiling </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Section 5<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Restrictions</b>Article 23<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>– Restrictions (<a href="https://gdpr-info.eu/chapter-3/" target="_blank">GDPR, Chapter III</a>)</blockquote>
The non-binding GDPR Recital 71 is the most interesting in regard to the notion of explainability, it states,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
the data subject should have the right not to be subject to a decision, which may include a measure, evaluating personal aspects relating to him or her which is based solely on automated processing and which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her, such as automatic refusal of an online credit application or e-recruiting practices without any human intervention... such processing should be subject to suitable safeguards, which should include specific information to the data subject and the right to obtain human intervention, to express his or her point of view, to obtain an explanation of the decision reached after such assessment and to challenge the decision (<a href="https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-71/" target="_blank">GDPR Recital 71</a>)</blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBndBycw7RYa3FIhb9wwh2g7uZlg4jIYP9te-ITrfaP90prXCnLJdeyA_K90BjH-IiVxTujH9U6tu6_tghixGHVh8sZWMSNCFjcge9kEaYvHJDYX_38rMs37y3Yx65n6d2kvv6/s1600/GDPR-questions-answers.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="395" data-original-width="785" height="161" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBndBycw7RYa3FIhb9wwh2g7uZlg4jIYP9te-ITrfaP90prXCnLJdeyA_K90BjH-IiVxTujH9U6tu6_tghixGHVh8sZWMSNCFjcge9kEaYvHJDYX_38rMs37y3Yx65n6d2kvv6/s320/GDPR-questions-answers.png" width="320" /></a></div>
Whilst a recital is non-binding, the "European Court of Justice (ECJ) jurisprudence reveals that the role of Recitals is “to dissolve ambiguity in the operative text of a framework.”", it therefore provides a critical reference point for future interpretations (Casey et al 2018: 17). This is where the notion of explanation as a derivation from automated algorithmic systems is largely given as a requirement, and in effect requires a deconstruction of the processes of computation, including the value specific and calculative model that was used to perform the processing. But there are difficult questions in relation to this requirement, indeed,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
this might be impossible, even for systems that seem relatively simple on the surface, such as the apps and websites that use deep learning to serve ads or recommend songs. The computers that run those services have programmed themselves, and they have done it in ways we cannot understand. Even the engineers who build these apps cannot fully explain their behavior (<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/" target="_blank">Knight 2017</a>).</blockquote>
The major reason for these requirements is that there are greater concerns over biases, whether intentional or not being built into an algorithmic or machine-learning system and reflected in an "anxiety felt by those who fear the potential for bias to infiltrate machine decision-making systems once humans are removed from the equation" (Casey et al 2018: 4). So, this new "right to explanation" has been mobilised as an attempt to mitigate these worries but also put in place legislative means to seek redress from them. As Casey et al 2018 have explained,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
the “complexity of machine-learning” algorithms used in such systems “can make it challenging to understand how an automated decision- making process or profiling works.” But such complexity, it insisted, “is no excuse for failing to provide information” to data subjects... companies making automated decisions which fall under Article 22(1) “should find simple ways to tell the data subject about the rationale behind, or the criteria relied on in reaching the decision”—albeit “without necessarily always attempting a complex explanation of the algorithms used or [a] disclosure of the full algorithm (Casey et al 2018: 30)</blockquote>
Indeed, they further argue that this does not necessarily mean that the algorithm as such need be provided, nor details of the processing steps outlined, indeed this is rather a representational issue. The processing need be presented as a simplified model or explanation that shows the general contours of the algorithm used in this case,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The “right to explanation” may not require that companies pry open their “black boxes” per se, but it does require that they evaluate the interests of relevant stakeholders, understand how their systems process data, and establish policies for documenting and justifying key design features throughout a system’s life cycle (Casey et al 2018: 39)</blockquote>
So the "GDPR provides an unambiguous 'right to explanation' with sweeping legal implications for the design, prototyping, field testing, and deployment of automated data processing systems. Failing to countenance this right could subject enterprises to economic sanctions of truly historic magnitudes—a threat that simply did not exist under the GDPR’s predecessor" (Casey et al 2018: 49).<br />
<br />
So what are the implications for aesthetic works in this case?<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcGZXACkbQ7mea4ZPcMLaszAwIhDUuDVXaqI7SNgSWhZoaO2OTnRvwT0dFIj_-8jg5irWcf88EN3fk_ktNHG2lnwowkjIifpTU9HkGlhunlxrrbiXjZ72iIn0mDCHDbIQjeQpn/s1600/2_EITSOG_SCREENSHOT_HUGERES_01_small.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcGZXACkbQ7mea4ZPcMLaszAwIhDUuDVXaqI7SNgSWhZoaO2OTnRvwT0dFIj_-8jg5irWcf88EN3fk_ktNHG2lnwowkjIifpTU9HkGlhunlxrrbiXjZ72iIn0mDCHDbIQjeQpn/s320/2_EITSOG_SCREENSHOT_HUGERES_01_small.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Screenshot from Emissary in the Squat of Gods, Ian Cheng 2015. <br />
Live simulation and story, infinite duration, sound. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The discussion I wish to open is largely speculative. It seems to me that we have two issues that are interesting to consider, firstly that the GDPR might require algorithmic artworks to have or to be <b>explainable aesthetics</b> and therefore subject to the same data protection regime as other algorithms. This may mean they are required to provide their processing descriptions under this "right to explanation". So, for example, it would be interesting to raise a request for explanation in relation to Ian Cheng's work on algorithmically structured visual environments (Steyerl and Cheng 2017). What would such explanation consist in? How would it be presented and what would be the relationship of this explanation to the installation as an object of art.<br />
<br />
Secondly, there is the question of the <b>aesthetics of explanation</b>, in as much as the explanations will not necessary need to be code-based or detailed descriptions of the algorithm, instead they may well be representations or stereotyped, designed and visually engaging as a mediation of the underlying algorithm and its processing. It seems to me that for the average "data subject" a highly complex mathematical explanation will be useless as an explanatory device, so the kinds of explanatory models being calculated from a system will need to be mediated through aesthetics (such as in the user interface, or through a video-essay of some kind).<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[2] </span><br />
<br />
As we see the roll-out of a greater number of projects using AI or machine-learning we might see other artist's and individuals interventions, not as algorithms in and of themselves, but as a kind of algorithmic critique (or "tests") (see Berry 2015: 65) that seek to force prior artworks to explain themselves. Secondly, I should imagine more attention will start to be paid to the explanations that are generated and the way in which they are structured, the information they provide and the aesthetic language they deploy.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">This post was prompted in response to a paper by Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths) talking about "On Creative Computers, Art Robots and AI Dreams" at the Intelligent Futures: AI, Automation and Cognitive Ecologies, organised at the University of Sussex 1-2 Oct 2018. </span></i><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Notes</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">1. A "‘controller’ means the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data; where the purposes and means of such processing are determined by Union or Member State law, the controller or the specific criteria for its nomination may be provided for by Union or Member State law" (<a href="https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/" target="_blank">GDPR Art. 4</a>)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">2. There are also very interesting implications for the notion of the "truth" of an algorithm and what constitutes an accurate or correct representation of it. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<br />
<b>Bibliography</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Berry, D. M. (2015) <i>The Philosophy of Software</i>, London: Palgrave.<br />
<br />
Casey, Bryan and Farhangi, Ashkon and Vogl, Roland, (2018) Rethinking Explainable Machines: The GDPR's 'Right to Explanation' Debate and the Rise of Algorithmic Audits in Enterprise (February 19, 2018). Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: <a href="https://ssrn.com/abstract=3143325">https://ssrn.com/abstract=3143325</a><br />
<br />
Steyerl, H. and Cheng, I. (2017) Simulated Subjects: Glass Bead in conversation with Ian Cheng and Hito Steyerl, <i>Glass Bead</i>, <a href="http://www.glass-bead.org/article/simulated-subjects/">http://www.glass-bead.org/article/simulated-subjects/</a><br />
<br />
Knight, W. (2017) The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI, Technology Review, <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/">https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-29863065614548594282018-09-22T10:16:00.002-07:002021-08-19T15:10:52.725-07:00Infrasomatization, the Datanthropocene and the Negantropic UniversityI use the notion of infrasomatization to expand the categories of exosomatization and endosomatization developed by Alfred J. Lotka and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in their work on ecological economics and by Karl Popper in relation to what he called objective knowledge (see Lotka 1925; Georgescu-Roegen 1970, 1972, 1978; Popper 1972). The terms exosomatization and endosomatization have also more recently deployed in the work of Bernard Stiegler in relation to thinking about human augmentation and digital technologies, particularly in relation to the anthropocene and the counter-entropic move towards a “neganthropocene” (see for example, Stiegler 2015, 2018). Whilst these have been important contributions, I want to argue that we need to move away from a binary between endosomatic and exosomatic, by introducing a third term, “infrasomatization”.<br />
<br />
I think this captures better the reticular nature of specific forms of digital technologies, which create new non-human agencies and potentially unpredictable entopic effects – so infrasomatization is also an informatization, a softwarization and an automatization. This also calls for a pluralisation of the notions of anthropocene and neganthropocene, so that we can think more broadly about alternative neganthropocenes in relation to the current situation, but I do not have time to explore this specific challenge further here.<br />
<br />
Instead I want to concentrate on the notion of infrasomatization, that is how algorithms are deployed as a new form of infrastructure. That is, algorithms are not just exosomatizations, not just the production of tools or instruments. Infrasomatizations are, rather, the production of constitutive infrastructures. Indeed, infrasomatizations rely on a complex fusion of endosomatic capacities and exosomatic technics leading to what Berns and Rouvroy call algorithmic governance (Berns and Rouvroy 2013) and Stiegler has called the Automatic Society.<br />
<br />
Infrasomatizations can be thought of as social-structuring technologies – inscribing new forms of the social (or sometimes the anti-social) onto the bodies and minds of humans and their institutions. Infrasomatizations correspondingly have an obduracy that can be mobilised to support specific instances of thought, rationality and action. They are latent technologies that are made to be always already poised for use, to be configured and reconfigured, and built into particular constellations that form the underlying structures for social and psychic individuation. Infrasomatizations also gestures toward a kind of gigantism, the sheer massiveness and interconnectedness of fundamental computational technologies and resources. Their size usefully contrasts with the phenomenological experience of the minuteness or ephemerality of the kinds of personal devices that are increasingly merely interfaces or gateways to underlying infrasomatic systems.<br />
<br />
Today, we talk a lot about data infrastructures, computational materiality for the highly digital sociality we live in today, especially the questions raised in the relations between the social and social media, but we also need to examine the way in which infrasomatizations creates cognitive infrastructures that proletarianise our cognitive faculties creating anti-thought. Some examples include, brain-interfaces, conversational interfaces, implants, and algorithmic user interfaces that constantly reshape themselves based on their monitoring and processing of the user space and their practices. That is, that through these technologies, the loop from within the brain to the outside environment is closing, and the aperture of thought is compressed.<br />
<br />
Thus, the capacity for the human brain to process not just the computation, or even to perceive that such computations have taken place, is impaired, if not destroyed. I am very interested in exploring how algorithms are therefore used as not just a technique in the exercising of power, but their use in infrastructures to individuate strategic behaviour through their deployment in the management of thought in infrastructures of communication as an aspect of our everyday lives. This calls for urgent attention to the temptation for manipulation using these new infrastructures but also how a new critique of their political economy, together with the development of an ethics of data-intensive technologies, is key for thinking new forms of neganthropocenes.<br />
<br />
In this post I want to briefly raise the question of the implications of infrasomatizations at the level of the social and the individual.<br />
<br />
First, we might explore how infrasomatizations are created as infrastructure, and more particularly how these new forms of infrastructure are positioned to change or replace existing institutions. This allows us to think about institutions as knowing-spaces, and how they force us to consider the political economic issues of making institutions, combined with a focus on creating specific epistemic communities within them – that is, how do infrastructures think. By ascertaining how infrasomatization effect knowledge formations, we can work to produce new knowledges and practices that contest particular institutional structures and thereby working towards a new kind of literacy to empower citizens to contest a newly digital data-centric life. But infrasomatizations is also the process by which a particular mode of rationality, calculative and algorithmic, becomes hegemonic through a colonisation of an increasing number of social spheres, from law, politics, communication, media and education, etc.<br />
<br />
This process of infrasomatization suppresses and eventually replaces the local rationalities within particular social spheres, which once constituted the functional independence of the complementary spheres of social life, into a single regime of computation. This creates a mono-rationality, both in theory and practice, and a single temporal and spatial gamut. There is also a tendency to create interdependences and structural brittleness, and allows the macroscopic functions of the derangement of social knowledge by the application of computational functions and efficiencies across multiple realities. The result is a reduction in the systemic resilience of the social system, and thus the danger that systemic collapse is made more likely, and more difficult to protect against.<br />
<br />
This is one of the implications of moving into a data-intensive society, indeed, the anthropocene is also a <i>datanthropocene</i>. This notion of data-intensivity I draw from the notion of a fourth paradigm in science. This is informed both by the notion of the transformation of life by computation and by an understanding of the changing practices of scientific work understood as a set of scientific exemplar paradigms. These follow from the (1) experimental science paradigm, which is then replaced by (2) theoretical science, (3) computational science (models), and now (4) data-intensive science. This paradigm is often described using the four ‘V’s of data, volume, variety, velocity and veracity. This is a situation in which scientists are often overwhelmed by the volume of data which comes from a variety of sources, such as data collected by instruments, data generated by simulations and data generated by sensor networks. As Hey et al (2009: xiii) argue, “data-intensive science consists of three basic activities: capture, curation, and analysis. Data comes in all scales and shapes, covering large international experiments; cross-laboratory, single-laboratory, and individual observations; and potentially individuals’ lives.” Further, they argue,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
data-intensive science promises breakthroughs across a broad spectrum. As the Earth becomes increasingly instrumented with low-cost, high-bandwidth sensors, we will gain a better understanding of our environment via a virtual, distributed whole-Earth “macroscope.” Similarly, the night sky is being brought closer with high-bandwidth, widely available data-visualization systems. This virtuous circle of computing technology and data access will help educate the public about our planet and the Universe at large (Hey et al (2009: 224).</blockquote>
The data intensive economy is therefore the economic realisation of the gains and possibilities of the data-intensive scientific milieu but it is also an extractive economy creating an economy of krisis. It creates new economic structures but also new social realities and data-intensive subjectivities and hence new problems for society to negotiate. In response, we need to develop new possibilities through what I call data-intensive critique together with the creation of data-intensive ethics.<br />
<br />
For me, a critical site for both understanding these issues and for starting the process of responding to it is the university. Not just the university we have, but the university we have to have, the university we need to build – what we might call the negentropic university. I have started to describe this new form of the university as a data-intensive university, one that is increasingly challenged by a data-centric economy and polity.<br />
<br />
I argue that these shifting social, political and economic forces call for a new distinctive role for the university. But they also raise new questions for the university: How do the academic disciplines respond, what are the implications for their teaching and research? What are the implications for the wider university? Where is the centre of the university in a data-intensive age?<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
Rethinking the university in light of the challenge of infrasomatization will, I believe, sustain and augment the existing institutional character of the university but also provide new orientations and give an impetus to a set of new long-range research commitments for institutions of learning. I argue for the need to create a special role for the university in relation to its new infrasomatic environment and a data-intensive cultural milieu. This would have institutional implications in terms of the shape or pattern of the university, its funding, the organisational structures and cultures, its work in teaching students, and the kind of research and knowledge produced.<br />
<br />
If I am right that infrasomatizations are creating a new orientation for the university, what I call the ‘data-intensive research university’, in response we need to think the possibilities for the negentropic university. The digital opens up new ways of seeing and enables new methods for undertaking research. As such, a negentropic university supports efforts to ensure a new spirit of discovery, creativity and the promotion of research through the use of computational techniques and practices which will transform the culture of the university. This I believe will have a fundamental transformatory effect on the idea of a mission for the university, and the way in which the institutional pattern and organisation structure of the university is currently constituted.<br />
<br />
In relation to the learning, development and application of critical reason in a data-intensive society I have time only to make a few preliminary remarks. In the case of this algorithmic condition, thought is suspended and crystallized through infrasomatizations that accentuate screenic pragmata. That is, thought directed to thinking about objects in terms of practice rather than theoretically or critically. Certain modes of thinking are de-emphasized by algorithmic nets, so critical reason, concentrated attention, and even memory are attenuated. Instead associational ways of thinking are prioritised through concepts of streaming, surfing, or algorithmic reverie – what we might call the stabilisation of passive intellect. The possibility of thought is thereby prescribed by a net of software that surrounds and envelopes the mind, creating a new topology of attention, but also augmenting the human mind in radical ways. The university, in its work in the creation of critical reason remains a key, if not the key, institution here to contest these developments.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>This is a slightly shorter version of a talk given at the </i><a href="https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/work-marathon" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Work Marathon at the Serpentine Galleries</a><i> on 22 September 2018. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>The 2018 Serpentine Marathon has the goal of contributing to the writing of a manifesto about economics for an age of planetary-scale environmental crisis, looking to reduce the human footprint on the planet and reverse the phenomenon of entropy. The first version of the manifesto will be issued on 23 September, and the definitive version of which will be sent to the United Nations, in Geneva, on 10 January 2020 – the day of the centenary anniversary of the League of Nations. </i><br />
<br />
<b>Bibliography</b><br />
<br />
Berns, T. and Rouvroy, A. (2013) Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d'émancipation : le disparate comme condition d'individuation par la relation?, accessed 14/12/2016, <a href="https://works.bepress.com/antoinette_rouvroy/47/download/">https://works.bepress.com/antoinette_rouvroy/47/download/</a><br />
<br />
Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1970/2011) The Entropy Law and the Economic Problem, in Bonaiuti, M. (Ed.), <i>From Bioeconomics to Degrowth: Georgescu-Roegen's 'New Economics' in Eight Essays</i>, London: Routledge Studies in Ecological Economics, pp. 49–57.<br />
<br />
Georgescu-Roegen, N., (1972/2011). Energy and Economic Myths, in Bonaiuti, M. (Ed.), <i>From Bioeconomics to Degrowth: Georgescu-Roegen's 'New Economics' in Eight Essays</i>, London: Routledge Studies in Ecological Economics, pp. 58–92<br />
(2011).<br />
<br />
Georgescu-Roegen, N., (1978/2011) Inequality, Limits and Growth From a<br />
Bioeconomic Viewpoint, in Bonaiuti, M. (Ed.), <i>From Bioeconomics to Degrowth: Georgescu-Roegen's 'New Economics' in Eight Essays</i>, London: Routledge Studies in Ecological Economics, pp. 103–113 (2011).<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Hey, T., Tansley, S., and Tolle, K. (2009) The Fourth Paradigm Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery, Microsoft Research. <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Fourth_Paradigm.pdf">https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Fourth_Paradigm.pdf</a><br />
<br />
Lotka, A.J. (1925) <i>Elements of Physical Biology</i>. William & Wilkins Company, Baltimore.<br />
<br />
Popper, K. (1972) <i>Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach</i>, Oxford: University of Oxford Press.<br />
<br />
Stiegler, B. (2015) Power, Powerlessness, Thinking, and Future, Los Angeles Review of Books, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/power-powerlessness-thinking-and-future/#!">https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/power-powerlessness-thinking-and-future/#!</a><br />
<br />
Stiegler, B. (2018), <i>The Neganthropocene</i>, Open Humanities Press, <a href="http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Stiegler_2018_The-Neganthropocene.pdf">http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Stiegler_2018_The-Neganthropocene.pdf</a><br />
<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-15704740216471954902018-09-14T04:57:00.000-07:002018-09-15T04:43:01.909-07:00The Data-Intensive University<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJCcEV0XZjzutmQ6VrU-dGJhBAqejf1_840B7sZM46rHvjoWSiTBEVyYrggVutN03fT4KnZBfoREenfkdT8DdG2tGysXKf6UsUh-uWcs3kMP22A85CkKXzSlYMKOckjM1jc2M5/s1600/Magdalen+College+2017.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="1536" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJCcEV0XZjzutmQ6VrU-dGJhBAqejf1_840B7sZM46rHvjoWSiTBEVyYrggVutN03fT4KnZBfoREenfkdT8DdG2tGysXKf6UsUh-uWcs3kMP22A85CkKXzSlYMKOckjM1jc2M5/s320/Magdalen+College+2017.jpg" title="Photographed by David M. Berry" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Magdalen College, University of Oxford<br />
<br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Previously I have argued that we now live within a horizon of interpretability determined in large part by the capture of data and its articulation in and through algorithms (Berry 2011, 2012, 2014, 2017; see also Golumbia 2009). Software and data shape and mediate our direct experience of political, economic and social systems through the automation of innumerable processes. This I call the data-intensive society, drawing on the notion of a fourth paradigm in science. This is informed by an understanding of the changing practices of scientific work understood as a set of scientific exemplar paradigms. These follow from the (1) experimental science paradigm, which is then replaced by (2) theoretical science, (3) computational science (models), and now (4) data-intensive science. Relatedly, the data intensive economy is an economic realisation of the projected gains and possibilities of the data-intensive scientific milieu. This will create new economic structures but also new social realities and, I would argue, data-intensive subjectivities and hence new problems for society to negotiate. Developing a set of practices around what we might call <i>data-intensive critique</i> and <i>data-intensive ethics</i> by thinking through the connected questions that are raised by the data-intensive society is a key element of this.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So I am keen to connect these questions to what I have started to think about as the data-intensive university and hence to the wider questions raised by a data-centric economy and polity (this post is one of a series where I want to explore and deepen a knowledge of this notion). These shifting social, political and economic forces demand a new distinctive role for the university and speaks to a situation in which universities also want to enhance their individual prestige and intellectual endeavours. It remains a question to the extent to which this new role will help to sustain and augment the existing institutional character of the university but also provide new orientations. I think these are important questions that give an impetus to a set of new long-range research commitments for the university. The concept of a data-intensive university is also, crucially, open for contestation. Therefore, I argue that if there is a need to create a special role for the university in relation to its data environment and new computational cultural milieu then it will need to provide a distinctive university in relation to others. This would have institutional implications in terms of the shape or pattern – the idea – of the university, and hence its organisational structures and its cultures. Indeed, there will undoubtably be a temptation for neoliberal management and corporate techniques being imported into the university: surveillance of staff, intensification of work routines facilitated through these new digital technologies. These will have to be contested continually by faculty and others inside and outside of the university. Now is the time for an alternative programme that needs to be articulated before the infrastructures of computation are solidified and normalised. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ8jRMavI8iFjb2kWpYfgYlg0dPQJAhmIjYjz8GWHkkYeLJLjfMAWNiE4PKNSif3WUu19rNJcjcY1uZo1C-m-y9iMhJYP6FA7vKy-0FNLSGbJ284BWS_d0nXb8Qu4GMJkqV3Mg/s1600/Lincoln+College+2017.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="1536" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ8jRMavI8iFjb2kWpYfgYlg0dPQJAhmIjYjz8GWHkkYeLJLjfMAWNiE4PKNSif3WUu19rNJcjcY1uZo1C-m-y9iMhJYP6FA7vKy-0FNLSGbJ284BWS_d0nXb8Qu4GMJkqV3Mg/s320/Lincoln+College+2017.jpg" title="Photographed by David M. Berry" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lincoln College, University of Oxford<br />
<br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
John Henry Newman wrote perhaps the most famous idea of the university in 1859 when he argued, “a University…. is a place of teaching universal knowledge”. He maintained that the university had an essential function in the conservation of knowledge and ideas and their transmission to an elite body of largely undergraduates, a model he drew from Oxford. Similarly, Abraham Flexner writing in the 1930s with Johns Hopkins University in mind, argued that the university is “an institution consciously devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, the solution of problems, the critical appreciation of achievement, and the training of [students] at a very high level”. </div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div>
But as the varieties of universities began to grow and their internal complexity multiplied, it became seemingly more difficult to identify an essential idea of a university. By the late 1920s, for example, Robert Maynard Hutchins was remarking that the modern university was a set of schools and departments held together by a central heating system. Later in the 1960s, Clark Kerr described the modern university as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance” over car parking. And today it does sometimes seem like the 21st century university is similarly a set of schools and departments held together by a shared grievance over the e-learning system. But it is important to note that a university ideal has never been frozen in aspic, it has continually adapted over time. In fact the university's very success has been through a process of accretion. </div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Arguably the last major change for the universities was the shift in the 1800s to what we now call the modern research university. I am interested in how the institutional pattern grew from the notion that research, as an experimental procedure conducted in a spirit of discovery, could form the basis of a new mission for the university. This emerged particularly in the German universities in the nineteenth century and later became more widely known as the Humboldtian university. The German universities developed the idea that integrating teaching and research within the same institution could be intensified to improve both teaching and the research process. Professors increasingly began to teach methodological skills, greater analytical and theoretical knowledge and tools as part of their courses. This included a growing reliance on field-work, maps and graphs, catalogues, and lists of specialised data to explain to students’ recent scientific advances and ongoing research work. However, it was the American universities that would take these ideas and develop them to a new level of intensity by combining and integrating the English collegial model of teaching and the German research traditions which resulted in the modern American research university. These new universities (particularly John Hopkins and Chicago) had a strong commitment to basic research, to contextualized and applied research and to training researchers. These pioneering universities had a great influence on others, such as Harvard, which soon embraced this new idea of a university. This created a distinctive American institutional structure for a research university which was extremely successful during the twentieth century. This modern research university subsequently became the reference standard for the idea of a university and there can be little doubt that American universities are in a class of their own in terms of their ability to produce world-class research. By continuing to undertake teaching, these universities have been able to develop an important role in contributing new knowledge to the economy and to various organizations and firms in the industrial sector. This connection between academia and the wider society has also created an expectation that teaching should be up-to-date and incorporate new knowledge. The institutional structures of the modern research university thus gave it the capacity to institutionalize and organize the proliferation of specialized knowledge into departments which were very successful over the course of the 20th century in undertaking high quality fundamental knowledge and practical research discoveries. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3csTju-qXLCtAJ_RdngHwXSF6ssrnHIP20Nk6aFeMLsZ02rCt4WM-4Y_BvXYvC8jGjaQjGx7WK3Q0lxhBiBJsPDhiUej8aarY5tzWd41gIPV474niwDHiro9X9aF5JrgO35J7/s1600/Wolfson+College+2018.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1182" data-original-width="1600" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3csTju-qXLCtAJ_RdngHwXSF6ssrnHIP20Nk6aFeMLsZ02rCt4WM-4Y_BvXYvC8jGjaQjGx7WK3Q0lxhBiBJsPDhiUej8aarY5tzWd41gIPV474niwDHiro9X9aF5JrgO35J7/s320/Wolfson+College+2018.jpg" title="Photographed by David M. Berry" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Wolfson College, University of Cambridge</span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><br /></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Research thus became arguably the foundational concept for the university which meant that the goal of the university was to create new knowledge (research) and transmit and preserve it (teaching). Research was articulated in terms of the project of the nation state, its economic development and the training of an educated citizenry (albeit often an elite). This implied that the state would be required to fund the basic research and the universities develop the capacity to undertake it. </div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In my own work, I argue that we are on the verge of a new challenge for the university under the conditions of a society that is based increasingly upon digital knowledge and its economic valorisation. These post-industrial societies are structured around using knowledge and new knowledge production through computational technologies. The acquisition of new skills and these new knowledges are fundamental drivers of innovation in and around an economy based on data, information and digital techniques. As such the university continues to play a key role in undertaking basic research, a highly concentrated output of academia, but also in encouraging its use and innovation. There are two essential platforms for the university in this new economic environment, (1) the creation of new knowledge, and (2) the capacity for the transformation of knowledge into new forms of invention and transformation. I argue that a university’s growth will increasingly depend on its ability to integrate and transform new knowledge, compelling it to equip itself with new structures for research and teaching. This new formal structural capacity is fundamentally reliant on digital processes of creation, capture, experimentation and analysis in research through digital tools, methods, and techniques, combined with a critical capacity to assess theoretical and methodological foundations for such knowledge claims. As such these structures enable a data-intensive research university to flexibly adapt to the kinds of shifts in the core income streams necessary for university sustainability and growth.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div>
At even the most basic level, access to the benefits of computation is still unequally distributed, and social, cultural and political disruptions persist. How can the university contribute to these social problems and thereby to notions of social justice more generally? What is the contribution of an institution that has been traditionally structured as an island of learning, even in the case of the civic universities, how do the boundaries operate and what is the permeability of knowledge?</div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div>
Today, science and technology policy lacks even a rudimentary capacity to confront the complex implications of a computational society. The acquisition of new digital skills and these new knowledges are now fundamental drivers of innovation in and around an economy based on data, information and digital techniques. As such it is argued that the university has a key role to play in the undertaking of basic data-intensive research, a highly concentrated output of academia, but also in encouraging its use and innovation (now called “impact”). </div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKw3gFURrwMWMw7b1cKzPkM1mmAtTbHvkyiNbaghmA7tGcLqleHDTehWV1bR3YxyrRWgM2t5h5lgeFX7-lnRq0V4eIeBNbWYoPyxGNZmyeNAUqh0qvRi0X-4Od5Gy_NF1F7uFs/s1600/Original+Design+for+Sussex.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="426" data-original-width="639" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKw3gFURrwMWMw7b1cKzPkM1mmAtTbHvkyiNbaghmA7tGcLqleHDTehWV1bR3YxyrRWgM2t5h5lgeFX7-lnRq0V4eIeBNbWYoPyxGNZmyeNAUqh0qvRi0X-4Od5Gy_NF1F7uFs/s320/Original+Design+for+Sussex.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Original Design for the University College of Sussex (1960), <br />
which later became the University of Sussex. This building <br />
was designed by Basil Spence and was originally called <br />
College House with a central quad (now called Falmer House).<br />
<br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In this new digital milieu, a university’s growth, and even its survival, will increasingly depend on its capacity to integrate and transform data-intensive knowledge and incorporate new methods for teaching and research. This would mean that a university is not only a research-intensive one but also a data-intensive one. The digital opens up new ways of seeing and enables new methods for undertaking research. As such, a data-intensive university supports efforts to ensure a new spirit of discovery and the promotion of research through the use of computational techniques and practices which will transform the culture of departments in a university. This I believe will have a fundamental transformatory effect on the idea of a mission for the university, and the way in which the institutional pattern and organisation structure of the university is currently constituted. For example, this includes new research into and investment in digital infrastructure (cyberinfrastructure) to support the digital transformation of research activities and to create a culture of digital-intensive research. </div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div>
This is also connected to the “turn” to "global challenges", interdisciplinarity, collaborative research, shared teams, and project-based research. It also problematises the notion of “open” as a legitimating concept for scholarly communications and knowledge dissemination, for example in the notion of open-access and open source. This would mean that such a university transforms its research-intensive identity into one that incorporates a data-intensive mission too. With the stress increasingly on the latter. Digital approaches for teaching and research also create the possibility of developing a digital data-intensive teaching environment which forms the base of the diversified pyramid of teaching programmes in the university from undergraduate to those at graduate level.</div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div>
It remains a question as to whether a data-intensive research university needs a “centre” to the university. The chapel or the library no longer provide that function, and in a future post I want to explore what the status of the centre of a data-intensive university might be. </div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div>
These more general trends are both useful starting points for thinking about how the processes enabled by “data-intensive” as an ideal of a university is anchored in a set of norms related strongly to computational techniques and technologies. That is, how ideas, people, infrastructure, business environment, and places are transformed through “digital thinking” or "disruption". This means not only what the effects of expanding data-intensive research capacity of a university might be but also how transforming the digital skills of its students and thereby the wider labour workforce, changes the wider social milieu.</div>
</div>
<div>
<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Bibliography</b><br />
<br />
Berry, D. M. (2011) <i>The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age</i>, London: Palgrave Macmillan.<br />
<br />
Berry, D. M. (2012) <i>Understanding Digital Humanities</i>, Basingstoke: Palgrave.<br />
<br />
Berry, D. M. (2014) <i>Critical Theory and the Digital</i>, New York: Bloomsbury<br />
<br />
Berry, D. M. and Fagerjord, A. (2017)<i> Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age</i>, Cambridge: Polity.<br />
<br />
Golumbia, D. (2009) <i>The Cultural Logic of Computation</i>, Harvard University Press.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-683042392250827452017-03-27T10:07:00.000-07:002017-03-28T01:38:17.321-07:00Against the Computational Creep<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii7HjXrCEu4mJhd2rnnIn__LVOJYHRqgx3DibcTVg-knP1e1JndRurPVgKd7zadrrV2ZYqW6VGw82Nl7uChuxZyDyIZXDccG1VOjYBJA3rFvayeb63m4NPSAjXJPC9Bt6H_YQU/s1600/ground_ivy2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii7HjXrCEu4mJhd2rnnIn__LVOJYHRqgx3DibcTVg-knP1e1JndRurPVgKd7zadrrV2ZYqW6VGw82Nl7uChuxZyDyIZXDccG1VOjYBJA3rFvayeb63m4NPSAjXJPC9Bt6H_YQU/s320/ground_ivy2.jpg" width="320" /></a>In this short post I want to think about the limits of computation, not the limits theoretically of the application or theorisation of computation itself, but actually the limits to which computation within a particular context <i>should</i> be contained. This is necessarily a normative position, but what I am trying to explore is the limit at which computation, which can have great advantages to a process, institution or organisation, starts to undermine or corrode the way in which a group, institution or organisation is understood, functions or how it creates a shared set of meanings.<span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span>Here though, I will limit myself to thinking about the theorisation of this, rather than its methodological implications, and how we might begin to develop a politics of computation that is able to test and articulate these limits and understand the development of a set of critical approaches which are also a politicisation of algorithms and of data.<br />
<br />
By <i>computational creep</i> I am interested in the development of computation as a process rather than an outcome or thing (Ross 2017: 14). This notion of "creep" has been usefully identified by Ross in relation to extreme political movements that take place by what he calls "positive intermingling".<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[1]</span> I think that this is a useful way to think of the way in which computationalism, and here I do not merely mean the idea that consciousness in modelled on computation (e.g. see Golumbia 2009), but more broadly as a set of ideas and style of thought which argues that computational approaches are by their very nature superior to other ways of thinking and doing (Berry 2011, 2014). This is also related to the notion that anything that has not been "disrupted" by computation is, by definition, inferior in some sense, or is latent material awaiting its eventual disruption or reinvention through the application of computation. I would like to argue that this process of computational creep takes six stages:<br />
<ol>
<li><b>Visionary-computational</b>: Computation suggested as a solution to existing system or informal process. These discourses are articulated with very little critical attention to the detail of making computational systems or the problems they create. Usually, as Golumbia (2017) explains, these draw on metaphysics of information and computation that bear little relation to material reality of the eventual or existing computational systems. It is here, in particular, that the taken-for-grantness of the improvements of computation are uncritically deployed, usually with little resistance. </li>
<li><b>Proto-computational</b>: One-off prototypes developed to create notional efficiencies, manage processes, or to ease reporting and aggregation of data. Often there is a discourse associated with the idea that this creates "new ways of seeing" that enable patterns to be identified which were previously missed. These systems often do not meet the required needs but these early failures, rather than taken as questioning the computational, serve to justify more computation, often more radically implemented with greater change being called for in relation to making the computational work. </li>
<li><b>Micro-</b><b>computational</b>: A wider justification for small scale projects to implement computational microsystems. These often are complemented by the discursive rationalisation of informal processes or the justification of these systems due to the greater insight they produce. This is where a decision has been taken to begin computational development, sometimes at a lightweight scale, but nonetheless, the language of computation both technically and as metaphor starts to be deployed more earnestly as justification. </li>
<li><b>Meso-</b><b>computational</b>: Medium-scale systems created which draw from or supplement the existing minimal computation already in process. This discourse is often manifest in multiple, sometime co-exisiting and incompatible computations, differing ways of thinking about algorithms as a solution to problems, and multiple and competing data acquisition and storage practices. At this stage the computational is beyond question, it is taken as a priori that a computational system is required, and where there are failures, more computation and more social change to facilitate it are demanded. </li>
<li><b>Macro-</b><b>computational</b>: Large-scale investment to manage what has become a complex informational and computational ecology. This discourse is often associated with attempts to create interoperability through mediating systems or provision for new interfaces for legacy computational systems. At this stage, computation is now seen as as source of innovation and disruption that rationalises the social processes and helps manage and control individuals. These are taken to be a good in and of themselves to avoid mistakes, bad behaviour, poor social outcomes or suchlike. The computational is now essentially metaphysical in its justificatory deployment and the suggestion that computation might be making things worse is usually met with derision. </li>
<li><b>Infra-</b><b>computational</b>: Calls for overhaul of and/or replacement of major components of the systems, perhaps with a platform, and the rationalisation of social practices through user interface design, hierarchical group controls over data, and centralised data stores. This discourse is often accompanied by large scale data tracking, monitoring and control over individual work and practices. This is where the the notion of top-view, that is the idea of management information systems (MIS), data analytics, large-scale Big Data pattern-matching and control through algorithmic intervention are often reinforced. In this phase a system of data requires free movement of the data through a system through an open definition (e.g. open data, open access, open knowledge), which allows standardisation and sharability of data entities, and therefore of further processing and softwarization. This phase often serves as an imaginary and is therefore not necessarily ever completed, its failures serving as further justification for new infrastructures and new systems to replace earlier failed versions. </li>
</ol>
This line of thinking draws on the work of David Golumbia, particularly the notion of Matryoshka Dolls that he takes from the work of Phillip Mirowski. This is in relation to the notion of multiple levels or shells of ideas, that form a system of thinking, but which is itself not necessarily coherent as such, nor lacking in contradiction, particularly at different layers of the shells. This "Mirowski calls the '’Russian doll’ approach to the integration of research and praxis in the modern world'" (Golumbia 2017: 5). Golumbia makes links between this way of thinking about neoliberalism as a style of thinking that utilises this multi-layered aspect and technolibertarianism, but here I want to think about computational approaches more broadly, that is as instrumental rational techniques of organisation. In other words, I want to point to the way in which computation is implemented, usually in a small scale way, within an institutional context, and which acts as an entry-point for further rationalisation and computation. This early opening creates the opportunity for more intensive computation which is implicated in a bricolage fashion, that is that, at least initially, there is not a systematic attempt to replace an existing system, but over time, and with the addition to and accretion of computational partialities, calls become greater for the overhaul of what is now a tangled and somewhat contradictory series of micro-computationalisms, into a more broad computational system or platform. Eventually this leads to a macro- or infra-computational environment which can be described as functioning as algorithmic governmentality, but which remains ever unfinished with inconsistencies, bugs and irrationalities throughout the system (see Berns and Rouvroy 2013). The key point is that in all stages of computationally adapting an existing process, there are multiple overlapping and sometimes contradictory processes in operation, even in large-scale computation.<br />
<br />
Here I think that Golumbia's discussion of the "sacred myths among the digerati" is very important here, as it is this set of myths that are unquestioned especially early on in the development of a computational project. Especially at what I am calling the visionary-computational and proto-computational phases, but equally throughout the growth in computational penetration. Some of these myths include: claims of efficiency, the notion of cost savings, the idea of communications improvement, and the safeguarding corporate or group memory. In other words, before a computerisation project is started, these justifications are already being mobilised in order to justify it, without any critical attention to where these a priori claims originate and their likely truth content.<br />
<br />
This use of computation is not just limited to standardised systems, of course, and by which I mean instrumental-rational systems that are converted from a paper-based process into a software-based process. Indeed, computation is increasingly being deployed in a cultural and sociological capacity, so for example to manage individuals and their psychological and physical well-being, to manage or shape culture through interventions and monitoring, and the capacity to work together, as teams and groups, and hence to shape particular kinds of subjectivity. Here there are questions more generally for automation and the creation of what we might call human-free technical systems, but also more generally for the conditions of possibility for what Bernard Stiegler calls the Automatic Society (Stiegler 2015). It is also related to the notion of digital and computational systems in areas not previously thought of as amenable to computation, for example in the humanities, as is represented by the growth of digital humanities (Berry 2012, Berry and Fagerjord 2017).<br />
<br />
That is to say, that "the world of the digital is everywhere structured by these fictionalist equivocations over the meanings of central terms, equivocations that derive an enormous part of their power from the appearance that they refer to technological and so material and so metaphysical reality" (Golumbia 2017: 34). Of course, the reality is that these claims are often unexamined and uncritically accepted, even when they are corrosive in their implementations. Where these computationalisms are disseminated and their creep goes beyond social and cultural norms, it is right that we ask: how much computation can a particular social group or institution stand, and what should be the response to it? (See Berry 2014: 193 for a discussion in relation to democracy). It should certainly be the case that we must move beyond accepting a partial success of computation to imply that more computation is by necessity better. So by critiquing computational creep, through the notion of the structure of the Russian doll in relation to computational processes of justification and implementation, together with the metaphysical a priori claims for the superiority of computational systems, we are better able to develop a means of containment or algorithmic criticism. Thus through a critical theory that provides a ground for normative responses to the unchecked growth of computations across multiple aspects of our lives and society we can look to the possibilities of computation without seeing it as necessarily inevitable or deterministic of our social life (see Berry 2014).<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Notes</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[1] The title "Against the Computational Creep" is reference to the very compelling book <i>Against the Fascist Creep</i> by Alexander Reid Ross. The intention is not to make an equivalence between fascism and computation, rather I am more interested in the concept of the "creep" which Ross explains involves small scale, gradual use of particular techniques, the importation of ways of thinking or the use of a form of entryism. In this article, of course, the notion of the computational creep is therefore referring to the piecemeal use of computation, or the importation of computational practices and metaphors into a previously non-computational arena or sphere, and the resultant change in the ways of doing, ways of seeing and ways of being that this computational softwarization tends to produce. </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Bibliography</b><br />
<br />
Berns, T. and Rouvroy, A. (2013) Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d'émancipation : le disparate comme condition d'individuation par la relation?, accessed 14/12/2016, https://works.bepress.com/antoinette_rouvroy/47/download/<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Berry, D. M. (2011) <i>The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age</i>, London: Palgrave Macmillan.<br />
<br />
Berry, D. M. (2012) <i>Understanding Digital Humanities</i>, Basingstoke: Palgrave.<br />
<br />
Berry, D. M. (2014) <i>Critical Theory and the Digital</i>, New York: Bloomsbury<br />
<br />
Berry, D. M. and Fagerjord, A. (2017)<i> Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age</i>, Cambridge: Polity.<br />
<br />
Golumbia, D. (2009) <i>The Cultural Logic of Computation</i>, Harvard University Press.<br />
<br />
Golumbia, D. (2017) Mirowski as Critic of the Digital, boundary 2 symposium, “Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski”, University of Pittsburgh, March 16-17, 2017<br />
<br />
Stiegler, B. (2016) <i>The Automatic Society</i>, Cambridge: Polity.<br />
<br />BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-76500676561997935832017-03-16T06:03:00.001-07:002017-05-05T07:01:53.254-07:00Three Universities<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZcWr-UqZGfcceTwTJugWqq3DW8d4pIlXQ1JGaT0EwN-nR9jhR6W7O8Bft8UXxpf1U7xWFJjZLpyoj-QyFBqrBGFD7pFyYlxDMciP4BcFHhBhaJ4DWHwXgz2bKO6ty8ZiAd8Z9/s1600/Oxford.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZcWr-UqZGfcceTwTJugWqq3DW8d4pIlXQ1JGaT0EwN-nR9jhR6W7O8Bft8UXxpf1U7xWFJjZLpyoj-QyFBqrBGFD7pFyYlxDMciP4BcFHhBhaJ4DWHwXgz2bKO6ty8ZiAd8Z9/s320/Oxford.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Every university is in reality three universities. In this article, I am naming them: the university of <i>truth</i>, the university of <i>learning</i>, and the university of <i>necessity</i>. This collectively I am calling the <i>Schemata</i> of the university and the three imaginaries of the university pertain to partial experiences and to epistemological truths of the university which overlap and interact in important ways. The balance between these three realities is key to the success of a university qua university, but also to helping us understand how many of the modern proposals for reform of the university, by not taking these into account, serve to sever these worlds of the university apart, and more worryingly, act to privilege one world at the expense of the others.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi28fe7nhi0lhOlJ0hgYQMnXApCBUX5_gCn8d737nxwbHg-h3uQmxbGuOsXl5OlVV30-fTF3JTaRGj3fep24nvIizkbxPoPk95EKFo2OJ0BT286VQDlnWNPmYrLG1cJMk9OWsXY/s1600/Codex_Guelferbytanus_B_00404-palimpsest.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi28fe7nhi0lhOlJ0hgYQMnXApCBUX5_gCn8d737nxwbHg-h3uQmxbGuOsXl5OlVV30-fTF3JTaRGj3fep24nvIizkbxPoPk95EKFo2OJ0BT286VQDlnWNPmYrLG1cJMk9OWsXY/s320/Codex_Guelferbytanus_B_00404-palimpsest.JPG" width="252" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Palimpsest: Codex Guelferbytanus B, 026, folio 194 verso</span></i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
A metaphor that might be useful for thinking about this is that the university functions as a kind of palimpsest, multiply inscribed with differing conceptions of the university's ends. A palimpsest is, of course, a manuscript or piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed on effaced earlier writing creating a multiply written document which previous versions are faintly visible through the newer writings. Similarly, the university form contains within it, inscribed in buildings and practices, discourse and policies, multiple over-writings, that interact and coalesce in productive ways for university to be function as a university <i>qua</i> university. In this article, therefore, I want to examine how in theorising the university we can develop concepts adequate not only for defending the specificity of the university as a form, what I have called elsewhere <i>universitality</i>, but also in a positive sense for the future development and invention in relation to the university form by thinking through this palimpsest metaphor for understanding the ends of the university (see Berry 2017).<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
</div>
These differing imaginaries of the university, as necessity, as truth and as learning, must be overlaid and mutually respectful of each others presence for the university <i>as an institution</i> to function. That is, that the reality of the university is constantly informed by, and shaped through the interaction with these multiple possibilities of the university. Here, of course, I am gesturing to the notion of the Idea of a University, and seeking to develop and deepen this notion (Newman 1996). Conflicts between these imaginaries is common, indeed productive of the university as an institution, but these conflicts should nonetheless be balanced as the overall institution should be manifest in cooperation at a higher level (Rothblatt 1972). What we might call the sublation of these imaginaries, and the institutional processes that enable these conflicts both to be staged and performed, without thereby undermining the whole, is a crucial element of ensuring the vitality of the capillary structures of the university, but also that in the moment of sublation, all elements, all forces that represent these imaginaries feel represented but also that their contribution makes the university possible in the first place. When these imaginaries break out into open conflict, or cannot sublate their imaginaries, or even worse, one imaginary seeks to liquidate another or seek hegemony in the university, then disaster is at hand.<br />
<br />
I would like to now outline a tentative mapping of these imaginaries and start to think about how they interoperate and structure the possibilities that are opened up in the university.<br />
<br />
<b>university of <i>truth</i></b><br />
<br />
The university of truth is usually populated by academic staff, scholars and researchers. It is vital that the university should connect to and capture the imagination and hearts and minds of the general public in order that it can provide a benefit to the nation in which it is located. But this imagination is represented not in pandering to the fads and fashions of a purported population, nor to the whims of government policy, but rather in the search for truth (or the principles for the validation of truth) and the application of critical reason. This requires that the university of truth is constantly on the search for academic brilliance and outstanding thought in whatever way it is represented, in order that the university should continue pushing at the boundaries of thought and knowledge. This requires constant vigilance by the university of truth, and is its most important function and mission, and one which must not be distracted by other issues. The university of truth is, in most modern universities, lacking institutional representation and manifests as an invisible college. However, its lack of institutional materiality must not be allowed to disqualify or undermine this crucial role that it plays in keeping the university eye's focussed on the horizon of knowledge (Derrida 2004). No sacrifice is too great for the university of truth to secure academics of great repute and merit and conspicuous ability must be nurtured and developed within the domain of this university.<br />
<br />
<b>university of <i>learning</i>.</b><br />
<br />
The university of learning is usually populated by teaching staff, students, and teaching fellows. The university of learning has a crucial function as a dissemination point for knowledge, passing and continuing the state of the field across the generations. This results in a two-fold outcome, providing the capacities for critical reason, through engagement and contestation of knowledge claims and truths, but also furthering and deepening the individual and economic independence of the learner so that on leaving the university they are more knowledgeable, critical and self-confident in their capacity to live in the world than when they entered the university. The passage through the university is then a pathway creating through complex knowledge fields, and inoculating the individual against irrationality and virulent forms of populism. The ability to think for oneself, to dare to know (<i>sapere aude!</i>), is a benchmark against which success in this university should be judged.<br />
<br />
<b>university of <i>necessity</i>, </b><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The university of necessity usually consists of the management staff, the administrative and and professional staff of the university. The university of necessity is tasked with providing the conditions which will create the facilities for the university of truth and the university of learning. The university of necessity is named for its role in stabilising and managing the necessities for a university, such that these should not become the concern of the university of truth or the university of learning. The university of necessity, by virtue of its privileged role in managing and controlling the flows of funds and the structures of the university has a strong duty of care towards the university of truth and the university of learning. In neoliberal models of the university, the university of necessity becomes the university of control, or of excellence, undermine the other spheres and weakening the institution and its mission (Readings 1996). </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
This early attempt to draft this schematic is necessarily explorative but through thinking through the conflicting pushes and pulls of the university in its institutional form we can, through conceptual invention, help to energise and revivify the university as respectively a university of truth, learning and necessity. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />
<b>Bibliography</b><br />
<br />
Berry, D. M. (2017) Towards an Idea of Universitality, <i>stunlaw</i>, <a href="http://stunlaw.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/towards-idea-of-universitality.html">http://stunlaw.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/towards-idea-of-universitality.html</a><br />
<br />
Derrida, J. (2004) Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties, in The Eyes of the University, Stanford University Press.<br />
<br />
Newman, J. H. (1996) The Idea of a University, Yale University Press.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Readings, B. (1996) The University in Ruins, London: Harvard University Press.<br />
<br />
Rothblatt, S. (1972) The Modern University and its Discontents: The Fate of Newman's Legacies in Britain and America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />
<br />BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-77280142474163435282017-02-16T17:06:00.000-08:002017-08-23T05:25:48.488-07:00The Uses of Open Access<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguT5E1fAOD9fzd3XZ797sajnD7MHS_GRzOHn8AIn_FZvRUustwsWGn08XPvB01EMSrmKGntj411jz8ydCF_TCVecDm6Cm6xLlRpHx2RhH4e_nGMSqYmVieS6sUv2VVRqkPR3OO/s1600/SupportOpenAccess.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguT5E1fAOD9fzd3XZ797sajnD7MHS_GRzOHn8AIn_FZvRUustwsWGn08XPvB01EMSrmKGntj411jz8ydCF_TCVecDm6Cm6xLlRpHx2RhH4e_nGMSqYmVieS6sUv2VVRqkPR3OO/s320/SupportOpenAccess.jpg" width="318" /></a></div>
It is increasingly clear that the university is undergoing rapid change in higher education systems right across the globe. This is partly due to the forces of digital technology, partly due to neoliberal restructuring of the higher education sector by governments, and partly due to a shift in student demographics, expectations and a new consumerist orientation. However, there is an additional pressure on universities, and an illogical one at that, which is the claim that they do not contribute to the public good through their practices of publication. This claim has more recently come from open access (OA) advocates, but also increasingly from governments that seek to use university research as a stimulus to economic growth. This claim is without foundation and unhistorical but it is a claim that is being made with greater stridency and is being taken up by research funders and university managements as an accurate state of affairs that they seek to remedy through new policies and practices related to academic publication. It is time, as Allington has convincingly argued, that we ask "what’s [OA] for? What did [OA's] advocates... think it was going to facilitate? And now that it’s become mainstream, does it look as if it’s going to facilitate that thing we had in mind, or something else entirely?" (Allington 2013).<br />
<br />
In this article I want to start to explore some of the major themes that I think need to be addressed in the current push towards open access but also how it serves as a useful exemplar of the range of "innovations" being forced on the university sector. With such a large subject I can only gesture to some of the key issues here, but my aim is to start to unpick some of the more concerning claims of open access advocates and question why their interests, government proposals and university management are too often oriented in the same direction. I want to suggest that this is not accidental, and actually reflects an underlying desire to "disrupt" the academy which will have dire implications for academic labour, thought and freedom if it is not contested. Whilst it is clear some open access advocates believe that their work will contribute to and further the public good, without an urgent critique of the rapidity and acceleration of these practices, the university, as it has been historically constituted through the independent work of scholars, will be undermined and the modern university as we have come to understand it may be transformed into a very different kind of institution.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[1]</span><br />
<br />
Within this new complex landscape of the university, there is has been the remarkable take up and acceleration of the notion of <i>mandated</i> Open Access (OA). Open Access is the use of copyright licenses to make textual materials available to others for use and reuse through a mechanism similar to that which was created by the Free Software Foundation as the GNU Public Licence (GPL) and later through the activities of the open access movement and the Creative Commons organisation. The FLOSS (Free Libre and Open Source Software) movement and the Creative Commons have been important in generating new ways of thinking about copyright, but also in generating spaces for the construction of new technologies and cultural remixes, particularly the GNU GPL licence and the Creative Commons Share-Alike licence (Berry 2008). Nonetheless, these new forms of production around copyright licenses have not been free of politics, and often carry with them cyberlibertarian notions about how knowledge should be treated, how society should be structured, and the status of the individual in a digital age (see Berry 2008). These links between the ways of thinking shared between open source and open access raise particular concerns. As Golumbia has cautioned, "in general, it is the fervor for OA... especially as expressed in the idea that OA should be mandated at either the institutional or governmental level... [that] seems far more informed by destructive intent and ideology toward certain existing institutions and practices than its most strident advocates appear to recognize, even as they openly recommend that destruction" (Golumbia 2016: 76).<br />
<br />
However, it is important to note at this point that I agree with Golumbia that,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
this does not mean that OA is uniformly a bad idea: it is not. In many ways it is, very clearly, a good idea. In particular, versions of voluntary “green” OA, where researchers may or may not deposit copies of their works wherever and under whatever conditions they choose, and the voluntary creation of OA journals when not accompanied by pressure, institutional or social, to refrain from publishing in non-OA journals, strike me as welcome... But it is a good idea that has been taken far beyond the weight that the arguments for it can bear, and frequently fails to take into account matters that must be of fundamental concern to any left politics. Further, it is a good idea that is surrounded by a host of ideas that are nowhere near as good, and that fit too easily into the general rightist attack on higher education, especially in the humanities, that operates worldwide today (Golumbia 2016: 76).</blockquote>
To examine these issues, first I want to briefly explore the new political economic reality that has been facing the university in the late 20th and early 21st century. Indeed, we have seen these changes mapped out in a number of important recent publications about the UK and USA university systems (see for example, Collini 2012, 2017; Holmwood 2011; Readings 1996). Under this new regime, it is argued that the student is cast as consumer, and the academic is recast as an <i>academic entrepreneur</i> who must constantly seek to make "impact" through activities that lead to an outcome that can be quantified (Biswas and Kirchherr 2016). Finlayson and Hayward (2012) have argued that in changing the university, "four different rationales have been put forward by successive administrations or their appointed advisors for these reforms: 1. Expansion, 2. Efficiency, 3. Economic accountability – i.e. value for money, 4. Political accountability – i.e. democratisation or widening participation". These are demonstrated most clearly in the notion of "impact". Stefan Collini, for example, describes how in the REF (Research Excellence Framework) consultation document 37 different “impact indicators” are outlined for assessing the university sector, most of which serve to promote economic or utilitarian interests,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
nearly all of these refer to “creating new businesses”, “commercialising new products or processes”, attracting “R&D investment from global business”, informing “public policy-making” or improving “public services”, improving “patient care or health outcomes”, and improving “social welfare, social cohesion or national security” (a particularly bizarre grouping). Only five of the bullet points are grouped under the heading “Cultural enrichment”. These include such things as “increased levels of public engagement with science and research (for example, as measured by surveys)” and “changes to public attitudes to science (for example, as measured by surveys)”. The final bullet point is headed “Other quality of life benefits”: in this case, uniquely, no examples are provided. The one line under this heading simply says “Please suggest what might also be included in this list” (quoted in Finlayson and Hayward 2012).</blockquote>
Indeed, more recently Collini (2017) has described the events leading up to the emergence of what has come to be called the "impact agenda". This is the idea that research should be shown to be socially beneficial and economically useful. Collini describes how Gordon Brown, then at the Treasury, was being lobbied by businesses who sought to change the incentives of the universities towards short-term, preferably commercial, impact-led innovation. This led to "impact" being added to the research assessment process of the REF, which many have argued, deliberately shifts how the university understands itself as an institution.<br />
<br />
Similarly, in the "2003 White Paper and the 2007 Annual Review of the Science and Innovation Investment Framework that, in spite of one or two passing remarks about the value of education, the Government’s overriding concern is to harness and increase the economic impact of research... All the government reviews, papers and reports in the period are about how to make Higher Education serve the needs of the knowledge economy" (Finlayson and Hayward 2012). These kinds of claims and arguments are often related to the notion of the emergence of an information society, usually understood as a shift in Western economies from the production of goods to the production of innovation (see Berry 2008: 4). This is related to a similar notion of a knowledge-based economy which is built on the condition that there is knowledge, information and data freely flowing around that economy, and is structured in such a way as to allow exchange, aggregation, reuse and transformation, preferably with minimal forms of friction. Geert Lovink captures this well when he says that Google's mantra is "let others do the work first that we won't pay for. You write the book, we scan it and put our ads next to it" (Lovink 2016: 169). As Greenspan argued in 1996,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
the world of 1948 was vastly different from the world of 1996. The American economy, more then than now, was viewed as the ultimate in technology and productivity in virtually all fields of economic endeavor [sic]. The quintessential model of industrial might in those days was the array of vast, smoke-encased integrated steel mills in the Pittsburgh district and on the shores of Lake Michigan. Output was things, big physical things. Virtually unimaginable a half-century ago was the extent to which concepts and ideas would substitute for physical resources and human brawn in the production of goods and services (Alan Greenspan, quoted in Perelman 2003).</blockquote>
Clive Humby has described a kind of process where "data is the new oil... Data is just like crude. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value" (Palmer 2006). Or as Wired put it, "like oil, for those who see data’s fundamental value and learn to extract and use it there will be huge rewards. We’re in a digital economy where data is more valuable than ever. It’s the key to the smooth functionality of everything from the government to local companies. Without it, progress would halt" (Toonders 2014). So this extractive metaphor, which is rich in illustrative description but which is limited for describing the process of creating, maintaining and using research, has nonetheless served to inspire governmental policy in numerous ways. For example, Meglena Kuneva, European Consumer Commissioner at the European Commission, has described personal data as "the new oil of the internet and the new currency of the digital world" (Kuneva 2009). Indeed, Hinssen 2012 uses the notion that "information is the new oil" and that we should be "drilling new sources of innovation". Innovation in this sense, usually means changing or creating more effective processes, products and ideas for commercial exploitation. Naturally, the next step has been to connect the notion of data (or "open data" as it has been termed) to this extractive metaphor. Indeed, the Office for National Statistics (a producer of data sets) has argued that "if data is the new oil, Open Data is the oil that fuels society and we need all hands at the pump" (Davidson 2016). What makes data into open data, is that it is free of intellectual property restrictions that prevent it from being used by others by publishing constraints, such as copyright, and that it is machine readable. Open data, like open access publications and open source before them, relies on copyright licenses to grant the user the right to dice up and remix the textual or other digital materials in ways that can create new forms of innovative products. Under these conditions open access type works can be collected into a computer processable corpus to subject to pattern matching algorithms, Big Data analysis, free content to populate silicon valley apps and services, and other processing to make the "oil" into economic products.<br />
<br />
In this sense, the knowledge economy is built on a contradictory set of principles, property rights to control intellectual products and processes (including digital rights management), and a mechanism to promote the "free" or "open" circulation of data and information. This contradiction is resolved if one understand them as not mutually antagonistic to each other, but rather as differing spheres or layers of the knowledge economy. With free data and information at the bottom, waiting to be exploited by entrepreneurs, and a thriving ecosystem of corporations living on top of this land. Indeed, within the academic literature and in governmental publications there is a tacit notion that the government, government-funded research and historical cultural materials (usually out-of-copyright but not digitised and sitting in archives) should become the freely available knowledge in a form that can be "mined" by the private sector in order to create economic growth. But to fully realise this vision requires that much more of the information and knowledge generated by, for example, universities and archives, will need to be opened up for innovation. This opening up, quite literally means providing in a digital form their materials without the kinds of copyright protections that have historically provided the stimulus for research publication, and which would be handed over to the private sector <i>gratis</i>. Indeed, these private sector corporations are driven by very different norms to the research university and certainly do not share its ethical commitment towards science and knowledge. Rather "the norms that guide how companies like... Google organise and disseminate knowledge are primarily market based and have little in common with the formative practices and intellectual virtues that constitute the core of the research university" (Wellmon 2015: 272).<br />
<br />
One of the most influential descriptions of the workings of innovation has been the notion of "disruptive innovation" a term developed by Christensen (1997) and which describes a process by "which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors" (Christensen 2017). This notion of disruptive innovation is now very much part of silicon valley ideology, and has become part of a discourse that has led calls for "disruption" in other sectors of the economy, from taxis, hotel, deliveries and education. Disruption theory has been connected with new ways of doing things that disturb, interrupt or cause to be restructure what is perceived to be a "closed" way of doing things, whether that through unionisation, monopoly or oligopoly behaviour, public sector or educational. Indeed, in regard to the possible disruption of the university sector, the Economist was keen to argue that technology "innovation is eliminating those constraints [of existing universities]... and bringing sweeping change to higher education" (Economist 2014). What is striking is how this notion of disruptive innovation is increasingly being mobilised in relation to the university, from government, industry and also from university management itself. But also how, often uncritically, many open access advocates are echoing the need for a disruptive innovation of university publication practices (see Mourik Broekman et al 2015).<br />
<br />
This is an example of a how disruptive innovation in relation to the university sector has created the conditions under which university research outputs have been re-articulated as "not open". There has subsequently been an attempt to argue that they must be "opened up" and as such they would be a resource which can be made available to others to contribute to innovation and economic growth. One of the most important examples is the Finch report of 2012, commissioned by the UK Government. This report drew on many of these themes where it made an explicit link between economic growth and the access to and use of publicly funded research. It argued, "most people outside the HE sector and large research-intensive companies - in public services, in the voluntary sector, in business and the professions, and members of the public at large - have yet to see the benefits that the online environment could bring in providing access to research and its results". These innovations, it argues, are prevented because of "barriers to access – particularly when the research is publicly-funded – [and] are increasingly unacceptable in an online world: for such barriers restrict the innovation, growth and other benefits which can flow from research" (Finch 2012).<br />
<br />
The "barriers to access" the report counter-intuitively identifies, are practices of publishing research in the public sphere in a form which has been enormously successful in transforming our societies over the last 350 years. Indeed, it is as if universities had, by publishing materials over this period, been actively seeking to create a closed system, rather than, as was actually the case, contributing to Enlightenment notions of a Republic of Letters and open science. Indeed, as Bernard Stiegler has pointed out, "every student who enrols in the final year of school [in France] is expected to know that the Republic of Letters was conditioned by the publishing revolution from which sprang gazettes and then newspapers, and that the philosophy of the Enlightenment that inspired the French Revolution itself emerged from this Republic of Letters" (Stiegler 2016: 235). Golumbia (2016: 77) similarly has observed that there is a real problem with open access advocates' arguments that "what we have until the last decade or two called 'publication' somehow restricts access to information, rather than making [that] information more available". These claims are not made more believable by the OA habit of picking one or two major journal publishers who have especially problematic practices of publication pricing strategies. This partial representation of the wider landscape of publishing and the use of selective, and often very emotive, cases to argue that all academic publication is against the public good, is damaging to academia as a whole as well as unsubstantiated. This aspect of proselytising of the virtues of open access without any concerns for its potential dangers is very reminiscent of the intense argumentation that has taken place with the FLOSS movement where similar zealotry has been observed (see Berry 2008).<br />
<br />
Open access advocates often claim an alignment between open access and democratisation, participation and the public good, but to me this is only part of the story about why open access is now being promoted by government. Indeed, if one was under any confusion about why open access might be useful, Finch has helpfully laid this out,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
support for open access publication should be accompanied by policies to minimise restrictions on the rights of use and re-use, especially for non-commercial purposes, and on the ability to use the latest tools and services to organise and manipulate text and other content</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[government should seek to] extend the range of open access and hybrid journals, with minimal if any restrictions on rights of use and re-use for non-commercial purposes; and ensure that the metadata relating makes clear articles are accessible on open access terms.</blockquote>
It goes without saying that these moves seek to ensure that "innovative" products can be refined from research outputs that have no restrictions on their extraction, use, and exploitation. Finch also uncritically argues that universities should fund, in combination with research councils and government, research that could later be used free of restrictions by commercial users, without themselves contributing back into this open access repository. In effect, Finch is arguing for greater public subsidy for the private sector's use of university research outputs. Indeed, the range of information from universities that Finch saw as available for exploitation includes "research publications...reports, working papers and other grey literature, as well as theses and dissertations... publications and associated research data" (Finch 2012).<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[2] </span>Not only is Finch generalising the case for open access to all forms of output from university and related research institutions, she is also eager to assume that students' MA dissertations and PhD theses are also fair game for commercial exploitation, without consideration of the ethical or legal implications of mining student work without their permission or consent. As Stiegler has argued, "the logic of the free and open (free software and hardware, open source, open science, open data, and so on), while initially conceived in order to struggle against the privatisation of knowledge and the plundering of those who possessed it, was able to be turned against the latter" and into a new form of proletarianisation (Stiegler 2016: 240).<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[3] </span>Google and other companies have "touted their services as 'free' and available to all, but these companies are under pressure to return a profit to their investors" (Wellmon 2015: 272).<br />
<br />
Open Access is too often presented as an unquestioned good, especially by its more zealous advocates (for a useful critique of this, see Golumbia 2016).<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[4]</span> Following the push for mandating journal articles as open access across the UK higher education sector, for example, there is now a developing discourse of open access for monographs which tends to uncritically accept OA's "progressive" benefits (see Crossick 2015). In deed, as Fuller has argued, "public access to academic publications in their normal form is merely a pseudo-benefit, given that most people would not know what to make of them (Fuller 2016). In this short article I have sought to contribute to work that problematises open access ideas and places them within their specific historical location. By drawing links between government policies that have sought to reorient the university from its historical mission related to research and understanding to that of economic growth and impact, one begins to see a new alignment of power and knowledge. Open access appears at a time when digital technologies are changing the contours of the dissemination of knowledge and information and are also challenging the publishing industry with new means of publication. Therefore "granting companies... the authority to distribute, even as platforms and not necessarily owners, university-produced knowledge could cede control over the dissemination and organisation of knowledge to institutions primarily oriented to profit-making" (Wellmon 2015: 272). Indeed, OA cannot be understood without seeing it within this wider historical constellation, and consequently its advocates' attempts to depoliticise it by placing it within a moral category, that is, as an obvious good, is extremely concerning and needs urgent critique. Additionally, as Fuller argues, "much of the moral suasion of the open access movement would be dissipated if it complained not only about the price of academic journals but also the elite character of the peer-review process itself... in effect open access is making research cheaper to those who already possess the skills to [use it]..." (Fuller 2016). Open access raises important questions about how publications can better reach publics and audiences, but by exaggerating its advantages and dismissing its disadvantages, it becomes ideological and therefore unreflexive about its <i>uses</i> in the current restructuring of the university and knowledge in the 21st century.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Notes</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[1] Rockhill (2017) has written about how these changes in the university diminish the range of critical voices that historically were found in the academy. Indeed, he suggests that they</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> "</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">should invite us to think critically about the current academic situation in the Anglophone world and beyond, [for example]... the ways in which the precarization of academic labor contributes to the demolition of radical leftism. If strong leftists cannot secure the material means necessary to carry out our work, or if we are more or less subtly forced to conform in order to find employment, publish our writings or have an audience, then the structural conditions for a resolute leftist community are weakened". Similarly, Golumbia has argued that "</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">depriving professors of the opportunity to earn money for their own creative and scholarly productions is one of the best ways to eviscerate what is left of the professiorate" (Golumbia 2013). </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[2] Finch argued further and completely bizarrely that "we therefore expect market competition to intensify, and that universities and funders should be able to use their power as purchasers to bear down on the costs to them both of APCs and of subscriptions" (Finch 2012). The idea that a smaller number of academic purchasers would drive down prices by paying for production rather than consumption of research publications was presented with no evidence except for the self-evidence of the claim. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[3] Stiegler also quotes that </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">“Catherine Fisk, a lawyer, has gone through old trials in the US in which employers and employees confronted each other over the ownership of ideas. In the early 19th century, courts tended to uphold the customary right of works to freely make use of knowledge gained at the workplace, and attempts by employers to claim the mental faculties of trained white workers were rejected by courts because this resembled slavery too closely. As the knowhow of workers became codified and the balance of power shifted, courts began to vindicate the property claims of employers” (Stiegler 2016: 240).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[4] Andrew Orlowski has argued a similar point in relation to free culture advocates in cultural production, "u</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">nfortunately for the creative industries, there’s money and prestige to be gained from promoting this baffling child-like view [that the creative economy exists to deprive people of publicly owned goods]</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">. The funds that cascade down from Soros’ Open Society Initiative into campaigns like A2K, or from the EU into NGOs like Consumer International, or even from UK taxpayers into quangos like Consumer Focus, all perpetuate the myth that there’s a ‘balance': that we’ll be richer if creators are poorer, we’ll have a more-free society if we have fewer individual rights, and that in the long-term, destroying rewards for creators is both desirable and ‘sustainable’" (Orlowski 2012).</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Bibliography</b><br />
<br />
Allington, D. (2013) On open access, and why it’s not the answer, <a href="http://www.danielallington.net/2013/10/open-access-why-not-answer/">http://www.danielallington.net/2013/10/open-access-why-not-answer/</a><br />
<br />
Berry, D. M. (2008) <i>Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source</i>, London: Pluto Press.<br />
<br />
Biswas,A. and Kirchherr,J. (2016) The Tough Life of an Academic Entrepreneur: Innovative commercial and non-commercial ventures must be encouraged, <i>LSE Blog</i>, <a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/02/16/the-tough-life-of-an-academic-entrepreneur/">http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/02/16/the-tough-life-of-an-academic-entrepreneur/</a><br />
<br />
Mourik Broekman, P., Hall, G., Byfield, T. Hides, S. and Worthington, S. (2015) <i>Open Education: A Study in Disruption</i>, London: Rowman and Littlefield.<br />
<br />
Collini, S. (2012) <i>What Are Universities For?</i>, London: Penguin.<br />
<br />
Collini, S. (2017) <i>Speaking of Universities</i>, London: Verso.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Christensen, C. M. (1997), <i>The innovator's dilemma: when new technologies cause great firms to fail</i>, Boston, Massachusetts, USA: Harvard Business School Press</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Christensen, C. M. (2017) Disruptive Innovation, http://www.claytonchristensen.com/key-concepts/</div>
<div>
<br />
Crossick, G. (2015) Monographs and Open Access: A report to HEFCE, <i>HEFCE</i>, <a href="http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce/content/pubs/indirreports/2015/Monographs,and,open,access/2014_monographs.pdf">http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce/content/pubs/indirreports/2015/Monographs,and,open,access/2014_monographs.pdf</a><br />
<br />
Davidson, R. (2016) Open Data is the new oil that fuels society, Office for National Statistics, <a href="https://blog.ons.digital/2016/01/25/open-data-new-oil-fuels-society/">https://blog.ons.digital/2016/01/25/open-data-new-oil-fuels-society/</a><br />
<br />
Economist (2014) Massive open online forces, <i>The Economist</i>, <a href="https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21595901-rise-online-instruction-will-upend-economics-higher-education-massive">https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21595901-rise-online-instruction-will-upend-economics-higher-education-massive</a><br />
<br />
Finch (2012) <i>Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications</i>, Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, <i>https://www.acu.ac.uk/research-information-network/finch-report-executive-summary</i></div>
<div>
<br />
Finlayson, G. and Hayward, D. (2012) Education towards heteronomy: a critical analysis of the reform of UK universities since 1978, <i>libcom.org</i>, <a href="https://libcom.org/history/education-towards-heteronomy-critical-analysis-reform-uk-universities-1978">https://libcom.org/history/education-towards-heteronomy-critical-analysis-reform-uk-universities-1978</a></div>
<div>
<br />
Fuller, S. (2016) <i>Academic Caesar</i>, London: Palgrave Macmillan.<br />
<br />
Golumbia, D. (2013) On Allington on Open Access, uncomputing, <a href="http://www.uncomputing.org/?p=288">http://www.uncomputing.org/?p=288</a><br />
<br /></div>
<div>
Golumbia, D. (2016). Marxism and Open Access in the Humanities: Turning Academic Labor against Itself, <i>Workplace</i>, 28, 74-114.</div>
<div>
<br />
Hinssen, P. (2012) (Ed.) Information is the New Oil: Drilling New Sources of Innovation, <a href="http://datascienceseries.com/assets/blog/GREENPLUM_Information_is_the_new_oil-LR.pdf">http://datascienceseries.com/assets/blog/GREENPLUM_Information_is_the_new_oil-LR.pdf</a><br />
<br /></div>
<div>
Holmwood, J. (2011) (Ed.) <i>A Manifesto for the Public University</i>, London: Bloomsbury Academic.</div>
<div>
<br />
Kuneva, M. (2009) Keynote Speech, Roundtable on Online Data Collection, Targeting and Profiling, <a href="http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-09-156_en.htm">http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-09-156_en.htm</a><br />
<br />
Lovink, G. (2016) <i>Social Media Abyss: Critical Internet Cultures and the Forces of Negation</i>, Cambridge: Polity.<br />
<br />
Orlowski, A. (2012) Popper, Soros, and Pseudo-Masochism, <a href="http://andreworlowski.com/2012/05/02/popper-soros-and-pseudo-masochism/">http://andreworlowski.com/2012/05/02/popper-soros-and-pseudo-masochism/</a><br />
<br />
Palmer, M. (2006) Data is the New Oil, <a href="http://ana.blogs.com/maestros/2006/11/data_is_the_new.html">http://ana.blogs.com/maestros/2006/11/data_is_the_new.html</a><br />
<br />
Perelman, M. (2003) ‘The Political Economy of Intellectual Property', <i>Monthly Review</i> 54 (8): 29–37.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<div>
Readings, B. (1996) <i>The University in Ruins</i>, London: Harvard University Press.</div>
</div>
<div>
<br />
Rockhill, G. (2017) The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left, <i>The Philosophical Salon</i>, <a href="http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/">http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-reads-french-theory-on-the-intellectual-labor-of-dismantling-the-cultural-left/</a><br />
<br />
Stiegler, B. (2016) <i>The Automatic Society: The Future of Work</i>, Cambridge: Polity.<br />
<br />
Toonders, Y. (2014) Data is the New Oil of the Digital Economy, Wired, <a href="https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/07/data-new-oil-digital-economy/">https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/07/data-new-oil-digital-economy/</a><br />
<br />
Wellmon, C. (2015) <i>Organizing Enlightenment: Information overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University</i>, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-50140062840781113412017-02-09T13:57:00.001-08:002017-02-09T14:05:52.827-08:00Towards an Idea of Universitality<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghzICvgNpYb9J8T0GYdcsFW2GBbI8K5W_23o3zW6rr74sMFfiPC5D0h-obASFhqrB99IRxfIwRqaNPeSrpEnl0GT2Se6RTc6qNEgW0cd873FNIq8Ap4GgD319pMWDpjnMCm2_b/s1600/Plato_Academy_02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghzICvgNpYb9J8T0GYdcsFW2GBbI8K5W_23o3zW6rr74sMFfiPC5D0h-obASFhqrB99IRxfIwRqaNPeSrpEnl0GT2Se6RTc6qNEgW0cd873FNIq8Ap4GgD319pMWDpjnMCm2_b/s1600/Plato_Academy_02.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Ruins of Plato's Academy</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
What would it mean to reclaim the university from its ruins? To revisit what were considered the fundamental conditions of the social epistemology of the university without falling into the trap of nostalgia and traditionalism? In this short post I want to think about what might be the content of a notion of what I am calling <i>universitality</i>, understood precisely as the conceptualisation of a constellation of thought and practice manifested through multiple histories, practices, institutions and bodies related to the idea of a university (Readings 1996; Rothblatt 1972; Thelin 2011, Whyte 2016). By means of a set of <i>hodos, </i>I intend to examine the notion of a university, with a view to developing a new conceptualisation in response to the contemporary crisis of the university, but also in terms of the crisis of its epistemology in and through the university in its modern corporate form.<br />
<br />
This is to rethink the university in light of the more recent challenge to universities and collegiality. To turn a critical eye over the return of a philosophy of utility which hangs over the fate of universities in the 21st century and which dates back to before the founding of the University of London (Collini 2012; Holmwood 2011). Not to say, of course, that this is necessarily a new threat to the university (Newman 1996; Shils 1972). Indeed, the history of the university has also been a history of thought against power, reason against utility, until in the 20th and 21st century thought and reason become themselves instrumentalised in the service of a project of economism driven in part by computationalism and neoliberalism. But what I explicitly seek to do in this article, in contrast to Collini (2017: 24), is to "propose some ideal or essence, some way of distinguishing supposedly 'real' universities from institutions that do not deserve the name". In other words, by making a cut, which here Collini (2017) is reluctant to do, one develops the means of describing and classifying what we might call the university-ness of a university. This is, by its nature an exercise in genealogy as much as description, but it is also about recovering an idea of the university that seems to be all but forgotten, and without which we struggle to articulate a sense of an idea of what a university is for.<br />
<br />
I draw the notion of <i>universitality </i>from the Latin <i>Universitatis</i>, in the particular sense of <i>Studium Generale </i>(understood as a place where students came to study) and more particularly as <i>Magistrorum et Discipulorum </i>(e.g. master and scholars, where scholars here means students)<i>.</i> A universitatis is a form of organisation that can own and control a groups’ property in common for its members and which has a set of rules and regulations which the masters and students must conform to be accepted into the guild. Indeed, this is the etymological source of the notion of ‘university’ which was originally formed of a corporate body formed of masters and students acting as a legal person. The universitatis typically exists where a resource is too large for a single member to administer or to provide temporal security beyond individuals' lifetimes. These corporate bodies, subsequently granted by a royal decree, were similar to municipalities or guilds which would often own property, such as racetracks and theatres. What is important to note here is that the term university, is not drawn from universal or general knowledge, but rather from the generality of the people who can study within the universitas. The idea was that a universitas could be joined by anyone capable of profiting from being there, that is without distinction of class, age, rank or previous occupation. So the universitas was understood as a specific form of corporation or society, hence the notion of members of the society being identified as <i>socii </i>(e.g. Fellows, a term still used at Oxford and Cambridge, and elsewhere for visiting academics). In this understanding of the university only the Fellows are essential to the university, and they are tasked with the search after knowledge, to advance knowledge and to possess knowledge for themselves. Indeed, historically, the role of the university has been closely associated with the production of knowledge, right up to present times. But universitatis also created the conditions for particular epistemologies and particular ways of seeing.<br />
<br />
Here are clues to the first aspect of universitality, the notion that those who make up its core are a community of associates, the masters, dedicated to the advancement of knowledge, understanding and learning. Built around this core group, are the structures of the buildings, the libraries, and the scholars or students who are instructed, trained, educated but also tested, licensed, and qualified for competence by the masters. This is also the basis for the assertion by Kant that the university is ruled by an idea of reason emerging from philosophy, in other words, with infinity (see Derrida 2004: 83-112). Kant outlined this argument of the nature of the university in 1798, under the notion of <i>The Conflict of the Faculties</i>. He argued that all of the university’s activities should be organised through a single regulatory idea – the concept of reason. Kant argued that reason and the state, knowledge and power, could be unified in the university by the production of individuals capable of rational thought and republican politics – the students trained for the civil service and society. This is the beginning of the modern notion of a university and with it the development of both objective and subjective attempts to shape knowledge and learning towards the needs of modernity and its complex society. With this we see the development of the second aspect of the concept of universitality, the idea that a specific social epistemology of a scholarly community is regulated by the notion of reason. <br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />
<br />
<b>Bibliography</b><br />
<br />
Collini, S. (2012) <i>What Are Universities For?</i>, London: Penguin.<br />
<br />
Collini, S. (2017) <i>Speaking of Universities</i>, London: Verso.<br />
<br />
Derrida, J. (2004) Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties, in <i>The Eyes of the University</i>, Stanford University Press.<br />
<br />
Holmwood, J. (2011) (Ed.) <i>A Manifesto for the Public University</i>, London: Bloomsbury Academic.<br />
<br />
Kant, I. (1991) The Conflict of the Faculties, in Kant, I., <i>Kant: Political Writings</i>, Cambridge University Press.<br />
<br />
Newman, J. H. (1996) <i>The Idea of a University</i>, Yale University Press.<br />
<br />
Readings, B. (1996) <i>The University in Ruins</i>, London: Harvard University Press.<br />
<br />
Rothblatt, S. (1972) <i>The Modern University and its Discontents: The Fate of Newman's Legacies in Britain and America</i>, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<br />
<br />
Shils, E. (1972) <i>Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays</i>, The University of Chicago Press.<br />
<br />
Thelin, J. R. (2011) <i>A History of American Higher Education</i>, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.<br />
<br />
Whyte, W. (2016) <i>Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain's Civic Universities</i>, Oxford: Oxford University Press.<br />
<br />BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-76971501109474974642017-01-09T05:34:00.001-08:002017-01-10T10:53:21.788-08:00Prince Rupert's Drop<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgALCpQgZsR0qX7-VWTVn3O1iw8SzYhzEQrL-t-qLsKq4Vi1TtiCFA48PoYA4P1haNh5DSVpuGYfWAZVwfo9U21C97iVYQBFj3x2-BA7irZHi1sZAVWGaBcvONksrh_Nc17-zLB/s1600/PrinceRupertDrop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="184" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgALCpQgZsR0qX7-VWTVn3O1iw8SzYhzEQrL-t-qLsKq4Vi1TtiCFA48PoYA4P1haNh5DSVpuGYfWAZVwfo9U21C97iVYQBFj3x2-BA7irZHi1sZAVWGaBcvONksrh_Nc17-zLB/s320/PrinceRupertDrop.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>A Prince Rupert's Drop</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Prince Rupert's Drops offer very suggestive metaphors for the state of a society in a moment of both extreme resilience and potential fragmentation. The drops appeared in England during the seventeenth century immediately after the Restoration of the English monarchy. Charles II was interested in the new sciences that were emerging and was familiar with many of the scientific controversies of the day, Prince Rupert too was fascinated by new scientific discoveries and curiosities. Indeed, in 1660, the Royal Society was granted a royal charter by King Charles II and whose scientific activities caused great interest across English society. For example, Samuel Pepys mentions the drops in his diary of 13 January 1662, as "chymicall glasses, which break all to dust by breaking off a little small end; which is a great mystery to me" (Pepys 1662).<br />
<br />
The Prince Rupert's Drop (<i>Lacrymae Vitreae</i>) is a scientific oddity, originally thought to have emerged when glass was melted and perhaps accidentally released into water, which was always found near the furnaces for glass-blowers (Beckmann et al 1846: 241). As Brodsley et al explain, a sense of mystery permeates the history of Prince Rupert's Drops, which they link to the fact that since the time of Emperor Tiberius glass-blowers might well have had a taboo about mentioning information about glass to outsiders as Tiberius had ordered the inventor of toughened glass to be put to death to prevent it being communicated to others. When molten glass is dropped into water in a particular way, it forms what look like glass tears, or tadpole shaped glass beads. The beads themselves, together with their tails of glass, have some extremely odd properties, which when they came to the attention of experimental philosophers in the middle of the seventeenth century caused much excitement.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The 'bubbles'-the solid ones, at least-were what were later to called 'Prince Rupert's drops'. (Those said to contain 'liquor' could have been something different, but were probably the same containing vacuoles and no actual liquid.) These objects, glass beads with the form of a tear- tapering to a fine tail, made (though that was not generally known at the time by dripping molten glass into cold water, exhibited a paradoxical combination of strength and fragility not without interest to the materials scientist of the present day, and which could not fail to excite the imagination of natural (and not so natural) philosphers of the I7th century. The head withstands hammering on an anvil, or, as a more modern test, squeezing in a vice indenting its steel jaws, without fracture: yet breaking the tail with finger pressure caused the whole to explode into powder (Brodsley 1986: 1).</blockquote>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL6uiPRtPTVNrLsxUzzRRP5uuvgKFCvqPBnc3e804PCf7HicyaTsx0kL77d46UP0iW6Gox3jiMwv8iNaU-8AGwtxM4cedWqYr2KUPxqcZFTIGcLThO5fV-NZzu92wxhTiehlJg/s1600/PrinceRupert.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL6uiPRtPTVNrLsxUzzRRP5uuvgKFCvqPBnc3e804PCf7HicyaTsx0kL77d46UP0iW6Gox3jiMwv8iNaU-8AGwtxM4cedWqYr2KUPxqcZFTIGcLThO5fV-NZzu92wxhTiehlJg/s320/PrinceRupert.jpg" width="294" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Prince Rupert</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Beckmann et al explain that the beginning of the scientific examination of these glass drops is somewhat clouded in history, with evidence that they were made in The Netherlands in 1656 (and hence their other name as Dutch drops), and displayed in Paris and other cities to much interest (although some thought they had emerged from Sweden rather than The Netherlands). Brodsley dates their earliest date to the Mecklenburg glass-houses before 1625 (Brodsley 1986: 5-6). Nonetheless, their name became associated with Prince Rupert who bought them to England as gifts for Charles II, and which were given to the Royal Society. Prince Rupert returned to England from Germany in 1660 to join with Charles II after the Restoration in 1660. They were experimented with at the Royal Society in 1661 and examined by Robert Hooke (1665) and Thomas Hobbes (1662). According to the minutes of the Royal Society, "the King sent by Paul Neile five little glass bubbles, two with liquor in them, and the three solid, in order to have the judgement of the society concerning them" (Brodsley 1986: 1). In 1663 even Samuel Butler referred to them in his poem, Hudibras,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Honour is like that glassy bubble<br />
That finds philosphers such trouble,<br />
Whose least part crack'd, the whole does fly<br />
And wits are crack'd, to find out why.</blockquote>
The way in which the drop's head is formed into a state of tensile stress creates a remarkably strong material surface, which cannot be cracked with a hammer, or even with a bullet.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[1]</span> However, should the tail be given the slightest crack, the entire structure disintegrates into an explosion of glass due to the high potential energy stored through the tail. It was not until A. A. Griffith's research in 1920 that,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
the qualitative ideas of the strengthening effect of compressive stress could be given a detailed and mathematical formulation. In Griffith's theory, the fracture of a brittle substance, such as glass, is initiated from pre-existing microcracks, which can grow larger, extracting enough elastic energy from their surroundings to pay for the energy of the increased area of free surface only if the stress around them is tensile and the product of the stress and the square root of the crack diameter exceeds a critical value dependent on basic properties of the material. (Brodsley 1986: 2).</blockquote>
This curious way of fragmentation and explosion of the drop from a tiny crack in the tail, but the incredible resilience in the head of the drop led to many analogies being formed from its example. For example, as early as 1671, Geminiano Montanari who sent a paper to the Royal Society on the subject of the Prince Rupert Drop, concluded his paper saying "so is a kingdom one and strong but when the top is broken shivers into men" (McManus 2014). Similarly, in 1851, in his <i>Address to the Citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law</i>, Waldo Emerson remarked that Daniel Webster, a Massachusetts senator elected by the Whig party, thought,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
that the American Union is a huge Prince Rupert's Drop, which, if so much as the smallest end be shivered off, the whole will snap into atoms. Now, the fact is quite different from this. The people are loyal, law-abiding. They prefer order, and have no taste for misrule and uproar (Emerson 1851: 182).</blockquote>
Indeed, Freud in <i>Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego</i> (1921) contemplated "the loss of the leader in some sense or other, the birth of misgivings about him, brings on the outbreak of panic, though the danger remains the same; the mutual ties between the members of the group disappear, as a rule, at the same time as the tie with their leader. The group vanishes in dust, like a Prince Rupert’s drop when its tail is broken off" (Freud 1921).<br />
<br />
At a time when there appears to be a rise in authoritarianism and popularism, and the strong identification with a leader, this metaphor provides a way of thinking about the political unity of contemporary constellations of reactionary political movements. The Prince Rupert's Drop perhaps becomes useful again as a metaphor to think about the possible effects of this kind of political sensibility. But whether it is the new political constellations themselves or society as a whole that fragments when the tail potentiality is released, depends ever more on the political sensibility, levels of rationality and critical reflexivity of a public which under conditions of computational capitalism looks increasingly unprepared in a digital age.<br />
<br />
<b>Notes</b><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[1] See <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe-f4gokRBs">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe-f4gokRBs</a> for a 130,000 frames per second video of the Prince Rupert's Drop as it explodes.</span><br />
<br />
<b>Bibliography</b><br />
<br />
Beckmann, J., Johnston, W., Francis, w., Griffith, J. W. (1846) <i>A history of inventions, discoveries, and origins</i>, London, H.G. Bohn.<br />
<br />
Brodsley, L., Frank, C. and Steeds, J.W. (1986) <i>Prince Rupert's Drops</i>, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Oct., 1986), pp. 1-26<br />
<br />
Emerson, W. (1851 [2005]) Address to the Citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law, in <i>The Selected Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson</i>, University of Georgia Press.<br />
<br />
Freud, S. (1921) <i>Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego</i>, London: WW Norton & Company.<br />
<br />
Hobbes, T. (1662) <i>Problematica Physica</i>, translated in English in 1682 as Seven Philosophical Problems, pp. 36-39, 146-148.<br />
<br />
Hooke, R. (1665) <i>Micrographia or Some Physiologial Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses with Observation and Inquiries thereupon</i>, London: Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry.<br />
<br />
Pepys, S. (1662) Monday 13 January 1661/62, <i>The Diary of Samuel Pepys</i>, accessed 09/01/2017, <a href="http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1662/01/13/">http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1662/01/13/</a>BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-34708755675733205622016-12-15T11:18:00.004-08:002021-08-19T15:11:39.006-07:00InfrasomatizationIn this post I want to introduce the notion of <b>infrasomatization</b>. The intention is to expand the categories of <i>exosomatization</i> and <i>endosomatization</i> developed by Alfred J. Lotka and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in their work on ecological economics and by Karl Popper in relation to what he called objective knowledge (see Lotka 1925; Georgescu-Roegen 1970, 1972, 1978; Popper 1972). The terms exosomatization and endosomatization have more recently deployed in the work of Bernard Stiegler in relation to thinking about human augmentation and digital technologies, particularly in relation to the anthropocene (see for example, Stiegler 2015a). The notion of infrasomatization I want to use as a contribution to thinking about the questions raised by these concepts, but also to move away from a binary between endosomatic and exosomatic, by introducing a third term. First it might be useful to briefly survey the earlier uses of these terms.<br />
<br />
Alfred J. Lotka described the world as a giant engine and argued that man and nature should be understood holistically, particularly to show how human activity had an influence upon the operation of what he called the “world engine” (Lotka, 1925: 331). For Lotka, what he called exosomatic elements are different from genetic, endosomatic organs like arms, legs or hands. Exosomatic elements are tools and other instruments used by man to produce, exchange and consume energy in some form. Exosomatic organs, therefore, are an extension of the natural functions of man and the upshot of economic production. As he argued,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In place of slow adaptation of anatomical structure and physiological function in successive generations by selective survival, increased adaptation has been achieved by the incomparably more rapid development of ‘artificial’ aids to our native receptor–effector apparatus, in a process that might be termed exosomatic evolution (Lotka, 1945: 188).</blockquote>
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen used and developed Lotka's ideas of biophysical economics, particularly in <i>The Entropy Law and the economic problem</i> (1970), <i>Energy and economic myths</i> (1972) and <i>Inequality, limits and growth from a bioeconomic viewpoint</i> (1978). He argued,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Apart from a few insignificant exceptions, all species other than man use only endosomatic instruments — as Alfred Lotka proposed to call those instruments (legs, claws, wings, etc.) which belong to the individual organism by birth. Man alone came, in time, to use a club, which does not belong to him by birth, but which extended his endosomatic arm and increased its power. At that point in time, man's evolution transcended the biological limits to include also (and primarily) the evolution of exosomatic instruments, i.e., of in- struments produced by man but not belonging to his body. That is why man can now fly in the sky or swim under water even though his body has no wings, no fins, and no gills (Georgescu-Roegen, 1972: 81).</blockquote>
We might summarise the distinction drawn by Georgescu-Roegen as between:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>endosomatic instruments</b> (legs, claws, wings, etc.) which belong to the individual organism by birth </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>exosomatic instruments</b>, that is, of instruments produced by man but not belonging to his body (Georgescu-Roegen, 1972: 81) </blockquote>
Karl Popper (1972) similarly drew the notion of exosomatisation from biology arguing (against Hume) that the specificity of human reason is related to the exosomatic processes of externalisation of reason as writing, which enables the possibility of criticism and therefore of the correction of incorrect inferences (Popper 1972: 98). Popper argued that Hume claims that "in practice we make... inferences, on the basis of repetition or habit" a psychology Popper describes as "primitive". Indeed, Popper further argues, that "without the development of an exosomatic descriptive language – a language which, like a tool, develops outside the body-there can be no object for our critical discussion" and that through the externalisation of language "a linguistic third world can emerge; and it is only in this way, and only in this third world, that the problems and standards of rational criticism can develop" (Popper 1972: 120). He expands, arguing,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Animal evolution proceeds largely, though not exclusively, by the modification of organs (or behaviour) or the emergence of new organs (or behaviour). Human evolution proceeds, largely, by developing new organs outside our bodies or persons: 'exosomati-cally', as biologists call it, or 'extra-personally'. These new organs are tools, or weapons, or machines, or houses... The rudimentary beginnings of this exosomatic development can of course be found among animals. The making of lairs, or dens, or nests, is an early achievement. I may also remind you that beavers build very ingenious, dams. But man, instead of growing better eyes and ears, grows spectacles, microscopes, telescopes, telephones, and hearing aids. And instead ofgrowing swifter and swifter legs, he grows swifter and swifter motor cars (Popper 1972: 238).</blockquote>
But as Popper was particularly interested in the development of rationality in and through the capacity for the externalisation of the processes of communication, in language and through the materialisation of thoughts in a medium of expression, he argued that "instead of growing better memories and brains, we grow paper, pens, pencils, typewriters; dictaphones, the printing press, and libraries" (Popper 1972: 239).<br />
<br />
Similarly, Bernard Stiegler has begun deploying the concepts of endosomatic and exosomatic in his more recent work (see Stiegler 2015a, 2015b), arguing,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Marx and Engels showed at the beginning of The German Ideology (1845) that humanity consists above all in a process of exosomatization that pursues evolution no longer through somatic but through artificial organs (which was already glimpsed by Herder 70 years prior to these two early theorists of the role of technology in the formation of social relations and knowledge). But humankind has discovered to its stupefaction that this exosomatization is now directly and deliberately produced by the market — and, with respect to the immense transformations to which it gives rise, without offering any choice other than, in the best case, the profitability of investment, or, in the worst case, the pure speculation involved in the increasingly tight connection between the casino economy, marketing and R&D conceived according to inherently short-term, and therefore speculative, models of disruption (Stiegler 2015a).</blockquote>
Today of course, we have new forms of externalisation which complicate the picture of mere externalisation of what have been described by Popper as internal thoughts and ideas made exosomatic. Not only do I claim that computational techniques and technologies differ from previous materialisations, but are also troublingly constitutive of and able to frame how those externalisations are made (see Berry 2011, 2014). I haven't the space here to explore the specificities of the materialities of previous mediums and their capacity to shape thoughts and ideas, but I want to highlight the difference of computational forms in their processual shaping and reshaping, that is the very fluidity of the moment of a new kind of externalisation under the conditions of computation. Indeed, this can be detected in terms of the anxiety currently exhibited by a public that has begun to note the automation and datafication of everyday life and the wider effects of a financialized economy and the resultant claims for the capacity for individuation and critical thinking, for example in the development of "fake news" but also the recent use of social media in the election of Donald Trump.<br />
<br />
So I want to claim here that data technologies are deployed as what I am calling <i>infrasomatizations</i>. That is, that they are not just exosomatizations, not just the production of tools or instruments. Infrasomatizations are, rather, the production of constitutive infrastructures. Indeed, infrasomatizations rely on a complex fusion of endosomatic capacities and exosomatic technics to create what we might call algorithmic governance (Berns and Rouvroy 2013). So we might consider the way in which infrasomatizations differ in relation to the claims made by Popper, for example, for the role of exosomatization in the development of the capacity for reason and critical thinking.<br />
<br />
By infrasomatization I drawing on the Latin <i>infra</i> as meaning ‘below’ but also its use in anatomy where <i>infra</i> refers to below or under a part of the body. Therefore as I previously explained, infrasomatization does not refer to an instrumental notion of technology, but rather the capacity for framing or creating the conditions of possibility for a particular knowledge milieu. In this sense, certain exosomatizations are actually infrasomatizations, that is when they are built into the lived environment and act to provide context and associations, both material and symbolic.<br />
<br />
Through the creation of specific infrasomatic formations, temporary or otherwise, new modes of knowing and thinking, assembling and acting can be made possible by bringing scale technologies together to create infrastructures. Infrastructure is commonly understood as the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g. buildings, roads, power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise. It is also sometimes understood as the social and economic infrastructure of a country. Indeed, Parks argues, the word infrastructure “emerged in the early twentieth century as a collective term for the subordinate parts of an undertaking; substructure, foundation”, that is, as what “engineers refer to as ‘stuff you can kick’” (Parks 2015: 355). Similarly Easterling argues, "the word infrastructure typically conjures up associations with physical networks of transportation, communication, or utilities. Infrastructure is considered to be a hidden substrate – the binding medium or current between objects of positive consequence, shape or law" (Easterling 2016: 11).<br />
<br />
But infrastructure is not just the built environment, the cables and wires, the water pipes and transport networks, it is also the technical a priori created in and through computation. It is also notable that talk of infrastructure seems to allow us to get a grip on the ephemerality of data and computation, its seemingly concreteness as a concept, contrasts with that of clouds, streams, files and flows. So we hear about cables and wires, satellites and receivers, chips and boards, and the sheer thingness of these physical objects. But we also need to consider stacks and layers, software and code, algorithms and patterns, together with shared standards, diagrams, interfaces and organisational structures.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div>
Infrasomatizations can be thought of as social-structuring technologies, they have an obduracy that can be mobilised to support specific instances of thought, rationality and action. They are latent technologies that are made to be already ready for use, to be configured and reconfigured, and built into particular constellations that form the underlying structures for social and psychic individuation. Infrasomatizations also gestures toward a kind of gigantism, the sheer massiveness of fundamental technologies and resources. Their size usefully contrasting with the minuteness or ephemerality of the kinds of personal devices that are increasingly merely interfaces or gateways to underlying infrastructural systems.Today, we talk a lot about data infrastructures, computational materiality for the highly digital sociality we live in today, especially the questions raised in the relations between the social and social media </div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div>
The key question for me is how infrasomatizations are created as infrastructure, and more particularly how these new forms of infrastructure are positioned to change or replace existing institutions. This allows us to think about institutions as knowing-spaces, and how they force us to consider the political economic issues of making institutions, combined with a focus on creating specific epistemic communities within them – for example in remaking the university. By institution I am gesturing to specific organizations founded for a religious, educational, professional, or social purpose, such as a university. An institution is a material constellation of bodies, affects, histories, technologies, infrastructures and cultures which is organized but requires infrasomatization to function. By organization I mean a specifically ordered, assembled, and structured group of people for a particular purpose, for example a business or government department or a political organization.</div>
</div>
<div>
<br />
By connecting the knowledge formations, affective and cognitive styles, and performances made possible within an institution, structured by the particular constellations of infrasomatizations deployed, we might begin to create the grounds for political intervention. For example, Andrew Feenberg has argued that a critical theory of technology requires “counter-acting the tendencies towards domination in the technological a priori” through the “materialization of values” (Feenberg 2013: 613). Thus tactical infrasomatizations are also possible – here gesturing towards the rich theoretical work on tactical media which has been extremely important for media activism and theory (see Garcia and Lovink 1997; Raley 2009). Indeed, as Stiegler has argued,</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
the reticulated digital infrastructure that supports the data economy... can and must be inverted into a neganthropic infrastructure founded on <i>hermeneutic</i> digital technology in the service of dis-automatisation. That is, it should be based on <i>collective investment</i> of the productivity gains derived from automatisation in a culture of knowing how to do, live and think (Stiegler 2016: 15-16). </blockquote>
For Feenberg these can be found at specific intervention points within the materialisation of this a priori, such as in design processes. Feenberg argues that “design is the mediation through which the potential for domination contained in scientific-technical rationality enters the social world as a civilisational project” (Feenberg 2013: 613). By ascertaining how infrasomatization effect knowledge formations, we can work to produce new knowledges and practices that contest particular institutional structures.<br />
<br />
Understanding the relationship between infrasomatization and organization and then to the form of the institution is crucial to constructing progressive institutions. This provides the possibility of contestation of problematic institutional forms, and particularly of the increasingly computational aspect. Hence, we might consider the need for infrasomatic critique, and the subsequent possibility for contesting the emerging forms of computational technologies, structures, systems and processes.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Bibliography</b><br />
<br />
Berns, T. and Rouvroy, A. (2013) Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d'émancipation : le disparate comme condition d'individuation par la relation?, accessed 14/12/2016, <a href="https://works.bepress.com/antoinette_rouvroy/47/download/">https://works.bepress.com/antoinette_rouvroy/47/download/</a><br />
<br />
Berry, D. M. (2011) <i>The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age</i>, London: Palgrave Macmillan.<br />
<br />
Berry, D. M. (2014) <i>Critical Theory and the Digital</i>, New York: Bloomsbury.<br />
<br />
Feenberg, A. (2013) Marcuse’s Phenomenology: Reading Chapter Six of One-Dimensional Man, Constellations, Volume 20, Number 4, pp. 604-614.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Garcia, D. and Lovink, G. (1997) The ABC of Tactical Media, Nettime, accessed 15/09/16, <a href="http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html">http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html</a><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1970/2011) The Entropy Law and the Economic Problem, in Bonaiuti, M. (Ed.), <i>From Bioeconomics to Degrowth: Georgescu-Roegen's 'New Economics' in Eight Essays</i>, London: Routledge Studies in Ecological Economics, pp. 49–57.<br />
<br />
Georgescu-Roegen, N., (1972/2011). Energy and Economic Myths, in Bonaiuti, M. (Ed.), <i>From Bioeconomics to Degrowth: Georgescu-Roegen's 'New Economics' in Eight Essays</i>, London: Routledge Studies in Ecological Economics, pp. 58–92<br />
(2011).<br />
<br />
Georgescu-Roegen, N., (1978/2011) Inequality, Limits and Growth From a<br />
Bioeconomic Viewpoint, in Bonaiuti, M. (Ed.), <i>From Bioeconomics to Degrowth: Georgescu-Roegen's 'New Economics' in Eight Essays</i>, London: Routledge Studies in Ecological Economics, pp. 103–113 (2011).<br />
<div>
<br />
Easterling, K. (2016) <i>Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space</i>, London: Verso.<br />
<br /></div>
Lotka, A.J., 1925. <i>Elements of Physical Biology, </i>Baltimore: William & Wilkins Company.<br />
<br />
Parks, L. (2015) “Stuff you can kick”: Towards a theory of Media Infrastructures. In Between the humanities and the digital, (Eds, Svensson, P. & Goldberg, D.T.) MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pp. 355-373.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Popper, K. (1972) <i>Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach</i>, Oxford: University of Oxford Press.<br />
<br />
Raley, R. (2009) Tactical Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Stiegler, B. (2015a) Power, Powerlessness, Thinking, and Future, <i>Los Angeles Review of Books</i>, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/power-powerlessness-thinking-and-future/#!">https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/power-powerlessness-thinking-and-future/#!</a><br />
<br />
Stiegler, B. (2015b) Symptomatology of the Month of January 2015 in France, accessed 14/12/2016, <a href="https://www.academia.edu/12797208/Bernard_Stiegler_Symptomatology_of_the_Month_of_January_2015_in_France_2015_">https://www.academia.edu/12797208/Bernard_Stiegler_Symptomatology_of_the_Month_of_January_2015_in_France_2015_</a><br />
<br />
Stiegler, B. (2016) <i>The Automatic Society</i>, volume 1: The Future of Work, Cambridge: Polity.<br />
<br />
<br />BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-13466209410983351002016-10-31T16:30:00.000-07:002016-11-01T08:53:24.493-07:00Six Theses on Computational Attention <div style="text-align: right;">
</div>
<b>Thesis 1</b>: Computational attention is a reconfiguration of human attention around a new historical constellation of intelligibility related to technically mediated <i>signalling</i> (e.g. individuated “touch-events”), for example, clicks, touch, taps, nudges, notifications, etc.<br />
<br />
<b>Thesis 2</b>: Computational attention is reassembled through labour to make this new mediated attention possible through computational objects, devices, systems and ideologies. It is delegated to and prescribed from technical devices, funnelled and massaged through algorithmic interfaces.<br />
<br />
<b>Thesis 3</b>: The subjectivity appropriate to a digital age is reconstructed in relation to this fundamental reconfiguration of human attention under conditions of computation, e.g. enframed and patterned. It is a positive subjectivity in terms of its capacity to generate positive signals of interaction and movement.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTxFozJccHNyARKJ6TaNx66D_DNPl9hDbmdENKHd-MOx5OZeO8byG-u22C1GpIfQCr6og8N325kUjQq5ltwJop4CWu-SKqZ_Ej8vWH1-xDCFpsL_UWbbIdXStc_CiNf6LbEhUG/s1600/Screen+Shot+2016-10-31+at+23.15.11.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTxFozJccHNyARKJ6TaNx66D_DNPl9hDbmdENKHd-MOx5OZeO8byG-u22C1GpIfQCr6og8N325kUjQq5ltwJop4CWu-SKqZ_Ej8vWH1-xDCFpsL_UWbbIdXStc_CiNf6LbEhUG/s320/Screen+Shot+2016-10-31+at+23.15.11.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Apple implementation of "tapbacks" in Messages App on iOS 10</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b><br /></b>
<b>Thesis 4</b>: New grammars of hyper-attention are developed, so to “pay attention” becomes to “tapback”, to provide a signal by a technical gesture transmitted through a technical medium (“likes”, “hearts”, emoticons”).<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[1]</span> To attention is to <i>click</i> or <i>touch</i>, to anti-attention is to <i>exit</i> (from the app, the webpage, the social group, the country).<br />
<br />
<b>Thesis 5</b>: As technical <i>attentioning</i> becomes more important, traditional signalling of attention becomes secondary to the collection of postdigital metrics of attention. For example, how attentive where they? What are they attending to? How can I signal my attention? What are they paying attention to?<br />
<br />
<b>Thesis 6</b>: The mediation of attention becomes crucial in the governmentality of postdigital political economy. We must signal that we are “paying attention”, through computational devices we gesture our attentioning. Hence, we increasingly are encouraged to leave attentioning traces through digital interactions on interfaces.<br />
<div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">These theses are drawn from a presentation given at the conference <i><a href="http://www.yvescitton.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Citton-AttentionHumaineComputationnelle-Introduction-13oct2016-Livret8pages.pdf" target="_blank">Attention humaine / Exo-attention computationnelle</a></i> in Grenobles, October 2016, organised by <a href="http://www.yvescitton.net/" target="_blank">Yves Citton</a>.</span>
</div>
<br />
<br />
<b>Notes</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[1] as an example of signalling attention, Apple uses what it calls tapbacks via its messages application. These trigger both visual and haptic feedback to demonstrate attention to the conversation. </span>BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-22687445284884115002016-09-15T06:01:00.012-07:002016-09-28T02:53:47.990-07:00Tactical Infrastructures<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXQTX0YWwDNnLCQ7NndfrzZBX6dyrTs4FFtyFqHNakRFJnba2WNIS7rKigbYjafWmbxfG7Q7gU_I9ByYp-9Y9tMKOBFIjysTKZUWpj5MkIXFZ3iMeZ-DUnH7Fuc3doPPLM6cTV/s1600/banner-support-infrastructure.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="164" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXQTX0YWwDNnLCQ7NndfrzZBX6dyrTs4FFtyFqHNakRFJnba2WNIS7rKigbYjafWmbxfG7Q7gU_I9ByYp-9Y9tMKOBFIjysTKZUWpj5MkIXFZ3iMeZ-DUnH7Fuc3doPPLM6cTV/s320/banner-support-infrastructure.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Infrastructures are currently the subject of much scholarly and activist critique (Hu 2015; Parks and Starosielski 2015; Plantin et al 2016; Starosielski 2015). Perhaps not so much in terms of their critically dissected effects and influences as a form of ideology critique, but more in terms of a new recognition of their importance as conditions of possibility for forms of knowing and acting together with the creation of epistemic stability and modes of knowledge that can be instrumentalised in particular ways (for a discussion, see Berry 2014).<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[1]</span> In contrast, rather than describe existing infrastructure I would like to think through the way in which counter-infrastructures can be thought about as <i>tactical infrastructures</i>. That is, how through the creation of specific formations, temporary or otherwise, new modes of knowing and thinking, assembling and acting can be made possible by bringing scale technologies together. By tactical infrastructures I am, of course, gesturing towards the rich theoretical work on tactical media which has been extremely important for media activism and theory (see <span style="background-color: white;">Garcia and Lovink 1997; Raley 2009)</span>.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[2]</span> I also think it is useful to point towards the work of Liu (2016) and his recent conceptualisation of critical infrastructure studies. I am also drawing on the work of Feenberg who has argued that a critical theory of technology requires “counter-acting the tendencies towards domination in the technological a priori” through the “materialization of values” (Feenberg 2013: 613). This Feenberg argues can be found at specific intervention points within the materialisation of this a priori, such as in design processes. Feenberg argues that “design is the mediation through which the potential for domination contained in scientific-technical rationality enters the social world as a civilisational project” (Feenberg 2013: 613).<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Infrastructure is commonly understood as the basic physical and organizational structures and facilities (e.g. buildings, roads, power supplies) needed for the operation of a society or enterprise. It is also sometimes understood as the social and economic infrastructure of a country. Indeed, Parks argues, the word infrastructure “emerged in the early twentieth century as a collective term for the subordinate parts of an undertaking; substructure, foundation”, that is, as what “engineers refer to as ‘stuff you can kick’” (Parks 2015: 355). Infrastructure can be thought of as pre-socialised technologies, not in the sense that the material elements of infrastructure are non-social, but that although they themselves are sociotechnical materialities, they have reached what we might call their quasi-teleological condition. They are latent technologies that are made to be already ready for use, to be configured and reconfigured, and built into particular constellations that form the underlying structures for institutions. Heidegger would say that they are made to stand by. <i>Infrastructure talk</i> also gestures toward a kind of gigantism, the sheer massiveness of fundamental technologies and resources – their size usefully contrasting with the minuteness or ephemerality of the kinds of personal devices that are increasingly merely interfaces or gateways to underlying infrastructural systems.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[3]</span> </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzjosEFWz-7hwCWH4TvVQAWhisUyoy3aTpen65bInwl7PmIBqvYYiiftSqcDRbrL-0axryKw1XUWQd8zmJV85T_cxHXa70i9gvqgBN-fM7i54d1i3my30VsKREXQQdYb-e42Zk/s1600/apple-a9-iphone.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzjosEFWz-7hwCWH4TvVQAWhisUyoy3aTpen65bInwl7PmIBqvYYiiftSqcDRbrL-0axryKw1XUWQd8zmJV85T_cxHXa70i9gvqgBN-fM7i54d1i3my30VsKREXQQdYb-e42Zk/s320/apple-a9-iphone.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Apple highlighting the M9 section of its A9 processor</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Today, we talk a lot about data infrastructures, computational materiality for the highly digital sociality we live in today, especially the questions raised in the relations between the social and social media (see also Lovink 2012). But also in terms of the anxiety currently exhibited by a public that has begun to note the datafication of everyday life and the wider effects of a financialized economy. It is also notable that talk of infrastructure seems to allow us to get a grip on the ephemerality of data and computation, its seemingly concreteness as a notion, contrasts with that of clouds, streams, files and flows. So we hear about cables and wires, satellites and receivers, chips and boards, and the sheer thingness of these physical objects, stands in symbolically for the difficulty of visualising the computational objects. I use symbolically deliberately because merely discursively asserting a materiality does not make it material. Indeed, most people have never seen an “actual” satellite or an undersea data cable, nor indeed a computer chip or circuit board. They rely on mediations provided by visual representations such as photography, or videos, that show the thingness of the cables or chips by photographing it. One is reminded of Apple’s turn towards a postdigital aesthetic of chip representation, gloriously shown in glossy marketing videos and component diagrams, displayed in keynote presentations that whilst iterating the chip speeds, transistor numbers and cycles, dives and swoops over the visualised architecture of the device, selecting and showing black squares in light borders on the CPUs of their phones and computers (see Berry and Dieter 2015). The showing of the chip materiality, seeing it in place, within the device, translates the threatening opaqueness of computation into a design motif. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTVQ5pPXyebfVkJyvFwhDe8A6YRtA65YBdvmNFEYq3ZfBYDm7YwXEcPbsuKlPvtdr90Sg9MTkzkTlTbdM8A27hDKSWw5B0vVkF0StzQWHYq1E8wx-_9w6ksExZZAvQkJAQX-as/s1600/20841134.cms.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTVQ5pPXyebfVkJyvFwhDe8A6YRtA65YBdvmNFEYq3ZfBYDm7YwXEcPbsuKlPvtdr90Sg9MTkzkTlTbdM8A27hDKSWw5B0vVkF0StzQWHYq1E8wx-_9w6ksExZZAvQkJAQX-as/s320/20841134.cms.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
In terms of infrastructures we might consider the ways in which particular practices of Silicon Valley have become prevalent and tend to shape thinking across the fields effected by computation. For example, the recent turn towards what has come to be called “platformisation”, that is the construction of a single digital system that acts as a technical monopoly within a particular sector (for a discussion, see Gillespie 2010; Plantin et al 2016). The obvious example here is Facebook in social media. Equally, with discussion over digital research infrastructures there is an understandable tendency towards centralisation and the development of unitary and standardised platforms for the digitalisation, archiving, researching and transformation of such data. Whilst most of these attempts have so far ended in failure, it remains the case that the desire and temptation to develop such a system is very strong as it creates a transitional path towards institutionalisation of infrastuctures and the alignment of technologies towards an institutional goal or end. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I am interested here in how infrastructures become institutions, and more particularly how tactical infrastructures can be positioned to change or replace institutions. As Tocqueville observed, “what we call necessary institutions are often no more than institutions to which we have grown accustomed.” This is to take forward Merton’s notion that only appropriate institutional change can breakthrough problematic or tragic institutional effects (Merton 1948). I also want to move our attention beyond infrastructures and point their tactical use towards making institutions in order to think about institutions as knowing-spaces, and how they force us to consider the political economic issues of making institutions, combined with a focus on creating specific epistemic communities within them. Here I am thinking of Fleck's notion of a "thought collective" as a "nexus of knowledge which manifests itself in a social constraint upon thought" (Fleck 1979:64). For example, Benkler (2006: 23) has called for a “core common infrastructure”, or a space of non-owned cultural production, making links between the particular values embedded in free-software infrastructures and the kinds of institutions and communities made possible. As he writes, particularly in relation to the internet, “if all network components are owned… then for any communication there must be a willing sender, a willing recipient, and a willing infrastructure owner. In a pure property regime, infrastructure owners have a say over whether, and the conditions under which, others in their society will communicate with each other. It is precisely the power to prevent others from communicating that makes infrastructure ownership a valuable enterprise” (Benkler 2006: 155).<br />
<br />
We can think about how institutions generate alternate instantiations of space and time, which thus create the conditions of possibility for new forms of intentionality, thought and action. This also connects to the regulatory aspects of the forms of governance made possible in and through the structures of organization of an institution, and how through combining tactical infrastructures with activism they might be subverted or jammed. In Fleck's terms this would be to think about the relation between the "thought style", "thought collective" and the problem of infrastructures. He writes, the thought style "is characterized by common features in the problems of interest to a thought collective, by the judgment which the thought collective considers evident, and by the methods which it applies as a means of cognition" (Fleck 1979: 99). By connecting the affective and cognitive styles and performances made possible within an institution, structured by the particular constellations of infrastructures deployed, we might begin to create the grounds for intervention through the kinds of tactical infrastructure for institutional change that I am exploring here. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
By institution I am gesturing to specific organizations founded for a religious, educational, professional, or social purpose, such as a university or research lab. An institution is a material constellation of bodies, affects, histories, technologies, infrastructures and cultures which is organized. By organization I mean a specifically ordered, assembled, and structured group of people for a particular purpose, for example a business or government department or a political organization.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[4]</span> Understanding the relationship between infrastructure to organization and then to the form of the institution is crucial to constructing progressive institutions and providing the possibility of contestation of institutional form, not just their actions.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[5]</span> Hence, to turn to the question of infrastructure critique is to also turn towards ideology critique, and the subsequent possibility for unbuilding and, if necessary, creating counter-infrastructures or <i>tactical infrastructures</i>.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[6]</span> To do this it seems to me we have to avoid the dangers of a form of infrastructural fetishism that seeks to show the multiplicity of infrastructures through a project of aestheticisation of infrastructure, whether through photography, data visualisations, or any other media form. What is important is identifying how humans act within institutions and in doing so how they create and recreate fundamental elements of social interaction – i.e. how do thought-collectives and thought-styles adapt? – but also if we change the fundamental structures of infrastructures supporting institutions and their organization, can we strengthen the agencies of actors and the institution to work progressively. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Notes</b></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[1] There is a need for more ideology critique in relation to infrastructures, making use of the work of STS, software studies, sociology of technology, etc. With the ongoing critical turn in relation to algorithms, data, software and code we should hope to see more work done in infrastructure critique. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[2] Garcia and Lovink write that "</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">or excluded from the wider culture. Tactical media do not just report </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">events, as they are never impartial they always participate and it is </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media... </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">above all [it is] mobility that most characterizes the tactical </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">practitioner. The desire and capability to combine or jump from one </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">media to another creating a continuous supply of mutants and hybrids. To </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">cross boarders, connecting and re-wiring a variety of disciplines and </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">always taking full advantage of the free spaces in the media that are </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">continually appearing because of the pace of technological change and </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">regulatory uncertainty</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">" (</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">Garcia and Lovink 1997).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[3] Here there are normative questions here in regard to scale and methodology, particularly in relation to disciplinary biases towards certain scales and approaches. More so considering the way in which the digital creates multi-scalar potentials for research methods – it is interesting to consider the way in which scales still performs a "truth" directing role nonetheless.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[4] There are strong connections here to Lovink and Rossiter’s (2013) notion of Orgnets. </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[5] This is to radicalise the notion of <i>research infrastructures</i> in the digital humanities, for example, where debates over the proper form of research infrastructures tend towards instrumental concerns over technical construction and deployment rather than normative or political issues. For example, many universities select their technical support infrastructures from large proprietary software companies, so in the case of email, Microsoft or IBM might be chosen to allow "integration" with their Office suite, but without considering the wider issues of data sharing, transatlantic movement of student data and work, data mining and so forth. Alan Liu is currently working very interestingly on some of these problematics under the notion of critical infrastructure studies, see Liu (2016). </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[6] This article has been inspired by much fruitful discussion with Michael Dieter, who I have been working with on the notion of critical infrastructures, particularly <i>dark infrastructures, alter-infrastructures</i> and </span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>vernacular infrastructures</i> represented by Aaaaarg, Monoskop, Sci-Hub and related infrastructure projects. But we might also think about hacking "toolkits", crypto parties, hack-labs, copy-parties, data activism and maker spaces as further examples of new structural environments for new forms of knowledge creation, dissemination and storage. Mapping the underlying infrastructures is an important task for thinking about how <i>tactical infrastructures</i> might be deployed. </span><br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Bibliography</b></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Benkler, Y (2006) <i>The Wealth of Networks.</i> London: Yale University Press. Bergson, H. (1998) Creative Evolution. New York: Dover Publications.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Berry, D. M. (2014) <i>Critical Theory and the Digital</i>, New York: Bloomsbury</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Berry, D. M. and Dieter, M. (2015) <i>Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design</i>, Basingstoke: Palgave. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Feenberg, A. (2013) Marcuse’s Phenomenology: Reading Chapter Six of One-Dimensional Man, <i>Constellations</i>, Volume 20, Number 4, pp. 604-614.</div>
<div>
<br />
Fleck, L. (1979) <i>Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact</i>, London: The University of Chicago Press.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white;">Garcia, D. and Lovink, G. (1997) </span><span style="background-color: white;">The ABC of Tactical Media, <i>Nettime</i>, accessed 15/09/16, </span><a href="http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html">http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html</a><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white;">Gillespie T (2010) The politics of “platforms”, <i>New Media & Society</i> 12(3): 347–364.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white;">Hu T.-H. (2015) <i>A Prehistory of the Cloud</i>. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span>
Liu, A. (2016) Against the Cultural Singularity: Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies, <i>Youtube</i>, accessed 15/09/16, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHnJCc2Sc4Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHnJCc2Sc4Y</a><br />
<br /></div>
<div>
Lovink, G. (2012) What is Social in Social Media?, <i>e-flux journal</i>, #40, December 2012. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Lovink, G. and Rossiter, N (2013) Organised Networks: Weak Ties to Strong Links, <i>Occupy Times</i>, accessed 04/04/2014, http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=12358</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Merton, R. K. (1948) The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, <i>The Antioch Review</i>, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Summer, 1948), pp. 193-210 </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Parks, L. (2015) “Stuff you can kick”: Towards a theory of Media Infrastructures. <i>In Between the humanities and the digital</i>, (Eds, Svensson, P. & Goldberg, D.T.) MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pp. 355-373.</div>
<div>
<br />
Parks, L. and Starosielski, N. (2015) <i>Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures</i>, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.<br />
<br />
Plantin, J. C., Lagoze, C., Edwards, P. N., and Sandvig, C. (2016) Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook, <i>New Media & Society</i> August 4, 2016, accessed 16/09/16, <a href="http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/08/02/1461444816661553.abstract">http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/08/02/1461444816661553.abstract</a><br />
<br />
Riley, R. (2009) <i>Tactical Media</i>, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. </div>
<div>
<br />
Starosielski N. (2015) The Undersea Network. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-43202104242449147252016-04-14T09:52:00.005-07:002016-04-14T09:59:36.455-07:00The Digital Humanities StackThinking about the structure of the digital humanities, it is always helpful if we can visualise it to provide some sort of map or overview. Here, I am exploring a way of representing the digital humanities through the common computer science technique of a software "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_(abstract_data_type)" target="_blank">stack</a>". This is the idea that a set of software components provides the infrastructure for a given computer system or platform. In a similar way, here I illustrate the discipline of digital humanities with a pictorial representation of the layers of abstraction in the image given below. This gives the reader an idea of what I am calling the digital humanities stack.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6B-ZAugLrU0jRefdEXWBOCAmSOR-oL51-2llAoCKHsTTrqTqkWxBgavUThDuWqQIEAkA9QU2VfzY20PWZ6B-4DC0IlQyFpcgzn1q3RNn2l9cR1HU5x5vzeXo1A0AP0ptVn1pE/s1600/TheDigitalHumanitiesStack.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6B-ZAugLrU0jRefdEXWBOCAmSOR-oL51-2llAoCKHsTTrqTqkWxBgavUThDuWqQIEAkA9QU2VfzY20PWZ6B-4DC0IlQyFpcgzn1q3RNn2l9cR1HU5x5vzeXo1A0AP0ptVn1pE/s400/TheDigitalHumanitiesStack.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Digital Humanities Stack, illustration by Marcus Leis Allion (Berry 2016)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
This type of diagram is common in computation and computer science to show how technologies are “stacked” on top of each other in growing levels of abstraction. Here, I use the method in a more illustrative and creative sense of showing the range of activities, practices, skills, technologies, and structures that could be said to make up the digital humanities as an ideal type. This is clearly a simplification, and is not meant to be prescriptive, rather it is aimed to be helpful for the newcomer to the digital humanities as it helps to understand how the varied elements that make up the digital humanities fit together. Whilst I can foresee criticisms about the make-up and ordering of this stack that I present here, nonetheless, I think it, more or less, provides a useful visual guide to how we can think about the various components of a digital humanities and contributes towards further understanding digital humanities. I deliberately decided to leave out the "content" elements in terms of the specificity, for example, of the different kinds of digital archive that we see across the digital humanities. I think that this is acceptable as the term digital archive does, I think, capture a wide range of digital databases and archival forms, although perhaps does not strongly enough signify the related material elements, for example in a "postdigital archive" that includes both digital and non-digital element. Relatedly, this diagram does not capture sufficiently, perhaps, something like the inclusion of a media archaeological collection in its materiality.<br />
<br />
So this diagram can be read as the bottom levels indicating some of the fundamental elements of the digital humanities stack, such as computational thinking and knowledge representation, and then other elements that later build on these. Of course, diagrams simplify and even though I would have preferred for the critical and cultural critique to run through more of the layers, in the end it made for a more easily digestible visual representation if I didn’t over-complicate the diagram. The illustration here stretches the concept of a stack, in a strict computer science manner, as it includes institutional layers and non-computational elements, but as a heuristic for thinking about the digital humanities in its specificity, I think it can be helpful. As a version 1.0 of the digital humanities stack I look forward to reworkings of it and complication and re-articulations in the comments.<br />
<br />
<br />BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-65566833957891700312016-01-06T04:41:00.001-08:002017-05-08T09:55:45.561-07:00New Book: Digital Humanities<br />
New book, <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Digital-Humanities-David-M-Berry/dp/0745697658/" target="_blank">Digital Humanities</a></i>, authored by <a href="http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/125219" target="_blank">David M. Berry</a> and <a href="http://fagerjord.no/" target="_blank">Anders Fagerjord</a>, on Polity under production and available in Apr 2017.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkmCxeCCE3LaSZyAMhv8Gg1VrnRzbHUWoDBLuUBTJnkVbz0p_wbLEPSsTaZeeWhH1pRE1pEML4SxMllN4L__YTulScnqfWGhLrWHhZ5FFOrgNy0guZP_eg5UbPbPhR5yPdJNMr/s1600/Berry+-+Digital+Humanities+2017.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkmCxeCCE3LaSZyAMhv8Gg1VrnRzbHUWoDBLuUBTJnkVbz0p_wbLEPSsTaZeeWhH1pRE1pEML4SxMllN4L__YTulScnqfWGhLrWHhZ5FFOrgNy0guZP_eg5UbPbPhR5yPdJNMr/s640/Berry+-+Digital+Humanities+2017.PNG" width="422" /></a></div>
<br />BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-88418326648894731182015-06-25T05:35:00.001-07:002015-08-27T16:42:40.530-07:00Continuous Interfaces<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-b6d6XEvdWFGDlIq5z5SaoyCDd3YpJEP291k1uvV8S08zhXJNDPfPFetOcmS5PfaukAVtM36Bu2chHfW7oc_CX4om18tHGjMssVpRI0jzPGAuEEwBrK7VWQYTAmNd4XhtdnbG/s1600/applealldevices-624x351.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-b6d6XEvdWFGDlIq5z5SaoyCDd3YpJEP291k1uvV8S08zhXJNDPfPFetOcmS5PfaukAVtM36Bu2chHfW7oc_CX4om18tHGjMssVpRI0jzPGAuEEwBrK7VWQYTAmNd4XhtdnbG/s320/applealldevices-624x351.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Apple's Continuity technology across devices</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Under the contemporary condition of computation the question of the interface requires us to attend to that which in everyday practice we attend to continuously.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[1]</span> In this short article I want to think about the way in which the interface as a thin membrane over computational devices is increasingly being stretched across computational devices, objects, practices and processes to create what I am calling <i>continuous interfaces</i>. This has political economic, material and phenomenological dimensions. Here, I focus on the relationship between a computational imaginary related to ubiquitous computing and its important links between design, interface patterns and material technologies rather than its political economic drivers, for example in terms of lock-in, ecological ideas of digital media, and platform hegemony (see Maeda 2015 for discussion of the importance of design as a driver of industry growth and competitiveness), however the materiality of technical devices remains crucial to understanding current technology imaginaries.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[2]</span><br />
<br />
The notion of continuous interfaces I am drawing from the concept of continuous computing which has been deployed to talk about the increasing way in which ubiquitous computing is being embedded in devices which are in tension with their environment – for example in Apple's new continuity technology (Apple 2015). It is also relevant to the notion of continuous partial attention and the work of Linda Stone who explains that continuous partial attention,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
describes how many of us use our attention today. It is different from simple multi-tasking. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. One or both of the activities we’re doing is automatic or routine, and requires very little cognitive processing... To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — continuously. It is motivated by a desire to be a live node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected (Stone 2010, emphasis removed). </blockquote>
In the notion of continuous interfaces, the term continuity refers to the unbroken and consistent existence or operation of something over time but also gestures towards a media notion of continuity of broadcast, in the maintenance of continuous action and self-consistent detail in the various scenes of a film or broadcast. Thomson, for example argues that to enable a new area of continuous computing depends on three factors (adapted from Thomson 2015),<br />
<ul>
<li>Physical design</li>
<li>Interaction models</li>
<li>The ability of the technical device to interact with its environment </li>
</ul>
The experience of the surface of computation has intensified in recent years, both in terms of its growth as a mediating technology for social and cultural life, but also in terms of conceptual means for transcending institutional and technical boundaries between different spheres. Current manifestations of continuous interfaces have tended towards individual computing, the passing of a theoretical user interface intentionality across different computational surfaces, for example. But one could imagine a public continuity as a social imaginary which contributes to public culture and an imagined community although there appears to be little work in this area (see Anderson 2006 for a discussion of imagined community).<br />
<br />
So continuity as a concept has links between hyper-individualised experiences of computation and closing the gap between different personal devices, and individualised goal-oriented behaviours, that is, instrumental rationality (Berry 2014). This also includes the micro-level of the individualised technologies across which various personal technologies that stretch computation across lives, life histories and sociality. This is a problematic I have argued elsewhere (Berry 2011, 2014) and concerns questions of interoperability, of inter or intra-computation and object-oriented paradigms of intercommunication between technical devices which now appears to have begun to be augmented through design, as a horizon of understanding provided by <a href="http://boundary2.org/2015/01/27/flat-theory/" target="_blank">flat interfaces</a> (Berry 2015).<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[3]</span><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The requirement for a shared constellation of representations, axiomatic concepts and grammars of interaction requires a complex assemblage of technologies, articulated through code and design, that has characteristics of responsive design combined with a tight coupling between the materiality of the technical device and the articulation of the principles of the design language. The recent turn towards flat design has been manifested in the use of a double articulation of the geometric fundamentals of the primitives of the interface combined with a neo-materialist abstraction of fictional materials from which the interface is imagined to be constructed. The obduracy of the interface is guaranteed through technical restrictions built into the interface toolbox, both in terms of API functionality but also the sophisticated deployment of integrated development environments (IDEs). But there is also a mythic reinforcement through the allegory of a material form that guarantees the conceptual and practical instantiation of interface design, so in the case of Google it is paper, and for Apple it is glass. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In Berry (2014) I talked about an analytical method of both separating the interface from the underlying code in a depth model of analysis that used the concepts of commodity and mechanism to point to the structural form of computational systems. These were defined as,</div>
<div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><b>Commodity</b>: accessible via the interface/surface and providing or procuring a commodity/service/function. Provides a relative stability for the consumption of ends. The commodity is usually articulated at the level of the interactional layer, usually visually, although this may be through other sensory interfaces level.</li>
<li><b>Mechanism</b>: accessible via textual source code, which contains the mechanisms and functions ‘hidden’ in the software (means). This can be thought of as the substructure for the overlay of commodities and consumption. The mechanisms are usually delegated within the codal layer, and thus hidden from the interactional.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDEa3NMyIDwsYcVDKllDiHo9UoJ1J0ubCM1_b28DTF88Sav4HDDyoymZLUJ1BB-CFDw6rQto9_TbjuKXUIMwQi31iVtIqh9RI4uVDOiFhpG_KsCMj5PxR1omW8zfNHiFX2BLAT/s1600/140602-0060.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDEa3NMyIDwsYcVDKllDiHo9UoJ1J0ubCM1_b28DTF88Sav4HDDyoymZLUJ1BB-CFDw6rQto9_TbjuKXUIMwQi31iVtIqh9RI4uVDOiFhpG_KsCMj5PxR1omW8zfNHiFX2BLAT/s320/140602-0060.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
This is nonetheless a simplification of the architectural structure of the computer allowing the fundamental dimensions of the the relationship between the interface (commodity) and the code (mechanism) to be brought forward. In relation to an approach to thinking about the interface qua interface, particularly in relation to a method or approach that contributes to interface criticism it might be helpful to zoom in on the interface not only as a thin layer or surface upon computational machinery, but also as a discrete computational form in and of itself. Here I am thinking about the possibility of thinking of the interface as a machine in its own right, in terms of what we might call <i>thin computation</i> that tends to be optimised towards breadth rather than depth in terms of its relationship to the functional properties of the computer, but also in a spatial and temporal dimension.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[4]</span> There is also an important question around the scaler function of continuous interfaces for transcending and scaling down planetary-scale computation to a local and individual scale (see Bratton 2014)<br />
<br />
Investigating these developments requires the triangulation of critical approaches to technologies, systems, interfaces, media and culture, but also supplemented with new methods for reading (and perhaps writing) continuity. Some tactics which might be deployed in a continuous interface criticism might include,<br />
<ul>
<li>Disrupting the bluetooth and WiFi antennas that enable the continuity experience. </li>
<li>Connecting and disconnecting new devices into the fabric of continuity technologies. </li>
<li>Connecting devices across platforms, e.g. across material and flat design paradigms. </li>
<li>Overloading the data or computational power to cause glitches to be surfaced in terms of the continuous interface. </li>
<li>Hijacking the public continuity functionality of users' personal technology either to invert the public/private continuity relationship, or to open the black box of such an "invisible" technology.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[5]</span> </li>
<li>Hacking the real-time experience of continuous interfaces by slowing down (increasing the latency) of computational translation between material objects.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[6]</span></li>
</ul>
Continuous interfaces offers not only a conceptual means of thinking about a possible new phase in interface design, but also invites us to think about the way in which one can deploy interface criticism under continuous computing. This helps to disrupt not just the traditional surfaces of computation, but also a growing tapestry of computational moments, objects, glances, notifications and complications that are weaved across the life-world and which we attend to continuously.<br />
<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
<br />
<b>Notes</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[1] This article was prompted by attending the Interfaces: Method and Critique for Designed Cultures conference at the University of Warwick, 24-25 June 2015. See <a href="http://cim-interfaces.net/">http://cim-interfaces.net</a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[2] Maeda (2015) argues "I predict large tech companies will place greater attention on design. This is not dissimilar to the automobile industry as it began to mature — the famous point when Henry Ford refused to sell variations in the only color that mattered, compared with GM, which diversified its designs to appeal to larger populations across multiple brands like Chevrolet, Buick and Cadillac with differing emotional appeal. We see it already with Google’s efforts around Android’s enhanced “Material” visual language led by Matias Duarte, eBay’s design leadership efforts led by John Donahoe and IBM’s resurgence in the design space with its new Austin center led by Phil Gilbert"</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[3] Design as a theoretical limit for the reconciliation of a highly fragmented computation experience, but also life in postmodern capitalism is interestingly reflected on by Latour (2008), where he argues "today everyone with an iPhone knows that it would be absurd to distinguish what has been designed from what has been planned, calculated, arrayed, arranged, packed, packaged, defined, projected, tinkered, written down in code, disposed of and so on. From now on, 'to design' could mean equally any or all of those verbs. Secondly, it has grown in extension – design is applicable to ever larger assemblages of production. The range of things that can be designed is far wider now than a limited list of ordinary or even luxury goods".</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[4] The production of a series of subjectivities constantly overloaded and reinforced through the interface as a temporal object which mediates experience can be captured in the idea of a subjectivity specific to a condition on contextual computing, continuous interfaces and flat design, what we might term <i>flat dasein</i>. That is a minimal subjectivity augmented through environmental and non-conscious cognition from machinic faculties produced via the programming industries and particularly the cognitive-software-design complex of Silicon Valley. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[5] For an example of a hack of Apple's instantiation of continuous computing is the Continuity Activation Tool, see <a href="https://github.com/dokterdok/Continuity-Activation-Tool/">https://github.com/dokterdok/Continuity-Activation-Tool/</a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[6] Treating continuity transfers as a logistics network, and selectively slowing down and speeding up the continuity computational objects would be an interesting example of playfully demonstrating the continuity system. </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Bibliography</b><br />
<br />
Anderson, B. (2006) <i>Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism</i>, London: Verso Books.<br />
<br />
Apple (2015) Connect your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac using Continuity, accessed 25/06/15, <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204681">https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204681</a><br />
<br />
Berry, D. M. (2011) <i>The Philosophy Of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age</i>, Basingstoke: Palgrave.<br />
<br />
Berry, D. M. (2014) <i>Critical Theory and the Digital</i>, New York: Bloomsbury<br />
<br />
Berry, D. M. (2015) Flat Theory, <i>Boundary 2,</i> accessed 25/06/2015, <a href="http://boundary2.org/2015/01/27/flat-theory/">http://boundary2.org/2015/01/27/flat-theory/</a><br />
<br />
Bratton, B. (2014) The Black Stack, <i>e-flux</i>, accessed 25/06/2015, <a href="http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-black-stack/">http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-black-stack/</a><br />
<br />
Latour, B. (2008) A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk), accessed 25/06/2015, <a href="http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/112-DESIGN-CORNWALL-GB.pdf">http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/112-DESIGN-CORNWALL-GB.pdf</a><br />
<br />
Maeda, J. (2015) Weekend Read: Why Design Matters More than Moore, <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>, accessed 25/06/2015, http://blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/2015/05/22/weekend-read-why-design-matters-more-than-moore/<br />
<br />
Stone, L. (2010) Continuous Partial Attention, accessed 25/06/2015, <a href="http://lindastone.net/qa/">http://lindastone.net/qa/</a><br />
<br />
Thomson, B. (2015) Apple Watch and Continuous Computing, <i>Stratechery</i>, accessed 25/06/2015, <a href="http://www.monomorphic.org/wordpress/continuous-computing/">https://stratechery.com/2015/apple-watch-and-continuous-computing/</a><br />
<br /></div>
BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-79669567042129138192015-05-31T18:50:00.000-07:002016-11-01T07:51:55.146-07:00Curatorialism as New Left PoliticsIt is often argued that the left is left increasingly unable to speak a convincing narrative in the digital age. Caught between the neoliberal language of contemporary capitalism and its political articulations linked to economic freedom and choice, and a welfare statism that appears counter-intuitively unappealing to modern political voters and supporters, there is often claimed to be a lacunae in the political imaginary of the left. Here, I want to explore a possible new articulation for a left politics that moves beyond the seeming technophilic and technological determinisms of left accelerationisms and the related contradictions of "fully automated luxury communism". Broadly speaking, these positions tend to argue for a post-work, post-scarcity economy within a post-capitalist society based on automation, technology and cognitive labour. The aim here is to move beyond the assertion that the embracing of technology itself solves the problem of a political articulation that has to be accepted and embraced by a broader constituency within the population (or party). Technophilic politics is not, of itself, going to be enough to convince an electorate, nor a population, to move towards leftist conceptualisations of possible restructuring or post-capitalist economics. However, it seems to me that the abolition of work is not a desirable political programme for the majority of the population, nor does a seemingly utopian notion of post-scarcity economics make much sense under conditions of neoliberal economics. Thus these programmes are simultaneously too radical and not radical enough. I also want to move beyond the staid and unproductive arguments often articulated in the UK between a left-Blairism and a more statist orientation associated with a return to traditional left concerns personified in Ed Miliband.<br />
<br />
Instead, I want to consider what a politics of the singularity might be, that is, to follow Fredrick James's conceptualisation of the singularity as "is a pure present without a past or a future" such that,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
today we no longer speak of monopolies but of transnational corporations, and our robber barons have mutated into the great financiers and bankers, themselves de-individualized by the massive institutions they manage. This is why, as our system becomes ever more abstract, it is appropriate to substitute a more abstract diagnosis, namely the displacement of time by space as a systemic dominant, and the effacement of traditional temporality by those multiple forms of spatiality we call globalization. This is the framework in which we can now review the fortunes of singularity as a cultural and psychological experience (Jameson 2015: 128). </blockquote>
That is the removal of temporality of a specific site of politics as such, or the successful ideological deployment of a new framework of understand of oneself within temporality, whether through the activities of the media industries, or through the mediation of digital technologies and computational media. This has the effect of the transformation of temporal experience into new spatial experiences, whether through translating media, or through the intensification of a now that constantly presses upon us and pushes away both historical time, but also the possibility for political articulations of new forms of futurity. Thus the politics of singularity point to spatiality as the key site of political deployment within neoliberalism, and by this process undercutting the left's arguments which draw simultaneously on a shared historical memory of hard-won rights and benefits, but also the notion of political action to fight for a better future. Indeed, one might ask if green critique of the anthropocene, with its often misanthropic articulations, in some senses draws on some notion of a singularity produced by humanity which has undercut the time of geological or planetary scale change. The only option remaining then is to seek to radically circumscribe, if not outline a radical social imaginary that does not include humans in its conception, and hence to return the planet to the stability of a geological time structure no longer undermined by human activity. Similarly, neoliberal arguments over political imaginaries highlight the intensity and simultaneity of the present mode of capitalist competition and the individualised (often debt-funded) means of engagement with economic life.<br />
<br />
What then might be a politics of the singularity which moved beyond politics that drew on forms of temporality for their legitimation. In other words, how could a politics of spatiality be articulated and deployed which re-enabled the kind of historical project towards a better future for all that was traditionally associated with leftist thought?<br />
<br />
To do this I want to think through the notion of the "curator" that Jameson disparagingly thinks is an outcome of the singularity in terms of artistic practice and experience. He argues, that today we are faced with the "emblematic figure of the curator, who now becomes the demiurge of those floating and dissolving constellations of strange objects we still call art." Further, <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
there is a nastier side of the curator yet to be mentioned, which can be easily grasped if we look at installations, and indeed entire exhibits in the newer postmodern museums, as having their distant and more primitive ancestors in the happenings of the 1960s—artistic phenomena equally spatial, equally ephemeral. The difference lies not only in the absence of humans from the installation and, save for the curator, from the newer museums as such. It lies in the very presence of the institution itself: everything is subsumed under it, indeed the curator may be said to be something like its embodiment, its allegorical personification. In postmodernity, we no longer exist in a world of human scale: institutions certainly have in some sense become autonomous, but in another they transcend the dimensions of any individual, whether master or servant; something that can also be grasped by reminding ourselves of the dimension of globalization in which institutions today exist, the museum very much included (Jameson 2015: 110-111).</blockquote>
However, Jameson himself makes an important link between spatiality as the site of a contestation and the making-possible of new spaces, something curatorial practice, with its emphasis on the construction, deployment and design of new forms of space points towards. Indeed, Jameson argues in relation to theoretical constructions, "perhaps a kind of curatorial practice, selecting named bits from our various theoretical or philosophical sources and putting them all together in a kind of conceptual installation, in which we marvel at the new intellectual space thereby momentarily produced" (Jameson 2015: 110).<br />
<br />
In contrast, the question for me is the radical possibilities suggested by this event-like construction of new spaces, and how they can be used to reverse or destabilise the time-axis manipulation of the singularity. The question then becomes: could we tentatively think in terms of a curatorial <i>political </i>practice, which we might call c<i>uratorialism? </i>Indeed, could we fill out the ways in which this practice could aim to articulate, assemble and more importantly provide a site for a renewal and (re)articulation of left politics? How could this politics be mobilised into the nitty-gritty of actual political practice, policy, activist politics, and engender the affective relation that inspires passion around a political programme and suggests itself to the kinds of singularities that inhabit contemporary society? To borrow the language of the singularity itself, how could one articulate a new <i>disruptive</i> left politics?<br />
<br />
At this early stage of thinking, it seems to me that in the first case we might think about how curatorialism points towards the need to move away from concern with internal consistency in the development of a political programme. Curatorialism gathers its strength from the way in which it provides a political pluralism, an assembling of multiple moments into a political constellation that takes into account and articulates its constituent moments. This is the first step in the mapping of the space of a <i>disruptive</i> left politics. This is the development of a spatial politics in as much as, crucially, the programme calls for a weaving together of multiplicity into this constellational form. Secondly, we might think about the way in which this spatial diagram can then be translated into a temporal project, that is the transformation of a mapping program into a political programme linked to social change. This requires the capture and illumination of the multiple movements of each moment and re-articulation through a process of reframing the condition of possibility in each constellational movement in terms of a political economy that draws from the historical possibilities that the left has made possible previously, but also the need for new concepts and ideas to link the political of necessity to the huge capacity of a left project towards mitigating/and or replacement of a neoliberal capitalist economic system. Lastly, it seems to me that to be a truly curatorial politics means to link to the singularity itself as a force of strength for left politics, such that the development of a mode of the articulation of individual political needs, is made possible through the curatorial mode, and through the development of disruptive left frameworks that links individual need, social justice, institutional support, and left politics that reconnects the passions of interests to the passion for justice and equality with the singularity's concern with intensification. <span style="font-size: xx-small;">[1] </span>This can, perhaps, be thought of as the replacement of a left project of ideological purity with a return to the Gramscian notions of strategy and tactics through the deployment of what he called a passive revolution, mobilised partially in the new forms of civil society created through <i>collectivities of singularities</i> within social media, computational devices and the new infrastructures of digital capitalism but also within the through older forms of social institutions, political contestations and education.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[2] </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Notes</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[1] </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">This remains a tentative articulation that is inspired by the power of knowledge-based economies both to create the conditions of singularity through the action of time-axis manipulation (media technologies), but also their (arguably) countervailing power to provide the tools, spaces and practices for the contestation of the singularity connected only with a neoliberal political moment. That is, how can these new concept and ideas, together with the frameworks that are suggested in their mobilisation, provide new means of contestation, sociality and broader connections of commonality and political praxis. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[2] I leave to a later paper the detailed discussion of the possible subjectivities both in and for themselves within a framework of a curatorial politics. But here I am gesturing towards political parties as the curators of programmes of political goals and ends, able then to use the state as a curatorial enabler of such a political programme. This includes the active development of the individuation of political singularities within such a curatorial framework. </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Bibliography</b><br />
<br />
Jameson F. (2015) The Aesthetics of Singularity,<i> New Left Review</i>, No. 92.<br />
<br />BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-6876037561638538862015-05-08T09:19:00.003-07:002015-05-12T00:49:10.648-07:00Signal Lab<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE_eADzXEvWsqko2yHrh34LeFgFtKcJT7aU2360uEPS67YKG64ulx9088ng0kifx2Ml_HYBT3e0WjlmNfB7BwMIRsFCsdWNZLcgQn9sqdJEh-DmQZduCZO_PTiWgWpLx-ZWF_C/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-05-08+at+16.55.06.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="104" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE_eADzXEvWsqko2yHrh34LeFgFtKcJT7aU2360uEPS67YKG64ulx9088ng0kifx2Ml_HYBT3e0WjlmNfB7BwMIRsFCsdWNZLcgQn9sqdJEh-DmQZduCZO_PTiWgWpLx-ZWF_C/s320/Screen+Shot+2015-05-08+at+16.55.06.png" width="320" /></a>As part of the <a href="https://humslab.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Sussex Humanities Lab</a>, at the University of Sussex, we are developing a research group clustered around information theoretic themes of signal/noise, signal transmission, sound theorisation, musicisation, simulation/emulation, materiality, game studies theoretic work, behavioural ideologies and interface criticism. The cluster is grouped under the label Signal Lab and we aim to explore the specific manifestations of the mode of existence of technical objects. This is explicitly a critical and political economic confrontation with computation and computational rationalities.<br />
<br />
Signal Lab will focus on techno-epistemological questions around the assembly and re-assembley of past media objects, postdigital media and computational sites. This involves both attending to the impressions of the physical hardware (as a form of <i>techne)</i> and the logical and mathematical intelligence resulting from software (as a form of <i>logos</i>). Hence we aim to undertake an exploration of the technological conditions of the sayable and thinkable in culture and how the inversion of reason as rationality calls for the excavation of how techniques, technologies and computational medias direct human and non-human utterances without reducing techniques to mere apparatuses.<br />
<br />
This involves the tracing of the contingent emergence of ideas and knowledge in systems in space and time, to understand distinctions between noise and speech, signal and absence, message and meaning. This includes an examination of the use of technical media to create the exclusion of noise as both a technical and political function and the relative importance of chaos and irregularity within the mathematization of chaos itself. It is also a questioning of the removal of the central position of human subjectivity and the development of a new machine-subject in information and data rich societies of control and their attendant political economies.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQyjXEr8McL6XLLilsEtc5XtAut62OFTdjzu1GH78Jepe5ZT2k3u3V82s-EYr34s-3jtFEdU9gcoOkVkBrLCh5U2RDrUjVzjq4ls1q7tKPDoyEQ7zZxpsWU9_heq081-AK6JGy/s1600/white_noise_1_by_falln_stock.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="155" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQyjXEr8McL6XLLilsEtc5XtAut62OFTdjzu1GH78Jepe5ZT2k3u3V82s-EYr34s-3jtFEdU9gcoOkVkBrLCh5U2RDrUjVzjq4ls1q7tKPDoyEQ7zZxpsWU9_heq081-AK6JGy/s200/white_noise_1_by_falln_stock.jpg" width="200" /></a>Within the context of information theoretic questions, we revisit the old chaos, and the return of the fear of, if not aesthetic captivation toward, a purported contemporary gaping meaninglessness. Often associated with a <i>style</i> of nihilism, a lived cynicism and jaded glamour of emptiness or misanthropy. Particularly in relation to a political aesthetic that desires the liquidation of the subject which in the terms of our theoretic approach, creates not only a regression of consciousness but also the regression to real barbarism. That is, data, signal, mathematical noise, information and computationalism conjure the return of fate and the complicity of myth with nature and a concomitant total immaturity of society and a return to a society in which self-relfection can no longer open its eyes, and in which the subject not only does not exist but instead becomes understood as a cloud of data points, a dividual and a undifferentiated data stream.<br />
<br />
Signal Lab will therefore pay attention both to the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of computational totality, taking the concrete meaningful whole and essential elements of computational life and culture. This involves the explanation of the emergence of the present given social forces in terms of some past structures and general tendencies of social change. That is, that within a given totality, there is a process of growing conflict among opposite tendencies and forces which constitutes the internal dynamism of a given system and can partly be examined at the level of behaviour and partly at the level of subjective motivation. This is to examine the critical potentiality of signal in relation to the possibility of social forces and their practices and articulations within a given situation and how they can play their part in contemporary history. This potentially opens the door to new social imaginaries and political possibility for emancipatory politics in a digital age.BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-56881323534209213372014-12-24T08:48:00.000-08:002014-12-24T08:49:34.782-08:00SignalOne of the key moments in the composition of the conditions of possibility for a digital abstraction, within which certain logical operations might be combined, performed and arranged to carry out algorithmic computation took place in 1961 when James Buie who was employed by Pacific Semiconductor patented the Transistor Transistor Logic (TTL). This was an all transistor logic for analogue circuitry that crucially standardised the voltage configuration for digital circuitry (0v-5v). This represented a development from the earlier Diode–transistor logic (DTL) which used a diode network and an amplifying function performed by a transistor, and the even earlier Resistor–transistor logic (RTL) based on resistors which handled the input network and bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) as the switching devices. The key to these logic circuits was the creation of a representation of logic functions through the arrangement of the circuitry such that key boolean logic operations could be performed. TTL offered an immediate speed increase as the transition over a diode input is slower than using a transistor. With the creation of the TTL circuitry the logical operations of NAND and NOR allowed the modular construction of a number of boolean operations that themselves served as the components of microprocessor modules, such as the Adder.<br />
<br />
I want to explore the importance of signal in relation to the interface between the underlying analogue carrier of the digital circuitry and the logical abstraction of digital computation – that is the maximisation of signal over noise in the creation of a digital signal carrier. It is exactly at this point that the emergence of digital computation is made possible, but also a suggestive link between signal/noise that points to the use of abstraction to minimise noise throughout the design of the digital computer, and which creates a logical universe within which computational thinking, that is signal without noise, or without noise as previously understood as thermal noise, is a constituent of programming practice. This is useful for developing an understanding between notions of materiality in theorising the digital, but also in making explicit the connection between digital "signal" and voltage "signal" or between the possibility of communication of information in a digital system.<br />
<br />
At its most basic level standard TTL circuits require a 5-volt power supply which provides the framework within which a binary dichotomy is constructed to represent the true (1) and the false (0). The TTL signal is considered "low", that is "false" or "0", when the voltage is between the values of 0V and 0.8V (with respect to ground) and "high", that is "true" or "1" when the voltage lies between 2.2V and 5V (called VCC to indicate that the top voltage is provided by the power supply, known as the positive supply voltage). Voltage which lies between 0.8V and 2.0V is considered "uncertain" or "illegitimate" and may resolve to either side of the binary division depending on the prior state of the circuitry or be filtered out by the use of additional circuitry. The range of voltages allows for manufacturing tolerances and instabilities of the material carrier, such that noise, uncertainty and glitches can be tolerated. This tripartite division creates the following diagram:<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCk16DySzHvp5LZuyETJgi49ordYPRiYc7peRchF6nbF2Pa9qL9-hvCTSqusqnbzyQdzBMD8pVcV33FMBpBBHxrEVspG9tEki-yOyC8srn2sANq60nI_VK3fAk3BlifUIPAOPC/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-12-24+at+16.38.59.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCk16DySzHvp5LZuyETJgi49ordYPRiYc7peRchF6nbF2Pa9qL9-hvCTSqusqnbzyQdzBMD8pVcV33FMBpBBHxrEVspG9tEki-yOyC8srn2sANq60nI_VK3fAk3BlifUIPAOPC/s1600/Screen+Shot+2014-12-24+at+16.38.59.png" height="123" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Tripartite division of voltage in TTL digital circuitry</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
This standardisation of the grammatisation of voltage creates the first and significant "cut" of the analogue world and one which was hugely important historically. By standardising the division of the binary elements of digital computation, in effect, the interoperability of off-the-shelf digital circuits becomes possible, and thus instead of thinking in terms of electrical compatibility, voltage and so forth, the materiality of the binary circuit is abstracted away. This makes possible the design and construction of a number of key circuits which can be combined in innovative ways. It is crucial to recognise that from this point, the actual voltage of the circuits themselves vanishes into the background of computer design as the key issue becomes the creation of combination of logical circuits and the issues of propagation, cross-talk and noise emerge at the different level. In effect, the signal/noise problematic is raised to a new and different level.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-86195747425629908562014-12-18T16:49:00.001-08:002014-12-18T16:56:29.674-08:00The Sussex Humanities Lab<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpKHMztepa-B1lIYuRmd3J2SqKz1RYEmeIkm2TOw6GyOvhieHPY2om1a3Ly9JpeGJCMOFJGp7xyZJQ06GtDz0d3pKKNglQ98qSPkdgAOeOmyWK5Bb1S4bnQXhWhr1cnxwFUkuy/s1600/US_Sussex+Humanities+Lab_RGB_Black.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpKHMztepa-B1lIYuRmd3J2SqKz1RYEmeIkm2TOw6GyOvhieHPY2om1a3Ly9JpeGJCMOFJGp7xyZJQ06GtDz0d3pKKNglQ98qSPkdgAOeOmyWK5Bb1S4bnQXhWhr1cnxwFUkuy/s1600/US_Sussex+Humanities+Lab_RGB_Black.jpg" height="156" width="320" /></a></div>
The Sussex Humanities Lab is a new programme that will seek to position the University of Sussex at the forefront of theoretical and empirical work exploring the purported fundamental re-configuration of the humanities offered by computational technologies. As culture is re-born digital, old divisions that marked out criticism from history, music from paint, image from text, object from performance, have become increasingly problematic - legacies, perhaps, of the mediality of technologies like print and the structures inherited from the medieval university. When cultural production flows through the digital, the boundaries between different media and practices are reconfigured. This new formation calls for us to re-imagine the humanities, and to build fields of study that transcend the computational and the aesthetic, informed by new digital objects of study, rather than by inherited disciplinary approaches. As such, this programme does not merely suggest a newly transplanted digital humanities into the existing disciplinary structures of the university, but rather <i>another digital humanities</i>. One which connects to the theoretical concerns of new media, media studies, critical theory, software studies, digital media, cultural studies and medium theory, whilst continuing to draw on and reconfigure the humanities within a digital milieu. As such, this suggests a turn to <b>critical digital humanities</b> and with it a set of concerns that engage with notions of materiality, medium-specificity, cultural critique, computation, networks, archives, performance, practices, and new computational cultures.<br />
<br />
<b>Directors: </b>Caroline Bassett (PI), David M. Berry (Co-I), Sally Jane Norman (Co-I), Tim Hitchcock (Co-I), and Rachel Thomson (Co-I). <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>/// Launching Sept 2015 ///</b></div>
BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-10651357112577032052014-12-17T05:05:00.001-08:002015-01-21T16:44:20.919-08:00Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/postdigital-aesthetics-/?K=9781137437198" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6ufHKnWi1UPOBPh58FbrhaJHP9o2UQu9msUdDJR3SKdQ26_PkvazFUZqV7AYfhoD7Psf0WRpnikKeFT2YBREWd1KYqs9yMujfoke7sU_ZHVkJBRD1IgEqN76uxulwyWwOpUdM/s1600/Postdigital+Aesthetics+Cover.jpg" height="640" width="412" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i><a href="http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/postdigital-aesthetics-/?K=9781137437198" target="_blank">Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design</a></i> out in 2015. </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Edited by David M. Berry and Michael Dieter. </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13099097.post-84794264638338598502014-11-13T07:32:00.001-08:002015-03-02T15:39:58.370-08:00Flat Theory<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGxlbHzZOgygXUqmPtgmbPzexwNcLOQ6BQsDXpeYM4TKAhM5_dTXc81SRD5Ej0RDktyD8OA5fSBoo7aZHq0X5rHj8xLGZDzqpOnCSEMCsanVb-KiIfz_jTZNIEGMsCHZyqA57b/s1600/6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGxlbHzZOgygXUqmPtgmbPzexwNcLOQ6BQsDXpeYM4TKAhM5_dTXc81SRD5Ej0RDktyD8OA5fSBoo7aZHq0X5rHj8xLGZDzqpOnCSEMCsanVb-KiIfz_jTZNIEGMsCHZyqA57b/s320/6.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
The world is flat.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[1]</span> Or perhaps better, the world is increasingly "layers". Certainly the augmediated imaginaries of the major technology companies are now structured around a post-retina notion of mediation made possible and informed by the digital transformations ushered in by mobile technologies that provide a sense of place, as well as a sense of management of complex real-time streams of information and data.<br />
<br />
Two new competing computational interface paradigms are now deployed in the latest version of Apple and Google's operating systems, but more notably as regulatory structures to guide the design and strategy related to corporate policy. The first is "flat design" which has been introduced by Apple through iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite as a refresh of the ageing operating systems' human computer interface guidelines, essentially stripping the operating system of historical baggage related to techniques of design that disguised the limitations of a previous generation of technology, both in terms of screen but also processor capacity. It is important to note, however, that Apple avoids talking about "flat design" as its design methodology, preferring to talk through its platforms specificity, that is about iOS' design or OS X's design. The second is "material design" which was introduced by Google into its Android L, now Lollipop, operating system and which also sought to bring some sense of coherence to a multiplicity of Android devices, interfaces, OEMs and design strategies. More generally “flat design” is "the term given to the style of design in which elements lose any type of stylistic characters that make them appear as though they lift off the page" (Turner 2014). As Apple argues, one should “reconsider visual indicators of physicality and realism” and think of the user interface as "play[ing] a supporting role", that is that techniques of mediation through the user interface should aim to provide a new kind of computational realism that presents "content" as ontologically prior to, or separate from its container in the interface (Apple 2014). This is in contrast to “rich design,” which has been described as "adding design ornaments such as bevels, reflections, drop shadows, and gradients" (Turner 2014).<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyBTmtnU3YMUHfvZFtDxUbp2aPMprJu2J8Tr_1_xekleXjkABTzh5QiVFhJ0sOVIC-BORe49HxQVxcmaRgcntdbf2K1G37qT8yUVDg052CD_9ADCufzgfZOVnW7I8UI6vrZjO3/s1600/color_family_a_2x.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="154" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyBTmtnU3YMUHfvZFtDxUbp2aPMprJu2J8Tr_1_xekleXjkABTzh5QiVFhJ0sOVIC-BORe49HxQVxcmaRgcntdbf2K1G37qT8yUVDg052CD_9ADCufzgfZOVnW7I8UI6vrZjO3/s320/color_family_a_2x.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
I want to explore these two main paradigms – and to a lesser extent the flat-design methodology represented in Windows 7/8 and the, since renamed, Metro interface (now Microsoft Modern UI) – through a notion of a comprehensive attempt by both Apple and Google to produce a rich and diverse <i>umwelt</i>, or ecology, linked through what what Apple calls "aesthetic integrity" (Apple 2014). This is both a response to their growing landscape of devices, platforms, systems, apps and policies, but also to provide some sense of operational strategy in relation to computational imaginaries. Essentially, both approaches share an axiomatic approach to conceptualising the building of a system of thought, in other words, a primitivist predisposition which draws from both a neo-Euclidian model of geons (for Apple), but also a notion of intrinsic value or neo-materialist formulations of essential characteristics (for Google). That is, they encapsulate a version of what I am calling here <i>flat theory</i>. Both of these companies are trying to deal with the problematic of multiplicities in computation, and the requirement that multiple data streams, notifications and practices have to be combined and managed within the limited geography of the screen. In other words, both approaches attempt to create what we might call aggregate interfaces by combining techniques of layout, montage and collage onto computational surfaces (Berry 2014: 70).<br />
<br />
The "flat turn" has not happened in a vacuum, however, and is the result of a new generation of computational hardware, smart silicon design and retina screen technologies. This was driven in large part by the mobile device revolution which has not only transformed the taken-for-granted assumptions of historical computer interface design paradigms (e.g. WIMP) but also the subject position of the user, particularly structured through the Xerox/Apple notion of single-click functional design of the interface. Indeed, one of the striking features of the new paradigm of flat design, is that it is a design philosophy about multiplicity and multi-event. The flat turn is therefore about modulation, not about enclosure, as such, indeed it is a truly processual form that constantly shifts and changes, and in many ways acts as a signpost for the future interfaces of real-time algorithmic and adaptive surfaces and experiences. The structure of control for the flat design interfaces is following that of the control society, is "short-term and [with] rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit" (Deleuze 1992). To paraphrase Deleuze: Humans are no longer in enclosures, certainly, but everywhere humans are in layers.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIXLLLIGWQlrwHTL-8loJZ_OOa3VOT_y1zNBJ8HtSq5J3j-Auk9BLN_0uXcb9qiXY9fOfbuxCojF86BMKA5pY335yJ9tbtHnhNv87jM6rHcvANAMN0mEHl04Ry-3WifKZl9ftf/s1600/manipulation_2x.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="155" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIXLLLIGWQlrwHTL-8loJZ_OOa3VOT_y1zNBJ8HtSq5J3j-Auk9BLN_0uXcb9qiXY9fOfbuxCojF86BMKA5pY335yJ9tbtHnhNv87jM6rHcvANAMN0mEHl04Ry-3WifKZl9ftf/s320/manipulation_2x.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Apple uses a series of concepts to link its notion of flat design which include, aesthetic integrity, consistency, direct manipulation, feedback, metaphors, and user control (Apple 2014). Reinforcing the haptic experience of this new flat user interface has been described as building on the experience of "touching glass" to develop the "first post-Retina (Display) UI (user interface)" (Cava 2013). This is the notion of layered transparency, or better, layers of glass upon which the interface elements are painted through a logical internal structure of Z-axis layers. This laminate structure enables meaning to be conveyed through the organisation of the Z-axis, both in terms of content, but also to place it within a process or the user interface system itself.<br />
<br />
Google, similarly, has reorganised it computational imaginary around a flattened layered paradigm of representation through the notion of <i>material design</i>. Matias Duarte, Google's Vice President of Design and a Chilean computer interface designer, declared that this approach uses the notion that it “is a sufficiently advanced form of paper as to be indistinguishable from magic” (Bohn 2014). But magic which has constraints and affordances built into it, "if there were no constraints, it’s not design — it’s art" Google claims (see <a href="http://material.cmiscm.com/" target="_blank">Interactive Material Design</a>) (Bohn 2014). Indeed, Google argues that the "material metaphor is the unifying theory of a rationalized space and a system of motion", further arguing:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The fundamentals of light, surface, and movement are key to conveying how objects move, interact, and exist in space and in relation to each other. Realistic lighting shows seams, divides space, and indicates moving parts... Motion respects and reinforces the user as the prime mover... [and together] They create hierarchy, meaning, and focus (Google 2014). </blockquote>
This notion of materiality is a weird materiality in as much as Google "steadfastly refuse to name the new fictional material, a decision that simultaneously gives them more flexibility and adds a level of metaphysical mysticism to the substance. That’s also important because while this material follows some physical rules, it doesn’t create the "trap" of skeuomorphism. The material isn’t a one-to-one imitation of physical paper, but instead it’s 'magical'" (Bohn 2014). Google emphasises this connection, arguing that "in material design, every pixel drawn by an application resides on a sheet of paper. Paper has a flat background color and can be sized to serve a variety of purposes. A typical layout is composed of multiple sheets of paper" (Google Layout, 2014). The stress on material affordances, paper for Google and glass for Apple are crucial to understanding their respective stances in relation to flat design philosophy.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[2]</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Glass (Apple)</b>: Translucency, transparency, opaqueness, limpidity and pellucidity. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>Paper (Google)</b>: Opaque, cards, slides, surfaces, tangibility, texture, lighted, casting shadows. </blockquote>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="text-align: start;"><i>Paradigmatic Substances for Materiality</i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b style="text-align: start;"><br /></b></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHxZhyphenhyphenxVsFtakb43VngrrJblgUsWfjpRG_8KYYZhXKecguiKu0BpQO5BYWc48jXcw5qnqn76O6VYVVBNZK7es_cSucYkYfIOQxLAd6iJzqhCr7ASc9IhnhARm-9SjEzNX1iLZl/s1600/paper-notes-template.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHxZhyphenhyphenxVsFtakb43VngrrJblgUsWfjpRG_8KYYZhXKecguiKu0BpQO5BYWc48jXcw5qnqn76O6VYVVBNZK7es_cSucYkYfIOQxLAd6iJzqhCr7ASc9IhnhARm-9SjEzNX1iLZl/s320/paper-notes-template.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
In contrast to the layers of glass that inform the logics of transparency, opaqueness and translucency of Apple's flat design, Google uses the notion of remediated "paper" as a digital material, that is this "material environment is a 3D space, which means all objects have x, y, and z dimensions. The z-axis is perpendicularly aligned to the plane of the display, with the positive z-axis extending towards the viewer. Every sheet of material occupies a single position along the z-axis and has a standard 1dp thickness" (Google 2014). One might think then of Apple as painting on layers of glass, and Google as thin paper objects (material) placed upon background paper. However a key difference lies in the use of light and shadow in Google's notion which enables the light source, located in a similar position to the user of the interface, to cast shadows of the material objects onto the objects and sheets of paper that lie beneath them (see Jitkoff 2014). Nonetheless, a laminate structure is key to the representational grammar that constitutes both of these platforms.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV4dPk3qCxCqA63xlDt5oLoCAcXjfLxwbE_MyZ-QzmpOi7NCpuiTDn9_doS0jB929V8XI6UOzroso5HjpvA5JWXJ4hatnIZw3ItcmhDlogxqXnEDEO06V1zOtFJUgz1w0h9tIH/s1600/armin_hofmann_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV4dPk3qCxCqA63xlDt5oLoCAcXjfLxwbE_MyZ-QzmpOi7NCpuiTDn9_doS0jB929V8XI6UOzroso5HjpvA5JWXJ4hatnIZw3ItcmhDlogxqXnEDEO06V1zOtFJUgz1w0h9tIH/s320/armin_hofmann_2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Armin Hofmann, head of the graphic design department at the Schule für Gestaltung Basel (Basel School of Design) and was instrumental in developing the graphic design style known as the Swiss Style. Designs from 1958 and 1959. </i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Interestingly, both design strategies emerge from an engagement with and reconfiguration of the principles of design that draw from the Swiss style (sometimes called the International Typographic Style) in design (Ashghar 2014, Turner 2014).<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[3]</span> This approach emerged in the 1940s, and<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
mainly focused on the use of grids, sans-serif typography, and clean hierarchy of content and layout. During the 40’s and 50’s, Swiss design often included a combination of a very large photograph with simple and minimal typography (Turner 2014).</blockquote>
The design grammar of the Swiss style has been combined with minimalism and the principle of "responsive design", that is that the materiality and specificity of the device should be responsive to the interface and context being displayed. Minimalism is a "term used in the 20th century, in particular from the 1960s, to describe a style characterized by an impersonal austerity, plain geometric configurations and industrially processed materials" (MoMA 2014). Robert Morris, one of the principle artists of Minimalism, and author of the influential <i>Notes on Sculpture</i> used "simple, regular and irregular polyhedrons. Influenced by theories in psychology and phenomenology" which he argued "established in the mind of the beholder ‘strong gestalt sensation’, whereby form and shape could be grasped intuitively" (MoMA 2014).<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[4]</span><br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAA9zm4lElMtURaPbmgNtG0fY66hRjR8MRaM0h-aTQ_lyPOBO_vJQKAlUZ4OvhzKsbeACuljgFYlQdrZfItVwUnN0JeUGcACUxFZrHnrUNlWWkOM4GpIidjNluMAC77sXW3004/s1600/img-robert-morris-1_125225955286.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAA9zm4lElMtURaPbmgNtG0fY66hRjR8MRaM0h-aTQ_lyPOBO_vJQKAlUZ4OvhzKsbeACuljgFYlQdrZfItVwUnN0JeUGcACUxFZrHnrUNlWWkOM4GpIidjNluMAC77sXW3004/s320/img-robert-morris-1_125225955286.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Robert Morris: Untitled (Scatter Piece), 1968-69, felt, steel, lead, zinc, copper, aluminum, brass, dimensions variable; at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. Photo Genevieve Hanson. All works this article © 2010 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The implications of these two competing world-views are far-reaching in that much of the worlds initial contact, or touch points, for data services, real-time streams and computational power is increasingly through the platforms controlled by these two companies. However, they are also deeply influential across the programming industries, and we see alternatives and multiple reconfigurations in relation to the challenge raised by the "flattened" design paradigms. That is, they both represent, if only <i>in potentia</i>, a situation of a power relation and through this an ideological veneer on computation more generally. Further, with the proliferation of computational devices – and the screenic imaginary associated with them in the contemporary computational condition – there appears a new logic which lies behind, justifies and legitimates these design methodologies.<br />
<br />
It seems to me that these new flat design philosophies, in the broad sense, produce an order in precepts and concepts in order to give meaning and purpose not only in the interactions with computational platforms, but also more widely in terms of everyday life. Flat design and material design are competing philosophies that offer alternative patterns of both creation and interpretation, which are meant to have not only interface design implications, but more broadly in the ordering of concepts and ideas, the practices and the experience of computational technologies broadly conceived. Another way to put this could be to think about these moves as being a computational founding, the generation of, or argument for, an axial framework for building, reconfiguration and preservation.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Indeed, flat design provides and more importantly serves, as a translational or metaphorical heuristic for both re-presenting the computational, but also teaches consumers and users how to use and manipulate new complex computational systems and stacks. In other words, in a striking visual technique flat design communicates the vertical structure of the computational stack, on which the Stack corporations are themselves constituted. But also begins to move beyond the specificity of the device as privileged site of a computational interface interaction from beginning to end. For example, interface techniques are abstracted away from the specificity of the device, for example through Apple’s “handoff” <a href="https://www.apple.com/uk/ios/whats-new/continuity/" target="_blank">continuity</a> framework which also potentially changes reading and writing practices in interesting ways.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
These new interface paradigms, introduced by the flat turn, have very interesting possibilities for the application of interface criticism, through unpacking and exploring the major trends and practices of the Stacks, that is, the major technology companies. I think that further than this, the notion of layers are instrumental in mediating the experience of an increasingly algorithmic society (e.g. think dashboards, personal information systems, quantified self, etc.), and as such provide an interpretative frame for a world of computational patterns but also a constituting grammar for building these systems in the first place. There is an element in which the notion of the postdigital may also be a useful way into thinking about the question of the link between art, computation and design given here (see Berry and Dieter, forthcoming) but also the importance of notions of materiality for the conceptualisation deployed by designers working within both the flat design and material design paradigms – whether of paper, glass, or some other "material" substance.<span style="font-size: xx-small;">[5]</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Notes</b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[1] Many thanks to Michael Dieter and Søren Pold for the discussion which inspired this post. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[2] The choice of paper and glass as the founding metaphors for the flat design philosophies of Google and Apple raise interesting questions for the way in which these companies articulate the remediation of other media forms, such as books, magazines, newspapers, music, television and film, etc. Indeed, the very idea of "publication" and the material carrier for the notion of publication is informed by the materiality, even if only a notional affordance given by this conceptualisation. It would be interesting to see how the book is remediated through each of the design philosophies that inform both companies, for example. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[3] One</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> is struck by the posters produced in the Swiss style which date to the 1950s and 60s but which today remind one of the mobile device screens of the 21st Century. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[4] There is also some interesting links to be explored between the <a href="http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/drohojowska-philp/drohojowska-philp1-18-01.asp" target="_blank">Superflat</a> style and postmodern art movement, founded by the artist Takashi Murakami, which is influenced by manga and anime, both in terms of the aesthetic but also in relation to the cultural moment in which "flatness" is linked to "shallow emptiness".</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">[5] There is some interesting work to be done in thinking about the non-visual aspects of flat theory, such as the increasing use of APIs, such as the </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer" style="font-size: small;" target="_blank">RESTful api</a><span style="font-size: x-small;">, but also sound interfaces that use "flat" sound to indicate spatiality in terms of interface or interaction design. </span><br />
<br />
<b>Bibliography</b><br />
<br />
Apple (2014) iOS Human Interface Guidelines, accessed 13/11/2014, <a href="https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/userexperience/conceptual/mobilehig/Navigation.html">https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/userexperience/conceptual/mobilehig/Navigation.html</a><br />
<br />
Ashghar, T. (2014) The True History Of Flat Design, accessed 13/11/2014, <a href="http://www.webdesignai.com/flat-design-history/">http://www.webdesignai.com/flat-design-history/</a><br />
<br />
Berry, D. M. (2014) <i>Critical Theory and the Digital</i>, New York: Bloomsbury.<br />
<br />
Berry, D. M. and Dieter, M. (forthcoming) <i>Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design</i>, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.<br />
<br />
Bohn, D. (2014) Material world: how Google discovered what software is made of,<i> The Verge</i>, accessed 13/11/2014, <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/27/5849272/material-world-how-google-discovered-what-software-is-made-of">http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/27/5849272/material-world-how-google-discovered-what-software-is-made-of</a><br />
<br />
Cava, M. D. (2013) Jony Ive: The man behind Apple's magic curtain, USA Today, accessed 1/1/2014, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/09/19/apple-jony-ive-craig-federighi/2834575/">http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/09/19/apple-jony-ive-craig-federighi/2834575/</a><br />
<br />
Deleuze, G. (1992) Postscript on the Societies of Control, <i>October</i>, vol. 59: 3-7.<br />
<br />
Google (2014) Material Design, accessed 13/11/2014, <a href="http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introduction.html">http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introduction.html</a><br />
<br />
Google Layout (2014) Principles, Google, accessed 13/11/2014, <a href="http://www.google.com/design/spec/layout/principles.html">http://www.google.com/design/spec/layout/principles.html</a><br />
<br />
Jitkoff, N. (2014) This is Material Design, <i>Google Developers Blog</i>, accessed 13/11/2014, <a href="http://googledevelopers.blogspot.de/2014/06/this-is-material-design.html">http://googledevelopers.blogspot.de/2014/06/this-is-material-design.html</a><br />
<br />
MoMA (2014) Minimalism, MoMA, accessed 13/11/2014, <a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/details.php?theme_id=10459">http://www.moma.org/collection/details.php?theme_id=10459</a><br />
<br />
Turner, A. L. (2014) The history of flat design: How efficiency and minimalism turned the digital world flat, <i>The Next Web</i>, accessed 13/11/2014, <a href="http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/03/19/history-flat-design-efficiency-minimalism-made-digital-world-flat/">http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/03/19/history-flat-design-efficiency-minimalism-made-digital-world-flat/</a><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />BerryDMhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07504400258739523237noreply@blogger.com0