The need to organise information in a meaningful way doesn’t diminish in a post-paper environment, and neither does the desire to discover new ideas. Curation and assisted discovery will take new forms as we bring together speakers, hands-on learning, online information and interactive storytelling. Librarians who ignore these opportunities are unlikely to have a future. Those who embrace them now should expect an exciting one. -Hugh Rundle, Blogs and the Post-Paper Library

Libraries, in their own way, do excel at making connections between information and ideas, but more importantly, they serve as a connection between people. Not just “patrons and patrons,” or “students and staff,” but also between “author and reader.” I mean active readers, who take what it is they read and bring it out into the world, the readers Foucault had in mind:

“I don’t write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.” -Michael Foucault (?) (thanks to the shrinking librarian, the best thing about the heart libraries on the internet)

Some days, I want to retire the word “literacies” from my personal vocabulary not because it is unhelpful, but because it is too helpful.  It’s nice to have an expression that validates what we do when we teach, but sometimes when I’m preparing to do an IL session, I feel lost among overlapping definitions and competing disciplinary fields. In those cases, I look for inspiration in doing, and remember that the thing we excel at is being that connection between people, a connection that we provide for one reason, which is not to prove to anyone that a person is “information literate,” but to give them some tools so that they may act upon the world. 

The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom to access and distribute information — and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time. Vinton Cerf rightly states that, “ technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself.” I believe that the same applies to libraries. Libraries support rights through attemps to create equitable (sometimes) access to technology, digital or otherwise. Further down the line, Cerf drives home his thesis–creators of technology need to support human rights. 

So, a tip from a man who helped draft the UN Declaration of Human Rights:

Those in positions of political responsibility, economic power and intellectual authority, in fact our whole society, must not give up or be overwhelmed by the current dictatorship of the financial markets, which is a sure threat to peace and democracy. -Stephane Hessel, Time for Outrage! p. 23

As librarians, we sit at an important intersection of communication, access to knowledge, education, technology, and the market. The question is, are we critically examining our relationship to financial markets? I’m not going to lead a total call against them, or “capitalism,” but time is well overdue to look at how even  the most well-intentioned actors and collaborators with profit motives affect our daily practices.

Waiting for books to come in, and shifting focus to old-school publishing for a while, back in a week or so…

This is about the digital humanities:

Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think, it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out. So as the Web and artificially intelligent smartphones and the rise of China and 9/11 and the winners-take-all American economy and the Great Recession disrupt and transform our lives and hopes and dreams, we are clinging as never before to the familiar in matters of style and culture. -Kurt Andersen, You Say You Want a Devolution?

Andersen here is positing that we are seeking cultural comfort by recycling the past and rarely create anything new, as a reflex against the onslaught of our times. That’s fine, but less than charitable. Even with the example of “why are we still wearing t-shirts and blue jeans?” The real answer is that for staples, it’s more important that they be functional, physically and symbolically. Andersen glosses over the idea that when things work well, you don’t need to improve them.  Given that, any push for “improvement” really becomes a waste of time, effort, and money. In the wake of the passing of Steve Jobs, it became clear that innovation was overrated. It has been widely demonstrated that Jobs took existing ideas and made them marketable, and by way of Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology: What It is and How It Evolves, this isn’t any great surprise. The drive of “innovation” as used in most discussions is often a thin veil for “marketability.” Jobs wasn’t interested in innovation to make the world better, his innovation was leverage to get people to buy products. The great strides in innovation Andersen sees in information technology are in fact, more of the same old he sees in cultural products. In buying technology’s marketing, Andersen judges the slow movement of cultural production too harshly.

As the baby-boomers who brought about this ice age finally shuffle off, maybe America and the rich world are on the verge of a cascade of the wildly new and insanely great. Or maybe, I worry some days, this is the way that Western civilization declines, not with a bang but with a long, nostalgic whimper. -Kurt Andersen, You Say You Want a Devolution?

Andersen has a speed issue. He expects rapid evolution that technology has promised, and he will now extend that negativity into the future, labeling all coming generations as not being revolutionary enough, even while he stagnates in a “decline of western civilization” narrative, which really reached its maximum potency in Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence. This is an old tune, and I won’t work harder to discredit it, but really, Andersen limits himself by worrying too much about western-centric, dead-rich-white-guy culture via Steve Jobs, and is trapped in the same cycle as everyone else. The terms of evolution and revolution have been hijacked by marketing, and they now force the expectation that things will move at that speed, and with this also comes the cultural blindness that keeps many people locked and repeating.  What Andersen sees, and falls prey to (we all do), is serfdom to time-scales dictated by marketing and technology, not by judging things in their own time. This problem is now a problem for the humanities, and we’re pretty ornery about it. Matthew Reisz entitled his critique of the digital humanities serfdom in recognition that the technology is driving research, and not the other way around. He quotes an unnamed scholar:  

“I felt that digitizing had become an end in itself, that too much of the limited research funding available in the humanities was going into it, and that consequently people whose aim was to get funding were being given a perverse incentive to limit themselves to what often seemed like a very mechanical and low-level form of research. Meanwhile, there was less money available to fund researchers wanting to investigate a substantive question or develop an original idea.”

The problem echoes Andersen’s complaint: because of technology, people are unimaginatively digitizing away without really pushing for “originality,” but fails to recognize, as Reisz does, that the ”mechanical” exposes problems with the technology, bringing up issues to be worked out before “more original” work can be done. Again, the hype and speed has eclipsed the reality of progress. A second complaint registered also highlights the myopic vision that digital humanities have wrought:

The danger for (Tamson) Pietsch (lecturer in imperial and colonial history at Brunel University) is that “what gets digitized drives scholarship. I’m sure since its release there have been a disproportionate number of articles using material from The Times‘ digital archive.” It is also safe to assume that poorer countries, like poorer universities, are going to be slower to digitize their archives, with all the potential for distortion that introduces.

As the cliché goes, the winners write the history books, and in the world of the digital humanities, this is still the case. Pietsch recognizes the blind spots that the digital humanities can create, because they are the same blind spots that have always existed. The intervention of the digital frustrates the problem, as the unnamed scholar illustrates: there is too much concern for the technology,  hyper-focusing attention on itself as opposed to the broader issues at play. The condition of our serfdom is the myopic vision of not seeing the larger world. Scholars are obsessing over the lack of innovation in blue jeans and t-shirts, while Tamson Pietsch is rocking it old school chipping away at a huge problem. That’s real innovation, unless you’re Andersen and just waiting around for the end.

There is some precedent for this; the logical methods of observation and refinement at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution enabled the creation and improvement of the microscope and the telescope. In turn, these tools both grew and shrank our sense of the world, enhancing the idea of hierarchies. Much social and scientific organization followed that path and destroyed its predecessors. We build the tool to change things, and then the tool changes us. -Quentin Hardy, How the Internet is Destroying Everything

This is the logic that leads most folks into a postmodern tailspin, where everything eats itself. It’s a fun place to be, and the revolutionary excitment is great, but it leaves you with a hangover. Hardy leaves his editorial with this thought on David Weinberger’s illustration of the internet as dragon eating-its-tail: “Instead of giving us of a new and better way of seeing the world, the Internet is a tool that embodies how we have wanted to see the world for some time. We have built it according to our new ideas about the world, and it gained a power that is destroying pre-existing structures.” Which is all that and then some, but:

Though of course, when a Harvard researcher values something because it affords a more accurate picture of reality, the end of hierarchy and a quest for ultimate understanding seems a long way off. -Quentin Hardy, How the Internet is Destroying Everything

So I am not worried about the end of books as material objects—in archives and private collections, at least. I think they will always be needed and valued. The changes that most college libraries are undergoing have created an era of unparalleled opportunity for collectors and teachers, like me, and who can foresee what the outcome of this reshuffling of printed materials will be? I look forward to the apocalypse as much as any romantic, but if we are witnessing new forms of creative destruction, I think we are also seeing a counterbalancing, reflexive trend toward the creative preservation of the past using both traditional and digital means. -William Pannapacker, We’re Still in Love with Books

Sites like Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, Instapaper, Snip.it, Clipboard, and Curisma, among others, all allow their users to decide what aspects of the web (text, media, etc.) are worth saving and sharing, instead of browsing the web from Google, or even Facebook for that matter. Because many of these networks have asymmetric follow/follower models, and because users can “tune” whom they are following, users’ feeds could increase in relevance as items are retweeted or repinned.  -Semil Shah, The Rise of Pinterest and the Shift from Search to Discovery

The implication of “search” is that there’s a huge volume of stuff, through which you sift. It’s a bad model for the educational aims of libraries.  For most of library history, libraries were not based on “searching” for materials. Libraries were and are assembled at great expense and effort, by human beings, so that there can be a place where community can form around an evolving body of knowledge.

Discovery, as Shah uses it above, emphasizes the role of human agency, both in shaping a body of knowledge itself, and in being able to select what voices one pays attention to. In order to meet the lofty goal of being communities of discovery and education, libraries, like Pinterest, need to emphasize  curation and discovery over “search.” When you’re searching, you look for a hypothetically known thing, when you’re discovering, you learn about something that you didn’t know before. It’s something algorithmic search design does poorly, because they rely on known patterns matching what’s out there. If you really want to discover something, you need to involve other people. Pinterest, like libraries, puts the people first, and the algorithm second. That being said, a body of knowledge will always reflect its creators, so see below:

My gut reaction to this video was to immediately suspect that it was a marketing ploy, but I was interested to see that the man behind it was Dave Cormier, who has some pretty broad-reaching ideas as to what education should be. My only critique there is that I’m weary of any educational proposal that comes close to equating “online” with “real life.” Certainly, we live a lot of our lives online, and the digital is part of real life, but I’m personally uncomfortable with making them equal. Outside of that, I like where Dave is coming from, although MOOC is pronounced like “mook,” which by the definitons of Urban Dictionary, is something to be avoided at all costs. I’m mostly be skimming the surface of what he’s doing, but I believe it applies pretty handily when understanding information literacy as a “lifelong-learning” skill.

All of this sounds pretty good, but it made me think of an even more broadminded/scary plant analogy: Nicolas Bourriaud’s Radicant.

Let us wager that our own century’s modernity will be invented precisely in opposition to all radicalism, dismissing both the bad solutuion of re-enrooting in identities as well as the standardization of imaginations….To be radicant means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogenious contexts and formatsdenying them the power to completely define one’s identity, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing – The Radicant, p.22

What really sets the two apart is the need for rootedness. While I just made an arguement for tradition and materiality, I don’t think there’s unresolvable tension here. At the heart of the radicant is that neither roots and traditions nor immediate locations define someone’s identity. Cormier is concerned with local conditions on the ground, and many traditions focus on internalizing themselves into someone’s identity, going back to a pure and stable root (this is part of Bourriard’s point). The radicant takes them for what they are and leaves the rest. It’s up to us to make the choice, some of us will do it because we have to, but in order to really get at the heart of things, we have to do it because we want to.

Handmade Portraits: The Sword Maker from Etsy on Vimeo.

This video is very heavy-handed, but it gave me pause. Korehira Wantanabe’s major concern is not ”innovation,” it is keeping a tradition alive by teaching a disciple who will surpass him.  David Lankes propses to make the claim that  “A new librarianship is emerging, taking the lessons learned over that nearly 3,000 year history to forge an approach based not on books and artifacts, but on knowledge and community. “  I just want to untangle this knot, because while Lanke is right to emphasize community, he overlooks the role of materiality in the formation of community. Wantanabe participates in a community based on a physical artifact. His understanding of it is informed by artifacts from the past, and he judges the success of his disciple on the artifacts he will create. In his thesis, Lankes overlooks the fact that our communities are built around shared artifacts, that learning and the creation of a community that will last needs artifacts to sustain it. I’m going to include books, born-digital media, and buildings in my list or artifacts. They are all parts of a community of practice, or to use an older term, a tradition.

In a desire to be “change agents,” librarians set up unneeded tensions within their communities. Consider some quotes from the ebook frontlines at the ACRLog:

Many of these professors own Kindles or other ereaders, and love them – for reading the latest Ruth Rendell mystery on a six-hour flight to France to visit an archive. It’s one thing, they tell us, to read for pleasure on a screen – but it’s quite another to read for understanding, for critique, for engaging in the scholarly conversation. And this isn’t a generational matter – some of the faculty I know who seem most committed to print are younger than forty.

Should we tell our Humanities faculty that even if they “just don’t read that way,” they should, because that’s the way the world of scholarly communication is moving in most other fields? Do we need to change their habits of reading, and habits of mind? Do we lead them to new formats or follow their preferences?

The answer ought to be no. If a community like the humanities is working out their own dealings with materiality, it is not in our interest to force new habits upon them, even if they fly in the face of the new paradigm of the digital, lease-access world. Using words like “tradition” is supposed to be avoided, because “innovation” and “speed” are in. It’s worth reading a little bit of Robert Hassan:

Temporal rights and temporal sovereignty would feed directly into democratic control over the forms and pace of temporal production in society. If the issue of temporality were made more salient, then the blanket acceleration that we experience under neoliberal globalization would rightly be viewed as illogical, and as ultimately inefficient and wholly unsustainable. Empires of Speed, 233.

True community building takes time. Participating in a community and in a tradition take time. The demands placed on our communities to respond quickly to their crises are perpetrated by those very forces which have sought to mask materiality with the gloss of “participation” in a digitized world. But a lifetime is short, so make something that lasts. That’s the goal of community. Lankes’ makes this proposal:

If you walk away from this talk believing that I see no value in cataloging, or books, or buildings, I have been unclear. All of these have been valuable to get us to today. However, their past value does not dictate their future value. We must constantly question everything we do, not to seek fault, but to test fitness. If a service adds value, we keep it. If it does not, we celebrate its past, and then move on. The mission and our values endure, the tools and functions we use to achieve this mission must change with the times.  -“A New Librarianship for a New Age”

For the first 2,900 years, librarianship was part of a humanist tradition, and it bears those marks, even with the new tools and functions we’ve been working with over the past 100 years. Like making swords, tools are part of a tradition, and the values of a community are reflected in them.  As a humanist and librarian, tools and tradition are not so handily untangled.

As far as I can tell, we need to have prior beliefs about the ways the world is structured, and only ever use digital methods to try to create works which let us watch those things in operation. Some, I’m sure, would want to scream ‘confirmation bias!’ at this–but the wonderful thing about the humanities is that they have always allowed scholars to work from problem to evidence, not vice-versa.

The digital humanities is perfectly poised at the moment to optimistically and beautifully affirm the world through all of history as it is now, full of progress and decentralized self-organizing networks and rational actors making free choices; or it might also try to take up what Adorno called the only responsible philosophy: to reveal the cracks and fissures of the world in all its contradictions with otherwordly light. That’s the demand placed on DH by theory, and it needs to come first: all else is mere technique. -Benjamin Schmidt, Theory First.

The beauty of the humanities is that they allow for a reversal of the scientific method, which as Benjamin Schmidt pioints out, can lead to charges of “confirmation bias,” which is only really a concern if “objectivity” was what you were shooting for in the first place. In reality, humanists are in a luxury position of being able to create and analyze texts in the same motion, and work best to examine all of the human underpinnings of them. I think this creates a large problem for humanist librarians, espcially as we try and operate in the field now called “library science.” It’s got an attractive ring to it, that we  are social scientists exploring the reality of libraries. In all honesty, this is a fine way to explore the realities around us, but it does very little good when it comes to the things we do as practitioners, which is make something new. Architects, journalists, artists, musicians, writers, designers, etc., all do this without the compulsion to call themselves scientists. They start with a theory or idea of how things ought to go, and then they make it happen. There’s a vision that is called into being and they create the evidence for it. Anything less than that, while good, is an exhibit of technique. Schmidt callson the eternal snob, Adorno, to make the point.

It is now librarianship’s time to join the humanities again. It is time to look at the cracks. The theory that this is a science is troublesome because we are beginning to “ optimistically and beautifully affirm the world through all of history as it is now, full of progress and decentralized self-organizing networks and rational actors making free choices,” which if you have taken a quick glance at the news, has not been working out as well as we’d like to pretend. If you’re inclined read Chis Lehman’s scathing Rich People Things . Librarians ought to be looking at theories which expose the cracks and faults of the world as it is.

Here’s an example: I believe that students ought to be taught to create openly while they explore their choosen academic fields. There is no reason to cheapen this and call it “play,” which can also be highly structured. I’m basing this on critical theory a la Paulo Friere. You can see examples of it in Critical Library Instruction, where learing starts from the student’s perspective and you go from there. It’s the exact opposite of this:

I could not help but to think of Bloom’s Taxonomy as a model for this transition. In fact, progression through the program is similar to ascending the various levels, steps, or stages. They are learning the language, behaviors, and knowledge base of their discipline. They are expanding their exposure and proficiency which leads to the goal of contributing something new. – Brian Matthews, “What It Takes to Become a Scholar“

The theory here is based on a description of what already is: if you play by the rules, you will build up slowly through the accepted levels and will maybe succeed. What is essentially taught are the rules of the game, not an understanding of how to succeed on one’s own terms. Isn’t that what information literacy is supposed to be? A similar problem came up in a blog post that wandered it’s way through twitter:

  It’s about arguing and displaying the value (in both monetary and intrinsic terms) of libraries, librarians and citizen-centred knowledge.  When it comes to keeping, organising and disseminating information and knowledge, the key has always been evolution.  In this field we should always be wary of revolutionary theories – they always lead to loss of information, knowledge and culture. -Hugh Rundle, Evolution, The Death of Libraries and the End of History.

I’d like to emphasize the idea of “citizen-centered,” because it resonates with the idea at the heart of critical literacy, and it goes in with the evolution of thought that started as far back as Jaques Ranciere. There’s not much that is revolutionary with  these theories, they’ve evolved over time, and are part of the history of libraries. We’ve come a long way from chaining books to tables, or from being closed-stack, and began providing people with the means to put things together their own way. We need to build and explore library theory that reflects those interests, and not lock ourselves into the world as it is. That’s merely technique.