▶ 2 5 spectra for speculative knowledge design nowviskie.org

NickMc 10/27/2019 9:50 PM in dhcu

ssemble information unobserved. Our designs must also respect individual and community agency in determining whether historical or contemporary cultural records should be open to access and display in the first place—ideally fostering and encouraging local intellectual control . But here, again, the contradi

Who gets to decide whether these records are public or private? Which individuals and communities do Digital Humanists actually respect? In what circumstances would withholding information from the public eye beget further injustice? In which circumstances would the opposite be true? Can we trust ourselves to be impartial arbiters in determining who gets to protect their privacy and who does not, or do we commit ourselves to protecting privacy regardless of who that protection may hurt?

NickMc 10/27/2019 9:41 PM in dhcu

en-ended making and re-making.” In considering the orientation of our libraries toward digital objects as evidence, we should also heed Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell’s call for increased attention to the “archival imaginary:” those absent (perhaps missing, destroyed, merely theorized or wished-for) documents that traverse aporia and offer “counterbalances and sometimes resistance to dominant legal, bureaucratic, historical and forensic notions of evidence that… fall short in explaining the capacity of records and archives” to move us. Designing for such imaginaries would counter “strands of archival theory and practice [that] maintain an un-reflexive preoccupation with the actual, the instantiated, the accessible and the deployable—that is, with records that have… evidentiary capacity.” How might such “differing imagined trajectories of the future” emerge from records both present in and absent from the past? Assessment vs. the Incommensura

This seems bizarre to me, so apologies if I've misread. How are we supposed to design for such imaginaries? Are these imaginaries even ethical? Is it appropriate to insert stories we want to hear in contexts and eras potentially foreign to us, as if our own values were universal? Wherever we find documentation we can find instances of counterbalance and resistance; we hardly need to make them up. Didn't this article just rightfully criticize the spread of fake news only three paragraphs above? How is this any different?

▶ 1 resistance in the materials nowviskie.org

NickMc 10/27/2019 9:12 PM in dhcu

e, from print to digital media: “You can’t have art,” Morris, the master craftsman of the Pre-Raphaelites had said, “without resistance in the material.” It’s a compelling line—reproduc

I suppose I read this particular quote under the 3w branch of 'Worrying'. Does ease make art more or less significant? I've seen conflicting views that: some say that a true artist should be 'in the zone' while producing, free of any sort of resistance whatsoever as they create. On the other hand, quotes like this one imply quite the opposite: that if your work isn't frustrating, difficult, or confusing, it's not worth being called art. Which is these is the general belief in DH?

▶ 4 Ghosts in the Machine – the scottbot irregular www.scottbot.net

ShleighsWorld 10/25/2019 5:50 PM in dhcu

roaching again, 70 years later. And yet, somehow, last month a school official and national parliamentary candidate in Canada admitted she “didn’t know what Auschwitz was” . I grew up hearing “Never Forge

Unfortunate as it is, when statements like these come out in the news, I think it goes to show how a lot of history books/classes (and therefore, the people writing the books and teaching the classes, and the bosses of those people) really influence the public's knowledge and in effect erase whole events from history.

Perhaps this is one advantage of the digital world: with so many people writing, many voices are heard. Though I suppose this also allows for the spreading of fake news...it seems like this cycle goes on.

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NickMc 10/27/2019 9:01 PM in dhcu

Yeah, I think it's a double-edged sword these days. It's easier to find factual information on the internet, but it's also easier to find fake or biased info: antivaxers still exist, after all, despite the fact that just about anyone can do a simple google search for 'Smallpox'.

NickMc 10/25/2019 3:11 AM in dhcu

y robots. Audits occur nightly. The Shoah Foundation materials were collected, developed, and preserved with the utmost respect. The goal is just, the cause respectable, and the efforts incredibly important. And by reconcentrating survivors’ stories, they can now be accessed by the world. I don’t blame the Foundation for the parallels which are as much a construct of my mind as they are of the society in which this technology developed. Still, on Halloween, it’s hard to avoid reflecting on the material, monetary, and ultimately dehumanizing costs of processing ghosts into the machine.

I'm glad to see the author's being self-aware, here, since this particular paragraph seemed to me a bit of a stretch. Server farms are organized the way they are to maximize efficiency - any resemblance to Nazi concentration camps is because they, too, were intended to be efficient. Does one prioritize respecting the memory of the deceased when that inefficiency may result in some names being forgotten to history entirely, or do you prioritize efficiency to maximize the amount of victims you can remember at the cost of coming off as cold and insensitive?

NickMc 10/25/2019 2:54 AM in dhcu

de access incredibly difficult. Digital copies would only cost tens of millions of dollars, even though hard-drives couldn’t be trusted to last more than a decade. Their solution was a RAID hard-

I guess I spoke too soon.

NickMc 10/25/2019 2:53 AM in dhcu

cess which took from 2008-2012. This had to be done quickly (automatically/robotically), given that cassette tapes are prone to become sticky, brittle, and unplayable within a few decades due to hydrolysis. They digitized about 30,000 hou

I wonder if our current technologies are as robust as we believe they are. Are we going to be scrambling to preserve data digitized on hard drives three decades from now? I can forsee us trying to move stuff from physical databases onto the cloud, but time will tell if that comes to pass or not.