[...]s in this society are named secretive and mysterious in the name of transparency
#in a way i am building an adequate mode of encounter with the “Iranian scientist”

they draw from their secret[s]

a technical issue (for example about how to code process) is also a an organizational theory

social embeddedness of scientific truth

(authors of ajayeb approached nature not in a way to sketch the boundaries of a discrete animal event, therefore, a unit of analysis, (which is very natural at 21st century;) rather an infrastructure itself in flux, providing an unnatural hierarchy)--> this is my rhetorical reading of ajayeb

as long as you/God pays attention to them, they will continue to exist

‘uninventing X’: changing society and technology in such a way that the X becomes an impossibility. (Donald Mackenzie)
development and maintenance of technical standards is a site of political decisions and struggle

______________


against the idea that “past is a different country, they do things differently there”

***how we are creating different kinds of past (out of the information infrastructures that we build)?

(pointed out by Bowker) the whole notion of big data is coming from the invention of census (amar-giri آمارگیری) in late 18th century, as its predecessor in a genealogy of techniques of government. “big data is grown up around that idea of control” --> statistics: (etymologically) the science of the state*
“I” <== me + my data

heavily informated world

flashbulb memory*
‘what were you doing when #Bambi's mother got shot?’ people have vivid but 80% of the time wronge memories of that day --> we are good at creating certainty in memory, but not very good at recognizing the ways past is differently configured according to different kinds of *memory practice*

the eternal flame file type/format

the psychoanalyst of Tintin

active archiving is about the framing of the present, and not about the future record

*commemoration is behind a lot of the ways in which we create memories and histories (on the web): that there will be someone who has the time to go back and recognize the values we have created --> recognize ourselves as monuments in the world

(thinking with Bowker fL94LVYjhQQ) as new entities will come to being in the world, instead of creating access to what is reconfiguring of the past we lock ourselves into single unitary visions of the past totally unnecessary --> that is exactly what i am trying to do, providing and creating a kind of approach to what would be an access to a reconfiguring of the past, ajayeb as the case in a Farsi speaking world


on way or another, databases are structured objects, they constraint the forms of narrative you can take ==> a restrict set of stories --> when we are dealing with database we don't have an infinite sets of narrative space

i am taking a theological alterity discourse from pre-enlightenment (islamicated cosmology) and puting it in [...?]*** (Latour is putting it in scientific style of faith)
•artistic research practices/discourses
•modern Iran
•modern culture
•

non-contemplative intelligence basing the database in our time (=/= older traditions of sequencing)

...................................

*deterioration of the immanent (eco-, politico-,) ==> corruption of social relations ==> corruption of memory*** (of a shared existence, of coexistence with [Div, jinn, shadow, birds, Hindus, Arabs, ]) !!!--✕--> issues of historical injustice
-or-
corruption of a river : the entropy and deterioration immanent to it ==> conditions of possibility for corruption of intimate relations and of memory }--([this] experience of corruption)--> takes the nature of being defrauded (روزگار فريبکار) of one's own form of life, one's family or one's inheritance***


(Naveeda Khan talking about river's point of view in Bangladesh, but her keywords are all relevant for Iran's landscape as well)

***the muslim responses to entropy*** ==?==> eschatology
}--> muslim majority regions are more embeded in the world that what we know from islam

سازش
limits of “adaptation”

a rapport ~ ربط تقریباً همگام
or orientation جهتگيرى

a looming future


“[how] politics and policies of climate change stand to shortchange the present and the past”


Naveeda Khan exploring the perception of climate change within everyday life


those who live on such formations --[powerful river waters, eroding, accreting, village politics, dynamics of individual lives,]


fret ترش کردن

مزروعى arable lands


thinking rivers:
to consider water as a ‘total social fact’, to think holistically about water [Caton & Orlove] =/= [Naveeda's] climate thinking --> that there is specificity that needs attending: rivers are major conduits هادى of ‘connectivity’ --> domain of localized interactions
-to take the river to convey local, embodied knowledge within the longer temporalities and emergent horizons (associated with climate change,) (new global urgencies produced by climate thinking)

a sufficient sense of the river

(Cavell < Naveeda's) there-ness of the river: “the rivers are a distinctive and significant locale at which human beings, though not only human beings, find their dwelling place.” Cavell responds thus, “The river poetizes the human being because, in providing *the unity of locality and journeying* it conceals and reveals Dasein's being and becoming ‘homely,’ homelike, I might say, homebound.”


in an analytical approach to examine separately [that is ‘to model']: narative actions and [-ian] images


Marks’ understanding of film as conveying the corporeality of objects


[*]milieu
a powerful concept with genealogy across a range of disciplines [physics, biology, geography, literature --> orienting our use of it]
•18th century: the fluid or ether in which physical bodies are immersed ==(that enable their)==> inter-dependence (#shena, shenavar?) --> milieu becomes universal
•19th century: as producing circumstances that changes needs [Lamarck] --> for Darwin milieu only produced change (at the level of the organism's phenotype)
•milieu rendered as complexes of elements whose actions mutually limit each other and in which the effects of causes become causes in turn, modifying the causes that gave rise to them. (Canguilhem)

umwelt: organisms privilege certain stimuli and response, thus, suggesting to Canguilhem that it isn't merely ‘need’ mediating between organism and milieu (as in Lamarck's formulation) but a prior sense of values that evaluates certain signals as worthy of response over others
--> *the animal finds it simpler to do what it privileges* (Canguilhem 2008)

[*]sense: (from the biological and psychological point of view:) an appreciation of values in relation to a [*]need: (for the one who experuences and lives it:) an irreducible ==(thereby)==> absolute, system of reference


Naveeda's notion of river's point of view:
“...” while the inorganic, such as a river, lacks the building blocks of life in being produced through the action of geological forces, it too has norms and values that take statistical form or are found (in both sense of the word: discovered and originating) in moments of spontaneous action (---> go to Delanda#)


...village and kinship structures being flexible, there is a high value places on sexual normativity


absence of water --> human suffering --> the death of the river --> emergence of land as property


Naveeda examines 3 films:
•focus on corruption, melodramatic specificities of the film-scale, subtext of pain --> Titash Ekti Nodir Naam
•focus on entropy within the Padma river, *ambivalent expression over the necessity for migration that will undoubtedly be one of the strategies of adaptation for an ocean-facing country such as Bangladesh* --> Padma Nodir Majhi
•(film's anticipation of) how rumors and bad news come to unsettle existence, the rumor of climate change may do more to re-organize a social milieu than its actual binding reality --> Chitra Nodir Parey


*there is a “systematic undervaluation of involuntary loss of places and cultures [which] disguises real, experienced but subjective limits to adaptation [and integration*]” (Naveeda > Adger)


(people in interrelation to the Jamuns river...) what may be coming up or downstream or even overhead or below ground, that they are also involved in displacements in situ either because of floods or erosion --> continual throwing up of constitutive elements of social life into the air and their constant re-organization when they return to ground


the erosive tendencies of the river --> the slow movement in place or lateral shifts that lead people to just drop off the scene


(Naveeda: we are in a) landscape not just erosive of relations but also *productive of forgetting* --> adaptation in the present entails an ongoing corruption of memory [--> #Bowker, forms of erasure]***
(#stories of integration in Germany)

...................................

[pre-notes with Delanda's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History]

what are word-forming resources in farsi?
(not to increase their prestige, rather, to problematize) reservoirs of expressive resources in ajayeb and tehran --> to challenge which international standard?

what are the definitive historical process that create uniform set of linguistic norms in iran?

in my work on ajayeb, also, perhaps i am offering a grammar to the empire---learning system thinking

dictionary --> formal codification of language

regarding my ajayeb hypertext
--✕-->? certain spelling rules, grapheme نويسه [characters A, B, ...], morpheme واژک [smallest meaningful language unit]
--✕--> what are my articulatory shortcuts? (least effort needed)

-how internet press is aiding which minor languages in their struggle against majors?
-and which standards are rising there?
-and what are the hegemonizing effect of my ajayeb hypertext on language and energy? its conservative pressures (on literary imagination) --> my concern with farsi linguistic evolution and its contaminations with other languages

what are my ajayeb hypertext contact situations?


(in my ajayeb) “?q=” =/=? searching device abstract probe head
==>? sorted into homogeneous sets
-->? abstract automata -->{ ajayeb.net ~= a valid-enough mean of transferring the *combinatorial productivity* of automaton [by different (social) dynamics] }-->? #bottom-top approach to writing

my Rigs are about:
•processes responsible for the generation of phrases and sentences
•to produce new strings =/= checking them for validity


(you cannot be not connected to) *collective assemblage* (of enunciations)

(what is my -or-) do i need an abstract machine that connects my language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to the collective assemblage?

my ajayeb: a throng (هجوم) of (neo-English-Farsi) dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages


my Rigs... :
•local restrictions of wach word
•the tendency of words to occur next to each other their degree of crystallization

[for my hypertext] (Zellig Harris:) the constraints or demands that words place on one another are transmitted as socially obligatory information [as physical information, the kind measured in bits, not the semantic information used in dictionary definitions.]

socially obligatory ‘information’-[as ‘physical information’ (kind measured in bits) =/= semantic information (used in dictionary definitions)] ==(transmits)==> constraints or demands that words place on one another

(my hypertext ajayeb is an) “informational niche”
[and what about the matter of ‘actual use’?]
ajayeb.net “rules”: a set of normative combinatorial constraints
recursive application of existing constraints ==> new patterns

*process of language: from optimal to obligatory*
(in respect of history: obligatory meanings of Attar, and so on)
--> in my work this flow is reversed: from obligatory (meanings of Attar or ajayeb) to optimal. that is perhaps why sometimes people say that they don't understand me or that I am wonge.
-memory is the matter of statistical fact: (core) meaning ~= “selection”

***the fate of my contribution depends on and is determined by my position in the communicative network


pidgin دست وپا شکسته ومخلوط : creative adaptations
ajayeb.net is a pidgin?
*pidginization: any process of reduction or simplification of linguistic resources {"=/=”, “=”, “==>”, “-->"}

my ajayeb writing:
step 1: redundent simplification of linguistic resources [--> creoles نژاد مخلوط: that segment of a continuum of variation which exhibits the maximum divergence from the standard but which is still connected to other portions of the meshwork (Farsi+English)]
step 2: reenriching itself with features eliminated during step 1 ~ recomplexification of creoles }==(how?!)==>
step 3: diversifying the number and type of uses it can be put to

double articulation: a sorting operation that yields a homogeneous distribution of elements and a consolidation operation that defines more or less permanent structural linkages between sorted materials.
if and when the materials on which a sorting device operates acquire the ability to replicate with variation, a new abstract machine emerges, in the form of a blind probe head capable of exploring a space of possible forms


ajayeb's (specialist) jargon <-- what intensified them? --> ? tech, colonialism, schooling,


what i am trying to do with ajayeb, in making this hypertext, is to connect its syntactical constructions to fresh reservoirs of linguistic resources ***

with ajayeb.net i am learning to resist the hierarchical weight of “received pronunciations” and official criteria of correctness of “ajayeb”

my Rigs, equipped with “knobs”: controlling parameters whose intensity defines the dynamical state of the structure-generating process


my work on ajayeb is an inquiry (or critique) in the ways we represent the world to ourselves [--> organizing objective referents and label-concepts] <--> a homogenizing social critique?

...................................

what is gained and what is lost when “tidying up the archive” ?

...................................

[Yates]

in the ages before printing a trained memory was vitally important; and the manipulation of images in memory must always to some extent involve the psyche as a whole

** mnemotechnical side of the art is always present **

Mnemosyne, said the Greeks, is the mother of the Muses

occult memory systems <== Renaissance Hermetic tradition --?--> lullism (lullaby? Hoda) <--✕-- rhetoric tradition

the history of memory

the problems of the mental image, of the activation of images, of the grasp of reality through images

...................................

the horror of no longer remembering the reason for forgetting, or, “when the times comes for our battle, the memories'll be the armour”
Thyrza Goodeve

...................................

knowledge infrastructure
how do changes in knowledge infrastructures reinforce or redistributes authority, influence, and power? --> new ways of thinking and acting

create + share + dispute knowledge

(Facebook, Google, etc.:) vast stores of anonymized data to analysis and exploitation, engaging users and publics in new ways

axes of change: [fundamental transformations challenging our understanding of the ways knowledge is processed:]
1- technical systems and standards
2- new modes of analyzing social (re)organization that exploit the extensive traces left behind by users of information

including:
•education
•libraries: changing structures, services, and physical spaces
•publishing industry
•intellectual property
•global flow
•knowledge politics: filter bubble, counter-expertise,
•

unpaind individuals
“sticky” processes and routines --> *most knowledge workers’ salaries are still paid by bricks-and-mortar organizations with hierarchical structures, established insitutional cultures, systems of credit and compensation/

eventual rise of a scientific culture of “extreme openness”

(forms that are) human-readable & machine-readable <-- the move i made from my notebook to ajayeb.net



infrastructure =/= system

infrastructure perspective:
•modular
•multi-layered, multi-scaled (layered nature of infrastructure, navigating among different scales)
•rough-cut character
•ecologies/complex adaptive systems
-->** infrastructures consist of numerous systems, each with unique *origins and *goals, which are made to interoperate by means of *standards, socket layers [: a bony hollow into which a structure fits], social norms, and individual behaviors that smooth out connections among them
=/=
system perspective:
•fully coherent
•deliberately engineered
•end-to-end process


(Weinberger's notion of) *stoping point*
“knowledge as a series of stopping points”
•printed journal articles
•books
•textbooks
•(other fixed products)
--[changing to]--> a world where knowledge is perceptually in motion }--> in a way ajayeb.net is part of this transition
we face a world of abundant information, hyperlinked ideas, permission-free resources, highly public interaction, and massive, unresolved disagreement. (Weinberger)
individual expertise is (many argue) being replaced by the wisdom of crowds: noisy and endlessly contentious, but also rich, diverse, and multi-skilled [=/= fantasies of Black Mirror TV series]


wikis of all sorts

(?is my ajayeb.net a) citizen science

vigor and growing utility

“distance matters”
(Olson)


commodification of data : the presentation of datasets as complete, interchangeable products in readily exchanged formats


data-driven science
problem of evaluation
--> ***Do we know things if we cannot explain why they are true?*** (Anderson)

hierachically organized forms of credentialing

in Julia's seminar we were trying to examine: commodified data analysis tools and widely available software skills ==> (larger number of participants to) analyze data and run models

(*a problem with university students:) [students who do appear] more motivated by the university as a *rite of passage* (گذار از بلوغ) and a *lifestyle*
=/= learning
*professors are no longer seen as infallible experts, but as resources whose facts can be checked in real time

(question of) standard / ontology --> (desire for) universality / (need for) change


knowledge of past climates


@apass
(through my love and study for ajayeb --> infrastructure -->) questions for apass:
-what new forms of organization and community are emerging? what power relations do they rely on, create, or destroy? who wins and who loses as knowledge infrastructure change? (questions proposed by a knowledge infrastructure workshop 2012)
-(ways to) encode and reinforce existing interests and relations of power
-(we need) a design community versed in these literatures:
•different social worlds
•conflicting conceptual frameworks
•sociology of science and technology
•sociology of standards (--> standardizing data has proven to be a crucial activity in *scaling up* the sciences) #lens
•boundary objects
•trading zones
•actor networks
•how sharing works in practice
•agreements on shared norms, practices, and technical systems (problematized by Femke, she focuses my attention on how software developers are too quick to construct “ontologies”)
•
==> to scale up the generally lower-level focus of design thinking [--> how my ajayeb.net addresses this?]
--> to co-design new infrastructures
--> to look beyond the scale of a field and timeframe of a career


(we need) meaningful access to digital media (not an exciting add-on investment)
--> new forms of knowledge infrastructure may disadvantage and devalue older forms of knowledge production:
•new sensor network replacing ecological fieldwork -->? my #amazon
•“instrumenting ocean” supplanting traditions of the oceanographic cruise [in the last 20 years new sensor grids have come to cover the oceans, land, sky and space] -->? my #ajayeb's is concerned with thinking “beyond the *instrumental languages of utility and function*, which tend to cast knowledge infrastructures as *neutral instruments* whose positive and negative effects lie solely in the way they are operationalized and used”

*consequences of change are rarely socially, culturally, or economically neutral*


collectives
assemblages
configurations

try to tell yourself a “technology only” or “social only” story of knowledge infrastructure (and you will find it impossible)
(Brunton's) spam --> co-evolution of technical systems, communities, and social norms

knowledge infrastructures ==carry==> significant distributional consequences --> advancing the interests of some and actively damaging the prospects of others

(ways of producing “raw” date) davulated by “data sharing”:
•*labor-intensive* collecting practices
•site-specific expertise required
}--> long-standing craft traditions

once-vast secretarial ranks (of large organizations) [a British nostalgia for bureaucratic hierarchy fantasized and franchized by Harry Potter]


ajayeb's 13th century's “technologies” for “virtual” witnessing


--imbalance in the structure and distribution of our knowledge--
overrepresentation of research on “charismatic megafauna” (cuddly pandas, expenssive human-like chimps, tigers, hallucinogenic plants, etc.)


*dark continent fallacy*: ignorance (~ non-knowledge) = absence of knowledge : a site, phenomenon, or set of questions that we haven't yet been able or thought to investigate, as: ‘darkness = absence of light’ (--> Star Trek idea of frontier) --@!%--> the relationship between knowledge and non-knowledge may not be as simple or innocent as that

new (forms of) knowledge infrastructures (--> new ways of knowing) ==>
•new questions thinkable --> whole classes of questions, phenomena and forms of knowledge may be lost or rendered unthinkable
•new maps to known territories --> reshape the geography itself
•rework existing (stocks of) knowledge
•reorder our sense of value and structure in the world
•*write new ontologies over old ones* (--> my interest in working with ajayeb)
•embed social norms

knowledge infrastructure ~= sociology of knowledge
= robust internetworks of people, artifacts, and institutions* (--> to attend kno.infs. as wholes, rather than focusing only on their most rapidly evolving elements; #ontology. and attending to the social relations both created and broken) [#to attend to Tehran's new digitally mediated social norms of negative ditributional consequences of change]
any effective sociology of knowledge ought to provide some account of its opposite: the accidental and systematic --> means by which non-knowledge is produced and maintained
**(Robert Proctor's) agnotology: the systematic study of ignorance** [+ Irvin Schick: unknowledge =/= ignorance --> socially constructed lack of knowledge : a conscious absence of socially pertinent knowledge, for example ‘terra incognita --> Western political and economic attention --> enabling colonialism...]

institutional elements of knowledge infrastructure:
•universities
•libraries
•scientific societies
}--> they all have typically conservative, slow-changing forms* -- because when they change, authority, influence, and power are redistributed; (changes takes decades rather than years) --> a long-time-scale, historically informed framework to situate our thinking --> sustainable, accumulative, and shareable qualitative databases


internet-supported citizen science

the 19th century's Darwin favored ‘genetic form’ --> massive and global shift in modes of classification


standard --> *preserving the meaning of data is a human affair, requiring continuous curation


#knowledge zoom lens --> “the long now” (Bowker)


(it took 200 years for printed book's) *intellectual armature* (that now we consider intuitive:)
(in ajayeb.net i am responding and working all of them)
•index
•table of contents
•bibliography
•footnotes
•generall[...]