[...]n 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 e[...]