[...] (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
•generally agreed rules on plagiarism
•page numbers (--> =^77988.1.6$shathiat)


***qualitative science*** : detailed, indepth, and meaning-oriented investigations --> analysis, statistical (for example the social network analysis strengths of scope and summation in Braudel's study)
(question of my “writing”:) how to nourish mechanisms for large-scale, long-term research?
-we need to go beyond one-off projects to develope systems and standards for collecting, curating (my knowledge, ajayeb's knowledge) while simultaneously protecting subject's identities and interests /***
=/= short-term, project-by-project work

-(constantvzw is doing this:) build collaborative sciences
sociotechnical phenomena do not rest within the domain of a single discipline

-comparative analysis techniques
comparison across cases (--> how Kobe in his case-based work produces a critically comparative data?)
creation of compatable data [: properly documented --> facilitate sharing] (--> how for my ajayeb?)
(in your work and research -->) encouraging the identification of crucial similarities and differences

-sustainable and sharable data archives, collected over multiple investigative projects --> ajayeb.net = knowledge/thoughts/notes of multiple projects (--> is this my “data”?)

cyberscholarship

#lens, to scale up qualitative social science <--> deploy data storage, visualization, hypertext, and collective-creation possibilities of the web and social media, *new tools for textual analysis*

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

[which] cultures (or stories) permit a graceful listening forth to our seeing[?]

(metaphorical economy of) *mnemonic deep*:
•past is a thing that you escape at all costs, our past explains who we are,
•as palimpsest, The infinite faces of the past can be read off the present face ==> narrative ideal presen
•

the time that the institution of the sciences create:
1- the time of the experiment/field study: going back billions of years, quantum units of time, tree rings; peat mosses; fossil seeds;
2- the time of the scientific enterprise, historiographical stances shared among sets of disciplines
3- the law of nature: the past which scientists create can be read as an eternal present

(total recall:) memory as a metaphor needed by a ‘handicapped’ observer who cannot see a complete system

(sa[...]