[...]tic 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

(same technique was used in Gulf War, Ali's production of consensus by flat) encephalogram

Ehsan's transmission sub rosa of information: stories and practices from his wild, discontinuous, ever-changing past


(Lyell's geology of earth:) working from the position that there was no sign of the origin of the earth, nor any portent of its end--what we have access to is a set of records in the landscape which leave the impression of massive upheaval and discontinuity in the past


tools to think past =/=? tools of (our own) archive


“most groups [...] engrave their form in some way upon the soil and retrieve their collective remembrances within the spatial framework thus defined” (Halbwachs 1968 > Bowker)

built: we often don't think of such [reworked natural landscapes] trails in memory terms, because it is not our own personal memory that is being engraved--it is the collective memory of our culture


(my favorite) specialized archival technology (~= memory practice): list*

synchronization in the 14th century, where information provided the ‘coin’ which allowed multiple endeavors--social and natural, along a (different) material substrate

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

idio + sync
-idio- (“private,” “one's own,” not capable of engaging in the public sphere, for Athenians: concerned exclusively with private (--> a natural state of ignorance that all persons are born into) (private soldier with no skills?) [~=? mast مست] =/= “polites” ~ police [~=? mohtaseb محتسب (--from--> احتساب, شمارنده, بشمارآورنده)])
-syn- (“with”)


کرم + حلیه
hile + karam

سجده شوریده

خام کن پخته تدبیرها

اول او اول بی ابتداست
آخر او آخر بی‌انتهاست

کار فلک بود گره در گره


(expelled from the temple of science) the collector and the classifier --> to grosser objects that we can taste, touch, accumulate

the master of ceremonies to a cage of tigers

Bowker on Charles Lyell

Buckland: (generally speaking) all things on earth can be seen at once objects and archives:
•as objects: they function in the world
•as archives: they maintain traces of their own past

a rock:
•object of lithosphere
•document of its history (striation: past glaciation; strata: complex stories of deposition + radioactive isotopes; journy through the mantle; etc.)


earth: a variable legible palimpsest

(office procedures & computer programs are both) designed as *abstract machines*
-for ajayeb i designed an abstract machine called ajayeb.net to realize a seamless interchangeability between my artist/research procedures and computer programs
[...]