[...]ss and membership
(purchasers of) **genome = book of life** ==> racialized and medicalized subjects
*mutated racial discourses*
renaissance of race categories
science has the authority to establish truth claims that scholars in the humanities must reckon with
humanities scholars may avoid a scientific debate because:
1- they feel out of their depths interpreting scientific data
2- they resist scientific authority in response to well-documented instances of scientific exploration of people of color
3- they may have surrendered to science the work of settling matters of fact, keeping hermeneutics and textual matters for themselves
science and technology studies --> *tracing objects through the practices and discourses that produce them as settled matters of fact, made, but not made up*
(tracking) social and legal arrangements ==producing==> race
***science is coded as the interpreter of nature in western discourse*** --> that is why i have to study science in my research on bestiaries
Hammond + Herzig on how scientific practices across disciplines describe and create what thereby becomes *naturalized difference* (=/= describing the nature of difference itself)
(learn from Hammond + Herzig -->)
source material --> organize & comment --sustain--> argument
+ questions that point the reader to discoursive moves and modes of attention of the author (=/= Quinsy's ملانقطى pedantic exploration of racism)
(politically correcting the popular understanding of race =/=) to show the unsettled and ongoing nature of the debate. [asking readers] to track the rise and permutation of various features of the argument
[asking Captain America --anatomical-->] “in what larger political, economic, and social contexts might ears, noses, index fingers, or brains hemispheres attract attention as reliable signs of racial difference?”
some wrong ideas:
•adaptation to new environments signals evolution (~= degenerating groups would eventually cease to exist)
•high mortality rates could signal problems in work and living condition
•sexual dimorphism thought to be a component of degeneration
•“more often than not, the views of society have shaped science rather than the other way around. in this instance, it may be time for science to reshape the views of society.” [<-- scary!]
•
to start with political agenda (good or bad) and fit evidence to that
political correctness (~ a social interest)
dogged persue of truth
*science's power to beguile اغفال imagination* (for example genomics testing to discover and reveal “truths” about unknown ancestry)
}--> (a post World War II and post-holocaust aspiratoin:) *the allure here is to finally prove we are all the same under the skin, or at least that we have more in common than we had liked to admit* <-- another project for making race matter, but differently
(Quinsy urgently need to learn) how not to be conversation stopper
Bland + Doan's Sexology Uncensored
...................................
scope of information science --> [*]document: organized physical evidence
new digital technologies renews old questions and also old confusions between medium, message, and meaning
document
ordniary information storage and retrieval system?
bibliography:
•collecting
•preserving
•organizing (arranging)
•representing (describing)
•selecting (retrieving)
•reproducing (copying)
•disseminating
•
(of documents)
early 20th century --> documentation adopted (in europe) instead of bibliography
[*]documentation: a set of techniques developed to mange significant (or potentially significant) [*]document: any expression of human thought (beyond written texts)
~-> *novel form of signifying objects*
objects bearing traces of...
*if you are informed by observation of it, you are looking at a document*
document: any material basis for extending our knowledge which is available for study or comparison
*capable of being used for:
•*reference*
•*study*
•*authority*
1951
document: evidence in support of a fact
any physical or symbiotic sign, preserved or recorded, intended to represent, to reconstruct, or to demonstrate a physical or conceptual phenomenon
--> viewed with access to evidence
=/= (concerned with) text
document =/= ajayeb's text object [--> pop-up book]
(object) (document?)
star in the sky no
photo of star yes
stone in river no
stone in museum yes
animal in wild no
animal in zoo yes
Briet's rules for determining when an object has become a document:
1. there is materiality
2. there is intentionality
3. the objects have to be processed (they have to be made into documents)
4. there is a phenomenological position (the object is perceived to be a document)
indexicality: *the quality of having been placed in an organized, meaningful relationship with other evidence --> gives an object its documentary status* [<-- for who and why is this useful?]
modernist mentality:
•scientific management
•standardization
•bibliographic control
--as--> complementary and mutually reinforcing bases for achieving progress
spiritual movement of anthroposophy --> cognitive aspects of the medium of the message
==> document: repository of an expressed thought + spiritual character
1963
document: micro-thought on a flat surface (fit for physical handling, transport across space, and preservation through time)
cultural anthropology --> “material culture” --> onject as document
artifacts contribute important evidence in the documentation and interpretation of experience
artistic research = aesthetic object + signifying object
semiotics
information sciences
Barthes --> object-as-sign
there is always a meaning which overflows the object's use
text: patterns of social phenomena not made of words or numerals
[signs have to be treated a something invented]
*social construction of meaning* ==> viewer's perception of the significance and evidential مدرکى character of documents ==> “relevance” is now considered to be situational and ascribed by the viewer (in digital)
}<== the property of being a sign is not a natural property <== ***property is given to objects***
Wikipedia: all signifying objects (points to) ~~> forensic aesthetic: all evidence = signifying فوری (easy + immediate) =/= aesthetic object فرار (volatile)
object in evidence --> offer it as evidence by the way it is arranged, indexed, presented
its manner --> in arranging material so that someone may be able to make use of it as new evidence for some purpose (=/= finding material that already is in evidence)
what is a digital document?
--Buckland--> becomes more problematic, unless we remember the path of reasoning underlying the largely forgotten discussions of Otlet's objects and Briet's antelope
**documenting the antelope** =/= ajayeb
antelope: Ethiopian word for the elusive unicorn
...................................
Calvert
technobibliocapital
librarians cannot hope to really change how people seek knowledge in libraries (they are not *information awareness office* ~= news agency)
will to knowledge --manifest--> in a massive electronic data processing project
[*]library science: a set of practices for producing knowledge in subjects --> *producing subjects through knowledge production*
patron: certain kinds of subjects (=/= citizen), consumers with an abiding market rationality and an interest in individualist private space
enmeshed in practices of classification, circulation, collection
technology + libraries + capital
•capital: social, political, economic, and other relationships crystallized in things, including books and libraries
•biblio: libraries, books, knowledge
•techno: technologies (both silicon-based and not) that make producing, storing, and reproducing knowledge possible and efficient
technology and capital shaping library practices [and animation of animal practices? --> emphasize animal geography]
(legacy of bibliography and book collecting) 1930 --> library practice centered on the development of bibliographic standards emphasizing procedures for identifying and indexing authors and tides
(21st century) democracy of texts, collaboration with autodidacticism and public education, is now giving itself over to the *circulation of commodities*
**the subjects produced through 21st century librarianship are customers and consumers** (who seeks content =/= knowledge)
new librarian --> new freedom of information --> free market (in the form of atomized particles of “microcontent” allowing free-floating information to be freely accessed via computers and networks, without the censorious mediation of embodied librarians)
libraries --> techniques for ordering (~-> discourse of standardization)
(shifting) ways the library has operated alongside the state as a disciplinary & ideological apparatus
•18th century --> national library
•19th century --> new techniques for ordering, discourse of standardization and order (in the library) + searching and retrieval external to the mind of the librarian
•19th century --> [emerging understanding of the role of literacy in worker self improvement ==>] public library <==> a project of nation, citizenship, democracy, self-betterment, universal education + concurrent with a serious reconstitution of hierarchies of access to books
•late 19th century --> paternalist financial auspices of Andrew Carnegie (who funded 1689 library buildings) for the explicit objective of the self-education of
workers and immigrants --purpose--> acculturation and assimilation
•Paul Otlet --> universal decimal classification 1899
•late 20th century --> dreams of intelligent computers and objectivized information science : (from) library school --to--> school of information management systems
•
}--> *schematization efforts* --> (20th century) library science (continue producing itself) as a cooperative venture of flourishing information [triumphant rationalism]
•standardization
•automation
•propagate
•expand
(in the name of) democratization & civil rights
library ==contribute==> to the civic sphere:
•providing the information
•providing *behaviors* necessary for appropriate citizenship
library ==> classification system (DDC) --> general knowledge organization tool
late 20th century neo-liberal rationality ==intensify==>
•moral directive for self-betterment (as workers)
•reorienting the relation of subjects (toward the state and the social) as one of consumership
+ shift in the definition of knowledge
technobibliocapital --> (new era of) ordering texts & subjects
[*appreciative =/= affirmative* <-- learning from Calvert, we can be appreciative but not affirmative]
[to be critical =] ****not to:
•dismiss X (by thinking of it as) composed entirely of domination [<-- @apass, Pierre] ~= to laud something as a timeless ideal
•evoke a sense of relief that we have X that are free (of power relations, freely available to all, and filled with free-flowing information)
}--> historical + present + future-looking formulations of X
•reverence for libraries of long gone days...
•accolades مراسم اعطای منصب شوالیه for librarians as heroes...
•libraries as the saviors of the people...
•as just another manifestation of government intrusion (paternalism, library: robust civilizing apparatuses, an ideal philanthropic gift)...
--Calvert--> **libraries are potent resources with vast possibilities for creating the worlds we inhabit** -->[*]library: (collectively produced ~ both collectively funded and collected from many sources) vibrant sites of knowledge generation + of power (for those who generate knowledge through libraries in turn diffuse this knowledge through other places and other people)
without a robust definition of power ==Calvert==> librarians have been unable to see or articulate how libraries have been in the service of disciplining subjugating power (a power that is productive not just for readers but of readers)
..weak appeals to market freedom
...................................
service-dominant logic = an enframing act --> a way of framing the world (which like all logics) chooses what to include and what to exclude from its frame of investigation and theory --Campbell--> how it enframes the world
marketing history --> (delineated between) “material (raw) resources =/= immaterial (dynamic) resources”
resources-assets-capabilities
(in math)
operand: passive objects that are manipulated (3, 5)
operator: specific actions that act upon operands (+, x)
importance of the operand resource
-the relative role of operand resources began to shift in the late 20th century as humans began to realize that skills and knowledge were the most important types of resources
operand resource: (raw material and land) an act is performed on them =/= operant resource: (technologies, knowledge, skill) those employed to act on operand resources
}--> a conceptual separation with roots in Greek philosophy:
•Plato: “material embodiment = distraction to true knowledge”
•Descartes: privileging of mental life over physical matter
==> we inherit this style of philosophy (in the west) that values formal abstract objectless thinking as the standard canonical way of knowing the world
--> *information age*:
•endorses the pre-eminence of the immaterial and disembodies (mind, skill, mental life) over the material and embodied (brute matter, physicality)
•celebrate a *culture of demateriality*
•
=/= object oriented philosophy:
•Heidegger's theory of tool-being
•Latour's displacement of the human proposed by the actor-network theory
•Merleau-Ponty's sensual phenomenology
•
(continental philosophy + analytical philosophy in West -->) **philosophies of access** to the world : they assume that the human-world gap is the privileged site of all rigorous philosophy
interest in human access to objects [--> correlationism: if things exists, they do so only for us] =/=? interest in objects
(in marketing literature)
•operant resources:
human sophisticated
cultural strategic
active dynamic
agentic immaterial
specialized intelligent
relational primary
*infinite*
--link--> to notions of progrss and achievement in contemporary society
•operand resources:
inhuman machine-like
basic stuff
functional physical
inanimate raw
inert less important
secondary lesser
tangible subordinate
*finite*
service-dominant logic {
•operant --> infinite --> human's skill
•operand --> finite --> world's material
service-dominant logic ==> a cut (“=/=”) --> operant resources will take these sluggish raw inherently secondary materials and act on them to whisk them into something valuable
--Barad--> every act of observation makes a “cut” in what is otherwise an indissolubly unauflösbare entangled natural-cultural universe : *every new way of observation cuts open new logics ==> undermines what is known + what can be known*
[*]operand resources: resources which require action to create benefit
--✕--> crucial scenarios where operand resources (forests, sea beds, topsoil) require the opposite of action (unused or underused) in order to create or maintain (their intrinsic) value
*value-in-use: somthing is assessed according to the use a consumer has for it
*value-in-underuse --> (tourism's) deserted beaches, unspoiled countryside, uninhabited ruins
for example brand management implicitly leverages the concept of *value-in-underuse*
brands are often valuable for the very fact that they are underused : when their use is confined to small communities, enabling them to maintain their cultural capital (exclusivity or authenticity)
*vlaue-in-context: value is conceived as something that is collectively co-created by multiple actors
for example in service-dominant logic an operant resource like *brand vlaue* is one which is external[...]