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My work is __________
I struggle at work with __________
My boss doesn’t understand __________
At work, I wish people noticed that ___________
My colleagues are great at ____________
At work, I am proud of ___________
In the last year, I have cried about ___________ times at work.*
*”More times than I can count” is definitely a valid answer!
You are already enough*
*even though there is so much more we could and should be doing
Leah Richardson
Modality without a presence
Meaningless to the materiality of the spaces we create + sustain
...in its blind and measureless drive, its insatiable appetite for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral but even the merely physical limits of the working day.
It usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body.
It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight.
It haggles over the meal-times, where possible incorporating them into the production process itself ...
– Karl Marx, Das Kapital
Our “vocational awe” is being weaponized to create surplus value.
Vocational awe describes the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred [places]... vocational awe directly correlates to problems within librarianship like burnout and low salary.
-Fobazi Ettarh (link)
Surplus Value often looks like:
The Trauma of Archives:
We help problematic people + ideas achieve immortality
“When we look into the collections, the actual�‘information’ contained in libraries and how it is organized, we can see that it somehow manages to construct a reality wherein whiteness is default, normal, civilized and everything else is Other.” nina de jesus (link)
The Trauma of Archives: Our practices are problematic AF
Data in spreadsheets—direct linkage to slavery and the history of “ledgering”
“Haunting Absences”: Hegemonic raw data is still hegemonic even with computational tools and analysis.
“...implications of a lexicon and set of practices/tools that rely upon and reproduce a colonial language of power and entitlement,” P. Gabrielle Foreman and Labanya Mookerjee, (link) Examples: “item,” “object,” “type,” “authorities”
Colonized Coding Languages: class, master branch, object, absence of non-English coding languages, file hierarchies, property and ownership language.
The immaterial has become material
"Stop calling me RESILIENT. Because every time you say, 'Oh, they're resilient,' that means you can do something else to me.
I am not resilient."
- Tracie Washington,
Louisiana Justice Institute (link)
The Effects of Laboring in the Intellectual Economy
Transforming Labor in Academia
Important to see our work---all of it---as labor.
Seek solidarity with faculty--the invisible and emotional labor is what connects us.
Precarity of adjunct work
Emotional labor of teaching
Legitimation through traditional publishing
The work never ends
When we see all work as labor we create the conditions for collective action, resistance, and change.
Works Cited
Ettarh, Fobazi. “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves.” In the Library with the Lead Pipe. January 10, 2018. (link)
Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. Capital: a Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1
de jesus, n., “Locating the Library in Institutional Oppression,” In the Library with the Lead Pipe. September 24, 2014. (link)
Foreman, P. Gabrielle and Mookerjee, Labanya. “Computing in the Dark: Spreadsheets, Data Collection and DH’s Racist Inheritance.” Position paper for Always Already Computational: Library Collection as Data, March 2017. (PDF)
“Archivists do a terrible job of advocating and informing people about our labor and the overall contributions of our labor to society. We seldom speak in terms of concrete concepts like time or money and speak instead of abstract notions like love and passion.”
-Stacie Williams
We are exhausted.
really exhausted.
LOOKING UP:
THE ADMINISTRATION
“I think of all the things that fill my day that capital simply outsources: earning wages by trading my time, doing laundry and dishes, making meals, raising children, all that reproductive labor that also takes time, time that we might otherwise spend building power.”
-Emily Drabinski
...Uncovered the story of the Osborne family while doing research...
This is one of those stories we never should have buried...
It felt like a story that should guide the college…but the story also had complexities and paradoxes...
We’ve ignored these stories over time...it’s dangerous for institutions to do that
D— noted how powerful it was to hear what a difference Colby had made in the lives of the trustees. Trustee S— was struck by the Osborne story. Trustee S— had said that if he had known the Osborne story, he would have known that there was a reason why he was at Colby. We’ve lost some of our most powerful stories. Colby has been at the forefront of the many issues of social justice, and we need to remember our history.
No discussion.
-Faculty meeting minutes, Fall 2017
LOOKING OUT:
FACULTY & CAMPUS
“I just have so much carework for students. Students asking me to look over work, for extensions, for excuses to get out of class, for mental health issues that I am so ill equipped to handle. After over 10 years of teaching, this is the one that is too much for me.”
-Professor, WGSS
My position feels shunted into a “feminized” space...because I am doing things that do not look like scholarship. I’m asked to be entrepreneurial without the protection...and without acknowledgement of the work.
-Visiting Professor, American Studies
LOOKING AHEAD:
STUDENTS
“I nonetheless want to thank the Special Collections staff for taking M— under your collective wing for her entire tenure at Colby College. All of you, and her special collections experiences, contributed so much to her successful student, and post-student, experiences there.
In particular, over the past year, so many highlights have been due to, or associated with, special collections. You have supported her, encouraged her, and helped her find and take advantage of opportunities of all kinds. I think you helped her find and recognize her passion, and supported her initial explorations as a journey began.” - A Mom
Radical empathy
------------
Radical labor
Thank You
enrhodes@colby.edu
co-researchers, accountability, and double-edged sword of invisible labor
Rachel Trent
@reliztrent
Collections as data /
Computational research /
Computational archival science
Treating our online collections (including metadata/descriptive records about them) as data and datasets.
GLAM collaboratives/services are busy exposing data APIs & releasing datasets!
. . . and GLAM institutions themselves, too!!
Chronicling America (also LC)
American Philosophical Society
More! Check out for example this list from the Collections as Data project
Also, institutions are releasing one-offs all over the place via
Dataverse, GitHub, OSF, WikiData, Internet Archive, and more!
Open Data / Reproducibility movements
“‘Open knowledge’ is any content, information or data that people are free to use, re-use and redistribute — without any legal, technological or social restriction.”
“Open data is data that can be freely used, shared and built-on by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose.”
Reproducibility: ability for other people to use similar research methods to come to the same finding.
(See ACM and IEEE for deep dives.)
Libraries have embraced open data!
Libraries:
Libraries guide researchers:
Buckheit and Donoho (1995). Wavelab and Reproducible Research. Wavelets and Statistics: Lecture Notes in Statistics
“An article about computational science in a scientific publication is not the scholarship itself, it is merely advertising of the scholarship. The actual scholarship is the complete software development environment and the complete set of instructions which generated the figures.”
Note the terminology differences used to describe the same activities
Faculty/Students/”Researchers”
publish
author
create
Libraries/Librarians
release
expose
make available
post
share
Old fashioned archival philosophy . . . .
“The Archivist’s career is one of service. He exists in order to make other people’s work possible. . . . his aim to provide, without prejudice or afterthought, for all who wish to know the Means of Knowledge. ... The good Archivist is perhaps the most selfless devotee of Truth the modern world produces.”
- Hilary Jenkinson
. . . replaced by recognition of archival subjectivity = curation is authorship of the historical record!
“Jenkinson saw the archivist as “custodian of a naturally occuring record, a natural residue of administrative processes rather than a conscious choice by the archivist. “
. . . . “stunningly reactionary . . . . a strange, jarring echo of the nineteenth century”
Archives “are so deeply embedded in political institutions and societal frameworks that any residual claims of innocence and objectivity are completely unfounded.”
Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression
“While we often think of terms such as “big data” and “algorithms as being benign, neutral, or objective, they are anything but.”
Studied how “Google could completely fail when it came to providing reliable or credible information about women and people of color yet experience seemingly no repercussions whatsoever.”
Digital Humanities ( in theory . . . )
“Whereas the modern university segregated scholarship from curation, demoting the latter to a secondary, supportive role, and sending curators into exile within museums, archives, and libraries, the Digital Humanities revolution promotes a fundamental reshaping of the research and teaching landscape. It recasts the scholar as curator and the curator as scholar, and, in so doing, sets out both to reinvigorate scholarly practice by means of an expanded set of possibilities and demands, and to renew the scholarly mission of museums, libraries, and archives.”
Our scholarly labor is invisible labor.
Accountable to research standards
Trust without accountability
People trust things that:
“cyberlibertarian notions of freedom, racelessness, and an ethos in which the only evil is restricting the flow of information on the Internet”
“White nationalists see the ‘race-less’ approach of platforms and the technological innovation of algorithms as opportunities to push the ‘Overton window,’ the range of topics tolerated in public discourse.”
“Today’s “Whitelash” is algorithmically amplified, sped up, and circulated to other White ethno-nationalist movements around the world, ignored all the while by a tech industry that “doesn’t see race” in the tools it creates.”
GW’s Ghost
GW’s Speculum (med school yearbook)
Enthusiastic accountability
Ideas borrowed from The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online:
Thank you!
Rachel Trent
George Washington University
Digital Services Manager, Special Collections
@reliztrent
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