What to take away from the first half? I hardly need to go over the themes of archival power. We’ve read enough about it and the various mechanisms through which archival/colonial power CAN be and in fact IS expressed.
To say that archives have a bias is not exactly a profound revelation in 2021. But the extent to which those biases manifest in personal and community identity and social inequity are maybe more extensive than you would have guessed.
One of the main ideas I hope it sticking with you from the archival half of the course is how power created by such seemingly trivial acts (the basic work of selection, labeling, cataloging, ontologies, epistemologies, interfaces, silences, etc) has a disproportionately large and long-term effect.
The premise of the 2nd half of the course is how the SAME KINDS of acts via data and automated and algorithmic decision making yield a disproportionate power, to which we are continually, and increasingly, subject. We won’t read much about archives anymore, but we’re going to be constantly trying to apply the first half of the course to the second.
My hope is that what we will read about algorithmic intelligence evokes the same kinds of resonance that the archive readings did. I hope that we can dismantle myths and misconceptions about big data and algorithmic decision making the way we dismantled archival objectivity. Both data/algorithms are frequently assumed to be more objective than they really are, and that bias is more easily avoided than it really is. But it’s not enough just to know that it happens. Learning HOW it has happened with archives can give us some insight into ways we need to be better creators, consumers, and custodians of data.
So that’s my hope for the first half of the course as it applies to the second half. I also hope our archival analysis is far more exportable as well, hence your first-half-of-the-course reflection assignment this week.
I’ve asked you to write about ways in which the lessons from archival history can be useful outside of archival contexts IN GENERAL, not just in terms of data and algorithms (we’ll get enough of that over the next few months). Please, in your responses, think about the MOST GENERAL lessons that YOU have learned from thinking about the history and problems with archives and where you have thought about possibly applying them. And if you come up empty and want to argue that you’ve learned nothing, TELL ME WHY! Just make sure you’re responding thoughtfully to the readings and disagreeing through careful argumentation. Your reflection should be about YOUR experience with the course. You’ll have liked some things and disliked other things. I’m not looking for a summary of course material, but a reflection on how you think you will or will not use the ways we critiqued archives outside of the course.
A maybe useful but also potentially misleading example:
Think about your app store (Android,iOS, whatever; it doesn’t matter). It’s a place where you can go get stuff that helps you do something else. Apps are stored there, they are organized; they have standard descriptive language applied to them. Tags, even. It has an interface. So it’s basically an archive of sorts. Even if you disagree that is is one, you can probably agree we can see some parallels.
Does is therefore suffer from some of the archival limitations we’ve already discussed? One totally defensible response is NO, it’s just an app store! Really, how influential or subversive can it be? Is it really an instrument of colonial power? It’s just a place to make apps available, right? Yes, but that has been the very response to questioning objectivity about archives until up to about 30 years ago. Just a place to put stuff that people might want to get to at some point.
Clearly there are differences. Most notably: much of logic of the app store might be characterized as fundamentally capitalist rather than colonialist, right? And, besides, isn’t an app store, unlike archives, open, democratic, and largely self-regulating and evolving? Absolutely. But maybe just as much as archives have been—which is to say not as much as most people assume to be the case. Funny how capitalist logic often seems to parallel colonial logic. People with access to power/capital set up and maintain structures to preserve it and even generate more for themselves through the work of others who have fewer options.
Even as we recognize crucial differences, we might start to entertain some key questions: WHO is making the app store? What do they look like? What have their life experiences been? How much, like archivists have, are they assuming their version of reality is THE reality that everyone experiences? If others have different histories with different access to and familiarity with technology, are they going to find what they want or need? Will that app even be in the app store? Does an app store privilege certain voices at the expense of others? Does it foster a cultural hegemony?
Just as archives create a certain kind of culture (via history) the app store creates a certain kind of culture. Remember the Keywords and Algorithmic Culture article? I would say it does this through many of the same mechanisms we’ve been reading about.
Forget about the app store. What about UNM Learn? How does this shape an educational experience? Who is privileged when using it? Who is marginalized? Does the way that it structures information or the way it shapes courses and learning experiences favor certain users—perhaps users that think in similar ways to the software/interface designers? Or even ways of thinking about the world? Obviously an online Learning Management System is NOT THE SAME as an archive. But I hope you see my point here that many of the same issues and questions that we’ve examined are far from exclusive to archives.
And this is how I hope the first half is most fundamentally useful for you going forward: That it makes you better able to analyze and critique knowledge infrastructures—to be ever critical of what categories people use (ontology), how they think they produce knowledge about the world (epistemology). I don’t mean such critique to be abstract philosophical exercises, but an ongoing awareness of how archives/data/knowledge is created, selected, structured, labeled, preserved, and accessed, how those choices have lasting and often unintended consequences.
I hope that thinking of the history and challenges of archives can help us think big when it comes to understanding how we organize and perceive the world around us. So I hope you will. I look forward to your reflections!