Month: March 2019
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Haunted libraries, invisible labour, and the librarian as an instrument of surveillance
This post was inspired by the article Intersubjectivity and Ghostly Library Labor by Liz Settoducato which was published earlier this month on In the library with the lead pipe. The article, in brief: Libraries are haunted houses. As our patrons move through scenes and illusions that took years of labor to build and maintain, we…
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Digitization is a multiplier and metadata is a fractal
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (sorry), Helga Hufflepuff’s goblet is stored in a vault at Gringotts that’s been cursed so that every time you touch one of the objects in it, dozens of copies are created. On the cover of the original U.K. edition of the book, Harry, Ron and Hermione are pictured…
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If the map becomes the territory then we will be lost
That which computation sets out to map and model it eventually takes over. Google sets out to index all human knowledge and becomes the source and the arbiter of that knowledge: it became what people think. Facebook set out to map the connections between people – the social graph – and became the platform for…