_An unedited version of a talk given at the conference[Public
Library](http://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/en/program/2014/events/public-library/)
held at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 1 November 2014._
_Bracketed sequences are to be reformulated._
Poetics of Research
In this talk I'm going to attempt to identify [particular] cultural
algorithms, ie. processes in which cultural practises and software meet. With
them a sphere is implied in which algorithms gather to form bodies of
practices and in which cultures gather around algorithms. I'm going to
approach them through the perspective of my practice as a cultural worker,
editor and artist, considering practice in the same rank as theory and
poetics, and where theorization of practice can also lead to the
identification of poetical devices.
The primary motivation for this talk is an attempt to figure out where do we
stand as operators, users [and communities] gathering around infrastructures
containing a massive body of text (among other things) and what sort of things
might be considered to make a difference [or to keep making difference].
The talk mainly [considers] the role of text and the word in research, by way
of several figures.
A
A reference, list, scheme, table, index; those things that intervene in the
flow of narrative, illustrating the point, perhaps in a more economic way than
the linear text would do. Yet they don't function as pictures, they are
primarily texts, arranged in figures. Their forms have been
standardised[normalised] over centuries, withstood the transition to the
digital without any significant change, being completely intuitive to the
modern reader. Compared to the body of text they are secondary, run parallel
to it. Their function is however different to that of the punctuation. They
are there neither to shape the narrative nor to aid structuring the argument
into logical blocks. Nor is their function spatial, like in visual poems.
Their positions within a document are determined according to the sequential
order of the text, [standing as attachments] and are there to clarify the
nature of relations among elements of the subject-matter, or to establish
relations with other documents. The [premise] of my talk is that these
_textual figures_ also came to serve as the abstract[relational] models
determining possible relations among documents as such, and in consequence [to
structure conditions [of research]].
B
It can be said that research, as inquiry into a subject-matter, consists of
discrete queries. A query, such as a question about what something is, what
kinds, parts and properties does it have, and so on, can be consulted in
existing documents or generate new documents based on collection of data [in]
the field and through experiment, before proceeding to reasoning [arguments
and deductions]. Formulation of a query is determined by protocols providing
access to documents, which means that there is a difference between collecting
data outside the archive (the undocumented, ie. in the field and through
experiment), consulting with a person--an archivist (expert, librarian,
documentalist), and consulting with a database storing documents. The
phenomena such as [deepening] of specialization and throughout digitization
[have given] privilege to the database as [a|the] [fundamental] means for
research. Obviously, this is a very recent [phenomenon]. Queries were once
formulated in natural language; now, given the fact that databases are queried
[using] SQL language, their interfaces are mere extensions of it and
researchers pose their questions by manipulating dropdowns, checkboxes and
input boxes mashed together on a flat screen being ran by software that in
turn translates them into a long line of conditioned _SELECTs_ and _JOINs_
performed on tables of data.
Specialization, digitization and networking have changed the language of
questioning. Inquiry, once attached to the flesh and paper has been
[entrusted] to the digital and networked. Researchers are querying the black
box.
C
Searching in a collection of [amassed/assembled] [tangible] documents (ie.
bookshelf) is different from searching in a systematically structured
repository (library) and even more so from searching in a digital repository
(digital library). Not that they are mutually exclusive. One can devise
structures and algorithms to search through a printed text, or read books in a
library one by one. They are rather [models] [embodying] various [processes]
associated with the query. These properties of the query might be called [the
sequence], the structure and the index. If they are present in the ways of
querying documents, and we will return to this issue, are they persistent
within the inquiry as such? [wait]
D
This question itself is a rupture in the sequence. It makes a demand to depart
from one narrative [a continuous flow of words] to another, to figure out,
while remaining bound to it [it would be even more as a so-called rhetorical
question]. So there has been one sequence, or line, of the inquiry--about the
kinds of the query and its properties. That sequence itself is a digression,
from within the sequence about what is research and describing its parts
(queries). We are thus returning to it and continue with a question whether
the properties of the inquiry are the same as the properties of the query.
E
But isn't it true that every single utterance occurring in a sequence yields a
query as well? Let's consider the word _utterance_. [wait] It can produce a
number of associations, for example with how Foucault employs the notion of
_énoncé_ in his _Archaeology of Knowledge_ , giving hard time to his English
translators wondering whether _utterance_ or _statement_ is more appropriate,
or whether they are interchangeable, and what impact would each choice have on
his reception in the Anglophone world. Limiting ourselves to textual forms for
now (and not translating his work but pursing a different inquiry), let us say
the utterance is a word [or a phrase or an idiom] in a sequence such as a
sentence, a paragraph, or a document.
## (F) The
structure[[edit](/index.php?title=Talks/Poetics_of_Research&action=edit§ion=1
"Edit section: \(F\) The structure")]
This distinction is as old as recorded Western thought since both Plato and
Aristotle differentiate between a word on its own ("the said", a thing said)
and words in the company of other words. For example, Aristotle's _Categories_
[lay] on the [notion] of words on their own, and they are made the subject-
matter of that inquiry. [For him], the ambiguity of connotation words
[produce] lies in their synonymity, understood differently from the moderns--
not as more words denoting a similar thing but rather one word denoting
various things. Categories were outlined as a device to differentiate among
words according to kinds of these things. Every word as such belonged to not
less and not more than one of ten categories.
So it happens to the word _utterance_ , as to any other word uttered in a
sequence, that it poses a question, a query about what share of the spectrum
of possibly denoted things might yield as the most appropriate in a given
context. The more context the more precise share comes to the fore. When taken
out of the context ambiguity prevails as the spectrum unveils in its variety.
Thus single words [as any other utterances] are questions, queries,
themselves, and by occuring in statements, in context, their [means] are being
singled out.
This process is _conditioned_ by what has been formalized as the techniques of
_regulating_ definitions of words.
### (G) The structure: words as
words[[edit](/index.php?title=Talks/Poetics_of_Research&action=edit§ion=2
"Edit section: \(G\) The structure: words as words")]
P.Oxy.XX 2260 i: Oxyrhynchus papyrus XX, 2260, column i, with quotation from
Philitas, early 2nd c. CE. 1(http://163.1.169.40/cgi-
bin/library?e=q-000-00---0POxy--00-0-0--0prompt-10---4------0-1l--1-en-50---
20-about-2260--
00031-001-0-0utfZz-8-00&a=d&c=POxy&cl=search&d=HASH13af60895d5e9b50907367) 2(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:POxy.XX.2260.i-Philitas-
highlight.jpeg)
Ephraim Chambers, _Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and
Sciences_ , 1728, p. 210. 3(http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-
bin/HistSciTech/HistSciTech-
idx?type=turn&entity=HistSciTech.Cyclopaedia01.p0576&id=HistSciTech.Cyclopaedia01&isize=L)
Detail from the Liddell-Scott Greek-English Lexicon, c1843.
Dictionaries have had a long life. The ancient Greek scholar and poet Philitas
of Cos living in the 4th c. BCE wrote a vocabulary explaining the meanings of
rare Homeric and other literary words, words from local dialects, and
technical terms. The vocabulary, called _Disorderly Words_ (Átaktoi glôssai),
has been lost, with a few fragments quoted by later authors. One example is
that the word πέλλα (pélla) meant "wine cup" in the ancient Greek region of
Boeotia; contrasted to the same word meaning "milk pail" in Homer's _Iliad_.
Not much has changed in the way how dictionaries constitute order. Selected
archives of statements are queried to yield occurrences of particular words,
various _criteria[indicators]_ are applied to filtering and sorting them and
in turn the spectrum of [denoted] things allocated in this way is structured
into groups and subgroups which are then given, according to other set of
rules, shorter or longer names. These constitute facets of [potential]
meanings of a word.
So there are at least _four_ sets of conditions [structuring] dictionaries.
One is required to delimit an archive[corpus of texts], one to select and give
preference[weights] to occurrences of a word, another to cluster them, and yet
another to abstract[generalize] the subject-matter of each of these clusters.
Needless to say, this is a craft of a few and these criteria are rarely being
disclosed, despite their impact on research, and more generally, their
influence as conditions for production[making] of a so called _common sense_.
It doesn't take that much to reimagine what a dictionary is and what it could
be, especially having large specialized corpora of texts at hand. These can
also serve as aids in production of new words and new meanings.
### (H) The structure: words as knowledge and the
world[[edit](/index.php?title=Talks/Poetics_of_Research&action=edit§ion=3
"Edit section: \(H\) The structure: words as knowledge and the world")]
Boethius's rendering of a classification tree described in Porphyry's Isagoge
(3th c.), [6th c.] 10th c. 4(http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/sbe/0315/53/medium)
Ephraim Chambers, _Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and
Sciences_ , London, 1728, p. II. 5(http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-
bin/HistSciTech/HistSciTech-
idx?type=turn&entity=HistSciTech.Cyclopaedia01.p0015&id=HistSciTech.Cyclopaedia01&isize=L)
Système figuré des connaissances humaines, _Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire
raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers_ , 1751. 6(http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/content/syst%C3%A8me-figur%C3%A9-des-
connaissances-humaines)
Another _formalized_ and [internalized] process being at play when figuring
out a word is its [containment]. Word is not only structured by way of things
it potentially denotes but also by words it is potentially part of and those
it contains.
The fuzz around categorization of knowledge _and_ the world in the Western
thought can be traced back to Porphyry, if not further. In his introduction to
Aristotle's _Categories_ this 3rd century AD Neoplatonist began expanding the
notions of genus and species into their hypothetic consequences. Aristotle's
brief work outlines ten categories of 'things that are said' (legomena,
λεγόμενα), namely substance (or substantive, {not the same as matter!},
οὐσία), quantity (ποσόν), qualification (ποιόν), a relation (πρός), where
(ποῦ), when (πότε), being-in-a-position (κεῖσθαι), having (or state,
condition, ἔχειν), doing (ποιεῖν), and being-affected (πάσχειν). In his
different work, _Topics_ , Aristotle outlines four kinds of subjects/materials
indicated in propositions/problems from which arguments/deductions start.
These are a definition (όρος), a genus (γένος), a property (ἴδιος), and an
accident (συμβεβηϰόϛ). Porphyry does not explicitly refer _Topics_ , and says
he omits speaking "about genera and species, as to whether they subsist (in
the nature of things) or in mere conceptions only" 8(http://www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/porphyry_isagogue_02_translation.htm#C1),
which means he avoids explicating whether he talks about kinds of concepts or
kinds of things in the sensible world. However, the work sparked confusion, as
the following passage [suggests]:
> "[I]n each category there are certain things most generic, and again, others
most special, and between the most generic and the most special, others which
are alike called both genera and species, but the most generic is that above
which there cannot be another superior genus, and the most special that below
which there cannot be another inferior species. Between the most generic and
the most special, there are others which are alike both genera and species,
referred, nevertheless, to different things, but what is stated may become
clear in one category. Substance indeed, is itself genus, under this is body,
under body animated body, under which is animal, under animal rational animal,
under which is man, under man Socrates, Plato, and men particularly." (Owen
1853, 9(http://www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/porphyry_isagogue_02_translation.htm#C2))
Porphyry took one of Aristotle's ten categories of the word, substance, and
dissected it using one of his four rhetorical devices, genus. Employing
Aristotle's categories, genera and species as means for logical operations,
for dialectic, Porphyry's interpretation resulted in having more resemblance
to the perceived _structures_ of the world. So they began to bloom.
There were earlier examples, but Porphyry was the most influential in
injecting the _universalist_ version of classification [implying] the figure
of a tree into the [locus] of Aristotle's thought. Knowledge became
monotheistic.
Classification schemes [growing from one point] play a major role in
untangling the format of modern encyclopedia from that of the dictionary
governed by alphabet. Two of the most influential encyclopedias of the 18th
century are cases in the point. Although still keeping 'dictionary' in their
titles, they are conceived not to represent words but knowledge. The [upper-
most] genus of the body was set as the body of knowledge. The English
_Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences_ (1728) splits
into two main branches: "natural and scientifical" and "artificial and
technical"; these further split down to 47 classes in total, each carrying a
structured list (on the following pages) of thematic articles, serving as
table of contents. The French _Encyclopedia: or a Systematic Dictionary of the
Sciences, Arts, and Crafts_ (1751) [unwinds] from judgement ( _entendement_ ),
branches into memory as history, reason as philosophy, and imagination as
poetry. The logic of containers was employed as an aid not only to deal with
the enormous task of naming and not omiting anything from what is known, but
also for the management of labour of hundreds of writers and researchers, to
create a mechanism for delegating work and the distribution of
responsibilities. Flesh was also more present, in the field research, with
researchers attending workshops and sites of everyday life to annotate it.
The world came forward to unshine the word in other schemes. Darwin's tree of
evolution and some of the modern document classification systems such as
Charles A. Cutter's _Expansive Classification_ (1882) set to classify the
world itself and set the field for what has came to be known as authority
lists structuring metadata in today's computing.
### The structure
(summary)[[edit](/index.php?title=Talks/Poetics_of_Research&action=edit§ion=4
"Edit section: The structure \(summary\)")]
Facetization of meaning and branching of knowledge are both the domain of the
unit of utterance.
While lexicographers[dictionarists] structure thought through multi-layered
processes of abstraction of the written record, knowledge growers dissect it
into hierarchies of [mutually] contained notions.
One seek to describe the word as a faceted list of small worlds, another to
describe the world as a structured lists of words. One play prime in the
domain of epistemology, in what is known, controlling the vocabulary, another
in the domain of ontology, in what is, controlling reality.
Every [word] has its given things, every thing has its place, closer or
further from a single word.
The schism between classifying words and classifying the world implies it is
not possible to construct a universal classification scheme[system]. On top of
that, any classification system of words is bound to a corpus of texts it is
operating upon and any classification system of the world again operates with
words which are bound to a vocabulary[lexicon] which is again bound to a
corpus [of texts]. It doesn't mean it would prevent people from trying.
Classifications function as descriptors of and 'inscriptors' upon the world,
imprinting their authority. They operate from [a locus of] their
corpus[context]-specificity. The larger the corpus, the more power it has on
shaping the world, as far as the word shapes it (yes, I do imply Google here,
for which it is a domain to be potentially exploited).
## (J) The
sequence[[edit](/index.php?title=Talks/Poetics_of_Research&action=edit§ion=5
"Edit section: \(J\) The sequence")]
The structure-yielding query [of] the single word [shrinks][zuzuje
sa,spresnuje] with preceding and following words. Inquiry proceeds in the flow
that establishes another kind[mode] of relationality, chaining words into the
sequence. While the structuring property of the query brings words apart from
each other, its sequential property establishes continuity and brings these
units into an ordered set.
This is what is responsible for attaching textual figures mentioned earlier
(lists, schemes, tables) to the body of the text. Associations can be also
stated explicitly, by indexing tables and then referring them from a
particular point in the text. The same goes for explicit associations made
between blocks of the text by means of indexed paragraphs, chapters or pages.
From this follows that all utterances point to the following utterance by the
nature of sequential order, and indexing provides means for pointing elsewhere
in the document as well.
A lot can be said about references to other texts. Here, to spare time, I
would refer you to a talk I gave a few months ago and which is online 10(http://monoskop.org/Talks/Communing_Texts).
This is still the realm of print. What happens with document when it is
digitized?
Digitization breaks a document into units of which each is assigned a numbered
position in the sequence of the document. From this perspective digitization
can be viewed as a total indexation of the document. It is converted into
units rendered for machine operations. This sequentiality is made explicit, by
means of an underlying index.
Sequences and chains are orders of one dimension. Their one-dimensional
ordering allows addressability of each element and [random] access. [Jumps]
between [random] addresses are still sequential, processing elements one at a
time.
## (K) The
index[[edit](/index.php?title=Talks/Poetics_of_Research&action=edit§ion=6
"Edit section: \(K\) The index")]
Summa confessorum [1297-98], 1310. 7(http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/illmanus/roymanucoll/j/011roy000008g11u00002000.html)
[The] sequencing not only weaves words into statements but activates other
temporalities, and _presents occurrences of words from past statements_. As
now when I am saying the word _utterance_ , each time there surface contexts
in which I have used it earlier.
A long quote from Frederick G. Kilgour, _The Evolution of the Book_ , 1998, pp
76-77:
> "A century of invention of various types of indexes and reference tools
preceded the advent of the first subject index to a specific book, which
occurred in the last years of the thirteenth century. The first subject
indexes were "distinctions," collections of "various figurative or symbolic
meanings of a noun found in the scriptures" that "are the earliest of all
alphabetical tools aside from dictionaries." (Richard and Mary Rouse supply an
example: "Horse = Preacher. Job 39: 'Hast thou given the horse strength, or
encircled his neck with whinning?')
>
> [Concordance] By the end of the third decade of the thirteenth century Hugh
de Saint-Cher had produced the first word concordance. It was a simple word
index of the Bible, with every location of each word listed by [its position
in the Bible specified by book, chapter, and letter indicating part of the
chapter]. Hugh organized several dozen men, assigning to each man an initial
letter to search; for example, the man assigned M was to go through the entire
Bible, list each word beginning with M and give its location. As it was soon
perceived that this original reference work would be even more useful if words
were cited in context, a second concordance was produced, with each word in
lengthy context, but it proved to be unwieldy. [Soon] a third version was
produced, with words in contexts of four to seven words, the model for
biblical concordances ever since.
>
> [Subject index] The subject index, also an innovation of the thirteenth
century, evolved over the same period as did the concordance. Most of the
early topical indexes were designed for writing sermons; some were organized,
while others were apparently sequential without any arrangement. By midcentury
the entries were in alphabetical order, except for a few in some classified
arrangement. Until the end of the century these alphabetical reference works
indexed a small group of books. Finally John of Freiburg added an alphabetical
subject index to his own book, _Summa Confessorum_ (1297—1298). As the Rouses
have put it, 'By the end of the [13]th century the practical utility of the
subject index is taken for granted by the literate West, no longer solely as
an aid for preachers, but also in the disciplines of theology, philosophy, and
both kinds of law.'"
In one sense neither subject-index nor concordane are indexes, they are words
or group of words selected according to given criteria from the body of the
text, each accompanied with a list of identifiers. These identifiers are
elements of an index, whether they represent a page, chapter, column, or other
[kind of] block of text. Every identifier is an unique _address_.
The index is thus an ordering of a sequence by means of associating its
elements with a set of symbols, when each element is given unique combination
of symbols. Different sizes of sets yield different number of variations.
Symbol sets such as an alphabet, arabic numerals, roman numerals, and binary
digits have different proportions between the length of a string of symbols
and the number of possible variations it can contain. Thus two symbols of
English alphabet can store 26^2 various values, of arabic numerals 10^2, of
roman numberals 8^2 and of binary digits 2^2.
Indexation is segmentation, a breaking into segments. From as early as the
13th century the index such as that of sections has served as enabler of
search. The more [detailed] indexation the more precise search results it
enables.
The subject-index and concordance are tables of search results. There is a
direct lineage from the 13th-century biblical concordances and the birth of
computational linguistic analysis, they were both initiated and realised by
priests.
During the World War II, Jesuit Father Roberto Busa began to look for machines
for the automation of the linguistic analysis of the 11 million-word Latin
corpus of Thomas Aquinas and related authors.
Working on his Ph.D. thesis on the concept of _praesens_ in Aquinas he
realised two things:
> "I realized first that a philological and lexicographical inquiry into the
verbal system of an author has t o precede and prepare for a doctrinal
interpretation of his works. Each writer expresses his conceptual system in
and through his verbal system, with the consequence that the reader who
masters this verbal system, using his own conceptual system, has to get an
insight into the writer's conceptual system. The reader should not simply
attach t o the words he reads the significance they have in his mind, but
should try t o find out what significance they had in the writer's mind.
Second, I realized that all functional or grammatical words (which in my mind
are not 'empty' at all but philosophically rich) manifest the deepest logic of
being which generates the basic structures of human discourse. It is .this
basic logic that allows the transfer from what the words mean today t o what
they meant to the writer.
>
> In the works of every philosopher there are two philosophies: the one which
he consciously intends to express and the one he actually uses to express it.
The structure of each sentence implies in itself some philosophical
assumptions and truths. In this light, one can legitimately criticize a
philosopher only when these two philosophies are in contradiction." 11(http://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/busa-1980.pdf)
Collaborating with the IBM in New York from 1949, the work, a concordance of
all the words of Thomas Aquinas, was finally published in the 1970s in 56
printed volumes (a version is online since 2005 12(http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/it/index.age)). Besides that, an
electronic lexicon for automatic lemmatization of Latin words was created by a
team of ten priests in the scope of two years (in two phases: grouping all the
forms of an inflected word under their lemma, and coding the morphological
categories of each form and lemma), containing 150,000 forms 13(http://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/busa-1980.pdf#page=4). Father
Busa has been dubbed the father of humanities computing and recently also of
digital humanities.
The subject-index has a crucial role in the printed book. It is the only means
for search the book offers. Subjects composing an index can be selected
according to a classification scheme (specific to a field of an inquiry), for
example as elements of a certain degree (with a given minimum number of
subclasses).
Its role seemingly vanishes in the digital text. But it can be easily
transformed. Besides serving as a table of pre-searched results the subject-
index also gives a distinct idea about content of the book. Two patterns give
us a clue: numbers of occurrences of selected words give subjects weights,
while words that seem specific to the book outweights other even if they don't
occur very often. A selection of these words then serves as a descriptor of
the whole text, and can be thought of as a specific kind of 'tags'.
This process was formalized in a mathematical function in the 1970s, thanks to
a formula by Karen Spärck Jones which she entitled 'inverse document
frequency' (IDF), or in other words, "term specificity". It is measured as a
proportion of texts in the corpus where the word appears at least once to the
total number of texts. When multiplied by the frequency of the word _in_ the
text (divided by the maximum frequency of any word in the text), we get _term
frequency-inverse document frequency_ (tf-idf). In this way we can get an
automated list of subjects which are particular in the text when compared to a
group of texts.
We came to learn it by practice of searching the web. It is a mechanism not
dissimilar to thought process involved in retrieving particular information
online. And search engines have it built in their indexing algorithms as well.
There is a paper proposing attaching words generated by tf-idf to the
hyperlinks when referring websites 14(http://bscit.berkeley.edu/cgi-
bin/pl_dochome?query_src=&format=html&collection=Wilensky_papers&id=3&show_doc=yes).
This would enable finding the referred content even after the link is dead.
Hyperlinks in references in the paper use this feature and it can be easily
tested: 15(http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~phelps/papers/dissertation-
abstract.html?lexical-
signature=notemarks+multivalent+semantically+franca+stylized).
There is another measure, cosine similarity, which takes tf-idf further and
can be applied for clustering texts according to similarities in their
specificity. This might be interesting as a feature for digital libraries, or
even a way of organising library bottom-up into novel categories, new
discourses could emerge. Or as an aid for researchers to sort through texts,
or even for editors as an aid in producing interesting anthologies.
## Final
remarks[[edit](/index.php?title=Talks/Poetics_of_Research&action=edit§ion=7
"Edit section: Final remarks")]
1
New disciplines emerge all the time - most recently, for example, cultural
techniques, software studies, or media archaeology. It takes years, even
decades, before they gain dedicated shelves in libraries or a category in
interlibrary digital repositories. Not that it matters that much. They are not
only sites of academic opportunities but, firstly, frameworks of new
perspectives of looking at the world, new domains of knowledge. From the
perspective of researcher the partaking in a discipline involves negotiating
its vocabulary, classifications, corpus, reference field, and specific
terms[subjects]. Creating new fields involves all that, and more. Even when
one goes against all disciplines.
2
Google can still surprise us.
3
Knowledge has been in the making for millenia. There have been (abstract)
mechanisms established that govern its conditions. We now possess specialized
corpora of texts which are interesting enough to serve as a ground to discuss
and experiment with dictionaries, classifications, indexes, and tools for
references retrieval. These all belong to the poetic devices of knowledge-
making.
4
Command-line example of tf-idf and concordance in 3 steps.
* 1\. Process the files text.1-5.txt and produce freq.1-5.txt with lists of (nonlemmatized) words (in respective texts), ordered by frequency:
> for i in {1..5}; do tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' < text.$i.txt | tr -c '[a-z]'
'[\012*]' | tr -d '[:punct:]' | sort | uniq -c | sort -k 1nr | sed '1,1d' >
temp.txt; max=$(awk -vvar=1 -F" " 'NR
* 2\. Process the files freq.1-5.txt and produce tfidf.1-5.txt containing a list of words (out of 500 most frequent in respective lists), ordered by weight (specificity for each text):
> for j in {1..5}; do rm freq.$j.txt.temp; lines=$(wc -l freq.$j.txt) && for i
in {1..500}; do word=$(awk -vline="$i" -vfield=2 -F" " 'NR
line {print
$field}' freq.$j.txt); tf=$(awk -vline="$i" -vfield=1 -F" " 'NR
* 3\. Process the files tfidf.1-5.txt and their source text, text.txt, and produce occ.txt with concordance of top 3 words from each of them:
> rm occ.txt && for j in {1..5}; do echo "$j" >> occ.txt; ptx -f -w 150
text.txt.$j > occ.$j.txt; for i in {1..3}; do word=$(awk -vline="$i" -vfield=1
-F" " 'NR
line {print $field}' tfidf.$j.txt); egrep -i
"[alpha:](/index.php?title=Alpha:&action=edit&redlink=1 "Alpha: \(page does
not exist\)") $word" occ.$j.txt >> occ.txt; done; done
Dušan Barok
_Written 23 October - 1 November 2014 in Bratislava and Stuttgart._
Mattern
Making Knowledge Available
2018
# Making Knowledge Available
## The media of generous scholarship
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A few weeks ago, shortly after reading that Elsevier, the world’s largest
academic publisher, had made over €1 billion in profit in 2017, I received
notice of a new journal issue on decolonization and media.* “Decolonization”
denotes the dismantling of imperialism, the overturning of systems of
domination, and the founding of new political orders. Recalling Achille
Mbembe’s exhortation that we seek to decolonize our knowledge production
practices and institutions, I looked forward to exploring this new collection
of liberated learning online – amidst that borderless ethereal terrain where
information just wants to be free. (…Not really.)
Instead, I encountered a gate whose keeper sought to extract a hefty toll: $42
to rent a single article for the day, or $153 to borrow it for the month. The
keeper of that particular gate, mega-publisher Taylor & Francis, like the
keepers of many other epistemic gates, has found toll-collecting to be quite a
profitable business. Some of the largest academic publishers have, in recent
years, achieved profit margins of nearly 40%, higher than those of Apple and
Google. Granted, I had access to an academic library and an InterLibrary Loan
network that would help me to circumvent the barriers – yet I was also aware
of just how much those libraries were paying for that access on my behalf; and
of all the un-affiliated readers, equally interested and invested in
decolonization, who had no academic librarians to serve as their liaisons.
I’ve found myself standing before similar gates in similar provinces of
paradox: the scholarly book on “open data” that sells for well over $100; the
conference on democratizing the “smart city,” where tickets sell for ten times
as much. Librarian Ruth Tillman was [struck with “acute irony
poisoning”](https://twitter.com/ruthbrarian/status/932701152839454720) when
she encountered a costly article on rent-seeking and value-grabbing in a
journal of capitalism and socialism, which was itself rentable by the month
for a little over $900.
We’re certainly not the first to acknowledge the paradox. For decades, many
have been advocating for open-access publishing, authors have been campaigning
for less restrictive publishing agreements, and librarians have been
negotiating with publishers over exorbitant subscription fees. That fight
continues: in mid-February, over 100 libraries in the UK and Ireland
[submitted a letter](https://www.sconul.ac.uk/page/open-letter-to-the-
management-of-the-publisher-taylor-francis) to Taylor & Francis protesting
their plan to lock up content more than 20 years old and sell it as a separate
package.
My coterminous discoveries of Elsevier’s profit and that decolonization-
behind-a-paywall once again highlighted the ideological ironies of academic
publishing, prompting me to [tweet
something](https://twitter.com/shannonmattern/status/969418644240420865) half-
baked about academics perhaps giving a bit more thought to whether the
politics of their publishing _venues_ – their media of dissemination –
matched the politics they’re arguing for in their research. Maybe, I proposed,
we aren’t serving either ourselves or our readers very well by advocating for
social justice or “the commons” – or sharing progressive research on labor
politics and care work and the elitism of academic conventions – in journals
that extract huge profits from free labor and exploitative contracts and fees.
Despite my attempt to drown my “call to action” in a swamp of rhetorical
conditionals – “maybe” I was “kind-of” hedging “just a bit”? – several folks
quickly, and constructively, pointed out some missing nuances in my tweet.
[Librarian and LIS scholar Emily Drabinski
noted](https://twitter.com/edrabinski/status/969629307147563008) the dangers
of suggesting that individual “bad actors” are to blame for the hypocrisies
and injustices of a broken system – a system that includes authors, yes, but
also publishers of various ideological orientations, libraries, university
administrations, faculty review committees, hiring committees, accreditors,
and so forth.
And those authors are not a uniform group. Several junior scholars replied to
say that they think _a lot_ about the power dynamics of academic publishing
(many were “hazed,” at an early age, into the [Impact
Factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor) Olympics, encouraged to
obsessively count citations and measure “prestige”). They expressed a desire
to experiment with new modes and media of dissemination, but lamented that
they had to bracket their ethical concerns and aesthetic aspirations. Because
tenure. Open-access publications, and more-creative-but-less-prestigious
venues, “don’t count.” Senior scholars chimed in, too, to acknowledge that
scholars often publish in different venues at different times for different
purposes to reach different audiences (I’d add, as well, that some
conversations need to happen in enclosed, if not paywalled, environments
because “openness” can cultivate dangerous vulnerabilities). Some also
concluded that, if we want to make “open access” and public scholarship – like
that featured in _Public Seminar_ – “count,” we’re in for a long battle: one
that’s best waged within big professional scholarly associations. Even then,
there’s so much entrenched convention – so many naturalized metrics and
administrative structures and cultural habits – that we’re kind-of stuck with
these rentier publishers (to elevate the ingrained irony: in August 2017,
Elsevier acquired bepress, an open-access digital repository used by many
academic institutions). They need our content and labor, which we willing give
away for free, because we need their validation even more.
All this is true. Still, I’d prefer to think that we _can_ actually resist
rentierism, reform our intellectual infrastructures, and maybe even make some
progress in “decolonizing” the institution over the next years and decades. As
a mid-career scholar, I’d like to believe that my peers and I, in
collaboration with our junior colleagues and colleagues-to-be, can espouse new
values – which include attention to the political, ethical, and even aesthetic
dimensions of the means and _media_ through which we do our scholarship – in
our search committees, faculty reviews, and juries. Change _can_ happen at
the local level; one progressive committee can set an example for another, and
one college can do the same. Change can take root at the mega-institutional
scale, too. Several professional organizations, like the Modern Language
Association and many scientific associations, have developed policies and
practices to validate open-access publishing. We can look, for example, to the
[MLA Commons](https://mla.hcommons.org/) and the [Manifold publishing
platform](https://manifold.umn.edu/). We can also look to Germany, where a
nationwide consortium of libraries, universities, and research institutes has
been battling Elsevier since 2016 over their subscription and access policies.
Librarians have long been advocates for ethical publishing, and [as Drabinski
explains](https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/9568/10924),
they’re equipped to consult with scholars and scholarly organizations about
the publication media and platforms that best reinforce their core values.
Those values are the chief concern of the [HuMetricsHSS
initiative](http://humetricshss.org/about-2/), which is imagining a “more
humane,” values-based framework for evaluating scholarly work.
We also need to acknowledge the work of those who’ve been advocating for
similar ideals – and working toward a more ethically reflective publishing
culture – for years. Let’s consider some examples from the humanities and
social sciences – like the path-breaking [Institute for the Future of the
Book](http://www.futureofthebook.org/), which provided the platform where my
colleague McKenzie Wark publicly edited his [ _Gamer
Theory_](http://futureofthebook.org/gamertheory2.0/) back in 2006. Wark’s book
began online and became a print book, published by Harvard. Several
institutions – MIT; [Minnesota](https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-
division/series/forerunners-ideas-first); [Columbia’s Graduate School of
Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
](https://www.arch.columbia.edu/books)(whose publishing unit is led by a New
School alum, James Graham, who also happens to be a former thesis advisee);
Harvard’s [Graduate School of Design
](http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/publications/)and
[metaLab](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/collection.php?cpk=2006); and The New
School’s own [Vera List Center
](http://www.veralistcenter.org/engage/publications/1993/entry-pointsthe-vera-
list-center-field-guide-on-art-and-social-justice-no-1/)– have been
experimenting with the printed book. And individual scholars and
practitioners, like Nick Sousanis, who [published his
dissertation](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674744431) as a
graphic novel, regard the bibliographic form as integral to their arguments.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick has also been a vibrant force for change, through her
work with the [MediaCommons](http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/) digital
scholarly network, her two [open-review ](http://www.plannedobsolescence.net
/peer-to-peer-review-and-its-aporias/)books, and [her
advocacy](http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/evolving-standards-and-practices-
in-tenure-and-promotion-reviews/) for more flexible, more thoughtful faculty
review standards. Her new manuscript, _Generous Thinking_ , which lives up to
its name, proposes [public intellectualism
](https://generousthinking.hcommons.org/4-working-in-public/public-
intellectuals/)as one such generous practice and advocates for [its positive
valuation](https://generousthinking.hcommons.org/5-the-university/) within the
academy. “What would be required,” she asks, “for the university to begin
letting go of the notion of prestige and of the competition that creates it in
order to begin aligning its personnel processes with its deepest values?” Such
a realignment, I want to emphasize, need not mean a reduction in rigor, as
some have worried; we can still have standards, while insisting that they
correspond to our values. USC’s Tara McPherson has modeled generous and
careful scholarship through her own work and her collaborations in developing
the [Vectors](http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/index.php?issue=7) and
[Scalar](https://scalar.me/anvc/scalar/) publishing platforms, which launched
in 2005 and 2013, respectively. _Public Seminar_ is [part of that long
tradition](http://www.publicseminar.org/2017/09/the-life-of-the-mind-online/),
too.
Individual scholars – particularly those who enjoy some measure of security –
can model a different pathway and advocate for a more sane, sustainable, and
inclusive publication and review system. Rather than blaming the “bad actors”
for making bad choices and perpetuating a flawed system, let’s instead
incentive the good ones to practice generosity.
In that spirit, I’d like to close by offering a passage I included in my own
promotion dossier, where I justified my choice to prioritize public
scholarship over traditional peer-reviewed venues. I aimed here to make my
values explicit. While I won’t know the outcome of my review for a few months,
and thus I can’t say whether or not this passage successfully served its
rhetorical purpose, I do hope I’ve convincingly argued here that, in
researching media and technology, one should also think critically about the
media one chooses to make that research public. I share this in the hope that
it’ll be useful to others preparing for their own job searches and faculty
reviews, or negotiating their own politics of practice. The passage is below.
* * *
…[A] concern with public knowledge infrastructures has… informed my choice of
venues for publication. Particularly since receiving tenure I’ve become much
more attuned to publication platforms themselves as knowledge infrastructures.
I’ve actively sought out venues whose operational values match the values I
espouse in my research – openness and accessibility (and, equally important,
good design!) – as well as those that The New School embraces through its
commitment to public scholarship and civic engagement. Thus, I’ve steered away
from those peer-reviewed publications that are secured behind paywalls and
rely on uncompensated editorial labor while their parent companies uphold
exploitative copyright policies and charge exorbitant subscription fees. I’ve
focused instead on open-access venues. Most of my articles are freely
available online, and even my 2015 book, _Deep Mapping the Media City_ ,
published by the University of Minnesota Press, has been made available
through the Mellon Foundation-funded Manifold open-access publishing platform.
In those cases in which I have been asked to contribute work to a restricted
peer-reviewed journal or costly edited volume, I’ve often negotiated with the
publisher to allow me to “pre-print” my work as an article in an open-access
online venue, or to preview an un-edited copy.
I’ve been invited to address the ethics and epistemologies of scholarly
publishing and pedagogical platforms in a variety of venues, A, B, C, D, and
E. I also often chat with graduate students and junior scholars about their
own “publication politics” and appropriate venues for their work, and I review
their prospectuses and manuscripts.
The most personally rewarding and professionally valuable publishing
experience of my post-tenure career has been my collaboration with _Places
Journal_ , a highly regarded non-profit, university-supported, open-access
venue for public scholarship on landscape, architecture, urbanism. After
having written thirteen (fifteen by Fall 2017) long-form pieces for _Places_
since 2012, I’ve effectively assumed their “urban data and mediated spaces”
beat. I work with paid, professional editors who care not only about subject
matter – they’re just as much domain experts as any academic peer reviewer
I’ve encountered – but also about clarity and style and visual presentation.
My research and writing process for _Places_ is no less time- and labor-
intensive, and the editorial process is no less rigorous, than would be
required for a traditional academic publication, but _Places_ allows my work
to reach a global, interdisciplinary audience in a timely manner, via a
smartly designed platform that allows for rich illustration. This public
scholarship has a different “impact” than pay-walled publications in prestige
journals. Yet the response to my work on social media, the number of citations
it’s received (in both scholarly and popular literature), and the number of
invitations it’s generated, suggest the significant, if incalculable, value of
such alternative infrastructures for academic publishing. By making my work
open and accessible, I’ve still managed to meet many of the prestige- and
scarcity-driven markers of academic excellence (for more on my work’s impact,
see Appendix A).
_* I’ve altered some details so as to avoid sanctioning particular editors or
authors._
_Shannon Mattern is Associate Professor of Media Studies at The New School and
author of numerous books with University of Minnesota Press. Find her on
twitter[@shannonmattern](http://www.twitter.com/shannonmattern)._