User:)biyibiyibiyi(/Special Issue 09

Session with Bodó Balázs on lineage and analysis on shadow libraries

Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education (ed J.Karaganis)

I encountered this book because of our guest from Special Issue: Interfacing the Law, Bodó Balázs contributed to the book. The editor for the book is Joe Karaganis, who is an editor in media piracy in emerging economies. He also run a project called The Open Syllabus : http://opensyllabusproject.org/faq-2/

Notes and thoughts, in accordance to chapters:

Introduction: Access from Above, Access from Below

Elbakyan and growth of unauthorized digital archives

University in her home country, Kazakhstan did not provide subscription access to international journal database. Elbakyan relied on haphazard and slow means of accessing information - she relied on her colleagues and visiting other universities which had access.

“Unauthorized digital copies of books and articles began to be aggregated into online collections in the early 2000s. In most cases, these collections were small—personal collections of scanned materials shared via listservs and social media accounts.”

Elbakyan launched Sci-hub, which facilitated dissemination of academic journals on a network scale, by accessing(not sure in legal or illegal way) account credentials from Western universities that had subscription to academic database. This way of access accumulated a database much faster than ad-hoc and haphazard ways of collecting from acquaintance/proximity network.

“In late 2015, Elsevier, whose ScienceDirect database was a major source for Sci-Hub, obtained an injunction in a U.S. court targeting the service, LibGen, several other unauthorized book archives”

Proof of Concept, Shadow Libraries' significance in Knowledge Ecosystem reorganization

bring to light the trajectories of education and research material dissemination, “from authors to publishers and libraries, to students and researchers, and from comparatively rich universities to poorer ones”; and both formal and informal institutions that shape the provision of these materials - “formal sector of universities and publishers to the broadly informal ones organized by faculty, copy shops, student unions, and students themselves”

The informal aspect of material distribution cannot be neglected. As Bodó had said in the session - it's important for the market to understand how the shadow market works. And we learned from Rita and Pedro about copy shops in university of Porto, being a place nested in formal institution. Teachers inform the copy shop about upcoming study material, and students go there to order their copied versions. If this kind of circulation is informal, then it's an operative informality.

Lineage from Media Piracy

“Shadow Libraries grew out of a book called Media Piracy in Emerging Economies (Karaganis 2011), which brought a similar perspective to bear on the question of access to media outside the high-income West.”

“At the time, we focused on music, movies, and software, for which the CD and DVD were the enabling technologies of large-scale informal exchange.”

The broader context: expanding global higher education in emerging economies and the state's retreat

Expanding higher education in emerging economies: Brazil, India, Poland (after fall of Communist regime), South Africa(post-apartheid), Mexico; in stark comparison to Western economies such as the U.S. which student population grows at 2% annual rate.

“In the United States and many other high-income countries, this transition was buffered by the accumulated strength of the public systems, by the relatively high purchasing power of students and institutions, and by the gradualism—after the 1980s—of both student growth and state retreat.” - in this case the state's retreat in sponsoring higher education is buffered by it's economical success and high purchasing power of both students and universities. However it's not the case in emerging economies.

The Genesis of Library Genesis: The Birth of a Global Scholarly Shadow Library

(Pirate) Libraries on the Internet

I highlighted "Digital Librarianship - the digitization, collection, and cataloguing of texts, was one of the earliest use of networked computers." This sentence is informative that it defined what digital librarianship is, that is interact with digital materials; and it put history of network computing to context. Of course network computer is to host digital archives - the network infrastructure is set up for information dissemination.

First digital library: Project Gutenberg

Infrastructure: APRANET

Time: 1971

Later on, the technical obstacles for building digital libraries declined, "dream of building universal libraries became very real". Here Bodó cited Borge's Library of Babel, Vannevar Bush's As We May Think https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/, and P. Otlet's Mundaneum. https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/%28SICI%291097-4571%28199704%2948%3A4%3C301%3A%3AAID-ASI3%3E3.0.CO%3B2-%23 These three examples are common for they all speculated envisioned forms of library. To list a comparison:

1. Library of Babel
   1. Hexagon Shape
2. As We May Think

Link back to previous citation in Special Issue 08:http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/User:)biyibiyibiyi(/Special_Issue_08#Digital_Literature:_From_Text_to_Hypertext_and_Beyond

A device for an individual to store all books in possession, the storage can be

1. P.Otlet's Mundaneum

Who is P Otlet? Paul Otlet, UDC(Universal Decimal Classification)

Visit to Rietveld Library

pad:https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/rietveld_library

Catalog System

Use of FLOSS Software Evergreen for transparency and free access. maybe less efficient, and negotiations had to be made with the institute.

On subjectivity of the catalog method: https://www.academia.edu/2831133/Teaching_the_Radical_Catalog

Splotr

Splotr is an instance of Bibliotecha implemented in the Rietveld Library. There are several reasons that made it effective:

1. Wide area of Rietveld Wi-Fi network. Consider the amount of people across the network, that's quite a large community.
2. In complementary to a well curated, diverse and rich physical library.
3. Shared interests. It's implemented in an art school, where research is encouraged and also mandatory. Conducting research required bibliographical materials, which created an urgent need for the community.
4. It's a sharing space not only for digital books, but also a log for events happening, images, google docs, emails, notes...In this way it's quite a space with formats of diversity and indicate a sense of porosity, in terms of media channels.
5. legality. Splotr is on local network

PUB

We met two students from the Sandberg Design department, working under the collective PUB(pub for publishing), https://pub.sandberg.nl/, which is a hub to facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations across and beyond the Rietveld network. The formats of their collaboration is concurrent with the Experimental Publishing's mediums, include but not limited to radio, TV, podcasts, publishing sessions, and websites. It was interesting to see what's happening over at the Rietveld that they treated publishing as an activity and medium to facilitate collaborations between people, who might be otherwise less connected. In design and autonomous practices, publishing is another way of interfacing with the audience by using common grounds of publishing.

Session with Eva Weinmayr

Tin Tin

https://www.douban.com/doulist/68073/?start=50&sort=time&sub_type= Universal Copyright Convention in Chinese http://www.ipr.gov.cn/zhuanti/law/conventions/unesco/Universal_Copyright_Convention.html

Beta Publishing, A Day in the Court Room

https://adage.com/creativity/work/north-face-top-imagens/2174261

Annotation

Toward a Geography of Knowledge

Markup language as means to formalize text in ordered form. when unordered, speech are utterances, to order is to "put utterances into material form". In materialized form, the content can be interacted further, as a format of exchange (to be archived, retrieved, cited, quoted, referenced, transmitted, printed, copied, regenerated). Among-st these furtherances, Stiegler is most interested in annotation.

Performativity in speech, to say is to do. For example as the judge says "The court is now is session", is to open a session.

The interest of their resource is to investigate the material culture of writing.

J.L.Lebrave: disappearance of manuscript: separation of the process of writing and process or reading. regression of of traces of hand. (perforativity of the writer, evidence of action of the writer, evidence of writing traces of the writer, variations of hand writing)

Emergence of publication: paper is not intended for annotation. emergence of publication established a separation between what is annotated, such as the footnotes, (from the author) and the main text.

Hyperlink as dynamic support of text

keyboard and mouse, interface first GUI computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto

Tools for annotation

Annotation Studio, web annotation tool developed for class room collective annotation http://www.annotationstudio.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/AnS-Manual-January-2015.pdf

Optical Authoring, it's a project and product developed for business writing, it's to create a ebook for Microsoft Word documents. https://www.opticalauthoring.com/

W3C https://www.w3.org/annotation/ diagram on how it works: https://www.w3.org/annotation/diagrams/annotation-architecture.svg

W3C - This decentralization is one of the key features of Web Annotations, giving the Reader (who is now a Content Creator) their choice of Publishers, reader communities, and publishing policies. This helps promote healthy competition between services and discourages publisher lock-in. Individuals or special-interest communities can even host their own annotation services.

Types of annotation in computer vision detection

https://www.buzzblogbox.com/2019/01/types-of-image-annotation-used-for-computer-vision.html

classification of knowledge

Mundaneum, Universal Decimal Classification System, SISO Digital Library, Chinese Library Classification System (in which we witness certain categories are prioritized for ideological representation.)

the politics of where the annotation storage

hypothesis account, amazon annotation, and the example Silvio gave about scanning a Kindle book's annotation.

Session with Dušan Barok

Monoskop's reader https://monoskop.org/reader/

Digital Librarianship

Throughout the Special Issue I was motivated to conceptualize the definition of Digital Librarianship. Now I've been searching some concrete examples from reality that help illustrate this new concept.

The Internet as a Library

Dukšan Barok joined our meeting yesterday (04-06-2019), reading his article on searched engines helped me understand Digital Librarianship better. The article here: https://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php?title=A_Book_of_the_Web , in which the notion of libraries is redefined affordances of online search engines that's able to perform full text search. "Libraries in this sense are not restricted to digitised versions of physical public or private libraries as we know them from history. Commercial search engines, intelligence agencies, and virtually all forms of online text collections can be thought of as libraries."

book recommendation algorithms

taking job of the librarian for making recommendations

curating the personal collection

tool like are.na allow user to create, archive and disseminate their customized collections.

Memory of the World, Calibre Plug-in

https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2012/11/26/end-to-end-catalog-2/

The next step is to connect Calibre librarians among themselves. Usually Calibre librarians run their Calibre catalogs on their personal computers inside of the local area networks. We make tools to allow them to seamlessly connect with each other. When connected together, librarians are able to synchronize their catalogs, recommend and share books. Librarians become librarian-cyberians.

Free Software

read in >> https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html

Meeting Dubravka

Book Space

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/664/the-room-of-requirement bookspace:collected essays on books

Planning the Workshop

Theme: Giving dignity to annotations

Inspired by discussion of a proposal by Tancre to follow git-workflow. A library that people can fork. This would work with epub. A platform/library for annotations. Structure of epub could somehow work within git. The desire for annotation: accrediting value to less authorized researchers/users. There are already a lot of annotation ideas/tools around (ref. Stiegler article, Toward a Geography of Knowledge https://westernchiasma.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/annotation-navigation-electronic-editions.pdf). Thinking about it as a way to practice other ways of producing knowledge.

Questions: - How does annotation re-organise or re-confirm conventional modes of knowledge production? - What about the authorship of annotation? - How to curate annotations? Should there be a 'curator'-role invented? -today's task, read stiegler text on annotation and present to group. (Can also develop discussion from this idea during Steve's class)  - related to Bo's thoughts on digital labor acknowledgement. This may be a little far from the context we are situated now but, for example, decent digital labor accredition is not offered and remained in shadows for jobs such as content reviewer and data set labelers. Their labor can be considered as works of annotations that's had not brought to light. 

Workshop Script

Knowledge in Action  - Workshop introduction

We looked for different ways that knowledge can be maintained and preserved. We visited different libraries of different scales. We investigated their operations and their levels of legality. We interviewed people who adopted the role of librarians in their unique ways. From these experiences, we started outlining our workshop.

The workshop "Knowledge in Action" invites participants to act the roles and perform the activities crucial to the sustenance of libraries. They interpret and reimagine the actors that take part in knowledge production and distribution, playing the parts of the librarian, the researcher, the pirate, the publisher, the reader, the writer, the student, the copyist, the printer. The activities embed the participants in different scenarios to shift their accustomed perspective and to start common dialogues.

- Structure of workshops

We propose for the workshop 3 different activities.

ACTIVITY ONE — Librarian's Choice A librarian is challenged with the task of choosing books from the large amounts that come to the library regularly. Before any categorization, the destiny of the book is determined: to keep, or to throw away. In this activity we ask you to represent the librarian and make choices like one. When we perform these processes of selection we understand how one's understanding of what should be displayed influences knowledge circulation.

1. In this first activity, you are assigned to the role of the librarian, please walk around bookshelves in Leeszaal and select a book.

2. Now, we will ask you to decide in a group which half of the books to keep, which to throw away. Remember that you are a librarian, try to think outside your personal preference.

3. We will give you a scenario:

• Decide on what books to keep/throw away for a shadow library.
• Decide on what books to keep/throw away for a research university.

Did anything change?

3. As a third action, you decide now over book categories. We provide some categories from Leeszaal shelves, the group should decide on half to keep, half to take away from Leeszaal Library.

• Sustainability Environment
• Religion Spirituality
• Rights
• Medical
• Humour
• Female feminism
• Regional novels / Romanticism
• Nations
• Philosophy
• Children's books

ACTIVITY TWO — Ideal Library When we use libraries we usually desire a certain service and expect specific behaviours. However, the creation of shadow libraries has changed a lot of predefined ideas: you don't need authorization to read, you don't need to be in a quiet room, maybe you don't need a librarian. In this activity the participants are asked to imagine new places and to eradicate preconceived ideas about these places. By doing so, we can conceptualize a future for libraries, where books, digital files, and other spaces come together and stay relevant for us.

1. Think now as a user, the reader, the library goer. The goal is to create our collective ideal library. We provide cards and ask you to:

• Write three categories of books/files you would like to have. 
• Think about spaces. (space for yourself, space for collective reading, space in transit...) 
• Imagine a scope of audiences (do you want to make it a safe space? invitation only? membership? radical openness? )
• Redesign the services (how does the library provide books? does it allow scanning? do you want a librarian? or a robot to organize the shelves? e.g. in Leeszaal people can have the books forever, and in traditional libraries you need to return them in due time)

You should all think about the organization of the categories and organization of the space. What books/spaces are near what?

ACTIVITY THREE — Discussion in the Library During the previous two activities, we became familiar with the operations of current libraries, and how may we imagine ideal libraries. The following activity takes you to a discussion that revolves the current phenomenon of the shadow libraries and open access, as a site for reorganizing of knowledge distribution. In this activity, you'll be assigned to roles that play a part in academic resources circulation. The discussion aim to map out relationships between these players, acknowledge friction and seek collaboration.

1. Choose a role/character. 2. We give quotes sourced from real characters. Take some time to read them and familarize with your role. 3. We provide a case. 4. Start the discussion with a round of introductions: who are you, what do you defend? 5. You should defend your character's best interests. Make use of the quotes if you want, but feel free to improvise.

Examples of cases:

• CASE 1: Ming recently graduated from a Chinese University, so she lost access to her university resources. Should she make a way to pay the expensive academic journal database or use shadow libraries instead?

Speak from the best interest of the roles you have selected and interpret the scenario.

• CASE 2: A researcher just made significant discoveries in a particular field and would like to make the work available to as many people as possible.

Speak from the best interest of the roles you have selected and interpret the scenario.

Roles:

• Academic Publishing Business
• Pirate
• Researcher
• Research Librarian
• Shadow Library 

Workshop Documentation

prepping workshop discussion in action