User:Charlie/Interview with a tool

Interview with a tool - Exercise
...Explore the environment in which a tool is made, used and circulated. The exercise is to explore tools as boundary objects.

How do your context and the context of a tool differ? Which gaps are there, and what does it mean to bridge them?

1. Which tools do you use in your practice? Take a sheet of paper and map them. Can you map them all?

2. Pick one. Can you loosely describe the environment that this tool is embedded in? Use 3 sentences max.You can use the back of your sheet of paper.

3. Take some time to do some research about the tool of choice. Pick one of the following angles and focus on the questions.

Angles:

• response-ability: Where do conversations happen? Who speaks to whom? Can you feed-back? Who can you reach out to with a question?
• pedagogical space: How does the tool invite you to learn? Where and when does learning happen? What can be learned?
• aesthetics: What aesthetics is the tool surrounded by? Which ones does it support? Which ones not?
• precarity: Does precarity play a role somehow? Which (financial or other) transactions are taking place?
• cultural: In what culture(s) did this tool emerge within? Academic? Industry? Community? Artistic? And what cultural practices did emerge around this tool?
• temporal: How does time play a role? What timelines does this tool cross with? How long can this tool be used?
• auto-ethnography: Which specific experiences did you have with this tool? What was the context of use?
• entanglement: Which larger environments is this tool part of? How does this tool rely on others, which can be other tools or other contexts?

4. Write a short interview between you and your tool of choice, focused on the angle you selected.

You can write anywhere you want, we will read each others interviews later in class.

The interview does not have to be long, on the contrary, try to focus on something specific.

Map

Tools

Most used tool in each category:

• Digital: Adobe Photoshop
• Research: Wiki
• Analog: Books
• Printer: HR-Printer

Chosen tool: The XPUB & Lens-Based wiki

Environment

① The wiki is the primary platform for the XPUB and Lens-Based Master students and tutors.

② The wiki is a publically accessible (resource) and a publication tool in itself.

③ The wiki is my personal repository and archive of my research and progress, my beloved.

Research

Entanglement: Which larger environments is this tool part of? How does this tool rely on others, which can be other tools or other contexts?

The wiki software/engines is a form of content management system allowing users to create custom wikis as a collaborative publication platform online. The first wiki software was developed in 1995, with the aim of creating a very simple and accessible database template using - A template software for collaborative and communal research, documentation and knowledge-exchange.Most wiki-based software is free and open-source. And many come with different styling/formatting, tools and extensions.

Originally, wiki software only used wikitext, its own "lightweight" mark-up language similar to HTML, to create and edit text. Nowadays, many new engines include a visual text editor, using JavaScript to transcribe the edits into wikitext format (or HTML). This has made wiki more accessible to users, as text editing does not need to rely on knowing wikitext formatting. Many wiki engines also enable further formatting and styling possibilities by enabling HTML + CSS as additional mark-up languages in the code editor. Like this wiki.

The wiki engine used by XPUB is MediaWiki. Created by the Wikipedia Foundation, this engine is also used by Wikipedia (largest wiki network), Wiktionary, Wikidata, etc. The advantage of the MediaWiki engine is its capacity for managing very large databases and enables a large amount of traffic and concurrent edits to be made at the same time. MediaWiki has also the highest amount of language options for its interface, with around 400 languages available.

The PZI XPUB & Lens-Based Wiki is a wiki shared by the Experimental Publishing and Lens-Based masters, as the main platform to organize/document/archive/share knowledge and class material. Created back in 2011, there currently are 51146 pages on the wiki and 467 user accounts, which have collectively made 295765 edits (15/06/25 18:07).

*..xpub server..HR-access..etc*

Personally, I use the wiki to document group work on collaborative pages, but most of all, to write and curate my own pages within my user space. Besides my user space, User:Charlie (acting like a homepage), I have created 16 other pages for various topics and purposes relating to course material, documenting self-directed research and other miscellaneous topics of interest (like I ♥ Dogs). As a text-based platform I appreciate the wiki a lot, as it allows me to "store" and publish my writing (whether it's based on research or more fun writing experiments, like Omens From The Dog Park). Considering that I have been using the wiki for creating both xpub-related and extracurricular documentation pages, a concern of mine has been: "What happens to my wiki pages after graduation?" & "Can I keep using the wiki? Or is that weird?"

Interview

Sources