WritingZalan

Synopsis 7 February 2018

Lawrence Liang – Shadow Libraries

Abstract

In this article Lawrence Liang builds up a metaphor between the ancient library of Alexandria, through shadow libraries till Michel Foucault’s heterotopia.

Synopsis

What are the similarities from the monumental ancient library of Alexandria, the New York public library, a collective enterprise like library.nu if not the word library? How could shadow libraries described as heterotopian environments? In the following synopsis I will elaborate more on these question and will try underline the most essential points of Lawrence Liang’s writing called Shadow Libraries published on the e-flux online journal platform in September 2012.

At the begin of the article the author describes, how through a rainy night his home library flooded and water leaked from the roof and through the walls. Through this accident he elaborates on comparisons about the fragile histories of books from the library of Alexandria to the great Florence flood of 1966. The popular linking library website Library.nu, suddenly created the impression of the universal library seem like reality. Unfortunately due copyright law issues this site was shut down and if it were ever possible to experience, what the burning of the ancient library of Alexandria must have felt like.

Referring to the first question “What are the similarities from the monumental ancient library from Alexandria, the New York public library, a collective enterprise like library.nu if not the word library?” I would state it with Lawrence Liang’s words: “ As spaces they may have little in common but as virtual spaces they speak as equals even if the scale of their imagination may differ. All of them partake of their share in the world of logotopias.” The curator Sascha Hastings described these places as “word places”–a happy coincidence of architecture and language. The burning of the library of Alexandria became a myth of all libraries. No one knows, how the library looked like, what was it’s content and what was it’s loss? We could argue about the loss of all the forms of knowledge in the world in a particular time. Diodorus Siculus, the Sicilian historian describes in the first century BC, a shadow library surviving the fire that destroyed the primary library of Alexandria, but has since been eclipsed by the latter’s myth.

Alberto Manuel states that “The Tower of Babel in space and the Library of Alexandria in time are the twin symbols of these ambitions. In their shadow, my small library is a reminder of both impossible yearnings—the desire to contain all the tongues of Babel and the longing to possess all the volumes of Alexandria.” (“My Library” in Hastings and Shipman eds.Logotopia, The Library in Art and Architecture and the Imagination, (Cambridge Galleries: ABC Art Books Canada, 2008).

Moving from the ancient library of Alexandria to the statement of library as paradise from Borges–describing, not as a spatial idea but a temporal one: that it was only within the confines of infinity that one imagine finishing reading one’s library. Thinking of shadow library as a way of thinking about what it means to dwell in knowledge.

In the end of the article Lawrence Liang compares the shadow library with heterotopia–a term popularised by Michel Foucault both in terms of language as well as spatial metaphor, stating “Heterotopias destabilize the ground from which we build order and in doing so reframe the very epistemic basis of how we know.” Concluding the article the heterotopic pleasure of our finite selves reaches till the infinity.

Opinion

Lawrence Liang expressed in the article a very inspiring metaphor of the library of Alexandria, as the new idea of the human itself. Nevertheless creating a new comparison between shadow libraries and heterotopias. It’s interesting to me that the author uses philosophical elements of describing the history of shadow libraries.

Essay 21. February 2018

In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub

A spiritual successor to Aaron Swartz is angering publishers all over aga

Both synopsises “In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub” and “A spiritual successor to Aaron Swartz is angering publishers all over aga” deal about the effects of two young web activists Aaron Swartz and Alexandra Elbakyan. In the first one the topic is highlighted from a more general point of view making a comparison between Antoine de Saint Exupery’s Little Prince and western businessman, referring to to the one of the leading scientific journal publishers Elsevier.

The online article “A spiritual successor to Aaron Swartz is angering publishers all over aga” written by David Kravets for the onlineblog (X) describes the story of the the two activists in a very informal way by almost using street language, which is less pleasant to read. In comparison to this article the online letter was written and signed by world leading researchers, scholars, designer, artists, lawyers, hackers such as Dušan Barok, Josephine Berry, Bodó Balázs, Sean Dockray, Kenneth Goldsmith, Anthony Iles, Lawrence Liang, Sebastian Lütgert, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Marcell Mars, spideralex, Tomislav Medak, Dubravka Sekulić, Femke Snelting. As a reader you experience the differences of writing style and the well thought true structure.

Moving to the middle part of the article and the open letter both share the similar citation methods such as in the case of “In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub” the authors take statements out of the Harvard reaction about the expensive publishing house Elsevier: “We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices."

The online article quotes first the statement of the young Russian web activist, Alexandra Elbakyan describing her motivation of founding her online library SciHub: “I started the website because it was a great demand for such service in research community. In 2011, I was an active participant in various online communities for scientists (i.e. forums, the technology preceding social networks and still surviving to the present day). What all students and researchers were doing there is helping each other to download literature behind paywalls. I became interested and very involved. Two years before, I already had to pirated many paywalled papers while working on my final university project (which was dedicated to brain-machine interfaces). So I knew well how to do this and had necessary tools. After sending tens or hundreds of research papers manually, I wanted to develop a script that will automate my work. That's how Sci-Hub started. The first users of the script were members of the online forum about molecular biology. At first, there was no goal to make all knowledge free. The script was simply intended to make the life of researcher easier, i.e. to make the process of unlocking papers more fast and convenient. But this turned out to be such an important improvement it changed the way research was accessed in our community. After some time, everyone was using Sci-Hub.”

The open letter uses one statement of the Russian hacker, where she expresses her thoughts about the court case, where Elsevier suit her for more billions of dollars: "If Elsevier manages to shut down our projects or force them into the darknet, that will demonstrate an important idea: that the public does not have the right to knowledge." An other similarity between the two texts is the description of the sad ending of Aaron Swartz, who after downloading millions of scientific research papers from the JSTOR account at the MIT got into a court case and during its process–he committed suicide. Both writings share parts of Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, which was written by him: “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable."I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal—there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back. Those with access to these resources—students, librarians, scientists—you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not—indeed, morally, you cannot—keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.”

Reading these lines the following questions arise about aspect of the activities of the two young activists: do the two hacktivist have a point? Should scholarly academia—science journals in particular—be behind paywalls? Both writings describe the difficult current situation of nowadays in the field of scientific knowledge sharing. In the end I would quote the final statement of the open letter: “Share this letter - read it in public - leave it in the printer. Share your writing - digitize a book - upload your files. Don't let our knowledge be crushed. Care for the libraries - care for the metadata - care for the backup. Water the flowers - clean the volcanoes.” In my opinion knowledge should be accessible for everyone for free, and we should not allow that big corporations that those ones would control our massive knowledge commons. The time of resistance has arrived!