User:Tash/Special Issue 05

Reflections on Book Scanning: A Feminist Reader

Key questions:

• How to use feminist methodologies as tool to unravel the known / unknown history of book scanning?
• What is lost and what is gained when we scan / digitize a book?
• What culture do we reproduce when we scan?

The last question became the focus of my individual research this trimester. Both my reader and my script are critiques on the way human bias can multiply from medium to medium, especially when the power structures that regulate them remain unchallenged and when knowledge spaces present themselves as universal or immediate.

My research

Key topics:

• How existing online libraries like Google Books select, structure and use literary works
• The human bias in all technological processes, algorithms and media
• Gender and power structures in language, and especially the written word
• Women's underrepresentation in science, technology and literature
• The politics of transparency and seamlessness of digital interfaces
• The male-dominated canon and Western-centric systems of knowledge production and regulation

Being a writer myself, I wanted to explore a feminist critique on the literary canon - on who is included and excluded when it comes to the written world. The documentary on Google Books and the World Brain also sparked questions on who is controlling these processes, and to what end? Technology is not neutral, even less so than science is, as it is primarily concerned with the creation of artefacts. In book scanning (largely seen as the ultimate means of compiling the entirety of human knowledge) it is still people who write the code, select the books to scan and design the interfaces to access them. To separate this labour from its results is to overlook much of the social and political aspect of knowledge production.

As such, my reader questions how human biases and cultural blind spots are transferred from the page to the screen, as companies like Google turn books into databases, bags of words into training sets, and use them in ways we don't all know about. The conclusion is, that if we want to build more inclusive and unbiased knowledge spaces, we have to be more critical of the politics of selection, and as Johanna Drucker said, "call attention to the made-ness of knowledge."

Key methodologies and attitudes:

• Situated knowledges (Donna Haraway)
• Intersectional feminism
• Feminist linguistic activism
• Diversity in works