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
2. As We May Think
3. P.Otlet's Mundaneum

Visit to Rietveld Library

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.

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

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.)

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.

Practice intersects community

starting point, motivations

Interest in excavating history of Katendrecht, being once a red light district and Chinatown. Still many Chinese immigrants live here, I identified them by these ways:

1.coming across them in public spaces, such as on the street, in the Asian supermarket Amazing Oriental. A lady working in Amazing Oriental once spoke to me asking if I the bread I bought that day was Turkish bread. As I live on Katendrecht for several months now I brewed a curiosity towards people working in the supermarket, despite my limited interaction with them.

2.encountering with their private spaces. On a frequent basis I discover Chinese last names on the post boxes, as I took walks after dinner. I see a Chinese family water their plants on the balcony.

3.semi-public, semi-private place, which is the Chinese church on Katendrecht. I see people gathering there for events, and there are posters outside about afternoon tea sessions. I thought I would like to invite the community to do something with me than the population from the church might be a good place to establish a network?

4. misc. As I participated in Angeliki's workshop the yesterday (23-05-2019), she told me that in Leeszaal west, some Chinese immigrant females go there. Her workshop inspired me in her way of how she worked with people. Several tips include confronting the fear of "I am the artist who is going to appropriate other people in my work", and be open and clear while proposing work plans/intentions to invitees.

News

996, ICU

996, ICU is a project initiated by Chinese programmers to speak about their work conditions. I brought up this project during initial conceptualizing session for the event launch. Tancredi brought up working with the Git structure to upload annotations. The git workflow will be explicit in retaining versions of different versions of annotations, showing which user had contributed what content, tracking changes, etc. In prototyping session, we also worked with EPUB file structure, it is composed of HTML files when unzipped. We imagined a collective annotation reader stored in a git repository, as separated files of HTML. I presented and talked about 996, ICU during class as an example of Git used as a social space to afford collective interactions. The Git software is particular powerful at recording authors and alterations made to files, making public of the provenance of these voices (in context of 996, ICU it's the voice of the programmers). Eventually we didn't pursue on working with this particular direction, however I want to write down the outline of 996 ICU and how the project hold relevance to what's being discussed during the course.

996 is short for going to work from nine in the morning, getting off work at nine in the evening, on six days per week. ICU is short for the emergency room. In the Chinese tech industry, there had been numerous cases of employees overworked to severe states health failures and death. To name the project 996, ICU is to call attention to labor condition of the tech workers.

996 ICU's page published citations from the Chinese Labor Law, which demanded limitations on work hours and overtime compensation if excess hours are needed. It is regulated that workers work less than 8 hours a day, and no more than 44 hours per week. If overtime work hours is needed per purposes of production, it is to be discussed with trade unions and laborers and be compensated accordingly.

The policies outlined by Labor Law is not carried out in practice. On the contrary companies had openly adopted 996 working models, treating as the unofficial, de facto rule to abide to. To claim 996 as a working schedule is to assign it with credibility and authority, uphold to it, promote it as industry standard.

This is the project page in which there are more details about how it's structured. It moved me by it's way of using Github, a virtual site for daily interactions of tech workers as a site for activism.

use of invisible watermarking to track exposed internal emails: https://www.zhihu.com/question/50735753/answer/122593277

National Technology Worker Day(全国科技工作者日),on May 30th

As I followed news from 996 ICU, I wondered if National Technology Worker Day had addressed tech worker's working condition by any means, as the topic popped in my news feed of the day. To my disappointment it didn't. The news reports on this particular memorial day focused on paying tribute to impacts that technology brought to society at large, such as technology used in agriculture and national defense. I felt disappointed that this day dedicated to technology workers across the nation failed to address working conditions of the most common worker in tech industry.

in relation to conditions of burn out and precarity

As I ruminate on the topic of the "entreprecariat" from the starting Special Issue, I see how 996, ICU reflect phenomenons described by the "entreprecariat" condition. I am trying to re-read the Entrepreneurial Self by Ulrich Bröckling.

A first look at the Chinese OS the government want to use to replace dependency on Windows

Link is here https://qz.com/505383/a-first-look-at-the-chinese-operating-system-the-government-wants-to-replace-windows/ The news article wrote about NeoKylin, a Chinese developed OS that's similar to linux, possibly developed from Fedora according to the article. The intention of promoting NeoKylin is to decrease dependency on foreign developed systems such as Windows, after it announced it's dropping support for Windows XP.

Huawei to replace Android

https://bgr.com/2019/06/13/huawei-phones-operating-system-android-replacement/