XPUB2 projects Trim5 2020

XPUB2 project summaries and links, for tutorials April 2020

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Simon Browne

Project description
The "bootleg library" is a particular, situated social infrastructure. It operates from the understanding that the library is a collection; a collection of the texts contained within it, and the readers collected around them. There is a reciprocal, self-reflexive relationship between the texts and the readers, which produces sociability. A bootleg is a homage, an unauthorised copy of a source publication; bootlegging is a strategy by which texts acquire diversity, resisting singularity and representing readers.

Links to relevant pages

• overview of project
  
• the physical bootleg library
  
• bootleg library sessions
  
• the digital bootleg library: hub.xpub.nl/bootleglibrary (please email info(at)simonbrowne.biz for the HTTP login)
  

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Rita Graça
Networks of Care

Networks of Care is a field guide to manage online hate with codes of conduct, community guidelines and other informal documents. This project sheds light on valuable clusters of people working as collectives to cut down hateful behaviours from their social spaces. A group that is active in removing hate for themselves and others creates important support systems. This field guide shares the experience of users and custodians, it comments on existing documents, and celebrates together the networks of care.

The project focuses on three actions — networking, archiving and linking. The effort of networking is to reach out to different people involved with community guidelines and document their knowledge. I'm approaching moderators of online social spaces, writers of codes of conduct, facilitators, community members and networks' administrators. In archiving, I'm assembling codes of conduct and annotating them, creating a collection that is possible to browse, dissect and analyse. My project is not isolated from all the others that informed my path, so I'm linking external resources, films, podcasts and books that relate with my work and point other ways forward.

Work in Progress:

Structure visualisation

The same information using the wiki API

Creating a wiki to host and organise my project

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Pedro Sá Couto

Tactical Watermarks
My project, Tactical Watermarks, is an online republishing platform. I actively make use of digital watermarks as a means to explore topics such as anonymity, paywalls, archives, and provenance. While the primary intention of analogue watermarks was to leave traces of authenticity, marks of quality or even aesthetic enhancements, digital watermarks are being used as a way to create accountability for users. Through this platform, I describe and document ways of living within and resist a culture of surveillance in the realm of publishing.

I am motivated by all the invisible individuals behind extra-legal publishing platforms, from curators, the ones who host, upload and even download material. Through the act of watermarking, I embed layers of information often dissolved within the processes of sharing texts. I experiment on how the process of adding stains can be twisted and revived. Stains are what I call user patches or marks that are difficult to remove and that do not play an active role in archives.

In this platform, users can upload and request different titles. While talking with enthusiasts from the Library Genesis forum, I understood the need to create a tool that allows people to share watermarked pdfs in a safe way. My platform is NOT a library, and it is also NOT an archive. I don't keep the files or intend to archive them. What I open is a space to de-watermark files, and append new anonymous watermarks with the technical and personal regards around sharing specific texts. In the end, these stories will circulate alongside the main narrative. With python, I will automate a republishing stream that enables me to automatically spread these unique files to different libraries, from aaaaarg.fail, to Library Genesis or even the Bootleg library.

Examples

Analogue watermark, 1417 :

www.ksbm.oeaw.ac.at/_scripts/php/loadRepWmark.php?rep=briquet&refnr=11729&lang=fr

Cover from the first book ready to republish:

Digitised version — https://imgur.com/a/X8s64qn

Ready to republish — https://imgur.com/a/LrkgMNY

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Artemis Gryllaki

Systers Constellations
'Systers' originates from the combination of the words systems and sisters. Already in 1987, a mailing list called "Systers" was founded by Anita Borg to support women in computer science and related fields.

My project focuses on the practices of feminist hacker communities, that work towards reversing the phenomenon of social exclusions (gender-based among others), in technological circles, hackerspaces and the geekdom. Their work creates safe spaces for excluded individuals to gain agency with technological matters; redefines who counts as a hacker, and what counts as hacking; encourages collective knowledge production and Do-It-Together practices in inclusive and diverse environments; builds and maintains technical infrastructures that support feminist and activist work.

Together with Angeliki Diakrousi, Greek media artist and researcher, we got involved with two feminist hacker initiatives:

• /ETC: an annual international event, where feminists gather to critically study, use, discuss, share and improve everyday information technologies in the context of the free software and open hardware movements.
  
• SysterServer, a feminist server, run and maintained by women. It hosts online services for feminist projects and acts as a place to learn administration skills. After our participation in these projects, we decided to initiate a series of Feminist Hack meetings in Rotterdam.

Feminist Hack meetings are informal gatherings that include tech skill-sharing, sociopolitical discussions around technology and art practices. http://varia.zone/en/feminist-hack-meetings-jan.html. The meetings are hosted in Varia, a coworking space and centre that explores everyday technology. Now, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the meetings have to switch to online; there is an urgency to explore how this can happen.

My role in this project is to support:
the organisation of various thematic gatherings;
the research/suggestion of tools to document these gatherings and find ways to publish them. In my current project prototype, I suggest:
To set up a Wiki, where participants of the feminist hack meetings can collectively upload and edit documentation material such as images/texts/audio. The events, with their curated documentation, can be afterwards visualised in a website, in the form of a digital timeline.

• Wiki prototype
  
• Website - Timeline prototype
  
• Workflow Diagrams
  
• Events Documentation prototype
  

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Bohye Woo
DoCiToS (Degrees of Coloniality in Terms of Service)

DoCiToS (Degrees of Coloniality in Terms of Service) is a modern-colonial publishing archive, a series of numerical analysis that reveal the colonial contexts in 'Terms of Service (ToS)'. ToS is a modern working contract in digital colonial society, where big companies are dominating the power structures via ToS to deceive users. The project develops the colonization of metrics by measuring how colonized particular terms are being used in ToS.

Work in Progress:

• overview of project