Amelia Abreu

I’ve uploaded some new papers, slides, and a poster to the work page.

Who knew that my adult research interests could be summed up in my favorite (since adolescence) pop-punk classic?

I’ve been excited to hear the outcry from the announcement that Yahoo! is shutting down del.icio.us.  Not because I wanted this day to come, but because I knew it would. I’ve been trying to direct my research toward the fleeting nature of commercial platforms, and the real lack of solutions to the problem of preserving the documents and environments they generate. In this situation, there’s also a secondary question, one about the nature of browsing and the role of context for it.

I was once a daily, hourly, delicious user, with dozens of friends who used the site and whose bookmarks I spent considerable time browsing.  My own del.icio.us feed was truly lively from the years 2005-2008, serving as an all-purpose collecting spot for things like vacation plans and grad school applications and things I wanted to buy, things I got sort of into or really into and didn’t mind sharing with the world as a means of keeping track of them.  This was for me, a time when Friendster had lost its sheen, MySpace was clearly not working out, and Facebook was still for college kids.  I was a librarian then, and was eagerly tracking the development of Zotero, but it obviously hadn’t (and still hasn’t) achieved the all-purpose functionality that del.icio.us had. Sometime soon I’m going to sit down and flip through my del.icio.us account, and no doubt remember something about my life at that time that I’ve now forgotten.

As happens when any social media platform reaches its pinnacle, I developed attachments to del.icio.us users whom I didn’t actually know. Friends of friends, the anonymous researcher of Latin American crypto-Judaism, media artists like Cory Arcangel. (I don’t think I need to make much of a case to argue that Cory Arcangel’s del.icio.us, circa 2006-2008, is a key historical document of that era’s internet culture. His article on links pages from this September’s Artforum is also required reading.)  Wasting a few hours on someone else’s del.icio.us was pure pleasure, an elevated browsing experience that took the genial solitude of screwing around on the internet and made it communal (and somehow more conscientious).

Eventually, I stopped using it, but it’s not like anything better came along. For me at least, del.icio.us encouraged mindfulness, introspection, recording things and revisiting them. Twitter might serve as a same catch-all, but it replaces introspection and attention to detail over time with fleeting glimpses. Twitter, as we all know, doesn’t bother to even maintain or keep available your tweets. I love using tumblr these days, but it’s simplistic, egocentric and visual, not complex and textual like del.icio.us. (Not to mention notoriously delicate.)

It was bound to happen sooner or later, because del.icio.us was clearly not gaining in popularity or making any money. Diehard del.icio.us users (like my mother-in-law, a medical librarian who maintains her tags and collections with impressive detail) and fair weather folks like me had reached a level of comfort and familiarity. Anyone could see that the interface hadn’t changed at all from its inception, that there was no ad space, nothing more than what del.icio.us had been when Yahoo acquired it. Yahoo’s ownership simply meant that del.icio.us worked consistently. It didn’t crash or go down for hours or days. Bookmarks were there where you left them, even years after the fact.

My friend Andrés tweeted last night that the lesson to be learned was not avoiding the cloud, but making data portability a crucial matter. Then, this morning, my friend Dharma tweeted “It’s infrastructure!” My sentiments are somewhere between these two.

I have this theory that users like a certain amount of chaos in data and documents, because the current zeitgeist of hyper-organization is pretty oppressive. My idea of a good time is not correcting the metadata in my iTunes library. Also, Marxism teaches us that individual resistance only matters so much in light of superstructure. Right now, there’s no real paradigm of keeping on top of your recreational data. Sure, services like Twapper Keeper  exist, and users are realizing that they do want to retain things. People like my mother-in-law (bless her!) will figure out what to do with their del.icio.us data. But the rest of us will sigh and probably do nothing.

I’m not sold on data portability. As an archivist, this goes against much of what we think about in terms of context and authenticity. Sure, I can export the available data from a social network site, but I can’t export how I used it. It seems like Science and Technology Studies folks have spent the last 20 years trying to convince us to think about situated actions, but we’re still not prepared to think about what we lose when we leave the situation.

Lastly, I don’t know if I should be excited or not about what this says about where research on tagging (or other sorts of infrastructure) will go. Del.icio.us tags were early studies, and now that it’s being shuttered, I think that there’s a good boundary there that shows that tagging and other forms of description in 2005 are different than in 2011. The metaphor of generations is normative, but it’s useful. I’m hoping this means rethinking what it means to collect things and share them.

I sent this message to a group of archival scholars this morning, and I’m posting it here:

over the past week, EVERYONE has been talking about WikiLeaks, but I haven’t seen much discussion in the archives community. (Granted, I don’t subscribe to mailing lists, and may have overlooked other arenas for discussion- if you know of something, let me know). Meanwhile, it seems like the mainstream discussion is of archive issues: provenance, context, authenticity, repositories and documentation. There’s the line I keep mulling over from Kate Eichhorn’s Archival Genres essay about “personal stories becoming collective histories or collective histories becoming state secrets… the archive is invariably a site of power and narrative production”.

So I’m interested in starting a public archival conversation, either through some sort of online roundtable, a series of blog posts, or some other means.

The great deal of attention to Wikileaks, especially from journalists and the government, seems to illustrate so many details of the position of the archive. More so,  relationship between Julian Assange’s persona and the acts of Wikileaks in publishing documents is so fraught to me. How Wikileaks is addressed, both in the news and in government proceedings, will shape records and archives for the years to come.

Objectifying

via Lily Irani

I can’t stop thinking about this WPA poster, and the argument it makes about the practical use of subject classification.

It’s not just saying “You’ll learn something at the library”. Is it telling the audience that they’ll learn more both about the subjects (and the idea of subjects) by visiting the library? Is it implying some sort of personal development of classification? Is it so over the top masculinist in its imagery that it demonstrates every possible argument of feminist analysis of classification? Is it trying to correlate the proper use of subject classification for learning stuff with some sort of efficient modern masculinity?

I’ve had a great time at the Reimagining the Archive symposium at UCLA, and had the pleasure of meeting some excellent scholars. Slides for the paper I gave yesterday, “Tag games, tweets, and recipes: collections in networked public” are up on Prezi.

Reposted from my tumblr:

My partner makes his living writing about professional basketball on the internet, and to a lesser extent, in print. (When we met we were grad students writing about drugs and art zines, respectively. If anyone wants to know what you do with a background cultural studies, well, don’t ask us.) He’d been researching and writing for a new book on basketball history, and somehow a joke turned into me making an index for the book. A really fun index, no less.

As you may know, the theory of indexing is (eternally!) a  hot topic with classification scholars. In the face of developments in information technology such as auto-text searching and the semantic web, the rhetoric of technological determinism tends to sweep the actual work of classifying, describing, and indexing under the rug. Even intelligent people, when you tell them that you study this stuff, will ask the inevitable dumb question: “Doesn’t Google take care of that?” No, jerk.

Indexes make for perfect teachable moments. How many times have you gotten frustrated with them? How do you find the juicy sex scenes in a novel? In cookbooks, where you have to look under “beef” to find “steak”, or in academic monographs, where you really would like a shortcut to see when and where the author uses a theory. Or when there isn’t one and you’d like it.  There are some things you can totally text-search, but other things where you can’t. Also, text searching tells you nothing about the book as a whole.

Jens Erik Mai calls for deconstruction in indexing, and reconsidering it as a “humanist art”. I took this opportunity (politely offering my professional services as a dutiful wife!) to deconstruct and humanize the heck out of this index, while still making it somewhat functional. I spent far more time conceptualizing the index than actually making it, and had forgotten most of the techniques I learned in library school. Thus, I relied heavily on  both text searching, and the experience of sharing an apartment with the person who had written it.

Indexing, like typing, editing, and proofing, childcare and household labor, is the invisible work of writing, often delegated to partners and/or assistants. Even when contracted out and professionalized, the indexer is anonymous and uncredited, ostensibly objective. I’d venture to say I broke with that a little. I made some jokes, and I’m taking some credit. Maybe you’ll buy the book for the index!