Mark A. Matienzo

Notes on ITLP Workshop 1 readings

2018-01-06T21:43:03-08:00

I completed my reading and viewing assignments for my cohort’s IT Leadership Program Workshop 1 (January 9-January 11 at UC Berkeley.) This is a brief set of notes for my own use about how all of them tie together.

Leaders are made not born and leadership skills don’t always transfer across contexts.
Leadership should be reflected in the culture of the organization; developing leaders, even in medium- and lower-level employees is a key part of that. Encourage them to take this on, and protect them when they step up. Leading up (i.e., leading your boss) should be expected, too.
Be aware of where you are looking to anticipate change.
Don’t be head down; you need to retain focus both of the work around you and broader context. You are responsible for framing problems, not solving them exclusively.
Great leaders have diverse networks and the ability to develop relationships with people different from them.
Self-mastery is the key to leadership. Great leaders model behavior (poise; emotional capacity) and define direction. Retaining empathy, humanity, dignity, passion, connection to other people in environment of transactional interaction are all hard.
Conflict and feeling pressure is necessary. Don’t smooth over either too much; instead, regulate it.
Be willing to look at taking large leaps, but take the time to understand them. At the same time, don’t wed yourself to long-term strategic planning processes that might be blocks.
Inspire people to move beyond their own perceived limitations and encourage others to break with convention when necessary.

And the readings and videos:

John P. Kotter, “What Leaders Really Do”, Harvard Business Review, May-June 1990
Roselinde Torres, What it takes to be a great leader, TED@BCG San Francisco, October 2013
Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie, “The Work of Leadership”, Harvard Business Review, January 1997
Mark Sanborn, How to lead without a title, 2009
Nancy Koehn, Whiteboard Sessions - the Ingredients of Great Leadership, HBR Video, January 6, 2017, Harvard Business Review
John P. Kotter and Pat Cormier, Leadership Tip: It’s How You Act, Not Your Position, Forbes, June 6, 2012
“Why Everyone in an Enterprise Can — and Should — Be a Leader”, Knowledge@Wharton, December 23, 2003. The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Walter Isaacson, “The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs”, Harvard Business Review, April 2012

Iterative Intentions for 2018

2018-01-01T11:43:12-08:00

While I enjoy seeing what my friends are setting their intentions towards in the new year, I don’t really believe in new year’s resolutions for myself. They tend to wear on me heavily whenever I’ve proclaimed a long list of things I’m hoping to get better at. Instead, this year, I’m starting with a very short list. My hope is that I can commit to a small number of good habits at a time, which I can then build on iteratively. I want to have the windows of reinforcement stay small at first (maybe a week or two), and once I feel satisfied about whichever habits I’ve committed to, I can add more.

I’m starting with three items:

Rebuilding this website: simplified tooling; new layout/style; using and publishing more structured data, and a partial implementation of a stack following Indieweb and Solid principles. The last part is intentionally slippery, but I mostly really care about sending and receiving notifications at this point. I’m giving myself about a week to get this done.
Eating better breakfasts. I started 2018 with overnight oats, which happened to be mildly successful. I have a lot to master in terms of proportions and taste, to say the least.
Budgeting and financial tracking to better understand my ongoing expenses. This is something I’m undertaking with my partner, and we have actionable (but private) goals for this.

Wish me luck.

A Push-to-Talk Conference Call Foot Pedal

2016-09-04T11:16:50-07:00

My current position at DPLA, especially since we are remote-first organization, requires me to be on lots of conference calls, both video and audio. While I’ve learned the value of staying muted while I’m not talking, there are a couple of things that make this challenging. First, I usually need the window for the call to have focus to unmute myself by the platform’s designated keystroke. Forget that working well if you need to bring something up in another window, or switch to another application. Secondly, while we have our own preferred platform internally (Google Hangouts), I have to use countless others, too; each of those platforms has its own separate keystroke to mute.

This all leads to a less than ideal situation, and naturally, I figured there must be a better way. I knew that some folks have used inexpensive USB footpedals for things like Teamspeak, but that ran into the issue where a keystroke would only be bound to a specific application. Nonetheless, I went ahead and bought a cheap PCSensor footswitch sold under another label from an online retailer. The PCSensor footswitches are programmable, but the software that ships with them is Windows-only. However, I also found a command-line tool for programming the switches.

After doing some digging, I came across an application for Mac OS X called Shush, which provides both push-to-talk and push-to-silence modes, which are activated by a keystroke. Once installed, I bound Shush to the Fn keystroke, which would allow me to activate push-to-talk even if I didn’t have the pedal plugged in. However, I couldn’t get the pedal to send the Fn keystroke alone since it’s a modifier key. As a workaround, I put together a device-specific configuration for Karabiner, a flexible and powerful tool to configure input devices for Mac OS. By default, the pedal sends the keycode for b, and the configuration rebinds b for an input device matching the USB vendor and product IDs for the pedal to Fn.

Since I’ve bought and set up my first pedal, I’ve gotten used to using the pedal to quickly mute and unmute myself, making my participation in conference calls become much more smooth than it was previously. I’ve also just replaced my first pedal which broke suddenly with a nearly identical one, but I might make the switch to a more durable version. My Karabiner configuration is available as a gist for your use - I hope this helps you as much as it helped me!

How We Work: The DPLA Technology Team Core Values

2016-07-05T00:00:00-07:00

One of the most important aspects of the work of the DPLA Technology Team is ensuring that we maintain a common frame of reference for all of our efforts. This is situated in multiple aspects - in terms of our shared technical knowledge, the overall DPLA strategic plan, and more. Overall, however, the guiding principles for our work are best understood through the core values that inform how we work together within our team, as well as with our colleagues at DPLA and across the network of our stakeholders and collaborators. These values are not only designed to be aspirational; instead, they also inform practical aspects of our day to day work, allowing us to work together effectively through their articulation of cultural norms and expectations. In addition, our values encourage us to be intentional about our work, even when faced with challenges from deadlines, staff capacity, and other external pressures.

The DPLA Technology Team core values document delineates the following eight areas of focus and awareness for our efforts:

Maximal openness to DPLA technology and infrastructure, through use of minimally restrictive open source or reuse-friendly licenses for software, documentation, and related assets.

Diversity and inclusion, focusing on developing an inclusive environment and eliminating discrimination within our team, our organization, and our network.

Transparency for all our aspects of our operations, balanced with security and privacy concerns.

Reliability, accountability and shared responsibility for the systems and software we develop and maintain, through a culture of testing and free and open communication.

Empathy and mutual respect, as a reflection of DPLA’s commitment to the public good and as a rejection of a culture of blame or shame.

Appropriate use of resources, facilitated by pursuing cost savings of infrastructural costs, collaboration, and through management of a sustainable pace in our work.

Leadership and support of and for the cultural heritage sector, the DPLA network of Hubs and partners, and beyond.

Continued learning and growth, in terms of gaining new skills and familiarity with emerging methodologies, supported by a culture of sharing across the team and our network.

All of the members of DPLA Technology Team recognize that we are not only responsible for following values set out in the document, but for shaping them as well. We started developing the values document for the Technology Team two years ago, after our team grew over the period of six months from zero to three staff members. Once we added our fourth team member, we reviewed our early drafts and revised them into their something close to their current form, and used it to guide our work from October 2014 onwards. Just recently, the Technology Team took the opportunity to review the document again and identify areas in which we were meeting the delineated norms and areas we could improve or expand our work.

If you are interested in reading through our full values document, please do so - we have made them available for review and feedback (link to local mirror). If you’re interested in actively helping to shape these values, please consider applying for our open Developer position, or contact us if you’re not looking for new opportunities with your ideas.

Open, Free, and Secure to All: DPLA Launches Full Support for HTTPS

2016-06-01T00:00:00-07:00

DPLA is pleased to announce that the entirety of our website, including our portal, exhibitions, Primary Source Sets, and our API, are now accessible using HTTPS by default. DPLA takes user privacy seriously, and the infrastructural changes that we have made to support HTTPS allows us to extend this dedication further and become signatories of the Library Digital Privacy Pledge of 2015-2016, developed by our colleagues at the Library Freedom Project.

The changes we’ve made include the following:

Providing HTTPS versions of all web services that our organization directly controls (including everything under the dp.la domain), for both human and machine consumption,
Automatic redirection for all HTTP requests to HTTPS, and
A caching thumbnail proxy for items provided by the DPLA API and frontend, which serves the images over HTTPS instead of providing them insecurely.

After soft-launching HTTPS support at DPLAFest 2016, DPLA staff has done thorough testing, and we are fairly confident that all pages and resources should load over HTTPS with no issues. If you do encounter any problems, such as mixed content warnings or web resources not loading properly, please contact us with the subject “Report a problem with the website” and describe the problem, including links to the pages on which you see the problem.

These changes are just the start, however. To ensure better privacy, DPLA encourages both its Hubs and their partners to provide access to all of their resources and web services over HTTPS, and to join DPLA in becoming a signatory of the Library Digital Privacy Pledge. By working together, we can achieve a national network of cultural heritage resources that are open, free, and secure to all. Please join me in thanking the Mark Breedlove, Scott Williams, and the rest of the DPLA Technology Team for making this possible.

DPLA and the International Image Interoperability Framework

2016-05-10T00:00:00-07:00

DPLA, along with representatives of a number of institutions including Stanford University, the Yale Center for British Art, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and more, is presenting at Access to the World’s Images, a series of events related to the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) in New York City, hosted by the Museum of Modern Art and the New York Academy of Medicine. The events will showcase how institutions are leveraging IIIF to reduce total cost and time to deploy image delivery solutions, while simultaneously improving end user experience with a new host of rich and dynamic features, and promote collaboration within the IIIF community through facilitated conversations and working group meetings.

The IIIF community provides the following overview for its mission and goals:

Access to image-based resources is fundamental to research, scholarship and the transmission of cultural knowledge. Digital images are a container for much of the information content in the Web-based delivery of images, books, newspapers, manuscripts, maps, scrolls, single sheet collections, and archival materials. Yet much of the Internet’s image-based resources are locked up in silos, with access restricted to bespoke, locally built applications. … IIIF has the following goals: to give scholars an unprecedented level of uniform and rich access to image-based resources hosted around the world; to define a set of common application programming interfaces that support interoperability between image repositories; and to develop, cultivate and document shared technologies, such as image servers and web clients, that provide a world-class user experience in viewing, comparing, manipulating and annotating images.

Just like our Hubs are much more than data providers to DPLA, we are also much more than an aggregation. Our core services, which are driven by metadata aggregation, are proving to be successful, indicated by our traffic, with 57% of that traffic via portal and 43% through our API. However, part of our larger role is to stand behind the development of efforts that make cultural heritage materials easier to use and share by anyone who wants to use them. Accordingly, we believe it aligns with our larger mission to support the development and implementation of standards and software that make encourage interoperability and reuse of the materials that we aggregate. In turn, from our perspective, DPLA's support of the International Image Interoperability Framework aligns naturally with these efforts, and we have been encouraging the adoption across our network.

DPLA has a number of motivations for promoting the adoption of IIIF within our network of partners. As noted, we see a high level of value in the use of open standards both within our community, as well as within allied communities within which we participate. However, IIIF also allows us to begin to address some larger needs at DPLA as well, particularly in terms of improving the user experience of accessing, delivering, reusing, and annotating image resources from our Hubs and partners. Our experience has shown us that this work will also have high value internally at DPLA, allowing us to more easily reuse image content in exhibitions and other curatorial contexts. In particular, we are aware of user experience issues through user testing of the DPLA portal, much of which relate to the "last mile" aspects of delivery to resources that we have aggregated. While some of these issues are not necessarily related to images, these aspects nonetheless impact images for us consistently. Across the board, we have discovered that access to images can often be unclear for many users, especially once they land on a DPLA item page. Furthermore, this is not only true for portal users, but API users as well. A lack of a reliable API to identify images that may provide zoomable views or at specific sizes is essentially impossible right now, without crawling the remote site. The consistency that IIIF would bring to the DPLA community would allow for greater possibilities of reuse.

Currently, there are five DPLA hubs with production IIIF implementations. Three Hubs, Digital Commonwealth, Harvard University Library, and the Internet Archive, all have production services running. Two additional hubs have implementations of the Image API. California Digital Library’s new version of Calisphere supports IIIF for a subset of images from a number of specific institutions in the University of California system, including UC Riverside and UC Merced. Finally, two additional hubs, The David Rumsey Map Collection and ARTstor, have been working to push their implementations to production.

Nonetheless, there are some issues that serve at least minor barriers to an exhaustive rollout of IIIF at DPLA, regardless of the value or possibilities implementation would provide. First, DPLA needs to establish how to best represent IIIF-accessible resources within DPLA Metadata Application Profile is based. We have been communicating with both the IIIF community and staff at Europeana and the National Library of Wales about potential modeling decisions, and significant progress was made at the IIIF meetings in Ghent, Belgium in December 2015. Secondly, DPLA doesn't always know that IIIF resources exist for a given item we've harvested, often because the institution hasn't specified this in the metadata about the item. We are interested in hearing from Hubs and institutions willing to work with us to determine a reliable and consistent way to do this. In addition, we are also concerned about the potential user experience mismatch between IIIF-accessible resources and those which are not, and how to best provide guidance on understanding usage statistics for IIIF image access. We hope to address this in conversation with the IIIF and DPLA communities in the coming year. Finally, we realize that IIIF might be a high bar to cross for some institutions, so we have been considering a number of options, including speaking with vendors and possibly providing an IIIF service, to make it easier to expose image resources effectively.

We are enthusiastic about the possibilities, and hope to be able to prototype IIIF implementations with content from DPLA partners in the coming months. We are interested in hearing your thoughts on this, particularly if you’re part of the DPLA network and have implemented or considering implementing IIIF, so please contact us!

Ever to Excel: Towards an Apologetics of the Spreadsheet

2016-03-08T13:54:32-08:00

This is the written version of my presentation from Code4lib 2016 in Philadelphia, on March 8, 2016. My presentation was part of a panel with my friends Christina Harlow, Ted Lawless, and Matt Zumwalt, after which we had some discussion moderated by Matt Miller. My slides are available, as are the video of all talks from the panel.

Spreadsheet software is a ubiquitous technology. This ubiquity encourages us to use them as a default starting point for lots of different kinds of tasks. In fact, let’s consider how you use spreadsheets. How many of you use spreadsheets on, say, a monthly basis? How many of you us them on a weekly basis? How about on a daily basis? And, more specifically, how do spreadsheets make you feel when you use them? But how do other people talk about spreadsheets, even if they know that you use them regularly? I have noticed that spreadsheets are often seen as the wrong tool for lots of jobs, particularly in libraries, archives and museums. I certainly know that I’ve been guilty of holding this view before on previous software projects I’ve worked on, and I’ve started to realize that it wasn’t particularly generous way of approaching user needs. So, if you’ve ever felt slighted by me in this regard, please accept my sincerest apologies.

Before we get too much further, I should probably articulate what I mean by a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet is a file with a specific form, which represents data in a tabular format, and within which formulas can be applied to that data. Spreadsheets are read and interpreted within the environment of spreadsheet software, such as Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. In the context of spreadsheet software, the data in tabular format is addressable through coordinate-based reference to cells, or by address- or category-based ranges. I want to emphasize, however, that tabular data on its own does not adequately qualify as a spreadsheet, meaning that a freestanding CSV-based dataset doesn’t qualify as such either. Nonetheless, such datasets can easily be “converted” or be understood using the paradigm of the spreadsheet, by loading it into spreadsheet software, or into an environment that provides somewhat similar functionality, such as OpenRefine.

This specific consideration allows us to see spreadsheets as the unification of tabularly expressed information and formulas. To put it plainly, as a form of information, a spreadsheet can be seen both as data and a program. This combination is a handy packaging format, which makes it easy to ship your data and the tools you use for calculations and methods for processing or analysis around to others to work with them. The increased ubiquity of spreadsheet software on personal computers over time has expanded the potential for end users to work with data directly in flexible and independent ways, and the unification of data and program has allowed for effective collaboration within groups of users working in a common domain.

This is a longstanding trend that has been fostered by the underlying design of spreadsheets as an application tailored towards end user needs from their inception, as we review the history of spreadsheet software development for personal computers. Arguably, the spreadsheet revolution originated with the development and release of VisiCalc by Software Arts. In his 1984 article on the emergence of spreadsheet software in Harper’s, Steven Levy describes source of the idea by Dan Bricklin, VisiCalc’s co-creator, as originating working on a class assignment while in an MBA program that required Bricklin to complete ledger sheets to analyze the implications of a merger between businesses.¹ More specifically, Burton Grad describes Bricklin’s motivation as also being upon his frustration of recognizing that then-current methods of programming were failing him to solve real-time needs based on the interruption and time it took to run a simple program in a timesharing environment to solve a problem.²

In addition, Levy notes that Bricklin’s desire to make a end-user focused version of a spreadsheet designed to run on a personal computer as a potential means to simplify this analysis was met with derision by his professors, as stated by Levy: “Why would a manager want to do a spreadsheet on one of those ‘toy’ computers? What were secretaries and accountants and the people down in [data processing] for?”³

VisiCalc’s co-creators, Bricklin and Bob Frankston, have acknowledged many times over that the product was designed in part to give more power to the user. While Bricklin himself has noted that neither that he nor Frankston were the originators of computer-based spreadsheets in general, he describes the value what VisiCalc provided as an what-you-see-is-what-you-get model of interactivity, wherein a user could point to change values, and see figures automatically recalculated based upon stored formulas.⁴

More broadly, VisiCalc also heralded a change in how users could approach computers. Martin Campbell-Kelly describes a paper given by Frankston in which he compared the potential of VisiCalc to how the projected growth of the telephone system between the 1930s and the 1950s would lead to an unsustainable number of operators. Ultimately, the resolution in the case of the telephone was to provide telephone users with the ability to dial telephones themselves; similarly, Frankston realized that “VisiCalc made everyone a programmer.”⁵ Similarly, Bricklin cites Jean-Louis Gassée’s description of his encounter with VisiCalc: “That was the day I realized that you didn’t have to be a programmer any more to use a computer. … Approximations, trial and error, simulations – Visicalc is an intellectual modeling clay. It lets you program without knowing it.”⁶ The power of VisiCalc, and arguably spreadsheets overall, then is this fundamental tension, wherein programming is both perceived to be both fundamentally accessible and simultaneously unnecessary to leverage the potential of the technology.

In this case, another strength of spreadsheet software on personal computers — particularly early applications like VisiCalc — is that they provided this power and control to end users with a degree of constraints within the user interface. Bonnie Nardi and James Miller have identified two specific factors that have demonstrated why spreadsheets work so well: in their words, “computational techniques that match users’ tasks and that shield users from the low-level details of traditional programming; [and] a table-oriented interface that serves as a model for users’ applications.”⁷ In other words, these are the formula languages targeted at users trying to get stuff done and the constraint of the grid-based format. Specifically, the visual constraint of the spreadsheet’s tabular format for data and formulas allows users a clearer understanding of how to complete their work at hand. In Nardi and Miller’s words,

As a user begins developing a spreadsheet, the tabular grid provides an overarching structure into which the parameters and variables of a model are cast. As the spreadsheet begins to take shape, the user views the emerging model and evaluates its accuracy and completeness. Within the framework of the rows and columns the user can restructure the model by re-arranging rows and columns and by adding new parameters as they become known. A spreadsheet model is grounded in the distinct tabular format of rows and columns, and is constructed in successive approximations as the user critiques the emerging model.⁸

Frankston himself notes that the “the grid was key”⁹ to the usability of VisiCalc, which provided a simplified representation of the structure in which users would be working:

If anything, the big break with the VisiCalc was the grid that actually reduced the amount of interactivity. The original design was much more flexible and powerful. The key was the grid, which gave you a framework for reference and simplified everything. It’s almost the opposite of what people think—people think that more features make a design easier. It’s actually a reduction in features that make it feasible. Later, as people became used to it, you could add features, but the basic idea was reducing the grid.¹⁰

In her recent book Calm Technology, Amber Case states that “a product that utilizes the right amount of technology becomes invisible more quickly.”¹¹ By constraining options in terms of data representation up front, spreadsheet users and developers can work to address their work at hand more directly.

Both beyond and including of VisiCalc, Martin Campbell-Kelly describes the personal computer spreadsheet sector as being notably responsive to user needs and usability concerns as the market emerged. For example, in describing Lotus 1-2-3, Campbell-Kelly writes that usability-related development was most often targeted at providing user support in environments that were lacking an in-house information technology support staff. Not only did Lotus 1-2-3 provide macros, which assisted end users in automating repetitive tasks, but Lotus also provided extensive documentation and infrastructure to support tutorials, and by providing a “development kit” to allow 1-2-3 users to easily spin up user groups intended to be broader than those targeted previously at “computer professionals.”

In addition, Lotus ultimately encouraged the development of “add-ons” for 1-2-3, such as spreadsheet templates and additional enhancement applications that augmented the functionality of the application. Campbell-Kelly indicates that while Lotus was originally resistant to encouraging the development of these add-ons, they recognized the complementary nature of these products to address user needs that were likely unable to be addressed by a single company, and that a regional “spreadsheet industry” developed in the metropolitan Boston area over time. As such, Campbell-Kelly thus demonstrates that “by the end of 1986, Lotus had a very definite vision of 1-2-3 as a technological system—a platform consisting of the spreadsheet ‘engine’ that could support ‘an entire system of products.’”¹²

By extension, spreadsheets and the other actors that interact with them as boundary objects can also be seen as a socio-technical system — not only through the case of Lotus 1-2-3’s ecosystem of add-ons and the vendors that developed and marketed them, but also through the collaborative nature of spreadsheet development as described by Bonnie Nardi and James Miller. Using ethnographic methods, Nardi and Miller establish in their research that the creation of spreadsheets is most often a site of “co-development”, wherein they come about through the efforts of a group of individuals working closely together. In addition, Nardi and Miller view spreadsheets as an excellent medium for supporting such co-development, as they serve as a conduit for communication, particularly in terms of how they “support design, development and use by people with different levels of both programming and domain knowledge.”¹³ I believe that this “bridging” function across levels and areas of domain knowledge is incredibly important, in that it improves the potential for dialog around the work at hand, and such co-development can allow for sustained collaboration in the longer term, allowing trust to be built across disparate teams.

In summary, spreadsheets as they’ve developed over time provide a useful instruction in terms of the types of interaction and collaboration we should be considering around the software, products and services we develop. I am deeply curious to hear why we haven’t been able to address this in our profession, and why we’re unable to develop transformative tools that empower users to work more closely together to solve common problems. The continued presence of spreadsheets in our domain of cultural heritage is precisely because they provide an adequate degree of constraint and power, particularly in institutions with small staffs, lower resourced institutions, or institutions where it’s frankly not feasible to develop custom solutions that are seen as well-architected. While not strictly speaking a spreadsheet application itself, I think that these same kinds of considerations in terms of collaboration and usability can account for the success of other applications like OpenRefine. They do just enough to allow us to do our work; they make us feel powerful and productive; and we can work closely with others to establish a shared network of solutions. In opposition, denying users the ability to work with the tools in which they feel the most productive demonstrates a lack of empathy and understanding, and can frankly hinder the efforts to develop a healthy collaborative environment between users and developers. I expect this community to carefully consider how productive and empowering tools are developed, when constraints themselves add value and the likelihood of comprehension, and how to ensure that we can build on this legacy developed over more than 35 years.

Steven Levy, “A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge.” Harper’s, November 1984. Republished online at https://backchannel.com/a-spreadsheet-way-of-knowledge-8de60af7146e. ↩
Burton Grad, “The Creation and the Demise of VisiCalc,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, July-September 2007, 21. ↩
Levy. ↩
Dan Bricklin, “Was VisiCalc the ‘first’ spreadsheet?” http://www.bricklin.com/firstspreadsheetquestion.htm. Accessed March 6, 2016. ↩
Quoted in Martin Campbell-Kelly, “Number Crunching without Programming: The Evolution of Spreadsheet Usability.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, July-September 2007, 7. ↩
Jean-Louis Gassée, The Third Apple, quoted in Bricklin. ↩
Bonnie A. Nardi and James R. Miller, “The spreadsheet interface: A basis for end-user programming.” In D. Diaper et al (Eds.), Human-Computer Interaction: INTERACT ‘90. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1990. Republished online at http://www.miramontes.com/writing/spreadsheet-eup/. ↩
Nardi and Miller 1990. ↩
Grad, 25. ↩
Software History Center Oral History Project. “Personal computer (PC) software workshop: VisiCalc.” Ed Bride, Moderator. May 6, 2004, Needham, Mass. Computer History Museum, 2004. CHM Reference number: X4276.2008. Available at http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102658146. ↩
Amber Case, Calm Technology: Principles and Patterns for Non-Intrusive Design. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2015. ↩
Campbell-Kelly, 13. ↩
Bonnie A. Nardi and James R. Miller. “Twinkling lights and nested loops: Distributed problem solving and spreadsheet development.” International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 34 (1991), 161-184. Republished online at http://www.miramontes.com/writing/twinklinglights/. ↩

My Jekyll todo list

2016-02-16T20:01:24-08:00

A running list of things I want to do or have done. A lot of this relates to adopting the IndieWeb ethos

DONE ~~Enable sending and receiving webmentions~~
DONE ~~Minimal h-entry markup~~
New theme!
Enable incoming webmention displays from Webmention.io.
Redo build process, perhaps running on Travis or my own server.
Enable automatic POSSE to Twitter, Medium, Slideshare, LinkedIn, and Facebook(?). Consider using Bridgy if this will lower friction.
Send automatic webmentions through Webmention.io on build.
Mobile post creation and editing using an existing Git client and Markdown editor.
Adopt Micropub or something comparable to potentially stage posts through pull requests. Longer term goal is to have a nice mobile client.
Refactor the publication and resume to be data driven.
Reuse and refactor existing codebases, like Aaron Gustafon’s Jekyll plugin for webmentions (Github repo) and Will Norris’ syndication plugin.
Implement Jekyll collections as a proxy for managing h-entry post-types.
Cache and eventually move commenting away from Disqus.

To Hell With Good Intentions: Linked Data, Community and the Power to Name

2016-02-10T22:48:00-08:00

This is the written version of my keynote presentation from the 2015 LITA Forum in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 14, 2015. I am grateful for the thoughtful and critical feedback from my friends and colleagues Maureen Callahan, Jarrett M. Drake, Hillel Arnold, Ben Armintor, Christina Harlow, and Chela Weber in their review of earlier drafts of this text. My slides are also available.

Good morning. I am honored to be here in Minneapolis, and I have to admit it’s the first time that I’ve been able to attend the LITA Forum. Today I’ll be trying to provide some structure to a few longstanding thoughts that have been percolating about the work that we do with metadata, which I see as being at the intersection of libraries and technology, and the rhetoric around linked data in particular. My hope is that we can start to examine linked data, particularly within the context of cultural heritage, and how it is decidedly not neutral, nor an intrinsic good, but instead as another space in which ideology and systematic oppression are likely to be reproduced. It is my belief that we have the power and the obligation to intervene in this, and that part of that intervention can involve both an intercession into our professional norms and practices and getting out of the way enough for communities to determine how they want to best document themselves.

I want to start my talk by defining my own “personal graph”¹ in relation to this presentation by acknowledging two things: the work and thought of others who inspire me and have helped me understand the provocation behind this presentation, and the context that I bring to this presentation. I am lucky to have a group of thoughtful colleagues who have helped me form my thoughts, whether they realize it or not. This is certainly not a list of everyone whom has ever inspired me to be an effective archivist and technologist willing to engage critically with the work that I do – it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Nonetheless, I would like to acknowledge the following people because of their profound impact on how this presentation has come into being. To Jarrett Drake, Christina Harlow, Benjamin Armintor, Bergis Jules, Ed Summers, Tara Robertson, Shirley Lew, Baharak Yousefi, Alison Macrina, Amelia Abreu, Maureen Callahan, and Hillel Arnold – thank you. And, if you’re a conference organizer, please consider one of them as a potential keynote speaker in place of someone who looks like me or talks like me. We might speak about similar things but we don’t always agree with each other, which makes it more interesting.

So, let’s talk about context. This is not to acknowledge my degrees and professional accolades, but rather to lay bare who I am and how some of the topics I’ll be navigating speak to me. I am called to do this in part because of my recent experience at the Digital Library Federation Forum in Vancouver. From the opening session and keynote presentation by Safiya Umoja Noble, to the concluding plenary panel, “Capacity and Community: Setting Agendas for #ourDLF,” the discussion of acknowledging the context that people, as well as institutions, bring to their professional lives and projects percolated throughout the conference. This in part relates to the need to acknowledge the potential bias that we bring to our professional projects, and to allow our potential audiences to identify points of commonality or discord.

So, who am I? Professionally speaking, I have worked in a variety of institutions, with an overwhelming focus on archives, metadata, and technology; the overwhelming majority of those institutions have been well-resourced and well-respected by people who find that important. I have been a project archivist, an assistant archivist, an application developer, an adjunct professor, a contractor, a digital archivist, and now a director of technology. I have worked with lots of metadata and have had lots of experience thinking about, implementing, and maintaining linked data and RDF over last couple of years. Generally, I think that unfettered access to information is a good thing. Nonetheless, my professional experience is an odd one, because I’ve found myself between worlds, dwelling in a liminal space between archives and technology. At least in the past, the relationships between archivists and technologists in my experience have never been smooth, and throughout my career, I have been given the message by one group that I didn’t really belong there since I was perceived to be part of the other one. IT folk have seen me as the demanding archivist who probably, in their mind, understand the complexity of their work. Archivists have labeled me as decidedly not an archivist, a data peddler, the resident geek, and someone unqualified to work in archives. In all fairness, this has gotten a lot better over the last few years – both for myself and the professions in general. Regardless, this is part of the reason why I say that I’m both an archivist and a technologist, even if at times I’m one moreso than the other.

This is a feeling I have to acknowledge, because it is so familiar in a personal context as well. It starts with my family. I am a child of two lovely people, an American and a first-generation immigrant who came to the US to further his education. My father, who’s now been in the states for most of his life, seemed intent on minimizing difference between my family and everyone else around us. So what? Assimilation is common. Throughout my life, however, this difference seemed to be unavoidable. My skin is relatively pale, and I am deeply aware that on a daily basis that I benefit from and am expected to contribute to the economy of white privilege. Nonetheless, I can’t shake that liminality. By some people’s read, I’m White; by others, I’m Latino. I don’t know what I am supposed to be, but I know I’m both. I also know that the way that people look at me in public changes when I’m by myself versus when I am with my father in the US, or when my mother and I are with him and his family when we visit them in Peru.

And such it is with other aspects of my identity. In the interest of time and perceived vanity I’m not going to itemize this for you further, but if you want to know, you can ask. Regardless, just look at me. I’ve got this white skin, and this masculine body and presentation. I have a reasonably secure income with a job I love that compensates me fairly. I am in a committed heterosexual partnership. I am not here to whine about myself precisely because I have a ton of privilege. Nonetheless, the context you should take with you is that identity - or your story - is a hard thing to assert when you have no control of how you will be read. People see what they want to, and elide or emphasize that difference. It is no surprise that this is painful and tiring. Sometimes the world drowns your voice, and more often than not, the voices in your head can do that too.

The other thing that weighs heavy on my mind, and adds to the context of my presentation today, is the stark reality that students of color are facing at University of Missouri, and other campuses across the country. It is an unfortunate truth that systemic racism and disenfranchisement are not news, but specific incidents are what draw attention. And such it is with what’s been playing out on the Mizzou campus. The racism experienced by people in Columbia, Missouri - itself less than five hundred miles from Minneapolis - is not new. These are all part of a broader series of events and historical realities, with a campus that was likely built on the labor of slaves. And even more recently, the opposition is nothing new; it’s part of a larger context.

I want to acknowledge these larger struggles even from the last three months at University of Missouri. Graduate students at MU organized, participated in a walkout, and begin unionizing in response to cuts to health care coverage for domestic and international students and to address other aspects of their working conditions, including better wages, tuition and fee waivers, and access to housing and childcare. There were three “Racism Lives Here” rallies this fall on the Mizzou campus even before the campus discovered the hateful graffiti in a residence hall bathroom. In October, three immigrant students filed separate lawsuits against the University of Missouri, St. Louis Community College, and the Metropolitan Community College in Kansas City. The suits were filed in reaction to the recent rewording of Missouri House Bill 3 from the 2014 version, which prohibited students with an “unlawful presence” from receiving in-state tuition rates, to students having an “unlawful status.” Two undocumented MU students that were not publicly identified would have seen a $15,000 per year tuition increase based upon this change. The University of Missouri Health System drastically reduced access to women’s healthcare through the ending of “refer and follow” privileges and the cancellation of agreements that allowed graduate students to receive training at Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri’s clinic in Columbia. I recommend looking at this timeline published by The Maneater, a student newspaper at University of Missouri, which allows you to start to see this greater trajectory.

Across all these aspects we see the interplay of issues of justice related to race, ethnicity and immigration status; to access to education and healthcare and the economic issues entangled within; and to gender. What speaks to me the most about this is the consciousness of the activists involved to want to ensure they are represented accurately and fairly. Specifically, I’m talking about the conscious decision to develop a “no media” safe space in an encampment set up on a campus quad, and the intentional reaction to eject an MU student who was working on assignment for ESPN.com who was trying to take photographs. To the Concerned Student 1950 movement, to all students, communities, and activists recognizing the need to protect themselves and designate that space for healing, fellowship, and organizing: bravo, I stand with you. To those of you decrying this as an assault to free speech, I offer the following inspired by Ivan Illich: to Hell with good intentions. This is a theological statement. The media will not help anybody by its good intentions.²

On Thursday, Tressie McMillan Cottom, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, wrote a blog post in response to a Twitter conversation she had with Roxane Gay and David Simon. Her post dismantles Simon’s assertions “that the Mizzou students were fascists in ‘intent’, the photographer was the real hero of recent events, and that these were the moments on the slippery slope to the decline of American democracy” through acknowledging the complicity of the media as being neither a rational, objective actor nor a neutral presence. Specifically, she asserts the following early on in her post:

The press is not a rational objective actor. The press shapes as much as it documents. All press benefits as much from social change as it benefits from the status quo. That means the press, especially corporate media, is always serving two masters. The press has rights but so do persons and sometimes we define those rights by working through the moments when they clash.³

I found out about Tressie’s post from my colleague Jarrett Drake, who posted a series of tweets that really blew my mind with his framing of the post. As an aside, I have to acknowledge that the process of how I learned and interpreted this itself was extremely serendipitous and haphazard. Jarrett was providing his own gloss on a blog post where Tressie was writing about an hours-long Twitter conversation. Jarrett tweeted the following:

Okay, read this and insert “the archives” where you read “the press” or “the media” and watch it still make sense.⁴

Especially this line: “The press shapes as much as it documents.” “The archives shapes as much as it documents.”⁵

The archives as shapers of the past, not merely documenters of it. I hope someone dissertates on this.⁶

To build off Jarrett’s reading of that critical sentence, I’ll ask you to do the same as he did. For “the press” or “the media,” replace that with “libraries.” Replace it with “library technology” or “library systems.” Replace it with “metadata.” Replace it with “linked data.”

I cannot help but emphasize how much this framing has helped me make sense of this presentation, particularly when read alongside “Locating the Library in Institutional Oppression,” an article that nina de jesus wrote for In the Library with a Lead Pipe, which demands that we see the complicity of libraries and librarianship in maintaining a perception of neutrality. Bess Sadler and Chris Bourg’s article in the Code4lib Journal, “Feminism and the Future of Library Discovery,” urges us to question our supposed professional neutrality in the context of developing systems and services to support discovery in a library context, and how to imbue a feminist agenda into not only how we think about our work, but also into those systems and services themselves. Bess and Chris acknowledge the work of Hope Olson, in particular her book The Power to Name: Locating the Limits of Subject Representation in Libraries, as establishing that subject classification systems are bound to their historical context and reflect bias.

More generally, Olson also establishes that subject classification itself is a type of “naming” information, or the creation of document surrogates. She continues (emphasis added):

Naming is the act of bestowing a name, of labelling, of creating an identity. It imposes a pattern on the world that is meaningful to the namer. Each of us names reality according to our own vision of the world build on past meanings in our own experience. … Dale Spender was speaking in general terms, but might have been describing the way librarians name information when she wrote: “All naming is of necessity biased and the process of naming is one of encoding that bias, of making a selection of what to emphasize and what to overlook on the basis of a strict use of already patterned materials.”⁷

Arguably, by extension, this also includes the creation of descriptions, or metadata about “real-world objects” in the parlance of RDF: books, places, people, topics, and so forth. It should be obvious that naming is power, as the title of the chapter of Olson’s book from which the previous quote is taken. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan further acknowledges this in the the specific case of geographical names, and how naming itself can be used to construct an convenient thing that previously did not exist, most specifically in the construction of “Asia”:

We may trace the continent in its present shape and size back to the end of the seventeenth century, when modern Western people felt the need for a collective name to designate their own society and culture. … “Europe” came to be seen as the handy term with which to describe a geographical area and an assortment of peoples, which, by the late seventeenth century, did have a large measure of unity in linguistic and civilizational origin, in physical (racial) type, and in religion. Asia, then, was defined negatively as all that was not Europe. Asia’s reason for existence was to serve as the backward, yet glamorous because exotic, Other. It had no independent reality; and yet, in the course of time, people who lived in this European creation began to accept it and exploit the name of Asia, and the sociopolitical reality it could call into existence, for their own purposes.⁸

If we return to the world of libraries and the management of metadata, we can notice a refraction of related issues. Building on Hope Olson, Chris Bourg identifies cases relating to subject classification in her talk “Never neutral: Libraries, Technology, and Inclusion” she gave at the OLA Superconference earlier this year. She relates a discovery where Randy Shilts’ book Conduct Unbecoming: Gays & Lesbians in the US Military, by virtue of the call number assigned to it, was shelved with works related to “Minorities, women, etc. in armed forces,” which let to the book being, in her words, “literally shelved between Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star and Military Trade – a collection of stories by people with a passion for military men.” She also acknowledges the recognition of Myrna Morales in discovering that materials related to the Young Lords Party, a Puerto Rican nationalist and activist group, as being classified under a subject heading of “gangs” within the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature.

Amber Billey, Emily Drabinski, and K.R. Roberto critically examine RDA Rule 9.7, which instructs catalogers to record gender with one of three options – “male,” “female,” and “not known” – as part of the process for constructing an authority record.⁹ Billey, Drabinski, and Roberto acknowledge that from the perspective of queer identity and lives that it erases or oversimplifies the reality of how people view their own gender. Specific issues, in their view, are threefold: that, contra RDA Rule 9.7 and the Library of Congress interpretation of that rule, gender is not reducible to a binary and innate state; that the rule fundamentally misunderstands how queer, transgender, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming people understand their own identities; and that gender can fundamentally be “read” by a cataloger. Most troubling is the recommendation in Rule 9.7 that gender “changes” be recorded associated with a given date. Billey, Drabinski, and Roberto note this practice as “insensitive at best, painful at worst, and belies, the often decidedly non-linear paths gender changes can take.”

It should be clear that the naming function of metadata raises a contentious point in that it allows assumptions and oppression to be reproduced over time. That is not to say that metadata and the process of naming does not have any positive value within the context of libraries and cultural heritage institutions. Structure and conformity – the basis of standardization – allows us to build systems that support discovery at all. Even a consistent locally-defined or discipline-specific vocabulary provides the potential for marginally better discovery insofar as you understand the context enough. Moreover, naming is fundamentally unavoidable in knowledge representation. As such, we need to make a decision whether we choose to name with an intention of justice, or with the pretense of neutrality and objectivity. Karen Coyle, in the first chapter of Understanding the Semantic Web: Bibliographic Data and Metadata, her ALA Library Technology Report, also notes that metadata should be defined as “constructed, constructive, and actionable”; in other words, metadata is a manufactured artificiality, developed for specific purposes, and can be used to satisfy a particular need. In my read, this further emphasizes that by definition metadata, nor its creation or interpretation can never be neutral, and it is incumbent upon us to recognize the damage we can or have inflicted on the communities represented, absent, or served by our institutions and collections.

So, if this is generally true for metadata, and if you’re an astute observer or maybe just opinionated you’ll probably guess this is probably true for linked data as well. If you’re not familiar with it by now, linked data relies on the standardized identification and naming of things – which again, include people, books, and so forth – in a global context using aspects of the Web as part of its core architecture. Specifically, and depending on how dogmatic you are, the preferred mechanisms are to use HTTP URIs for naming, and RDF as the underlying model for how you define the world. Linked open data assumes that your data is, well, open: in other words, publicly accessible, and ideally licensed for reuse.

In a library context, then, we can see that there are any number of entities we can consider – people, organizations, bibliographic works, cultural heritage objects, concepts, places, and so forth. The presumption is that Linked open data in libraries can hence help improve discovery – and, fundamentally, that this process of discovery is understood to be positive. In particular, this acknowledges one value of linked data for libraries in that it makes information more accessible to the Web. With a specific angle, this value is communicated by publishing linked data for libraries using Schema.org. The Schema.org initiative was originally started by Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex to “create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages.”¹⁰ In turn, the intent is for Schema.org to assist with discovery on the web, as it can be leveraged as part of search engine optimization.

I am less convinced that this is really a revolutionary thing when you do this by itself, without critically examining the rest of the practice. Yes, our resources should be broadly discoverable even on the broader web. This value of SEO within the context of linked data and libraries really doesn’t change much about how the Web operates nor does it demand that we change our processes of naming. I think those of us who work at the intersection of libraries and technology are directly responsible for the implementation choices that we make, and by merely opting into linked data in this manner we are trafficking in a Web that is built by corporations who are opting out of this responsibility. That lack of inaction is a conscious choice that allows for searching the Web to remain fundamentally undemocratic as described by Safiya Umoja Noble. In Dr. Noble’s words,

[N]ot all organizations have the ability to promote their URL via other media. One of the myths of our digital democracy is that what rises to the top of the pile is what is most popular. By this logic, sexism and pornography are the most popular values on the Internet when it comes to women.¹¹

Another specific set of foundational concepts within linked data is ripe for questioning and critical analysis, and this set of concepts has two heavily interrelated aspects. The first aspect is the open world assumption, which is a theoretical premise underpinning linked data. The open world assumption states that the truth value of a statement may be true irrespective of whether or not it is known to be true. As such, it emphasizes the fact that no single person or agent has comprehensive knowledge, and accordingly, we are limited about what we can infer from that knowledge to which we have access. The complementary aspect to the open world assumption is the view that “anyone can say anything about anything,”¹² which over time has been changed from the original claim, to “anyone can make simple assertions about anything,”¹³ to “anyone can make statements about any resource.”¹⁴^,¹⁵

These concepts are heralded by a handful of people as the power of linked data as a means for us to shift the narrative, to make it easier to assert truths as we know them. By publishing them as linked data, there’s also the possibility that someone else can pick up these narratives, read and interpret them, and help promulgate them further. In particular, the work of Tim Sherratt, an Australian historian and digital humanist comes to mind. In a presentation to the 2012 National Digital Forum in Wellington, New Zealand, Tim stated the following:

But to really have access, for something to be truly open, people also have to have the power to create. To take what they’re given and build something new — to challenge, to criticise, to offer alternatives. That means allowing people the space to have ideas, giving them the confidence to experiment, providing useful tools and the knowledge to use them.

This is precisely where I think we can really make ourselves useful, but first, we need to step back a little. We need to begin having some serious conversations about how we can best serve our communities not only as repositories of authoritative knowledge or mere individuals who work within them. We should be examining the way in which we can best serve our communities to support their need to tell stories, to heal, and to work in the process of naming. Part of that involves knowing how to engage in these conversations and asking how we can help instead of constructing a representation of the worst that is best flawed and perhaps unrelatable, and at worst, knowledge organization that inflicts or reproduces violence on those whom we intend to serve.

In addition, we have to recognize the folly of imposing our good intentions in regards to the production of linked data, or any form of documentation, without listening to these communities. These spaces are not always ours, and like the students occupying the quad at University of Missouri, we should be ready to make the space they demand when they do so. Even when we directly engage members of a community and request their presence in a project to correct a perceived absence of voices, we must recognize that this in itself is a form of labor that also has political and emotional impact. In her recent article “Minor Threats,” Mimi Thi Nguyen relates a case where she was urged to add materials to the riot grrrl archive at the Fales Library at New York University which viewed the absence of materials created by or about women of color from the collection, as “a crisis, a decisive historical moment that demanded mediation.”¹⁶ She asks us to consider what might be lost or hidden in the process of “correction” of an absence and that correction is pursued. Without thought, without conversation, and without vulnerability on the part of those of you with good intentions, our process of correction can simultaneously introduce and spackle over its own violence. To Hell with good intentions, and to Hell with well-intentioned linked data.

None of this is easy, even from a technical perspective. There’s a William Gibson quote that futurists like to use: “the future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” This quote is in some senses true with the reality of linked data and the tools that support it. The technology is not new and relatively mature but few organizations have been able to wield it effectively. The thing is that I also think this quote is also bullshit. The past and present are already here too, and neither are evenly distributed. Owen Stephens, in a recent talk on enhancing library data with linked data, quotes G.L. Holbert’s assertion that “With the Internet, we each have our own printing press.” In response, I offer A.J. Liebling’s aphorism that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” There are far too many tools and pieces of infrastructure that support publication and consumption linked data that are hard to set up. The possibility of using inference or questioning the provenance of linked data resources unfortunately remains somewhat unavoidable.

In his National Digital Forum talk, Tim Sherratt demands “simple tools” and “no platforms,” arguing that publication of linked data should be as easy as uploading an HTML page to a web server. While that is a noble goal, I nonetheless think that a certain level of additional of tool development is really necessary to help communities build out these narratives. There is a strong value for applications like Omeka and Mukurtu, in this space, and I am particularly interested to see how easy to use, open source, and visually welcoming authoring environments for interactive fiction like Twine can be leveraged or can inform how what direction these tools can take. We need to work more effectively together with our communities to produce these tools and to understand their impact.

I’d also like to add a word of warning here against being overly reliant on overcentralization here despite the gap in infrastructure. In the blog post I referenced earlier, Tressie McMillan Cottom responds to David Simon’s labeling as “fascism” of the actions of the students at Mizzou who removed the photographer from their encampment:

Fascism means something more than a thing one does not like. Fascism means a system of social organization that concentrates power and doesn’t just discourage dissent but organizes the State against it. … It is that hand-waving about a fascist state can confuse us about what making democracy looks like.³

Centralizing the process of naming in any context overly concentrates that power. I am not saying that all vendors are inherently bad, or that institutions responsible for metadata standards and authority files are bad. Yes, there’s a lot of work to be done to make linked data itself easier to publish, consume, and reuse for all kinds of institutions and communities, but I worry about our deference to this centralization. Despite my concerns about the lack of access to effective user-facing tools for linked data, I still believe its power is in its ability to leverage that decentralization. Relying on centralized authority management or metadata creation for everything, and the corporatization of library infrastructure, actively resists that decentralizing force, further limiting our own effectiveness in the construction of radical democracy.

I will close here to acknowledge some initiatives who have thought about this carefully and are taking action. It’s not to say that there haven’t been some missteps, but I urge you to read about their work. First, please read about the the People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland, an online archive to collecting, preserving, and providing access to stories of police violence as experienced or observed by people living in Cleveland. It was organized as a collaboration between Cleveland residents and professional archivists across the United States in reaction to the epidemic of police violence over the last few years. Also, read about the Find & Connect site, developed to help Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants understand more about their past and about the historical context of child welfare. It provides contextual information not only on sites of “care,” but also on associated archival records and photos, and information about how to connect with support services including counseling, assistance in accessing archival records, and, when possible, reconnection with family. It also provides important context about how and what you might find on the site, and what might be confronting, disturbing, or otherwise upsetting. Finally, please read the papers as they are published from the annual conference organized by the Community Informatics Research Network. Unfortunately, this year’s conference was held earlier this week, and I found out far too late. All of these examples have given me a lot to think about in this space and I am looking to you to help determine what’s next.

So, think about what and how you name. Decentralize the ability to tell stories. Remember that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Shut up enough and step back far enough to listen, so you can make a lasting relationship to the people and communities you serve. Thank you.

All credit goes to Hillel Arnold for this framing. ↩
Illich, Ivan. Address to the Conference on Inter-American Student Project, Cuernevaca, Mexico, April 1968. Published as “To hell with good intentions” in J.C. Kendall & Associates (eds.), Combining service and learning: A resource book for community and public service (Raleigh, NC: National Society for Internships and Experiential Education, 1990, 314-320). ↩
Cottom, Tressie McMillan. “Fascism.” tressiemc. November 12, 2015. ↩ ↩²
https://twitter.com/jmddrake/status/664783302079987713 ↩
https://twitter.com/jmddrake/status/664783611200192512 ↩
https://twitter.com/jmddrake/status/664783969704087552 ↩
Olson, Hope A. The Power to Name: Locating the Limits of Subject Representation in Libraries (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002, 4). ↩
Tuan, Yi-Fu. “Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81(3), 1991, 689. ↩
Billey, Amber, Emily Drabinski, and K.R. Roberto. “What’s Gender Got to Do with It? A Critique of RDA 9.7.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 52(4), 2014. Preprint: http://scholarworks.uvm.edu/libfacpub/19/ ↩
Goel, Kavi and Pravir Gupta. “Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web” Google Webmaster Central Blog. June 2, 2011. ↩
Noble, Safiya Umoja. “Missed Connections: What Search Engines Say About Women.” Bitch Magazine 54 (2012). See also Safiya Umoja Noble, “Google Search: Hyper-visibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible,” InVisible Culture 19 (2013). ↩
Klyne, Graham, and Jeremy Carroll (eds.). “2.2.6 Anyone can say anything about anything.” In Resource Description Framework (RDF): Concepts and Abstract Data Model. W3C Working Draft 29 August 2002. ↩
Klyne, Graham, and Jeremy Carroll (eds.). “2.2.6 Anyone Can Make Simple Assertions About Anything” In Resource Description Framework (RDF): Concepts and Abstract Data Model. W3C Working Draft 23 January 2003. ↩
Klyne, Graham, and Jeremy Carroll (eds.). “2.2.6 Anyone Can Make Statements About Any Resource” In Resource Description Framework (RDF): Concepts and Abstract Data Model. W3C Working Draft 10 February 2004. ↩
See Mirna Willer and Gordon Dunsire, “Semantic Web and Linked Open Data”, in Bibliographic Information Organization in the Semantic Web (Oxford: Chandos, 2013), 119. ↩
Nguyen, Mimi Thi. “Minor Threats.” Radical History Review 122 (2015), 17-18. ↩

IndieWebCamp NYC 2016

2016-01-24T14:24:49-08:00

I’m at IndieWebCamp NYC and I just added some microformats data to my site. Hurrah!

Edit: And I’ve successfully sent a Webmention by hand from the command line. Time to add that to the Jekyll build process…