Micki’s comment about how the computer literacy gap between younger and older generations disrupts and threatens the top down teacher-pupil paradigm has really stuck with me. Though it seems that professors have long been considered at risk of becoming dinosaurs, ossified in their own practices as new ideas outpace them, I get the sense that the discrepancy here and now is far greater.
I was talking to an actor friend of mine who does web and graphic design as his survival job, and he recommended this documentary on Aaron Swartz. I haven’t had a chance to watch in full, but it raises a lot of questions about open-source and system subversions, perhaps more-so than about the generation shift, and it seemed relevant to discussions from last week and the readings this week (“Hacktivism”).
The whole documentary is available on YouTube:
http://youtu.be/vXr-2hwTk58
The trailer:
And NPR coverage:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/07/06/327774311/the-life-and-death-of-the-internets-own-boy
-Jojo
The teacher-pupil paradigm is the thing that unsettled me about continuing my academic career after undergrad. It wasn’t a matter of authority, as I wanted to be taught by someone wiser than me… who doesn’t? I just didn’t like the idea that my work needed to compliment the work that was already being done. When I reached out to the professors in my undergrad program they told me… “Narrow down a time period. Don’t choose Contemporary Lit–it will never work. Find a program with a lot of professors in your time period…” It really bummed me out! I knew what I wanted to study, and it was weird being told that I needed to turn into a barnacle and find something/someone to stick to. New technology and finding ways to fit it into your field of study really does shake this up… but only if the program is willing to recognize the new technology as “academic”.
James’s comment brings up what I think is an important question about the digital humanities and specialization. With the rise of distant reading as advocated by Franco Moretti, it becomes possible to look at a broader range of materials — in terms of an increase in both numbers and chronological scope. Does this then necessarily come into conflict with the more narrow specializations of the academic departments, for example, Victorian literature or 20th-century European history?
I would also be curious in the differences in responses (if any) between people from an English/literature background and those from other disciplines. As a historian, I lean towards specialization over generalization, but I’d be interested in what others, particularly non-historians, think.
I saw this film at SXSW and I loved it. It is informative, emotionally powerful and politically provocative. We lost a real treasure when Aaron Swartz committed suicide. His work to provide wider access to academic journal articles in the JSTOR repository is very germane to DH. His exploit got him arrested, of course, and while I think it is going to far to say that the resulting prosecution killed him, you are very right to say that there are important questions raised.
IMHO, the most important question raised is what role universities should play in cases of ‘hacktivism’. Should a college or university “collaborate” or support a hacker if the goal of the hack is to increase academic freedom or fight injustice or any other morally defensible goal? Or should they, rather, protect the institution from attack by closely following the letter of the law? Swartz’s case is unique because he was not affiliated directly with any university at the time, but MIT was a party to the case because he had been using their network (he had discovered and unsecured wiring closet where he connected his laptop) to download the articles that he hacked from the JSTOR database. MIT was not harmed in any substantial way yet they chose to sit on the sidelines while the Feds prosecuted Swartz. If they had opted, instead, to press the Justice Department to drop the case, I think there is a strong likelihood that their influence would have been decisive. And perhaps Aaron Swartz would be alive today.
This is a conversation close to my heart, and replete with many provocative implications. While it’s certainly true that the federal prosecution reveals a kafkaesque relationship between the state and hacktivists, other aspects are tougher to gauge.
I started working for JSTOR in Feb. 2013 so needless to say this issue was top of mind. I wrote (write?) fiction at night and found myself fascinated by the Swartz case, especially as I came to more clearly understand the services JSTOR provides and the legal responsibilities JSTOR has to publishers. I found myself writing about him, using MITs report on the incident as scaffolding for part of my own story http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pdf. Ultimately, as a thought experiment I listed out the fields that my character (and by extension I) would need to have an understanding of for the narrative to work. My list included Network Analysis, Economics, Critical Theory, Data Visualization, Sociology, among other disciplines. At which point, I began looking for graduate programs that could help me learn from these disparate fields. The result was my app to the CUNY GC.
[quick aside: as a lover of Infinite Jest there are few blog posts more fascinating/haunting than reading Swartz’s hack of the book, imagining the one tortured genius tying a literary knot and the other untying it while they were both still here http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend%5D
But I don’t mean to waste time naval gazing. I have a DH question! What we have in this post are two very different, accounts of the same event (Documentary and MIT Report). My question is not about the validity of their claims. I suspect the reporting in both is fairly accurate. My question has to do with the way the medium affects our understanding of the event. I watched the documentary today, which does a number on the heart. Suffice to say, the MIT report doesn’t. It’s an utterly dry document that records the events clinically. Certainly not a pleasant read, though sort of fascinating in a bureaucratic way. My DH question is: could I run a summary of the two texts, lets say the script of the documentary and this MIT text, and create a summary of the two? Using ngrams, word frequency, perhaps finding a way to tag the subject of a paragraph. Could I use such an analysis to compare texts in order to make a more informed choice about what to consume? We do this with food, and we call it Nutrition Facts: a standardized set of metrics which we can measure separate foods by. I’m not the first to suggest we begin to think of media like we think of food, that we can rot our brains or nourish our brains just as we can our bodies. But that I know of there is not yet a standardized metric for content.
In this case, would it be useful for us to know that the documentary spends 10% of its time talking about Swartz’s childhood while the report spends 0%. Or would it reveal something about the MIT report if one of the most used words turns out to be “Neutral?”
I cast no aspersions on either of these works, but I think this technique could be useful for distinguishing propaganda from reporting (or to take a half step, a way to identify branded content?) If a documentary about Lybia spends 20% of it’s time talking about Nazi Germany, or if a political speech uses the words “Border,” “Preserve” and “Culture,” in high frequency does this teach us something useful before we engage? As Swartz suggests in the documentary, we now have a plethora of content, of voices. How can we discern what to consume? If our attention has become comodified we can be sure that content providers won’t do this work for us. Is there a way to strip out the medium, the flashy cover of a cereal box, and discover some useful, albeit boring, metrics by which we can navigate content? @mickikaufman I imagine you may have some insights given your work with the Rumsfeld Papers?
@lsweeney — Your experience at JSTOR sounds intriguing. I often wonder about the manipulations and storytelling in documentaries in general and your greater knowledge of the issue helps shed some light on the matter of Aaron Swartz. I look forward to checking out the links you posted. Thanks!
-Jojo