What you are holding in your hands or browsing on your screen is the first book published by the EverydayTechnologyPress, an imprint run by the Rotterdam-based collective space Varia. Everyday technology is not just a moniker for the tools and devices we use on a daily basis, but a formula that identifies a perspective on technical artefacts and a programmatic goal. Everyday technology means that a sewing machine is no less important than a laptop, that a seamstress’s work is by no means less meaningful than that of a computer scientist. Focusing on everyday technology means questioning the hierarchies that surround technical objects and therefore the valorisation of skills needed to design or use them. Everyday technology means also reconsidering the hegemony of high tech: with our publications, we try to show that low-tech approaches can be complex, inventive, and joyful.
What you are holding in your hands or browsing on your screen is the first book published by the \nohyphens{Everyday}\nohyphens{Technology}\nohyphens{Press}, an imprint run by the Rotterdam-based collective space Varia. Everyday technology is not just a moniker for the tools and devices we use on a daily basis, but a formula that identifies a perspective on technical artefacts and a programmatic goal. Everyday technology means that a sewing machine is no less important than a laptop, that a seamstress’s work is by no means less meaningful than that of a computer scientist. Focusing on everyday technology means questioning the hierarchies that surround technical objects and therefore the valorisation of skills needed to design or use them. \nohyphens{Everyday} technology means also reconsidering the hegemony of high tech: with our publications, we try to show that low-tech approaches can be complex, inventive, and joyful.
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At Everyday Technology Press, we believe that not only experts should have access and decisive power in regards to how things should work. This is why our publications show and document convivial tools; tools that guarantee a certain degree of autonomy to their users. We understand autonomy in Ivan Illich’s terms, namely, the possibility for each and everyone to use a tool in order to realise their own intentions and create meaning by leaving a mark, however small, in the world.\footnote{ Ivan Illich, \emph{Tools for conviviality} (New York: Harper and Row,1973).} We strive to include multiple and entangled perspectives, needs, and aspirations that are at play when it comes to technology. We think of theory as a practice and practice as a form of knowledge production. True to this belief, in our publications we complement analyses with instructions and code; tutorials and methods with essays. Here, the \emph{know what} goes hand in hand with the \emph{know how}.
At \nohyphens{Everyday}\nohyphens{Technology}\nohyphens{Press}, we believe that not only experts should have access and decisive power in regards to how things should work. This is why our publications show and document convivial tools; tools that guarantee a certain degree of autonomy to their users. We understand autonomy in Ivan Illich’s terms, namely, the possibility for each and everyone to use a tool in order to realise their own intentions and create meaning by leaving a mark, however small, in the world.\footnote{ Ivan Illich, \emph{Tools for conviviality} (New York: Harper and Row,1973).} We strive to include multiple and entangled perspectives, needs, and aspirations that are at play when it comes to technology. We think of theory as a practice and practice as a form of knowledge production. True to this belief, in our publications we complement analyses with instructions and code; tutorials and methods with essays. Here, the \emph{know what} goes hand in hand with the \emph{know how}.
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Through its engagement with vernacular languages, \emph{VLTK} suggests another meaning of everyday technology. Technology is often not recognised as such. Language, for example, is something that many take for granted and deem and call “natural.” However, a variety of technical procedures, rules, and constraints operate on top of its roots, which are, according to Jorge Luis Borges, “irrational and magical.”\footnote{Jorge Luis Borges, \emph{El otro, el mismo} (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2005).} This is how language becomes a technology. The technologisation of language tends to be a singular, reductive operation that produces a language with a capital “L” as a technology with a capital “T.” \emph{VLTK} counterbalances that: this book does not only show that a wealth of linguistic modes of being exist, but also that they can thrive, given enough space and the proper amount of attention.
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\hspace{-2pt}Through its engagement with vernacular languages,\thinspace\emph{Vernaculars come to matter} suggests another meaning of everyday technology. Technology is often not recognised as such. Language, for example, is something that many take for granted and deem and call “natural.” However, a variety of technical procedures, rules, and constraints operate on top of its roots, which are, according to Jorge Luis Borges, “irrational and magical.”\footnote{Jorge Luis Borges, \emph{El otro, el mismo} (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2005).} This is how language becomes a technology. The technologisation of language tends to be a singular, reductive operation that produces language with a capital “L” as a technology with a capital “T.” \emph{Vernaculars come to \nohyphens{matter}} counterbalances that: this book does not only show that a wealth of \nohyphens{linguistic} modes of being exist, but also that they can thrive, given enough space and the proper amount of attention.
\chapter[From \emph{contradictionaries} to \emph{formatterings} An introduction to VLTK -- Vernacular Language Toolkit\\Cristina Cochior, Julie Boschat-Thorez, Manetta Berends]{From \emph{contradictionaries}\\to \emph{formatterings}\\An introduction to VLTK\\-- Vernacular Language\\Toolkit\footnotemark\\\\Cristina Cochior\\Julie Boschat-Thorez\\Manetta Berends}
\chapter[From \emph{contradictionaries} to \emph{formatterings} An introduction to VLTK -- Vernacular Language Toolkit\\Cristina Cochior, Julie Boschat-Thorez, Manetta Berends]{From \emph{contradictionaries}\\to \emph{formatterings}:\\an introduction to VLTK\\-- Vernacular Language\\Toolkit\footnotemark\\\\Cristina Cochior\\Julie Boschat-Thorez\\Manetta Berends}
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\footnotetext{A toolkit among a myriad of other possible vernacular language toolkits.}
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@ -40,9 +40,9 @@
\noindent
Despite their ubiquity, the processes of computational language manipulation are largely imperceptible; they envelop, inform, and often standardise intimate interactions with the world. From spam filters, to search optimisation engines, to targeted advertisements, to reshuffled social media timelines, online experiences are mediated by the ordering logics of language processing.
\emph{Vernaculars come to matter} brings together contributions by Cengiz Mengüç, Clara Balaguer, Michael Murtaugh, Ren Loren Britton, and Rosemary Grennan. This publication, whose title derives from Britton’s contribution, reflects on the roles that the vernacular can play in linguistic and technological environments, as well as what vernacular orders language could inhabit or create. It is a speculation on what vernacular language processing might mean when considering how and where language is situated. \emph{Vernaculars comes to matter} is made in the context of the project VLTK, a Vernacular Language ToolKit in the making.
\emph{Vernaculars come to matter} brings together contributions by Cengiz Mengüç, Clara Balaguer, Michael Murtaugh, Ren Loren Britton, and Rosemary Grennan. This publication, whose title derives from Britton’s contribution, reflects on the roles that the vernacular can play in linguistic and technological environments, as well as what vernacular orders language could inhabit or create. It is a speculation on what vernacular language processing might mean when considering how and where language is situated. \emph{Vernaculars comes to matter} is made in the context of the project VLTK, a Vernacular Language Toolkit in the making.
In this introductory text, we will share some of the thoughts behind Vernacular Language Toolkit, or VLTK in short, the starting point of this publication. VLTK is an ongoing research project initiated by Cristina Cochior, Julie Boschat-Thorez and Manetta Berends that aims to connect the vernacular to “language processing,” a practice that refers to any kind of computational treatment of language. By combining these two, it explores what forms of “vernacular language processing” there could be.
In this introductory text, we will share some of the thoughts behind Vernacular Language Toolkit, or VLTK in short, the starting point of this publication. VLTK is an ongoing research project initiated by Cristina Cochior, Julie Boschat-Thorez, and Manetta Berends that aims to connect the vernacular to “language processing,” a practice that refers to any kind of computational treatment of language. By combining these, it explores what forms of “vernacular language processing” there could be.
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@ -57,16 +57,16 @@ The specific focus of VLTK on language playfully blurs the boundaries between to
\section{\nohyphens{From the “natural” to the\\“vernacular”}}
\noindent
The acronym VLTK is a response to, and joke on, a ubiquitous programming library called NLTK, which stands for Natural Language ToolKit. It is a well-known project among programmers and people working in the field of computational linguistics, which is also known as the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Current, concrete use cases of NLTK include operations such as text classification for customer support, sentiment analysis for marketing purposes, or automated hate speech detection. Our collective work around VLTK started from the discomfort with the expression “natural language,” which is used in the field of computational linguistics to refer to language that has not been structured (yet) for further computational processing. Accepting the premise that language is natural would imply ignoring the procedures through which language becomes naturalised, imposed, overwritten, and ignoring the political mechanisms that sustain these efforts. We came to VLTK through a word play that scratched the itch of this discomfort and we started replacing the term “natural” with “vernacular” instead. Vernacular, a word close to “vulgar” -- of the people, common -- points towards the processes of language formation, and the context and urgency they require to exist. This small but defiant joke slowly grew through conversations, reflections, and a desire to try to do otherwise. It opened up and stretched generative spaces of interpretation.
The acronym VLTK is a response to, and joke on, a ubiquitous programming library called NLTK, which stands for Natural Language ToolKit. It is a well-known project among programmers and people working in the field of computational linguistics, which is also known as the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Current, concrete use cases of NLTK include operations such as text classification for customer support, sentiment analysis for marketing purposes, or automated hate speech detection. Our collective work around VLTK started from a discomfort with the expression “natural language,” which is used in the field of computational linguistics to refer to language that has not been structured (yet) for further computational processing. Accepting the premise that language is natural would imply ignoring the procedures through which language becomes naturalised, imposed, or overwritten, and ignoring the political mechanisms that sustain these efforts. We came to VLTK through a word play that scratched the itch of this discomfort and we started replacing the term “natural” with “vernacular” instead. Vernacular, a word close to “vulgar” -- of the people, common -- points towards the processes of language formation, and the context and urgency they require to exist. This small but defiant joke slowly grew through conversations, reflections, and a desire to try to do otherwise. It opened up and stretched generative spaces of interpretation.
NLTK allows you to interface with text in many different ways using a programming language, in this case Python. The makers of NLTK introduce the project on their website by describing it as:
\begin{quoting}
(\ldots) a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data. It provides easy-to-use interfaces to over 50 corpora and lexical resources such as WordNet, along with a suite of text processing libraries for classification, tokenization, stemming, tagging, parsing, and semantic reasoning, wrappers for industrial-strength NLP libraries, and an active discussion forum.\footnote{\url{http://www.nltk.org}}
[\ldots] a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data. It provides easy-to-use interfaces to over 50 corpora and lexical resources such as WordNet, along with a suite of text processing libraries for classification, tokenization, stemming, tagging, parsing, and semantic reasoning, wrappers for industrial-strength NLP libraries, and an active discussion forum.\footnote{\url{http://www.nltk.org}}
\end{quoting}
\noindent
NLTK comes with a whole set of interfaces, such as word counters, summarizers, text generators, translators, context inspectors, dictionary functions, classification tools, and more. The toolkit is so extensive, and some of its components have been integrated within many applications or systems that they are used by people with backgrounds ranging from the arts and humanities to science and engineering.\footnote{“NLP is important for scientific, economic, social, and cultural reasons. NLP is experiencing rapid growth as its theories and methods are deployed in a variety of new language technologies. For this reason it is important for a wide range of people to have a working knowledge of NLP. Within industry, this includes people in human-computer interaction, business information analysis, and web software development. Within academia, it includes people in areas from humanities computing and corpus linguistics through to computer science and artificial intelligence. (To many people in academia, NLP is known by the name of 'Computational Linguistics.')” \url{https://www.nltk.org/book/ch00.html\#audience}} NLTK was initiated by Steven Bird and Edward Loper in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. The project is published under an open licence,\footnote{ NLTK is published under the Apache license v2.0, \url{https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0}} which means that anyone can use, modify, and distribute versions of the software for commercial or other purposes.
NLTK comes with a whole set of interfaces, such as word counters, summarizers, text generators, translators, context inspectors, dictionary functions, classification tools, and more. The toolkit is extensive, and some of its components have been integrated so within many applications or systems that they are used by people with backgrounds ranging from the arts and humanities to science and engineering.\footnote{“NLP is important for scientific, economic, social, and cultural reasons. NLP is experiencing rapid growth as its theories and methods are deployed in a variety of new language technologies. For this reason it is important for a wide range of people to have a working knowledge of NLP. Within industry, this includes people in human-computer interaction, business information analysis, and web software development. Within academia, it includes people in areas from humanities computing and corpus linguistics through to computer science and artificial intelligence. (To many people in academia, NLP is known by the name of 'Computational Linguistics.')” \url{https://www.nltk.org/book/ch00.html#audience}} NLTK was initiated by Steven Bird and Edward Loper in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. The project is published under an open licence,\footnote{ NLTK is published under the Apache license v2.0, \url{https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0}} which means that anyone can use, modify, and distribute versions of the software for commercial or other purposes.
\newpage
@ -75,10 +75,10 @@ NLTK comes with a whole set of interfaces, such as word counters, summarizers, t
\section{Vernacular processing\\as mapping}
\noindent
The field of NLP understands mapping as an activity to turn so-called unstructured language into structured linguistic objects, such as a document index, a thesaurus, a dictionary, a comparative word list or a morph analyser. In the NLTK textbook, \emph{Natural Language Processing with Python},\footnote{\emph{Natural Language Processing with Python }is a textbook, which is often used as a first mediator when working with NLTK tools. Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper, \emph{Natural Language Processing with Python: Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit }(Cambridge: O'Reilly, 2009). The book is also available in a digital form at \url{https://www.nltk.org/book/}.} such mapping activities are introduced in the following way:
The field of NLP understands mapping as an activity to turn so-called unstructured language into structured linguistic objects, such as a document index, a thesaurus, a dictionary, a comparative word list, or a morph analyser. In the NLTK textbook, \emph{Natural Language Processing with Python},\footnote{\emph{Natural Language Processing with Python }is a textbook, which is often used as a first mediator when working with NLTK tools. Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper, \emph{Natural Language Processing with Python: Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit }(Cambridge: O'Reilly, 2009). The book is also available in a digital form at \url{https://www.nltk.org/book/}.} such mapping activities are introduced in the following way:
\begin{quoting}
Most often, we are mapping from a “word” to some structured object. For example, a document index maps from a word (which we can represent as a string), to a list of pages (represented as a list of integers). In this section, we will see how to represent such mappings in Python.\footnote{\url{https://www.nltk.org/book/ch05.html\#sec-dictionaries}}
Most often, we are mapping from a “word” to some structured object. For example, a document index maps from a word (which we can represent as a string), to a list of pages (represented as a list of integers). In this section, we will see how to represent such mappings in Python.\footnote{\url{https://www.nltk.org/book/ch05.html#sec-dictionaries}}
\end{quoting}
\noindent
@ -105,7 +105,7 @@ In the same chapter there is also a table that describes the different maps that
\end{tabularx}
\noindent
Figure: NLTK's linguistic objects, From \emph{Natural Language Processing with Python: Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit}, “Table 3.1: Linguistic Objects as Mappings from Keys to Values”\footnote{\url{https://www.nltk.org/book/ch05.html\#tab-linguistic-objects}}\\
Figure: NLTK's linguistic objects, From \emph{Natural Language Processing with Python: Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit}, “Table 3.1: Linguistic Objects as Mappings from Keys to Values”\footnote{\url{https://www.nltk.org/book/ch05.html#tab-linguistic-objects}}\\
\noindent
NLTK uses the metaphor of mapping to form indexical relations between truth and map. The use of the word mapping was something that caught our attention -- it is this indexical relation that needs questioning and study. Considering that language maps generate a new kind of linguistic matter, one that is processed and transformed through code, how does that mutate language? How can these mutations be studied? What kinds of maps can be made to map language differently? Can mapping be done based on:
@ -117,13 +117,13 @@ NLTK uses the metaphor of mapping to form indexical relations between truth and
\item
\textbf{disorientation} by losing familiarity with a text?
\item
\textbf{thickening of matter, structures or paths} by intersecting text with other texts?
\textbf{thickening of matter, structures, or paths} by intersecting text with other texts?
\item
\textbf{revision of markers of orientation} by amending the path over time?
\item
\textbf{following threads} by focusing on one perspective at a time?
\item
\textbf{reparative taxonomies} by “reconfiguring relations according to local and personal vantage points”?\footnote{Melissa Adler, “Eros in the library: Considering the aesthetics of knowledge organization,” \emph{Art Libraries Journal}, 44, no. 2 (April 2019): 67--71.}
\textbf{reparative taxonomies} by “reconfiguring relations according to local and personal vantage points”?\footnote{Melissa Adler, “Eros in the library: Considering the aesthetics of knowledge organization,” \emph{Art Libraries Journal} 44, no. 2 (April 2019): 67--71.}
\item
\textbf{perversion} by operating outside of the normative discourse?\footnote{Melissa Adler, \emph{Cruising the Library: Perversities in the organisation of knowledge} (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).}
\end{compactitem}
@ -185,7 +185,7 @@ Figure: A table of VLTK possibilities. To be versioned and expanded.
\vspace{\baselineskip}
\noindent
The table of VLTK possibilities includes \emph{Complexity matrices} that complexify the understanding of the context of a certain phrase or word\footnote{An example of this is word2complex, a workshop by Manetta Berends and Cristina Cochior. word2complex is a thought experiment to resist the flattening of meaning that is inherent in word2vec, a model commonly used to create “word embeddings.” \url{http://titipi.org/wiki/index.php/Word2complex}}\emph{Navigation scores} that generate scores based on the path a reader took through the text, ready for a next reader to be used as a guide; and forms of encapsulated close reading, using \emph{Transfictions}, to provide ways to ruminate a set of phrases by dislocating and re-contextualizing them. This last one is interpreted into a script below that wraps expressions from the book \emph{Queer Phenomenology} by Sara Ahmed into a compilation of conversational utterances arranged by chance.\footnote{Sara Ahmed, \emph{Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others} (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).}
The table of VLTK possibilities includes \emph{Complexity matrices} that complexify the understanding of the context of a certain phrase or word\footnote{An example of this is word2complex, a workshop by Manetta Berends and Cristina Cochior. word2complex is a thought experiment to resist the flattening of meaning that is inherent in word2vec, a model commonly used to create “word embeddings.” \url{http://titipi.org/wiki/index.php/Word2complex}};\emph{Navigation scores} that generate scores based on the path a reader took through the text, ready for a next reader to be used as a guide; and forms of encapsulated close reading, using \emph{Transfictions}, to provide ways to ruminate a set of phrases by dislocating and re-contextualizing them. This last one is interpreted into a script below that wraps expressions from the book \emph{Queer Phenomenology} by Sara Ahmed into a compilation of conversational utterances arranged by chance.\footnote{Sara Ahmed, \emph{Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others} (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).}
\begin{lstlisting}
They looked at the auto-complete suggestions and suddenly said:
@ -230,9 +230,9 @@ The code output above is a fictional script generated by taking some of Ahmed's
The dislocation and relocation of phrases in the transfiction above draws attention to the aesthetics of knowledge organisation and structuring. By playing with traces of orality, versioning the language by accompanying it with verbal expressions, the example can be read as an invitation to keep Ahmed's phrases close, giving room for generating new understandings of them. The repetition of the dialogical phrases, for example, injects an idea of timing and rhythm, leaving gaps for the reader to fill in with their own interpretations.
In “Eros in the Library,” Melissa Adler introduces the ancient Greek historian Pamphila, who weaved “multiple sources and genres together to create a pleasing set of histories,” through a method she she called \emph{poikilia}.\footnote{Adler, “Eros in the library,” 69.} Adler cites Adeline Grand-Clément's definition of \emph{poikilia} as “harmonia that does not unify.”\footnote{Adeline Grand-Clément, “Poikilia,” in \emph{A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics}, ed. Pierre Destrée and Penelope Murray (Hoboken: John Wiley \& Sons, 2015), 410, cited in Adler, “Eros in the library,” 69.}. The aesthetic beauty and pleasure in Pamphilia's method shifts the purpose of knowledge organisation.
In “Eros in the Library,” Melissa Adler introduces the ancient Greek historian Pamphila, who weaved “multiple sources and genres together to create a pleasing set of histories,” through a method she she called \emph{poikilia}.\footnote{Adler, “Eros in the library,” 69.} Adler cites Adeline Grand-Clément's definition of \emph{poikilia} as “harmonia that does not unify.”\footnote{Adeline Grand-Clément, “Poikilia,” in \emph{A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics}, ed. Pierre Destrée and Penelope Murray (Hoboken: John Wiley \& Sons, 2015), 410, cited in Adler, “Eros in the library,” 69.} The aesthetic beauty and pleasure in Pamphilia's method shifts the purpose of knowledge organisation.
Instead of looking at the text from a distance by counting words and searching for numerical patterns throughout Ahmed's book, which is a very common practice in the field of NLP, these phrases were chosen after closely reading and discussing them. However, there is still an awkwardness in mixing them through programmatic relocations, placing the words in another context than the author intended them to be in which speaks to their need to be handled with care because a misalignment of contexts can create hurt.
Instead of looking at the text from a distance by counting words and searching for numerical patterns throughout Ahmed's book, which is a very common practice in the field of NLP, these phrases were chosen after closely reading and discussing them. However, there is still an awkwardness in mixing them through programmatic relocations, placing the words in another context than the author intended them to be in, which speaks to their need to be handled with care because a misalignment of contexts can create hurt.
The transfiction is an exercise to think about the relocation and recontextualisation of language, which has started from specific words from the book that resonated with the questions around vernacular language processing. They introduce a thinking around the notion of orientation, which adds a situated dimension to the metaphor of mapping. Ahmed describes orientation as a gesture of being “turned toward certain objects, those that help us to find our way.”\footnote{Sara Ahmed, \emph{Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others} (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 1.} If language is seen as a landscape of textual objects, in which one wishes to orient oneself, how do markers of orientation and markers of difference emerge? How do we orient ourselves? And what does it mean to be orientated through linguistic markers?
@ -249,18 +249,18 @@ The relation between the vernacular and time is also explored in the writings of
In the two examples above, we are speaking about different kinds of vernacular. In the first case, the vernacular appears as vernacular language and in the second one as a form of a vernacular way finding system.
\emph{Where} the vernacular is positioned within vernacular language processing is a complex question. How do we differentiate between different forms of informal language, such as dialects, accents, or slang? How do we understand the vernacular in relation to standards, urgencies, access, and time? This is a political question. Due to structural inequalities it is important for some forms of speech, accents, grammar, to be included in mainstream ways of doing, such as in the case mentioned by Halcyon Lawrence, which is a request for the vernacular to become standardised. It matters who the standards exclude, who has access, or for what purpose time is optimised.
\emph{Where} the vernacular is positioned within vernacular language processing is a complex question. How do we differentiate between different forms of informal language, such as dialects, accents, or slang? How do we understand the vernacular in relation to standards, urgencies, access, and time? This is a political question. Due to structural inequalities, it is important for more forms of speech, accents, and grammar, to be included in mainstream ways of doing, such as in the case mentioned by Halcyon Lawrence, which is a request for the vernacular to become standardised. It matters who the standards exclude, who has access, or for what purpose time is optimised.
Optimisation is a term often encountered in technical environments, where it generally refers to maximising the technical performance and minimising the financial costs of a particular technology. Seda Gürses et al argue that “optimization-based systems are developed to capture and manipulate behavior and environments for the extraction of value” and that as a result, “they introduce broader risks and harms for users and environments beyond the outcome of a single algorithm within that system.”\footnote{Seda Gürses et al, “POTs: Protective Optimization Technologies,” \emph{FAT* '20: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency}, 177--188. Paper available at \url{https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02711.pdf}. Quote is p1 on uploaded version.} While optimisation has its purpose in specific situations such as the non-static naming system of roads, the way optimisation has been embraced by the sciences as a mode of operating removes the possibility to stay with the uncertainty of what will follow, because the goal is defined within a financial scope. In programming more specifically, code is often written with the projection of what it should do in the world already present.
What might it mean instead to slow down and re-embed language processing in a messy world,\footnote{Derived from: “Reclaiming operations are never easy. If reclaiming scientific research means re-embedding the sciences in a messy world, it is not only a question of accepting this world as such, but of positively appreciating it, of learning how to foster and strengthen, in Whitehead's words, `the habits of concrete appreciation of the individual facts in their full interplay of emergent values'.” Isabelle Stengers, \emph{Another Science is Possible: A Mnifesto for Slow Science }(Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 122.} making space for rethinking the goal of a project or even without aiming for solutions at all? To take the time to develop counter-hegemonic counting techniques that process language otherwise?\footnote{“...referencing and citation in Black studies are what Carmen Kynard calls 'vernacular insurrections': narratives that are 'not only counter hegemonic, but also affirmative of new, constantly mutating languages, identities, political methodologies, and social understandings that communities form in and of themselves both inwardly and outwardly . . . not merely the bits and pieces chipped off or chipping away at dominant culture, but a whole new emergence.”' Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 26--27. McKittrick is citing Carmen Kynard, \emph{Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition Literacies Studies} (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013), 10--11.} VLTK turns to slow processing as a way to turn and return to the material at hand.
What might it mean instead to slow down and re-embed language processing in a messy world,\footnote{Derived from: “Reclaiming operations are never easy. If reclaiming scientific research means re-embedding the sciences in a messy world, it is not only a question of accepting this world as such, but of positively appreciating it, of learning how to foster and strengthen, in Whitehead's words, `the habits of concrete appreciation of the individual facts in their full interplay of emergent values'.” Isabelle Stengers, \emph{Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science }(Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 122.} making space for rethinking the goal of a project or even without aiming for solutions at all? To take the time to develop counter-hegemonic counting techniques that process language otherwise?\footnote{“...referencing and citation in Black studies are what Carmen Kynard calls 'vernacular insurrections': narratives that are 'not only counter hegemonic, but also affirmative of new, constantly mutating languages, identities, political methodologies, and social understandings that communities form in and of themselves both inwardly and outwardly . . . not merely the bits and pieces chipped off or chipping away at dominant culture, but a whole new emergence.”' Katherine McKittrick, \emph{Dear Science and Other Stories}, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 26--27. McKittrick is citing Carmen Kynard, \emph{Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition Literacies Studies} (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013), 10--11.} VLTK turns to slow processing as a way to turn and return to the material at hand.
\section{\nohyphens{A conclusion that is\\a beginning}}
\noindent
Although the questions we ask may seem particular to language processing applications in scope, they are still relevant in a broader sense, as the intentions behind human communication are more and more evaluated by algorithms, especially on social media. For example, since 2017 hate speech and harassment recognition on Twitter has been heavily relying on algorithms, but trolls have come to adopt methods that can circumvent their speech from being flagged. Twitter has what they call a Hate Lab that works on algorithms “to end hate speech and improve healthy conversations online.”\footnote{\url{https://developer.twitter.com/en/community/success-stories/hatelab}} Formally codifying the understanding of what hate speech consists of leaves plenty of ways to work around a detection algorithm, and so methods of pursuing reckless harassment and hate speech have become plentiful. One can, for instance, make use of stylistic devices such as metonymy, antiphrasis, or irony. On French Twitter, immigrants and their children are referred to mockingly as “chances for the country,” which implies that a certain category of immigrants' contribution to society is nefarious. By using such masked language, the messages escape hate speech detection while continuing to spread their harm. Of course, the deciphering of such allusions requires a familiarisation with the vernacular codes of these communities. Emojis are also used as signifiers of a shared universe of references. For the French it might be the map, a signifier of white supremacism that nods towards a map of the average IQs by country.\footnote{This refers to the map in the racist and antihuman book by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, \emph{IQ and the Wealth of Nations}(Westport: Praeger, 2002). See also Pauline Moullot, “La carte mondiale des QI, relayée par des comptes d'extrême droite, a-t-elle une valeur scientifique?” \emph{Liberation}, November 14, 2019, \url{https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/2019/11/14/la-carte-mondiale-des-qi-relayee-par-des-comptes-d-extreme-droite-a-t-elle-une-valeur-scientifique\_1754773/}} As such, it is important to remember that hate speech can also be vernacular language.
Although the questions we ask may seem particular to language processing applications in scope, they are still relevant in a broader sense, as the intentions behind human communication are more and more evaluated by algorithms, especially on social media. For example, since 2017 hate speech and harassment recognition on Twitter has been heavily reliant on algorithms, but trolls have come to adopt methods that can circumvent their speech from being flagged. Twitter has what they call a Hate Lab that works on algorithms “to end hate speech and improve healthy conversations online.”\footnote{\url{https://developer.twitter.com/en/community/success-stories/hatelab}} Formally codifying the understanding of what hate speech consists of leaves plenty of ways to work around a detection algorithm, and so methods of pursuing reckless harassment and hate speech have become plentiful. One can, for instance, make use of stylistic devices such as metonymy, antiphrasis, or irony. On French Twitter, immigrants and their children are referred to mockingly as “chances for the country,” which implies that a certain category of immigrants' contribution to society is nefarious. By using such masked language, the messages escape hate speech detection while continuing to spread their harm. Of course, the deciphering of such allusions requires a familiarisation with the vernacular codes of these communities. Emojis are also used as signifiers of a shared universe of references. For the French it might be the map, a signifier of white supremacism that nods towards a map of the average IQs by country.\footnote{This refers to the map in the racist and antihuman book by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, \emph{IQ and the Wealth of Nations}(Westport: Praeger, 2002). See also Pauline Moullot, “La carte mondiale des QI, relayée par des comptes d'extrême droite, a-t-elle une valeur scientifique?” \emph{Liberation}, November 14, 2019, \url{https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/2019/11/14/la-carte-mondiale-des-qi-relayee-par-des-comptes-d-extreme-droite-a-t-elle-une-valeur-scientifique_1754773/}} As such, it is important to remember that hate speech can also be vernacular language.
On the other hand, vernacular communication can be harmfully misunderstood by algorithms trained with a normative use of language in mind. This is the case with Perspective, the toxic speech detection API from Jigsaw (Google), which has a history of flagging African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as toxic.\footnote{Devin Coldewey, “Racial bias observed in hate speech detection algorithm from Google,” \emph{Techcrunch}, August 15, 2019, \url{https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/14/racial-bias-observed-in-hate-speech-detection-algorithm-from-google/}} Still, as of early 2021, Perspective was processing about 500 million requests daily in online spaces such as the comment sections of El País, Disqus, The New York Times, and others.\footnote{ Kyle Wiggers, “Jigsaw's AI-powered toxic language detector is now processing 500 million requests daily,” \emph{Venturebeat}, February 8, 2021, \url{https://venturebeat.com/2021/02/08/jigsaws-ai-powered-toxic-language-detector-is-now-processing-500-million-requests-daily/}} The risks of these language models reinforcing standards and refusing vernaculars are hard to understate. Communities that have been and still are marginalised, become marginalised further through the rejection of their linguistic expression.
On the other hand, vernacular communication can be harmfully misunderstood by algorithms trained with a normative use of language in mind. This is the case with Perspective, the toxic speech detection API from Jigsaw (Google), which has a history of flagging African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as toxic.\footnote{Devin Coldewey, “Racial bias observed in hate speech detection algorithm from Google,” \emph{Techcrunch}, August 15, 2019, \url{https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/14/racial-bias-observed-in-hate-speech-detection-algorithm-from-google/}} Still, as of early 2021, Perspective was processing about 500 million requests daily in online spaces such as the comment sections of \emph{El País}, \emph{Disqus}, \emph{The New York Times}, and others.\footnote{ Kyle Wiggers, “Jigsaw's AI-powered toxic language detector is now processing 500 million requests daily,” \emph{Venturebeat}, February 8, 2021, \url{https://venturebeat.com/2021/02/08/jigsaws-ai-powered-toxic-language-detector-is-now-processing-500-million-requests-daily/}} The risks of these language models reinforcing standards and refusing vernaculars are hard to understate. Communities that have been and still are marginalised become marginalised further through the rejection of their linguistic expression.
Both cases show that language models are not able to adapt to contexts and that moderation should not be left to automated systems. The vernacular and the systematic are hard to pull apart, resulting in a complex interrelation that is urgent to be thought through, not just in the interest of platforms.
@ -268,6 +268,7 @@ VLTK started from an interest to understand programming in relation to language
As non-professional practitioners of language processing, we are curious to understand what it means to work with tools that are commonly used while staying close to them. As such, we like to think of VLTK as a project for discussing and thinking, rather than working towards solutions; making space for programming practices, logics, and methods that depart from local standards, vernacular measurements, and forms of abstracting otherwise. VLTK is, for us, an environment to:
\noindent
... think about text processing tools, question them, and talk about them, in order to explore their vernacular possibilities\\
... explore social aspects of formats and formal text processing systems\\
... explore textual data as vernacular matter, through reading systems, exercises, small scripts ...\\
@ -284,25 +285,25 @@ As non-professional practitioners of language processing, we are curious to unde
\noindent
This publication came together as a form of resonant publishing: publishing that is not done at the end of a process of thought, but is embedded in the middle of a social process where thoughts develop and unfold.\footnote{Our model of publishing is informed by (among many others) Stevphen Shukaitis, “Toward and Insurrection of the Published? Ten Thoughts on Ticks and Comrades,” \emph{Transversal Texts}, June 2014, \url{https://transversal.at/transversal/0614/shukaitis/en}} The publication holds five contributions written by a group of co-conspirators that work with forms of vernacular languaging, software culture, and textual archives. Their contributions provide us with a rich ground of understandings of different forms of vernacular cultures and technologies.
We invited Rosemary Grennan from MayDay Rooms in London to be in conversation with us about their digital archive Leftovers, a shared online platform of political ephemera such as leaflets, posters, and manifestos. In the interview Rosemary speaks about the structure of the archive, how they used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and NLP tools to rethink this structure, and which dissemination tactics they have developed to make the work public.
We invited Rosemary Grennan from MayDay Rooms in London to be in conversation with us about their digital archive Leftovers, a shared online platform of political ephemera such as leaflets, posters, and manifestos. In the interview, Rosemary speaks about the structure of the archive, how they used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and NLP tools to rethink this structure, and which dissemination tactics they have developed to make the work public.
Clara Balaguer presents a range of voices and media formats together to speak about and through the vernacular. “A high-low mix tape on the subject of the vernacular” combines lyrics, poetry, email snippets, and theoretical writing in the form of a mix-tape and lecture performance, understanding the vernacular in relation to the hegemonic position of “correct” English, writing from an “I” perspective.
Clara Balaguer presents a range of voices and media formats together to speak about and through the vernacular. “A high-low mix tape on the subject of the vernacular” combines lyrics, poetry, email snippets, and theoretical writing in the form of a mixtape and lecture performance, understanding the vernacular in relation to the hegemonic position of “correct” English, writing from an “I” perspective.
Ren Loren Britton's “Turnabouts and deadnames: shapeshifting trans* and disabled vernaculars” speaks about deadnames as haunting matterings filtered through the fixed categories of bureaucratic institutional interfaces. Britton describes the violence and harm that these standardised systems produce and the potential for resistance to a rectangularised spreadsheet logic through the practices of trans* vernacular language.
Cengiz Mengüç shares a selection of a growing archive and research-in-progress around vernacular street typography of photos taken in Turkey between travels and family visits through 2019 and 2021. His attention to typography in the public space reminds us that written language exists not only in its abstraction. Street typography is very much shaped by its materiality, such as the encoded information or the sun-faded gradients that appear over time, but also by the traces of “reverse diaspora”\footnote{This is a term that Mengüç used in an email exchange while introducing his contribution, referring to the attempt to ”trace back the roots of certain local Rotterdam (diasporic) aesthetics and design cultures, scrolling back and forth in my iphone folders, I decided to work with this selection of photos I took in Turkey in 2019 \& 2021 in between travels and family visits”.} aesthetics that have travelled between the city of Rotterdam and Turkey.
Cengiz Mengüç shares a selection of a growing archive and research-in-progress around vernacular street typography of photos taken in Turkey between travels and family visits through 2019 and 2021. His attention to typography in the public space reminds us that written language exists not only in its abstraction. Street typography is very much shaped by its materiality, such as the encoded information or the sun-faded gradients that appear over time, but also by the traces of “reverse diaspora”\footnote{This is a term that Mengüç used in an email exchange while introducing his contribution, referring to the attempt to “trace back the roots of certain local Rotterdam (diasporic) aesthetics and design cultures, scrolling back and forth in my iphone folders, I decided to work with this selection of photos I took in Turkey in 2019 \& 2021 in between travels and family visits.”} aesthetics that have travelled between the city of Rotterdam and Turkey.
Michael Murtaugh uses the vernacular as a lens to understand the difference between programming projects and environments Processing and ImageMagick. “Torn at the seams: vernacular approaches to teaching with computational tools” introduces both software projects and describes how each of them comes with its own culture, aesthetics, mindset, and connections to specific contexts including the Bauhaus, minimal art, and the MIT Media Lab. Murtaugh embraces the vernacular and messiness in software projects and shows us how such an approach generates a whole range of open invitations for others.
VLTK is produced in the proximity of Varia, a collective-space in the South of Rotterdam that works on questions around everyday technology. This context allows us to unfold programming practices that combine practice-based research with networked publishing, while bridging fields of software studies and tool making, which we approach with trans*feminist sensibilities.\footnote{“Trans*feminism is certainly a polyhedric dynamic at work, in mutual affection with the previous forces. We refer to the research as such, in order to convoke around that star (*) all intersectional and intra-sectional aspects that are possibly needed. Our trans*feminist lens is sharpened by queer and anti-colonial sensibilities, and oriented towards (but not limited to) trans*generational, trans*media, trans*disciplinary, trans*geopolitical, trans*expertise, and trans*genealogical forms of study. The situated mixing of software studies, media archaeology, artistic research, science and technology studies, critical theory and queer-anticolonial-feminist-antifa-technosciences purposefully counters hierarchies, subalternities, privileges and erasures in disciplinary methods.” From “Volumetric Regimes, Material cultures of quantifies presence,” by Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting), \url{https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Introduction}}
VLTK is produced in the proximity of Varia, a collective-space in the south of Rotterdam that works on questions around everyday technology. This context allows us to unfold programming practices that combine practice-based research with networked publishing, while bridging fields of software studies and tool making, which we approach with trans*feminist sensibilities.\footnote{“Trans*feminism is certainly a polyhedric dynamic at work, in mutual affection with the previous forces. We refer to the research as such, in order to convoke around that star (*) all intersectional and intra-sectional aspects that are possibly needed. Our trans*feminist lens is sharpened by queer and anti-colonial sensibilities, and oriented towards (but not limited to) trans*generational, trans*media, trans*disciplinary, trans*geopolitical, trans*expertise, and trans*genealogical forms of study. The situated mixing of software studies, media archaeology, artistic research, science and technology studies, critical theory and queer-anticolonial-feminist-antifa-technosciences purposefully counters hierarchies, subalternities, privileges and erasures in disciplinary methods.” From “Volumetric Regimes, Material cultures of quantifies presence,” by Possible Bodies (Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting), \url{https://volumetricregimes.xyz/index.php?title=Introduction}}
Our (Cristina Cochior's, Julie Boschat-Thorez's, and Manetta Berends's) shared backgrounds in Media Design and Communication at the Piet Zwart Instituut, and hands-on experiences that we gained while working with language processing tools in art and design projects or commissions, have guided our understanding of the subject.
Our (Cristina Cochior, Julie Boschat-Thorez, and Manetta Berends) shared backgrounds in Media Design and Communication at the Piet Zwart Instituut, and hands-on experiences that we gained while working with language processing tools in art and design projects or commissions, have guided our understanding of the subject.
We orient ourselves through different languages: French, Dutch, Romanian, English, Darija, Spanish, and German, but also Python, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Bash among others, which we learn while watching TV, browsing the internet, or in conversation with family members.
This publication is published in a printed edition and digital one. The digital version is published on a self-hosted MediaWiki instance, or “wiki” in short, where we aim to unfold this research trajectory further. We see the wiki as a porous place that allows us to do this in close proximity of peers, friends, and other co-conspirators. You can find it at: \url{https://vltk.vvvvvvaria.org/}.
The printed edition was made using Free, Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS) tools by Marianne Plano. This publication came together through the use of ImageMagick and LaTeX, pushing the interplay between standardised layouts and vernacular effects further.
The printed edition was made using Free/Libre Open Source (F/LOSS) tools by Marianne Plano. This publication came together through the use of ImageMagick and LaTeX, pushing the interplay between standardised layouts and vernacular effects further.
Both the printed edition and the wiki are published under the CC4r open licence,\footnote{\url{https://gitlab.constantvzw.org/unbound/cc4r/}} which allows anyone to use, modify, and distribute versions of the work, under the condition that any derived work will be published under the same licence or one that is permissive in a similar way.
@ -60,7 +60,7 @@ Before playing the song, ad lib with story: found all of these songs while searc
\subsection{Lyrics [Excerpt]}
\noindent
They called our own languages vernacular
They called our own languages vernacular\\
So English was the\\
Real language we had to speak in school so\\
Everything was English\\
@ -189,13 +189,13 @@ I first heard about \emph{diskarte}, as a design concept, from Pamela Cajilig, w
\emph{Diskarte,} in contrast, is a subconscious attitude applied to design or life that stems not from luxury ennui from the want or lack of resources. It is a knowing how to solve and accept insurmountable problems in the face of poverty. We tend to see \emph{diskarte} attitude as something to be both proud and ashamed of, as these patchwork solutions arise when money (or any other desirable asset) is missing.
Though in the North/West there is a more-or-less strong public infrastructure and consciousness for recycling, it exists alongside this cavalier faith in the renewability, the false abundance of all resources. This is the contradiction of the most pedestrian form of Western eco-sensibility. In the Philippines, on the other hand, recycling starts at home with people saving and using all sorts of scraps and fragments to make \emph{diskarte}. Then the local garbage men collect waste in wooden carts and sacks, roving the neighbourhood with baskets and carts like the \emph{manghahasa} (tool sharpener), the sellers of \emph{balut} (incubated duck fetus eggs) and \emph{taho} (soybean curd with tapioca and syrup) and other mobile cottage industry microbusinesses. The independent trash men buy or simply collect recyclable paper, bottles and plastic to resell to junk dealers, maybe even back to Coca-Cola factories. Larger scale garbage collectors, with proper trucks and stuff, outsource the sorting service to junk shops or take it upon themselves for maximizing profit or simply bring unsegregated trash to landfills, where hundreds of informal dwellers---who may also live on these mountains of trash---pick doggedly through mountains of waste, mining for monetizable objects, relying on luck and persistence.
Though in the North/West there is a more-or-less strong public infrastructure and consciousness for recycling, it exists alongside this cavalier faith in the renewability, the false abundance of all resources. This is the contradiction of the most pedestrian form of Western eco-sensibility. In the Philippines, on the other hand, recycling starts at home with people saving and using all sorts of scraps and fragments to make \emph{diskarte}. Then the local garbage men collect waste in wooden carts and sacks, roving the neighbourhood with baskets and carts like the \emph{manghahasa} (tool sharpener), the sellers of \emph{balut} (incubated duck fetus eggs) and \emph{taho} (soybean curd with tapioca and syrup) and other mobile cottage industry microbusinesses. The independent trash men buy or simply collect recyclable paper, bottles and plastic to resell to junk dealers, maybe even back to Coca-Cola factories. Larger scale garbage collectors, with proper trucks and stuff, outsource the sorting service to junk shops or take it upon themselves for maximizing profit or simply bring unsegregated trash to landfills, where hundreds of informal dwellers -- who may also live on these mountains of trash -- pick doggedly through mountains of waste, mining for monetizable objects, relying on luck and persistence.
\emph{Chamba}, which is something like luck, also affects \emph{diskarte}. Your efforts to make \emph{diskarte} always require some element of luck, fatalistic and somewhat effortless auspiciousness. When you live so close to want and have so much faith in the supernatural, the idea of life becomes a set of bets you may win or lose---so you roll the dice and pray for favour as a natural component of action.
\emph{Chamba}, which is something like luck, also affects \emph{diskarte}. Your efforts to make \emph{diskarte} always require some element of luck, fatalistic and somewhat effortless auspiciousness. When you live so close to want and have so much faith in the supernatural, the idea of life becomes a set of bets you may win or lose -- so you roll the dice and pray for favour as a natural component of action.
The last particularity of \emph{diskarte} involves the concept of resilient humour. A not-so-pretty guy can get a hot girl with the power of his \emph{diskarte}---his humorous and engaging conversation. Same goes for site-specific design solutions. My recent favourite \emph{diskarte} find is a bench made for a patch of sidewalk that had both an elevated and depressed area. So they built a bench with one set of legs shorter than the other so it could be positioned, presumably, to maximise the hours of shade and not be in the way of passers-by. Though, maybe they just liked the view better sitting in that direction. It’s a funny looking thing and you can’t help but crack a grin when you see it. If you see it, that is. Often, we take for granted these tiny moments of wry ingenuity.
The last particularity of \emph{diskarte} involves the concept of resilient humour. A not-so-pretty guy can get a hot girl with the power of his \emph{diskarte} -- his humorous and engaging conversation. Same goes for site-specific design solutions. My recent favourite \emph{diskarte} find is a bench made for a patch of sidewalk that had both an elevated and depressed area. So they built a bench with one set of legs shorter than the other so it could be positioned, presumably, to maximise the hours of shade and not be in the way of passers-by. Though, maybe they just liked the view better sitting in that direction. It’s a funny looking thing and you can’t help but crack a grin when you see it. If you see it, that is. Often, we take for granted these tiny moments of wry ingenuity.
Decolonising local aesthetic does not mean returning to some idealistic, precolonial, tribal imagery, as if every Filipino had the right to appropriate indigenous culture because that’s the only thing they consider ‘pure’ or decolonised. Just because we are brown, doesn’t mean we belong to these groups. Just because some of the Aytas or Mangyan may identify as Filipino, doesn’t mean we have a right to claim their culture as ours and \emph{halo-halo} (mix-mix) it to our intra-culturally gentrified tastes. This is not to say that appropriation, mestizaje, creolization is never an enriching experience. It can be if it redistributes the locus of power. More than departing entirely from any pre-colonial influence, the way we’ve approached decolonising (and it pains me that this project-word has been run through the mill so consumptively by the Western world, to the point that it’s now demodé, as if emancipation were a biennale fashion trend of inconsequential shelf-life) through print and making public is by encouraging tenderness for the vernacular, everyday aesthetic influences. The stuff you see in lowbrow design at street level. The further away the vernacular designer’s technical knowledge is from Western or Northern processes --- hand-made, non-computerised production, for example --- the greater the chance of mispronunciation. A step towards decolonisation is not denying that these connections to the occidental aesthetic exist, but rather a shift in the perception of value: what is local, however uncouth, is not of lesser value. It does not merit a white- or west-washing. The local vernacular does merit close study and rigorous critical framing. Decolonising local aesthetic is an exploration of what is happening, what is being uttered now. It is not only a reaching into the past for a root of unsullied, idealized cultural purity that none of us can achieve. It is a commitment to the present for clues as to who we are --- a making visible of our current face without shame for its developing nature.\\
Decolonising local aesthetic does not mean returning to some idealistic, precolonial, tribal imagery, as if every Filipino had the right to appropriate indigenous culture because that’s the only thing they consider ‘pure’ or decolonised. Just because we are brown, doesn’t mean we belong to these groups. Just because some of the Aytas or Mangyan may identify as Filipino, doesn’t mean we have a right to claim their culture as ours and \emph{halo-halo} (mix-mix) it to our intra-culturally gentrified tastes. This is not to say that appropriation, mestizaje, creolization is never an enriching experience. It can be if it redistributes the locus of power. More than departing entirely from any pre-colonial influence, the way we’ve approached decolonising (and it pains me that this project-word has been run through the mill so consumptively by the Western world, to the point that it’s now demodé, as if emancipation were a biennale fashion trend of inconsequential shelf-life) through print and making public is by encouraging tenderness for the vernacular, everyday aesthetic influences. The stuff you see in lowbrow design at street level. The further away the vernacular designer’s technical knowledge is from Western or Northern processes -- hand-made, non-computerised production, for example -- the greater the chance of mispronunciation. A step towards decolonisation is not denying that these connections to the occidental aesthetic exist, but rather a shift in the perception of value: what is local, however uncouth, is not of lesser value. It does not merit a white- or west-washing. The local vernacular does merit close study and rigorous critical framing. Decolonising local aesthetic is an exploration of what is happening, what is being uttered now. It is not only a reaching into the past for a root of unsullied, idealized cultural purity that none of us can achieve. It is a commitment to the present for clues as to who we are -- a making visible of our current face without shame for its developing nature.\\
\section{\hspace{-1em}TRACK 5 Mash-Up}
@ -213,9 +213,9 @@ Decolonising local aesthetic does not mean returning to some idealistic, precolo
\subsection{Lyrics [Excerpt]}
\noindent
It’s no exaggeration that Linton Kwesi Johnson, who went to Britain from Jamaica at the age of 11 to follow his mother, part of the Windrush generation, did more than most to make black “cool” in Britain and beyond. In his music and poetry, he not only threw orthographical conventions by the wayside -- “Inglan” for England, “revalueshanary” for revolutionary \emph{-- }but with songs like \emph{Sonny’s Letta}, LKJ put at the centre of British attention the ignominy and hardship of the black experience in the United Kingdom.
It’s no exaggeration that Linton Kwesi Johnson, who went to Britain from Jamaica at the age of 11 to follow his mother, part of the Windrush generation, did more than most to make black “cool” in Britain and beyond. In his music and poetry, he not only threw orthographical conventions by the wayside -- “Inglan” for England, “revalueshanary” for revolutionary -- but with songs like \emph{Sonny’s Letta}, LKJ put at the centre of British attention the ignominy and hardship of the black experience in the United Kingdom.
In this hymn, Sonny is writing to his mother from Brixton prison relating his experience of how cops came up upon them as he and his friend Jim were waiting for a bus, “not causing no fuss”. Without provocation, “Out jump tree policeman/All a dem carryin baton/Dem walk straight up to me and Jim.” It is then that Sonny fights back, resulting in the death of the cop.
In this hymn, Sonny is writing to his mother from Brixton prison relating his experience of how cops came up upon them as he and his friend Jim were waiting for a bus, “not causing no fuss.” Without provocation, “Out jump tree policeman/All a dem carryin baton/Dem walk straight up to me and Jim.” It is then that Sonny fights back, resulting in the death of the cop.
“It’s winter 1980. I am 13, 14 and there is something in LKJ’s voice. You can’t quite figure out a lot of what he is saying, because of the Caribbean English he is using, but we could figure out it was anti-authoritarian. There is something about the voice, the defiant tone.” The standard fare that he had grown up listening to was pop on the radio and his father’s jazz collection. “You listen to \emph{Sonny’s Letta} and you say, what the fuck? This is a completely new thing. How is this possible?”
@ -233,7 +233,7 @@ In this hymn, Sonny is writing to his mother from Brixton prison relating his ex
\subsection{Lyrics [Excerpt]}
\noindent
Linton Kwesi Johnson is famed as the inventor of dub poetry, but his ability to take history and make it relevant --- as he does in ‘Reggae Fi Peach’ --- makes him more of a journalist.
Linton Kwesi Johnson is famed as the inventor of dub poetry, but his ability to take history and make it relevant -- as he does in ‘Reggae Fi Peach’ -- makes him more of a journalist.
While based on the toasting (a style of lyrical chanting) of reggae DJs such as I-Roy and U-Roy, riding with vocal braggadocio over riddims, LKJ wrote the poetry first, then it was set to reggae music.
@ -254,7 +254,7 @@ It was serious poetry, using the language of the black British working class to
\subsection{Mix Notes}
\noindent
Play Sample 1 (a capella version of \emph{Inglan is a Bitch}) for a few seconds, allowing its cadence to fall. Then play Sample 2 (from 3’30" onwards, instrumental outro of I\emph{nglan is a Bitch}) under Sample 1, allowing the music to build a rhythmic texture. After a few seconds, mute Sample 2. Repeat process 2 or 3 times, taking care to allow a capella and scored readings space to breathe.\\
Play Sample 1 (a capella version of \emph{Inglan is a Bitch}) for a few seconds, allowing its cadence to fall. Then play Sample 2 (from 3’30" onwards, instrumental outro of \emph{Inglan is a Bitch}) under Sample 1, allowing the music to build a rhythmic texture. After a few seconds, mute Sample 2. Repeat process 2 or 3 times, taking care to allow a capella and scored readings space to breathe.\\
\section{\hspace{-1em}TRACK 7}
@ -328,7 +328,7 @@ In the pre-scientific conception of the body of the late classical and medieval
\subsection{Mix Notes}
\noindent
Play until approx 0’55’
Play until approx 0’55”
\subsection{Lyrics [Excerpt]}
@ -383,7 +383,7 @@ A word of caution to would-be lovers of the vernacular. Alterity makes no saints
\subsection{Lyrics [Excerpt]}
\noindent
** **I shall try to say something useful about the language of people who speak the vulgar tongue, hoping thereby to enlighten somewhat the understanding of those who walk the streets like the blind, ever thinking that what lies ahead is behind them. I call ‘vernacular language’ that which infants acquire from those around them when they first begin to distinguish sounds; or, to put it more succinctly, I declare that vernacular language is that which we learn without any formal instruction, by imitating our nurses. There also exists another kind of language, at one remove from us, which the Romans called gramatica {[}grammar{]}. The Greeks and some - but not all - other peoples also have this secondary kind of language. Few, however, achieve complete fluency in it, since knowledge of its rules and theory can only be developed through dedication to a lengthy course of study. Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the human race; second, because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial. And this more noble kind of language is what I intend to discuss.\\
** **I shall try to say something useful about the language of people who speak the vulgar tongue, hoping thereby to enlighten somewhat the understanding of those who walk the streets like the blind, ever thinking that what lies ahead is behind them. I call ‘vernacular language’ that which infants acquire from those around them when they first begin to distinguish sounds; or, to put it more succinctly, I declare that vernacular language is that which we learn without any formal instruction, by imitating our nurses. There also exists another kind of language, at one remove from us, which the Romans called gramatica {[}grammar{]}. The Greeks and some -- but not all -- other peoples also have this secondary kind of language. Few, however, achieve complete fluency in it, since knowledge of its rules and theory can only be developed through dedication to a lengthy course of study. Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the human race; second, because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial. And this more noble kind of language is what I intend to discuss.\\
\section{\hspace{-1em}TRACK 11}
@ -476,7 +476,7 @@ To narrate from the voice of the eye is something the ivory tower cannot quite d
The eye that works to be seen, and nothing else, is blind to its own position as member of a body, a constituency of other senses, that enrich the map of perception eye am able to draw. The eye that works to see beyond itself is a tribute to the flesh that gives it purpose.
The eye is built to grasp everything “else”, outside of its body, outside of its lens. The eye’s function is to understand itself in relation to a landscape, inhabited by other eyes.
The eye is built to grasp everything “else,” outside of its body, outside of its lens. The eye’s function is to understand itself in relation to a landscape, inhabited by other eyes.
The only eye that sees itself as it looks on the world is one that is ill. Clouded vision results from injuries to the ego as from lesions of the organ. The whole eye sees past itself, does not perceive the boundary between itself and the rest of the world. It is this borderless and self-unconscious eye from which our words must be spoken, which is to say, written.
@ -488,7 +488,7 @@ When writing from the eye, when the eye lifts the veil that obscures it from the
HEARING EWE
Ah, but ears have no lids, as Steven Connor writes and as my friend Renan Laru-an has also said. The ears cannot shut ewe out. When eye think of the ewe that is conjured where conflict escalates--- -- he ewe that an irritated eye beholds -- the figure of the ewe departs from the gentle. Non-violent communication calls for the effacement of the ewe, which can be perceived as accusatory. Non-violence calls for speaking from the personal experience of an eye that doesn’t judge, accuse, or assume motives for the actions of a ewe.
Ah, but ears have no lids, as Steven Connor writes and as my friend Renan Laru-an has also said. The ears cannot shut ewe out. When eye think of the ewe that is conjured where conflict escalates -- the ewe that an irritated eye beholds -- the figure of the ewe departs from the gentle. Non-violent communication calls for the effacement of the ewe, which can be perceived as accusatory. Non-violence calls for speaking from the personal experience of an eye that doesn’t judge, accuse, or assume motives for the actions of a ewe.
Eye will have to remember, next time, to picture the homonymous image of ewe -- a soft, fuzzy sheep-mother jumping over fences made of dreams -- whenever eye am addressed as a ewe under duress. The ewe is not always rapacious mob, imagined thief, aggressor. How can eye summon a ewe without corralling it in fear? The eye that sees the ewe behind behaviour eye fear cannot but approach this ewe with some degree of tenderness. How can the eye, imprisoned in explication, in assessing and judging, become all ear instead, an implicated listener? How can eye hear ewe?\\
world's in there. Of course if I want to talk to almost \emph{anyone}\\
I have to go in. Fuck!\footnote{Ari Banias, “At Any Given Moment,” in \emph{Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics}, eds. TC Tolbert and Trace Peterson (San Francisco: Nightboat Books, 2013), 61.}
\begin{flushright}
Ari Banias\\
“At Any Given Moment”
\end{flushright}
\end{quoting}
\newpage
@ -65,20 +60,13 @@
\setlength{\parindent}{2em}
\setlength{\parskip}{0}
This is an aching archive---the one that contains all of our growing grief, all of our dispossessed longing for the bodies that were once among us and have gone over to the side that we will go to too. When I told you that I will probably haunt you, you made it about you, but it is about me. The opposite of dispossession is not possession. It is not accumulation. It is unforgetting. It is mattering.\footnote{Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective, “Before Dispossession, or Surviving It,” \emph{Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies} 12, no. 1 (2016): 2.}
\begin{flushright}
Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck,\\and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective
“Before Dispossession or Surviving It”
\end{flushright}
This is an aching archive---the one that contains all of our growing grief, all of our dispossessed longing for the bodies that were once among us and have gone over to the side that we will go to too. When I told you that I will probably haunt you, you made it about you, but it is about me. The opposite of dispossession is not possession. It is not accumulation. It is unforgetting. It is mattering.\footnote{Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective, “Before Dispossession, or Surviving It,” \emph{Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies} 12, no. 1 (2016): 2.}
\end{quoting}
\addtolength{\skip\footins}{-10pt}
\noindent
Vernacular comes to matter in the dictionary within language and architecture. In language defined as “using a language or dialect native to a region or country rather than a literary, cultured, or foreign language,” and in architecture defined as “of, relating to, or being the common building style of a period or place.”\footnote{\url{https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vernacular}} These definitions surface a relation to community (i.e. what people one comes from) and place (i.e. what relations are from that context). Reinventing material-discursive worlds that come to make the vernacular and actual conditions of possibility for trans* and disabled life is the community of thought, practice, and life that this writing begins from. This means practicing “nothing about us without us” politics,\footnote{Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, \emph{Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice} (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2018).} tying ideas of “liberation” to the liberation of all BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) trans* women,\footnote{Emi Koyama, “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” in \emph{Catching A Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the Twenty-First Century,} ed. by Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003).} analysing power differences,\footnote{Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David Rubin, and Angela Willey, \emph{Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader,} (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017).} and upholding non-compliant politics as desirable.\footnote{Aimi Hamraie, \emph{Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability,} (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).} Moving from a position spelled out by Disability Justice and following articulations from crip technoscience and trans*feminism, this article seeks to centre the experiences of those most impacted. Disability Justice is a capatious paradigm that “value{[}s{]} our people as they are, for who they are, and understands that people have inherent worth outside of capitalist notions of productivity.”\footnote{Sins Invalid, \emph{Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People}. (Sins Invalid, 2016).} In this way, “access{[}ibility is{]} a frictioned project requiring decolonization and racial justice."\footnote{Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch. 2019. “Crip Technoscience Manifesto,” \emph{Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience} 5, no. 1 (April 2019): 1--34.} Access is the project within which trans* and Disability Justice coalesce and this why I bring Disability Justice and trans* theory together when thinking about trans* vernacular practices. Meanings of place, infrastructure, and community in this article swivel into each other through two intersecting and intersectional\footnote{ Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” \emph{University of Chicago Legal Forum,} no. 1, 1989: 139--68.} sites where vernacular languages come to matter specifically: What does it mean to create conditions of flourishing for trans* and disabled lives in technoscience?\footnote{Trans* as in trans*gender studies, accounts for the fact that gender as it is experienced is more varied than can be accounted for by binary ideologies. See: Sandy Stone, “The 'Empire' Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto,” 1987, first presented at "Other Voices, Other Worlds: Questioning Gender and Ethnicity," Santa Cruz, CA, 1988; Koyama, “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” 2003; Susan Stryker (ed.), \emph{The Transgender Studies Reader}, (London: Routledge, 2006).
Vernacular comes to matter in the dictionary within language and architecture. In language defined as “using a language or dialect native to a region or country rather than a literary, cultured, or foreign language,” and in architecture defined as “of, relating to, or being the common building style of a period or place.”\footnote{\url{https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vernacular}} These definitions surface a relation to community (i.e. what people one comes from) and place (i.e. what relations are from that context). Reinventing material-discursive worlds that come to make the vernacular and actual conditions of possibility for trans* and disabled life is the community of thought, practice, and life that this writing begins from. This means practicing “nothing about us without us” politics,\footnote{Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, \emph{Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice} (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2018).} tying ideas of “liberation” to the liberation of all BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) trans* women,\footnote{Emi Koyama, “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” in \emph{Catching A Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the Twenty-First Century,} ed. by Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003).} analysing power differences,\footnote{Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David Rubin, and Angela Willey, \emph{Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader,} (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017).} and upholding non-compliant politics as desirable.\footnote{Aimi Hamraie, \emph{Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability,} (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).} Moving from a position spelled out by Disability Justice and following articulations from crip technoscience and trans*feminism, this article seeks to centre the experiences of those most impacted. Disability Justice is a capatious paradigm that “value{[}s{]} our people as they are, for who they are, and understands that people have inherent worth outside of capitalist notions of productivity.”\footnote{Sins Invalid, \emph{Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People}. (Sins Invalid, 2016).} In this way, “access{[}ibility is{]} a frictioned project requiring decolonization and racial justice."\footnote{Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch. 2019. “Crip Technoscience Manifesto,” \emph{Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience} 5, no. 1 (April 2019): 1--34.} Access is the project within which trans* and Disability Justice coalesce and this why I bring Disability Justice and trans* theory together when thinking about trans* vernacular practices. Meanings of place, infrastructure, and community in this article swivel into each other through two intersecting and intersectional\footnote{ Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” \emph{University of Chicago Legal Forum,} no. 1, 1989: 139--68.} sites where vernacular languages come to matter specifically: What does it mean to create conditions of flourishing for trans* and disabled lives in technoscience?\footnote{Trans* as in trans*gender studies, accounts for the fact that gender as it is experienced is more varied than can be accounted for by binary ideologies. See: Sandy Stone, “The ‘Empire’ Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto,” 1987, first presented at “Other Voices, Other Worlds: Questioning Gender and Ethnicity," Santa Cruz, CA, 1988; Koyama, “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” 2003; Susan Stryker (ed.), \emph{The Transgender Studies Reader}, (London: Routledge, 2006).
The asterisk is taken to signify an opening of trans*gender to a greater range of meanings. Avery Tompkins, “Asterisk,” \emph{Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ)} 1, no. 1--2 (May 2014): 26--27.
@ -91,35 +79,35 @@ Following vernacular-as-in--deadname and vernacular-as-in--what-did-you-say, thi
\noindent
DEADNAME as defined by the Digital Transgender Archive is: “A name that an individual no longer uses or identifies with. Deadnaming is the use or revealing of a person's deadname without their consent, often with harmful intentions.”\footnote{ “Glossary,” \emph{Digital Transgender Archive}, 2021,~\url{https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/learn/glossary}. Accessed November 16, 2021.}
Recently I changed my name again. With my first name change I shifted my name from something femme-legible in one context into a more gender-not-normal (as Hannah Gadsby would call it\footnote{Hannah Gadsby, \emph{Nanette,} comedy performance, Netflix, 2018.}) way of being called. For the past five years, that name held despite movements because it felt like a quick fix, just enough of a differentiation from my original deadname, a kind of living with the old in a trick of reformulated spelling. For a while this second name was fixed into a sign for me but over time that sign hasn't lasted.\footnote{cf. Cyrus Grace Dunham, “A Year Without A Name,” \emph{The New Yorker,} August 12, 2019, \url{https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/19/a-year-without-a-name}. Accessed November 16, 2021.} My second name hasn't held me through a move to a different language and geography. These significations didn't hold in a new environment. Over time, I realised I never got to really choose a “new name” because of this spelling trick. I went with what began to feel like an easy adaption, making it more convenient on other people, as though this slightly different formulation of my name would give me enough space. I have realised, it didn't.
Recently I changed my name again. With my first name change I shifted my name from something femme-legible in one context into a more gender-not-normal (as Hannah Gadsby would call it\footnote{Hannah Gadsby, \emph{Nanette,} comedy performance, Netflix, 2018.}) way of being called. For the past five years, that name held despite movements because it felt like a quick fix, just enough of a differentiation from my original deadname, a kind of living with the old in a trick of reformulated spelling. For a while this second name was fixed into a sign for me but over time that sign hasn't lasted.\footnote{cf. Cyrus Grace Dunham, “A Year Without A Name,” \emph{The New Yorker,} August 12, 2019, \url{https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/19/a-year-without-a-name}. Accessed November 16, 2021.} My second name hasn't held me through a move to a different language and geography. These significations didn't hold in a new environment. Over time, I realised I never got to really choose a “new name” because of this spelling trick. I went with what began to feel like an easy adaption, making it more convenient on other people, as though this slightly different formulation of my name would give me enough space. I have realised it didn't.
In her article “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept,” Rosemarie Garland-Thompson writes, “Every body is in perpetual transformation not only in itself but also in its location within a constantly shifting environment. {[}\ldots{]} The material particularity of encounter determines both meaning and outcome.”\footnote{ Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, "Misfits: A feminist materialist disability concept,” \emph{Hypatia} 26, no. 3 (2011): 591--609.} The meaning and outcome of my name in my new context, what people \emph{here} call me, and the kinds of playfulness that I could allow myself with my name have shifted and become more porous since my move. In this way my name and naming as a practice has come to define an edge of transformation. My current name in transformation is Ren and thank you for reading -- it's a pleasure to meet you. In my experience my name has acted as more of an interface that has continued to need updates, maintenance, and care. As my gender, presentation, and context have reshaped, I'm reminded of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's assertion that “edges are also interfaces.”\footnote{Ruth Wilson Gilmore, \emph{Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California} (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007).} Accumulating deadnames as a trans* person and interacting with bureaucratic systems and digital interfaces that presume name-stability is proving to be a sometimes funny, sometimes painful, and always confronting experience.
When unfolding what vernacular language means in relation to deadnaming, I'm thinking about how language is a very quotidian\footnote{Referencing Tina Campt's incredible work \emph{Listening to Images} while thinking about the quotidian is an effort to say that the quotidian is not only about what happens everyday, but further understanding this everdayness as “a practice honed by the dispossessed in the struggle to create possibility within the constraints of everyday life.” Tina Campt, \emph{Listening to Images.} (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 4. So to think of quotidian, vernacular trans* language in this sense is also to consider how to remake this language with less violence and more flourishing possible.} necessity, which becomes violent when filtered through numerous bureaucratic institutional forms. Through my processual transformation, my deadnames haunt me through the bureaucratic forms, (bank, identity, digitised, etc.) cards, (COVID-19, academic, etc.) certificates, and (email, telephone, etc.) digital trails.
When unfolding what vernacular language means in relation to deadnaming, I'm thinking about how language is a very quotidian\footnote{Referencing Tina Campt's incredible work \emph{Listening to Images} while thinking about the quotidian is an effort to say that the quotidian is not only about what happens everyday, but further understanding this everdayness as “a practice honed by the dispossessed in the struggle to create possibility within the constraints of everyday life.” Tina Campt, \emph{Listening to Images} (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 4. So to think of quotidian, vernacular trans* language in this sense is also to consider how to remake this language with less violence and more flourishing possible.} necessity, which becomes violent when filtered through numerous bureaucratic institutional forms. Through my processual transformation, my deadnames haunt me through the bureaucratic forms, (bank, identity, digitised, etc.) cards, (COVID-19, academic, etc.) certificates, and (email, telephone, etc.) digital trails.
These bureaucratic interfaces of my everyday life inescapably produce multiple examples of what researcher Jara Rocha calls “kingdom dysphoria,” defined as “the harm caused on all living and non-living entities as a result of the assignment of fixed categories, taxonomies, species and kingdoms.”\footnote{Jara Rocha, 2021 “Kingdom Dysphoria,” \emph{Biofriction}, Hangar. July 22, 2021. Available at: \url{http://jararocha.blogspot.com/2021/07/kingdom-dysphoria-biofriction.html}} Accessed 16 November, 2021.} Kingdom dysphoria captiously considers the harm caused through binary sex assignment as well as the ways in which that binary sex assignment is carried through the interfaces which presume fixity. The labour that sustains this fixity is immense. Labour that is practiced through the labour of bureaucratic processes themselves, and through the labour of institutional practices that require time, and the labour of the people who require consistence across contracts, banking information, and email signatures. The immense labour it takes to produce a legible singular identity across contexts. This labour, spent on seamlessness of individual identities across systems directly limits the legibility of trans* experience, which to be clear cannot and should not be contained, and quite literally labours towards checking boxes rather than towards breaking them. Through multiple bureaucratic interfaces where stability is assumed, inputting a name is to fit it and fix it as though it is permanent. The process of fitting or fixing it to input another name then becomes nearly impossible, for example with visa registrations, health insurance documents, banking forms, or signing a lease or sublet agreement for housing. The bureaucratic check boxes of everyday living do not account for one name, and then another. The imagination stops quite quickly in considering what contextual naming might mean when met with digitised, bureaucratized systems. Instead deadnames haunt spreadsheets: a plethora of quietly waiting rectangles labeled with categories fixed within spreadsheets set up to be \emph{once} populated and therefore made absolutely concrete.\footnote{As researcher Katta Spiel has pointed out in relation to the inclusion of non-binary or trans* people into data sets: databases themselves are increasingly aware of binary gender bias in data sets. Even with this being known, still most research tends to ignore how gender is assigned depending on assumed race via bias seeping into technologies of so called “gender recognition”. It is still often the case that data sets are developed with material coming from white people in the case of automated gender recognition. Spiel writes, referencing Os Keys, that all of these approaches for “gender recognition” are actually unfit to identify gender. Automated systems perform as though it is possible to look from the outside and determine someone's gender rather than understanding gender as a self-determined contextual and interpersonal negotiation. Framing gender as though it is possible to “see” what someone's gender \emph{is} further erases or does not detect non-binary people, which in turn produces more exclusion in the case of gendered databases. This is to say that even when gender is made “concrete” within data sets the violence for trans* people is not the only oppressive horizon. See: Katta Spiel, “\,'Why are they all obsessed with Gender?' --- (Non)binary Navigations through Techno-logical Infrastructures,” \emph{Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021,} (June 2021): 478--494; Os Keys, Josephine Hoy, and Margaret Drouhard, “Human-Computer Insurrection: Notes on an Anarchist HCI,” paper presented at CHI May 2019, Glasgow.}
These bureaucratic interfaces of my everyday life inescapably produce multiple examples of what researcher Jara Rocha calls “kingdom dysphoria,” defined as “the harm caused on all living and non-living entities as a result of the assignment of fixed categories, taxonomies, species and kingdoms.”\footnote{Jara Rocha, 2021 “Kingdom Dysphoria,” \emph{Biofriction}, Hangar. July 22, 2021. Available at: \url{http://jararocha.blogspot.com/2021/07/kingdom-dysphoria-biofriction.html} Accessed 16 November, 2021.} Kingdom dysphoria captiously considers the harm caused through binary sex assignment as well as the ways in which that binary sex assignment is carried through the interfaces which presume fixity. The labour that sustains this fixity is immense. Labour that is practiced through the labour of bureaucratic processes themselves, and through the labour of institutional practices that require time, and the labour of the people who require consistence across contracts, banking information, and email signatures. The immense labour it takes to produce a legible singular identity across contexts. This labour, spent on seamlessness of individual identities across systems directly limits the legibility of trans* experience, which to be clear cannot and should not be contained, and quite literally labours towards checking boxes rather than towards breaking them. Through multiple bureaucratic interfaces where stability is assumed, inputting a name is to fit it and fix it as though it is permanent. The process of fitting or fixing it to input another name then becomes nearly impossible, for example with visa registrations, health insurance documents, banking forms, or signing a lease or sublet agreement for housing. The bureaucratic check boxes of everyday living do not account for one name, and then another. The imagination stops quite quickly in considering what contextual naming might mean when met with digitised, bureaucratized systems. Instead deadnames haunt spreadsheets: a plethora of quietly waiting rectangles labeled with categories fixed within spreadsheets set up to be \emph{once} populated and therefore made absolutely concrete.\footnote{As researcher Katta Spiel has pointed out in relation to the inclusion of non-binary or trans* people into data sets: databases themselves are increasingly aware of binary gender bias in data sets. Even with this being known, still most research tends to ignore how gender is assigned depending on assumed race via bias seeping into technologies of so called “gender recognition.” It is still often the case that data sets are developed with material coming from white people in the case of automated gender recognition. Spiel writes, referencing Os Keys, that all of these approaches for “gender recognition” are actually unfit to identify gender. Automated systems perform as though it is possible to look from the outside and determine someone's gender rather than understanding gender as a self-determined contextual and interpersonal negotiation. Framing gender as though it is possible to “see” what someone's gender \emph{is} further erases or does not detect non-binary people, which in turn produces more exclusion in the case of gendered databases. This is to say that even when gender is made “concrete” within data sets the violence for trans* people is not the only oppressive horizon. See: Katta Spiel, “\,‘Why are they all obsessed with Gender?' --- (Non)binary Navigations through Techno-logical Infrastructures,” \emph{Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021,} (June 2021): 478--494; Os Keys, Josephine Hoy, and Margaret Drouhard, “Human-Computer Insurrection: Notes on an Anarchist HCI,” paper presented at CHI May 2019, Glasgow.}
\section{Deadname Remover}
\noindent
Responding to the structurally violent impossibility of fluid fields, the Deadname Remover is a Google Chrome web extension which aims to automatically remove and replace deadnames.\footnote{\url{https://github.com/WillHayCode/Deadname-Remover} There is also a version of Deadname Remover that works with Firefox.} This may seem at first to be a trans*-community-vernacular-tool that would enact some level of protection for trans* people living with deadnames online, but I have found that it seems to move too fast as this accessibility plugin plugs in new names and re-writes without hesitation. Echoing what Garland-Thompson calls “the relational component and the fragility of fitting” as it shakily erases relational history through its work.\footnote{Garland-Thomson, "Misfits”} One user from the reviews, Evan Rigel, giving Deadname Remover only one star, writes, “worked too well. FAR too well. I was sending a very important email to my doctor and it was changing the text of the email. Everytime I wrote my deadname (which I am registered under) the extension changed it.” and continues.\ldots{} “what if I hadn't realized it had `corrected' my name? this extension almost outed me, which is DANGEROUS.”\footnote{Evan Rigel, Deadname Remover User Reviews, Google Chrome webstore, September 28, 2020, \url{https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/deadname-\%09remover/cceilgmnkeijahkehfcgfalepihfbcag?hl=en-GB}}. Accessed November 16, 2021.} For Rigel and others (myself included), the problematics of removing deadnames across all contexts produces disappearances that paradoxically could render unwanted visibility. Further, that communications from so many trans* people become filtered through this plugin begs the worry: What happens when it glitches? And, why is it that the reproduction of fixity, the reproduction of history with the same name and reproduction of present with the same name, the direction that trans* people seem to want? Why is reproducing fixed-ness seemingly the only mode of safety when it comes to gendered embodiment?\footnote{As is evident with so many trans* and intersex artists, activists, and academics, fixity and gendered embodiment can be a site of extreme damage. Challenging this paradigm is the current (October 15, 2021--February 14, 2022) exhibition at the Schwules Museum in Berlin Germany, \emph{Mercury Rising -- Inter* Hermstory{[}ies{]} Now and Then, }which focuses on the universes and utopias that intersex people have joyfully self-determined.} In order to turn on the Deadname Remover, a user must click a miniature trans* flag. This kind of leaning into trans* identity to subsequently remove it -- you literally click on the trans*gender flag to erase one's own trans* history -- produces the idea of a stable past where gender-name-congruency is enabled and simultaneously lets the possibilities and difficulties of vernacular complication become sadly erased.
Responding to the structurally violent impossibility of fluid fields, the Deadname Remover is a Google Chrome web extension which aims to automatically remove and replace deadnames.\footnote{\url{https://github.com/WillHayCode/Deadname-Remover} There is also a version of Deadname Remover that works with Firefox.} This may seem at first to be a trans*-community-vernacular-tool that would enact some level of protection for trans* people living with deadnames online, but I have found that it seems to move too fast as this accessibility plugin plugs in new names and re-writes without hesitation. Echoing what Garland-Thompson calls “the relational component and the fragility of fitting” as it shakily erases relational history through its work.\footnote{Garland-Thomson, “Misfits”} One user from the reviews, Evan Rigel, giving Deadname Remover only one star, writes, “worked too well. FAR too well. I was sending a very important email to my doctor and it was changing the text of the email. Everytime I wrote my deadname (which I am registered under) the extension changed it.” They continue, "what if… “what if I hadn't realized it had `corrected' my name? this extension almost outed me, which is DANGEROUS”\footnote{Evan Rigel, Deadname Remover User Reviews, Google Chrome webstore, September 28, 2020, \url{https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/deadname-\%09remover/cceilgmnkeijahkehfcgfalepihfbcag?hl=en-GB}. Accessed November 16, 2021.} For Rigel and others (myself included), the problematics of removing deadnames across all contexts produces disappearances that paradoxically could render unwanted visibility. Further, that communications from so many trans* people become filtered through this plugin begs the worry: What happens when it glitches? And, why is it that the reproduction of fixity, the reproduction of history with the same name and reproduction of present with the same name, is the direction that trans* people seem to want? Why is reproducing fixed-ness seemingly the only mode of safety when it comes to gendered embodiment?\footnote{As is evident with so many trans* and intersex artists, activists, and academics, fixity and gendered embodiment can be a site of extreme damage. Challenging this paradigm is the current (October 15, 2021--February 14, 2022) exhibition at the Schwules Museum in Berlin Germany, \emph{Mercury Rising -- Inter* Hermstory{[}ies{]} Now and Then, }which focuses on the universes and utopias that intersex people have joyfully self-determined.} In order to turn on the Deadname Remover, a user must click a miniature trans* flag. This kind of leaning into trans* identity to subsequently remove it -- you literally click on the trans*gender flag to erase one's own trans* history -- produces the idea of a stable past where gender-name-congruency is enabled and simultaneously lets the possibilities and difficulties of vernacular complication become sadly erased.
There must be a plurality of ways of living as trans*, intersex, and disabled. Epistemic, practiced, and embodied plurality for trans*, intersex, and disabled people is a reality and without acknowledging this we have have nothing to gain, only to lose. However, the alignment of an identity category (represented by the trans*gender flag) tied to fantasies of “removal” like the Deadname Remover proposes to create a kind of fitting into a rectangular spreadsheet logic that must be resisted. Beginning instead from the political standpoint of misfittin, Garland-Thompson claims that “whereas the benefit of fitting is material and visual anonymity, the cost of fitting is perhaps complacency about social justice and a desensitising to material experience.”\footnote{Garland-Thomson, "Misfits”} To use the Deadname Remover then becomes a way to distance trans* individuals from the importance of anti-assimilationist praxis\footnote{Like the ones that Aimi Hamraie, Kelly Fritsch, and Sins Invalid have put forth. Disability justice in their view, points to the "the non-compliant, anti-assimilationist position that disability is a desirable part of the world." Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, “Crip Technoscience Manifesto.”} and at its worst will further disappear us from each other.
There must be a plurality of ways of living as trans*, intersex, and disabled. Epistemic, practiced, and embodied plurality for trans*, intersex, and disabled people is a reality and without acknowledging this we have have nothing to gain, only to lose. However, the alignment of an identity category (represented by the trans*gender flag) tied to fantasies of “removal” like the Deadname Remover proposes to create a kind of fitting into a rectangular spreadsheet logic that must be resisted. Beginning instead from the political standpoint of misfitting, Garland-Thompson claims that “whereas the benefit of fitting is material and visual anonymity, the cost of fitting is perhaps complacency about social justice and a desensitising to material experience.”\footnote{Garland-Thomson, “Misfits”} To use the Deadname Remover then becomes a way to distance trans* individuals from the importance of anti-assimilationist praxis\footnote{Like the ones that Aimi Hamraie, Kelly Fritsch, and Sins Invalid have put forth. Disability justice in their view, points to the “the non-compliant, anti-assimilationist position that disability is a desirable part of the world." Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, “Crip Technoscience Manifesto.”} and at its worst will further disappear us from each other.
Additionally, the privacy practices of Deadname Remover seem not secure enough (as though being Google wasn't enough): the plugin openly states that it collects “personally identifiable information” such as name, address, email address, age, or identification number. In the article “Hacking the Cis-tem,”Marie Hicks researches the experiences of trans* individuals and communities who fought to become legible within the UK welfare bureaucratic infrastructure. Hicks recalls how, “the struggle for trans rights in the mainframe era forms a type of prehistory of algorithmic bias: a clear example of how systems were designed and programmed to accommodate certain people and to deny the existence of others.”\footnote{Marie Hicks, "Hacking the Cis-tem," \emph{IEEE Annals of the History of Computing} 41, no. 1 (Jan--March 2019): 20--33.} With its insecure privacy practices, Deadname Remover runs the risk of re-inscribing the existing algorithmic biases against trans* people that are proven to already be well written into databases. Deadname Remover gives little hope that to have such extensive information collected by Google would be a good thing -- do we really want \emph{Google} to know the deadnames and current names of all of our trans* kin?
Additionally, the privacy practices of Deadname Remover seem not secure enough (as though being Google wasn't enough): the plugin openly states that it collects “personally identifiable information” such as name, address, email address, age, or identification number. In the article “Hacking the Cis-tem,”Marie Hicks researches the experiences of trans* individuals and communities who fought to become legible within the UK welfare bureaucratic infrastructure. Hicks recalls how, “the struggle for trans rights in the mainframe era forms a type of prehistory of algorithmic bias: a clear example of how systems were designed and programmed to accommodate certain people and to deny the existence of others.”\footnote{Marie Hicks, "Hacking the Cis-tem," \emph{IEEE Annals of the History of Computing} 41, no. 1 (Jan--March 2019): 20--33.} With its insecure privacy practices, Deadname Remover runs the risk of re-inscribing the existing algorithmic biases against trans* people that are proven to already be well written into databases. Deadname Remover gives little hope that to have such extensive information collected by Google would be a good thing -- do we really want \emph{Google} to know the deadnames and current names of all of our trans* kin?
Reading Jules Gill-Peterson on deadnames, she writes, “Trans-inclusion into the terms of the dominant system is not good enough.”\footnote{ Jules Gill-Peterson, “My Undead Name,” \emph{Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers}, October 5, 2020, \url{https://legacy- womenwriters.org/2020/10/05/my-undead-name}. Accessed November 16, 2021.} Refusing inclusion and refusing techno-fixes leads me to dreaming about what a haunting-of-deadnames could mean. What about deadnames that follow you around because you want them to, what kind of socio-technical environments would need to be set up so that to be haunted would be desirable, welcome, interesting?
Reading Jules Gill-Peterson on deadnames, she writes, “Trans-inclusion into the terms of the dominant system is not good enough.”\footnote{ Jules Gill-Peterson, “My Undead Name,” \emph{Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers}, October 5, 2020, \url{https://legacywomenwriters.org/2020/10/05/my-undead-name}. Accessed November 16, 2021.} Refusing inclusion and refusing techno-fixes leads me to dreaming about what a haunting-of-deadnames could mean. What about deadnames that follow you around because you want them to, what kind of socio-technical environments would need to be set up so that to be haunted would be desirable, welcome, interesting?
\section{the BlackTransArchive}
\section{\emph{the BlackTransArchive}}
\noindent
\emph{the BlackTransArchive }is an artwork and archive by Danielle Braithwaite Shirley that “stores and centres Black trans people to preserve our experiences our thoughts our feelings our lives.”\footnote{Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley, \emph{BlackTransArchive }project page on artist's website, 2020 \url{https://www.daniellebrathwaiteshirley.com/blacktransarchive-com}. Accessed November 18, 2021.} When entering the online archive the first page begins with a black screen moving through a digital field that resembles a road, purple text reads: \emph{WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT, WELCOME TO THE PRO BLACK PRO TRANS ARCHIVE, THIS INTERACTIVE ARCHIVE WAS MADE TO STORE AND CENTRE BLACK TRANS PEOPLE\ldots. }Based on your identity, different pathways are visible and accessible in the online PRO BLACK PRO TRANS ARCHIVE. Options are: 1. “I Identify as Black and Trans”; 2. “I Identify as Trans”; or 3. “I identify as cis.” In my case, I selected option 2 and navigated through the experience as a white trans* person. After navigating through the archive for some time, my path lead me to the “dead name burial site.” After arriving to the burial site a character asked me, “You may have a dead name following you, would you like me to bury it for you?” After choosing the option, “Yes, bury my dead name I need it to let go of me,” the screen reads with a message: “Dead name removed, it won't haunt you anymore.”
I have been thinking a lot about this removal, and thankful for having this option in the context of the really generous \emph{BlackTransArchive}. Conceptualising naming practices as those that need updates, maintenance, and care and then burying a name in the dead name burial site felt like a welcome relief and act of care towards the weight of carrying multiplicity in a context that actively disciplines this. My experience of being deadnamed has become so ubiquitous: every time I travel, open my bank account, check the post box, or apply for anything my name and its permutations unravel. In my access rider\footnote{Access Riders are documents that outline disability and trans* access needs so that institutions can meet these needs and ensure equal access to work. See for example Access Docs for Artists, a resource made by Leah Clements, Alice Hattrick, and Lizzy Rose, \url{https://www.accessdocsforartists.com/what-is-an-access-doc}} I explain that one name is for paying me, one name is for referring to me anywhere public, and now my new name is still spreading yet not incorporated into the doc. Whether I like it or not, I am haunted by my deadnames. While sometimes I luxuriously describe it as a choice to have multiple names following me around, to be honest, if I could change my name easily, I already would have. This haunting is a haunting that is also mattering\footnote{Morrill, Tuck and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective, “Before Dispossession, or Surviving It”} and it shapes my, and my trans* friends, interactions with systems, and with practices of vernacular language.
In the zine \emph{Sex Time Machine for Touching the Trancestors} by Julian Carter, there is a description of how trans* people might age. Chapter three, “Between Before \& After (For Jordan)” begins: “It's odd how queer generations work; one of my housemates is ten years younger than me but he transitioned seven years ago so I'm the baby.”\footnote{ Julian Carter, \emph{Sex Time Machine for Touching the Trancestors,} Zine, San Francisco, 1991--2017.} It carries on to discuss kinds of temporal pleating that disrupt predictable generational sequences and practices of naming. In this perspective, trans* time\footnote{Reese Simpkins, “Trans*feminist Intersections.” \emph{TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly} 3, no. 1--2 (2016): 228--234.} produces its own stability created through care, relationality, and invention rather than control. Perhaps a trans* vernacular language that could enact openended and non-coercive ways would mean to come back to these ongoingnesses of trans* life again\ldots. and again\ldots.. and again\ldots{} and\ldots{} again\ldots{} we would come back to more space for living with ongoingness and and and transformation and again\ldots{} and again change. and again change. More deadnames haunting us with humour rather than with humiliation.
In the zine \emph{Sex Time Machine for Touching the Trancestors} by Julian Carter, there is a description of how trans* people might age. Chapter three, “Between Before \& After (For Jordan)” begins: “It's odd how queer generations work; one of my housemates is ten years younger than me but he transitioned seven years ago so I'm the baby.”\footnote{ Julian Carter, \emph{Sex Time Machine for Touching the Trancestors,} Zine, San Francisco, 1991--2017.} It carries on to discuss kinds of temporal pleating that disrupt predictable generational sequences and practices of naming. In this perspective, trans* time\footnote{Reese Simpkins, “Trans*feminist Intersections.” \emph{TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly} 3, no. 1--2 (2016): 228--234.} produces its own stability created through care, relationality, and invention rather than control. Perhaps a trans* vernacular language that could enact open-ended and non-coercive ways would mean to come back to these ongoingnesses of trans* life again\ldots. and again\ldots.. and again\ldots{} and\ldots{} again\ldots{} we would come back to more space for living with ongoingness and and and transformation and again\ldots{} and again change. and again change. More deadnames haunting us with humour rather than with humiliation.
@ -54,13 +54,13 @@ There is quite an emphasis in contemporary archival practices on the digitisatio
The digital collections that result from archival digitisation projects often simply mirror a physical collection and are there to embellish the catalogue. At MayDay Rooms we wanted to think about what our digital collection could do that is different from our paper collection, and how our guiding principles can influence a digital formation. So we started to think about how digital possibilities of the archive can bypass traditional concerns of preservation in favour of dissemination and truly open access.
We have been inspired a lot by the work of friends and comrades from different “shadow libraries,” particularly Aaaaarg, and Memory of the World. There was an initial idea that MayDay Rooms' digitisations form part of these two libraries' collections, and we still host selected material on these sites. However, we soon realised that historical ephemera (posters, pamphlets, flyers, bulletins etc) not only require very particular attention but also present interesting possibilities in regards to a digital archive.
We have been inspired a lot by the work of friends and comrades from different “shadow libraries,” particularly Aaaaarg, and Memory of the World. There was an initial idea that MayDay Rooms' digitisations form part of these two libraries' collections, and we still host selected material on these sites. However, we soon realised that historical ephemera (posters, pamphlets, flyers, bulletins etc) not only requires very particular attention but also presents interesting possibilities in regards to a digital archive.
This is also why we chose the name Leftovers; as well as being a joke, it is also a comment on the nature of political ephemera. The book is in some ways a relatively self-contained durable object -- it has a blurb, a recognisable author -- that doesn't need additional material to become understandable, and its use in some ways is predetermined. Whereas political ephemera has a different temporal scope, it was not meant to endure, and its contemporary use is different from its first production. Its original intention. The leaflet to mobilise for a protest, the bulletin that communicates actions on a picket line, or newspapers that maintain organisational forms are meant to mobilise quickly and communicate in the moment but not to last. For these reasons ephemera is non-authoritative, and represent fragments of historical moments through different tendencies, so it needs a critical mass of comradely material and different archival strategies to make it understandable.
This is also why we chose the name Leftovers; as well as being a joke, it is also a comment on the nature of political ephemera. The book is in some ways a relatively self-contained durable object -- it has a blurb, a recognisable author -- that doesn't need additional material to become understandable, and its use in some ways is predetermined. Whereas political ephemera has a different temporal scope, it was not meant to endure, and its contemporary use is different from its first production. Its original intention. The leaflet to mobilise for a protest, the bulletin that communicates actions on a picket line, or newspapers that maintain organisational forms are meant to mobilise quickly and communicate in the moment but not to last. For these reasons ephemera is non-authoritative, and represents fragments of historical moments through different tendencies, so it needs a critical mass of comradely material and different archival strategies to make it understandable.
The structure of our digital collection has tried to reflect this structure, using flat relations between objects rather than hierarchical ones, and developing our metadata categories instead of using inherited conventions. Our collaboration with 0x2620 meant we could further experiment around the different processes and relations a digital archive can facilitate. Although the software Pan.do/ra was originally developed for video, we have worked with Jan Gerber at 0x2620 for the last few years to see if the way in which the software decomposes videos and makes each frame accessible could do the same for digital documents.
Leftover does not only represent MayDay Rooms' digital collection but is rather an “archive of archives” where we have pulled together existing online repositories and resources from all the types of institutes, collections, files, and folders into one platform. At present, materials in the archive come from many different sources and are not usually the only copy of that scan. The metadata around each object always links back to the source that we got it from. We hold material from some sisterly archives such as the Sparrows' Nest Library and Archive in Nottingham, and other material we found from different corners of the internet (torrents, smaller archival collections, state archives). Some of the processing we have done on the documents, and the functionality 0x2620 developed for the archive, has helped us think of different ways of making connections between documents that come from different collections, countries, tendencies, and groups.
Leftovers does not only represent MayDay Rooms' digital collection but is rather an “archive of archives” where we have pulled together existing online repositories and resources from all the types of institutes, collections, files, and folders into one platform. At present, materials in the archive come from many different sources and are not usually the only copy of that scan. The metadata around each object always links back to the source that we got it from. We hold material from some sisterly archives such as the Sparrows' Nest Library and Archive in Nottingham, and other material we found from different corners of the internet (torrents, smaller archival collections, state archives). Some of the processing we have done on the documents, and the functionality 0x2620 developed for the archive, has helped us think of different ways of making connections between documents that come from different collections, countries, tendencies, and groups.
I thought it might be good to go into a bit of detail about how we developed one of our metadata fields, “Tactics.” As I said, all the material in our archive is OCRed and there is a full text search functionality so that you can search \emph{within} the document, not only for data \emph{about} the document. This might sound a minor technical point but actually is highly significant in opening up digital archives and using the actual document's content as the basis of classification. In Leftovers you can search for a word or phrase and it will bring up every document that includes it. Through this we made a list of different tactics of left and anarchist movements and searched the documents for them. Some of the results are below with their occurrences in the archive:\\
@ -118,7 +118,7 @@ There have been many different strategies of inputting metadata on Leftovers. So
\end{figure}
\noindent
One of the ways of sorting the result of the different NLP scripts was to create word clouds to visually look at the most frequently occurring terms (see above). For example, in the word cloud that showed people, one of the most prominent names was Ronald Reagan, but this data did not fit into any of our categories relating to people, which mainly represent comradely relations. NLP was better at pulling out these known entities like Reagan rather than minor figures in left history, as the libraries have been trained on certain data sets. This could be immensely problematic as a tool of categorisation for an archive of radical ephemera. However, by thinking these relationships through and thinking what to do with this data we came up with the category of “Antagonisms.” We thought this showed the archive to be partisan and not a neutral historical collection, as well as establishing an oppositional relation to some of the data that the NLP was producing.
One of the ways of sorting the results of the different NLP scripts was to create word clouds to visually look at the most frequently occurring terms (see above). For example, in the word cloud that showed people, one of the most prominent names was Ronald Reagan, but this data did not fit into any of our categories relating to people, which mainly represent comradely relations. NLP was better at pulling out these known entities like Reagan rather than minor figures in left history, as the libraries have been trained on certain data sets. This could be immensely problematic as a tool of categorisation for an archive of radical ephemera. However, by thinking these relationships through and thinking what to do with this data we came up with the category of “Antagonisms.” We thought this showed the archive to be partisan and not a neutral historical collection, as well as establishing an oppositional relation to some of the data that the NLP was producing.
\begin{figure}[h!]
\centerline{
@ -129,7 +129,7 @@ One of the ways of sorting the result of the different NLP scripts was to create
\subsubsection{You've already mentioned that Leftovers came together as a\\collaboration with 0x2620. Are there more collaborators involved\\in the making of this archive?}
\newpage
\noindent
Leftovers was initiated by myself at MayDay Rooms, and was developed in collaboration with Jan Gerber from 0x2620. Anthony Iles from \emph{Mute Magazine} joined the working group in 2020 and has been very active in finding material and inputting metadata. He also helped produce our first online exhibition based on the digital archive called \emph{Print Subversion in the Wapping Dispute} which can be found here \url{https://exhibitions.maydayrooms.org/wapping}.We got a small grant to further develop our interface in 2020, and for this we worked with Gemma Copeland and Robbie Blundell from Evening Class, a design collective in London, to design the front end. You can see the work-in-progress version here, \url{https://dev.leftove.rs}.
Leftovers was initiated by myself at MayDay Rooms, and was developed in collaboration with Jan Gerber from 0x2620. Anthony Iles from \emph{Mute Magazine} joined the working group in 2020 and has been very active in finding material and inputting metadata. He also helped produce our first online exhibition based on the digital archive called \emph{Print Subversion in the Wapping Dispute} which can be found here \url{https://exhibitions.maydayrooms.org/wapping}.We got a small grant to further develop our interface in 2020, and for this we worked with Gemma Copeland and Robbie Blundell from Evening Class, a design collective in London, to design the front end. You can see the work-in-progress version here, \url{https://dev.leftove.rs}.
However the wider question of who contributes to Leftovers is a complicated one, as some people contribute without knowing they do so. For example, \emph{The Black Panther,} the newspaper of the Black Panther Party, was scanned at a university in America and then did the rounds on the internet as a torrent. We downloaded it and OCRed the scans and uploaded it to the collection. We were not the ones who scanned it, downloaded it from the university, and distributed it online and the scans are not only hosted on Leftovers, but we felt it was important that it become part of the archive and be freely accessible. Other contributors are comradely archives such as the Sparrows' Nest Archive and Library (UK), Archivio Grafton (IT), Rebel.info (IT), and Archives Autonomies (FR) who we have established relationships with through Leftovers. We hope that through pooling and sharing digitisation, Leftovers will help build a network of archives that share documents and resources.
@ -145,7 +145,7 @@ Although Leftovers has not been officially launched, it is already being used by
\noindent
That's an interesting question and speaks again to the different kinds of metadata fields we developed for Leftovers. The field of “Author” in the collection is almost completely redundant, as most material in the archive is produced by a group, a collective, or is anonymous. This is an indication of what kind of material the collection holds.
Some material is intentionally authored under a group name. In some of these cases the writing of newsletters, pamphlets, positioning papers, and bulletins becomes a form of internally constituting groups, and here writing and action combine as a form of political organisation. Other material remains anonymous or produced under a group name not as choice but as a societal position in relation to the state, whilst other groups are actually a single person masquerading as a group in order to explore imaginary formations. Other group names are actually descriptive tactics such as “The Angry Brigade.” With all of these examples anonymity is not merely dropping one's name, but speaks to the complex nature of the document's production. By fore-fronting these relations in thinking through the structure of our collection, we hope that the use of relational metadata categories around production and social movement contexts will help to orientate categorisation away from authorship.
Some material is intentionally authored under a group name. In some of these cases the writing of newsletters, pamphlets, positioning papers, and bulletins becomes a form of internally constituting groups, and here writing and action combine as a form of political organisation. Other material remains anonymous or produced under a group name not as choice but as a societal position in relation to the state, whilst other groups are actually a single person masquerading as a group in order to explore imaginary formations. Other group names are actually descriptive tactics such as “The Angry Brigade.” With all of these examples anonymity is not merely dropping one's name, but speaks to the complex nature of the document's production. By forefronting these relations in thinking through the structure of our collection, we hope that the use of relational metadata categories around production and social movement contexts will help to orientate categorisation away from authorship.
As well as the anonymous or group producer in the archive, there are the invisible figures that are integral to the political movements the collection is part of. As I mentioned before, through using Natural Language Processing to make lists of all the names that occur \emph{in} the material, we were able to find many figures that have been forgotten and excluded in favour of single authors. Although these are currently only indexes and have not been entered into metadata for the material, it is perhaps a good indication of the thousands of people who produce material and often prop up the category of author, or are behind prominent movement figures.
@ -168,7 +168,7 @@ I really liked this tweet from Archivio Grafton about their material on Leftover
MayDay Rooms is dedicated to the collective “activation” of historical material -- where we aim to not sit passively on archival “holdings.” With Leftovers we were really interested in developing tools, and ways of disseminating, integrating, and re-using the collection rather than it just being a repository where material is merely stored. I can't remember who said it, but it's a sentiment that has influenced our approach to an active archive: “The best way to preserve a film is to project it.” Digitising a document, making the whole thing freely available, downloadable, and readable is the first step towards dissemination.
One of the publications in Leftovers -- \emph{Spare Rib} -- was originally digitised by the British Library at huge expense and the copyright was contained through Digital Rights Management. After the UK left the EU, the copyright directive that covered the digitisation no longer applied and the digitisations were taken down. To my knowledge Leftovers now holds the only digital copies of this material, which represents the biggest Women's' Liberation publication in UK history. We can see here the fragility of institutional collections that do not commit to open access. We believe that creating collections where you always have access to the scan or object itself is a good step towards facilitating new forms of distribution and back-up that go beyond the original collection.
One of the publications in Leftovers -- \emph{Spare Rib} -- was originally digitised by the British Library at huge expense and the copyright was contained through Digital Rights Management. After the UK left the EU, the copyright directive that covered the digitisation no longer applied and the digitisations were taken down. To my knowledge Leftovers now holds the only digital copies of this material, which represents the biggest Women's Liberation publication in UK history. We can see here the fragility of institutional collections that do not commit to open access. We believe that creating collections where you always have access to the scan or object itself is a good step towards facilitating new forms of distribution and back-up that go beyond the original collection.
There is a text called “HyperReadings” (\url{https://samiz-dat.github.io/hyperreadings}) by Sean Dockray, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office, which I think really articulates well this idea of a “libraries of libraries,” where items are not confined to a single copy in a single universal library but are partially manifest with many different individuals, groups, and institutions. By breaking down categories and ways of collecting that usually confine a document, and using different processes to make connections between what would previously be atomised material, you can begin to circulate material in different ways. All material in Leftovers has a “Source” field that takes you back to the original source of the digitisation, and we hope that aggregating these materials on one platform not only brings them into proximity with one another but also highlights the work of many small independent archives.
\chapter[torn at the seams:\\considering computational\\vernacular\\\\Michael Murtaugh]{torn at the seams:\\considering computational\\vernacular\\\\Michael Murtaugh}
\chapter[Torn at the seams:\\considering computational\\vernacular\\\\Michael Murtaugh]{Torn at the seams:\\considering computational\\vernacular\\\\Michael Murtaugh}
Teaching programming with free software to media design students for years, I've resisted Processing as it has always seemed to me to embody a particular kind of solipsism of digital interactivity and graphics that I want my students to avoid.
\section{Design by numbers}
\section{wumbers}
\noindent
In the fall of 1996, John Maeda joined the MIT Media Lab to replace the recently deceased Muriel Cooper. Cooper was the first art director of the MIT Press, producing influential designs such as a 1969 catalogue of the Bauhaus and the iconic MIT Press logo, a Bauhaus-inspired stylised graphical rendering of the letters “mitp.” Cooper started the Visible Language Workshop, later one of the founding groups of the MIT Media Lab, to research the intersection of publishing, design, and computation.
@ -54,13 +54,15 @@ In the fall of 1996, John Maeda joined the MIT Media Lab to replace the recently
\begin{quoting}
\vspace{-1\baselineskip}
Our forefathers at the Bauhaus, Ulm, and many other key centers for design education around the world labored to create a sense of order and method to their teaching. Thanks to their trailblazing work, teaching at the university level gradually became accepted as a meaningful and constructive activity. A drawing board, small or large, became the stage for paper, pen, ink, and blade to interact in the disciplined activity that characterized the profession of visual design.\footnote{John Maeda, \emph{Design by Numbers} (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 19.}
Our forefathers at the Bauhaus, Ulm, and many other key centers for design education around the world labored to create a sense of order and method to their teaching. Thanks to their trailblazing work, teaching at the university level gradually became accepted as a meaningful and constructive activity. A drawing board, small or large, became the stage for paper, pen, ink, and blade to interact in the disciplined activity that characterized the profession of visual design.\footnote{John Maeda, \emph{Design By Numbers} (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 19.}
\end{quoting}
\noindent
Maeda created the Aesthetics and Computation Group, in part to continue Cooper's research. Maeda developed (with students Tom White, Peter Cho, Ben Fry, and later Casey Reas among others) a software system called Design by Numbers (DBN).\footnote{\url{https://dbn.media.mit.edu}} It had extreme constraints such as a fixed 100 by 100 pixel size and monochrome-only graphics. The command set is similarly constrained with only two drawing commands for lines and points. Commands like “paper” and “pen,” controlling the grey value of background and foreground colours, invoke the materiality of a (pre-digital) print practice. The accompanying print publication also had a square format.
Maeda created the Aesthetics and Computation Group, in part to continue Cooper's research. Maeda developed (with students Tom White, Peter Cho, Ben Fry, and later Casey Reas among others) a software system called Design By Numbers (DBN).\footnote{\url{https://dbn.media.mit.edu}} It had extreme constraints such as a fixed 100 by 100 pixel size and monochrome-only graphics. The command set is similarly constrained with only two drawing commands for lines and points. Commands like “paper” and “pen,” controlling the grey value of background and foreground colours, invoke the materiality of a (pre-digital) print practice. The accompanying print publication also had a square format.
When designing this system for learning basic computational media design, I intentionally limited the set of commands and constructs to a minimal number of possibilities. If I had given you drawing capability beyond a line or setting a dot, the examples could have been more exciting, but the point could not be made clearly because your attention would be drawn to the picture and not to the code.\footnote{ Maeda. \emph{Design by Numbers}, 144.}
\begin{quoting}
When designing this system for learning basic computational media design, I intentionally limited the set of commands and constructs to a minimal number of possibilities. If I had given you drawing capability beyond a line or setting a dot, the examples could have been more exciting, but the point could not be made clearly because your attention would be drawn to the picture and not to the code.\footnote{ Maeda. \emph{Design By Numbers}, 144.}
\end{quoting}
\begin{figure}[h!]
\centerline{
@ -84,7 +86,7 @@ In the case of the DBN's digital vase, the purpose does not seem to be for someo
The above is just one example of DBN's lack of historicity. In 1999, the Sony PlayStation and access to the World Wide Web, for instance, were popular phenomena, yet the text seems remarkably devoid of any reference to specific tools or practices. Even Maeda's invocations of historical figures like the Bauhaus and Paul Rand are vague, evoking a sort of nostalgic \emph{Mad Men} universe with the creative young men (those future forefathers) at their drawing boards and a sense of “timeless design values” like a devotion to discipline and order.
At the end of the book Maeda responds to a critique apparently made to him by one of the students doing some of the programming of the DBN system itself. Recounting how a visit to a “university-level Java class for designers {[}\ldots{]} teach{[}ing{]} the finer points of object-oriented programming and bit masking of 24-bit color values” made him feel “lost in all the gibberish,” he reasserts his pedagogical approach as an alignment with the “simplification” that is the “constant goal” of programming.\footnote{ Maeda. \emph{Design by Numbers}, 252.} Rather than trying to bridge the gulf between diverse practices, Maeda dismisses that which he doesn't (care to) understand in the name of simplification.
At the end of the book Maeda responds to a critique apparently made to him by one of the students doing some of the programming of the DBN system itself. Recounting how a visit to a “university-level Java class for designers {[}\ldots{]} teach{[}ing{]} the finer points of object-oriented programming and bit masking of 24-bit color values” made him feel “lost in all the gibberish,” he reasserts his pedagogical approach as an alignment with the “simplification” that is the “constant goal” of programming.\footnote{ Maeda. \emph{Design By Numbers}, 252.} Rather than trying to bridge the gulf between diverse practices, Maeda dismisses that which he doesn't (care to) understand in the name of simplification.
\section{Processing}
@ -264,7 +266,7 @@ Papert described the pedagogic project of LOGO in book titled \emph{Mindstorms}.
In a powerful central visual sequence, \emph{Mindstorms} presents a series of illustrations showing the screen output of code alongside a running dialogue. The conversation starts with a proposition to draw a flower like one sketched on paper. First they consider what programs they might already have to make use of, in this case they have a procedure to draw a quarter circle. Through a series of steps, mistakes are made, plans are adjusted and retried, and happy accidents lead to discoveries (it's a bird!). In the process the “ends become means” and a new tool is put to use to create a garden, and then, incorporating the “bug,” a flock of flying birds.
\noindent
In Belgium, where I live “brico” is the French language equivalent to “DIY” and is often used in a derogatory sense to indicate that something is made in an amateurish way. Papert is borrowing the term from Claude Lévi-Strauss, who first used the term in an anthropological context hypothesising how “universal” knowledge might form from myth and fragmentary cultural knowledge.\footnote{ Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Science of the Concrete,” in \emph{The Savage Mind} (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), Chapter 1.}
In Belgium, where I live, “brico” is the French language equivalent to “DIY” and is often used in a derogatory sense to indicate that something is made in an amateurish way. Papert is borrowing the term from Claude Lévi-Strauss, who first used the term in an anthropological context hypothesising how “universal” knowledge might form from myth and fragmentary cultural knowledge.\footnote{ Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Science of the Concrete,” in \emph{The Savage Mind} (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), Chapter 1.}
For Papert, bricolage exhibits a quality whereby informal methods not only appeal to “common sense” but also engage more profoundly with the materiality of the subject than would a formal approach. In the case of the circle, the “turtle” method is not only a way for the student to imagine the problem physically, it also relates to methods of differential calculus, something the algebraic formulation misses completely. In hacker circles, bricolage is evident in an approach of embracing “glue code” and “duct tape” methods, like the pipeline, that allow different systems to be “hacked” together to do useful (new) things.
@ -287,7 +289,7 @@ She cites Donna Haraway, who wonders in \emph{A Cyborg Manifesto}:
\end{quoting}
\noindent
Star draws on a tradition of diverse feminist thinking through the “articulation of multiplicity, contradiction, and partiality, while standing in a politically situated, moral collective” to synthesise and propose what she calls the important attributes of a feminist method:\\
Leigh Star draws on a tradition of diverse feminist thinking through the “articulation of multiplicity, contradiction, and partiality, while standing in a politically situated, moral collective” to synthesise and propose what she calls the important attributes of a feminist method:\\
\begin{compactitem}[$\bullet$]
\tightlist
@ -300,7 +302,7 @@ Star draws on a tradition of diverse feminist thinking through the “articulati
\item
situated historicity with great attention to detail and specificity;
\item
the simultaneous application of all of these points.\footnote{ Leigh Star, “Misplaced Concretism and Concrete Situations, 148--149.}\\
the simultaneous application of all of these points.\footnote{ Leigh Star, “Misplaced Concretism and Concrete Situations”, 148--149.}\\
\textbf{Clara Balaguer} (Makati City, Pisces Metal Monkey) is a cultural worker and grey literature circulator. From 2010 to 2018, she articulated cultural programming with rural, peri-urban, and diasporic communities from the Philippines through the~\emph{OCD}, a residency space and social practice platform. In 2013, she co-founded Hardworking Goodlooking, a cottage industry publishing hauz interested in the material vernacular, collectivizing authorship, and the value of the error.~ Currently, she builds and publishes curriculums at BAK basis voor aktuele kunst as head of Civic Praxis (Community Portal); at Willem de Kooning Academy as research lecturer in Social Practices; at Piet Zwart Institute as a midwife for Experimental Publishing; and at Sandberg Institute as teacher at the Dirty Art Department. Frequently, she operates under collective or individual aliases that disclose her stewardship in any given project, the latest of which is To Be Determined: a transitional, migratory, neighborly structure of sleeper cells (Trojan horse networks) that activate--deactivate for leaking access to cultural capital.
\textbf{Clara Balaguer} (Makati City, Pisces Metal Monkey) is a cultural worker and grey literature circulator. From 2010 to 2018, she articulated cultural programming with rural, peri-urban, and diasporic communities from the Philippines through the~\emph{OCD}, a residency space and social practice platform. In 2013, she co-founded Hardworking Goodlooking, a cottage industry publishing hauz interested in the material vernacular, collectivizing authorship, and the value of the error.~ Currently, she builds and publishes curriculums at BAK basis voor aktuele kunst as head of Civic Praxis (Community Portal); at Willem de Kooning Academy as research lecturer in Social Practices; at Piet Zwart Institute as a midwife for Experimental Publishing; and at Sandberg Institute as teacher at the Dirty Art Department. Frequently, she operates under collective or individual aliases that disclose her stewardship in any given project, the latest of which is To Be Determined: a transitional, migratory, neighbourly structure of sleeper cells (Trojan horse networks) that activate--deactivate for leaking access to cultural capital.
\textbf{Manetta Berends} works with forms of networked publishing, situated software and collective infrastructures. She is a member of Varia, a memberbased organisation working on everyday technology in Rotterdam, and an educator at the master Experimental Publishing at the Piet Zwart Institute. \url{https://manettaberends.nl}
\textbf{Manetta Berends} works with forms of networked publishing, situated software, and collective infrastructures. She is a member of Varia, a member-based organisation working on everyday technology in Rotterdam, and an educator at the master Experimental Publishing at the Piet Zwart Institute. \url{https://manettaberends.nl}
\textbf{Julie Boschat-Thorez} is a researcher, artist and educator whose work focuses on knowledge organisation systems and the stories which can be extracted from them. She primarily investigates mundane objects such as archives, collections, datasets or museums, to recover traces of their creators ideas and circumstances (for better or worse). She also has an overlapping practice of archiving with an interest for variability, circulation, community and access. She is a member of Varia, a Rotterdambased initiative which aims at developing critical understandings of the technologies that surround us. She teaches at the Willem de Kooning Academy.
\textbf{Julie Boschat-Thorez} is a researcher, artist, and educator whose work focuses on knowledge organisation systems and the stories which can be extracted from them. She primarily investigates mundane objects such as archives, collections, datasets, or museums, to recover traces of their creators ideas and circumstances (for better or worse). She also has an overlapping practice of archiving with an interest for variability, circulation, community, and access. She is a member of Varia, a Rotterdam-based initiative which aims at developing critical understandings of the technologies that surround us. She teaches at the Willem de Kooning Academy.
\textbf{Ren Loren Britton} is a white trans* interdisciplinary artist and researcher tuning with practices of Critical Pedagogy, Trans*FeministTechno Science and Disability Justice. Playing with the queer potential of undoing norms they practice joyful accountability to matters of collaboration, access, Black Feminisms, instability and trans*politics. They love slowness, reading, following non-linear processes and experimenting towards greater accessibility.~Ren has presented work with multiple institutions including Transmediale (Berlin), ALT\_CPH Biennale (Copenhagen), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Constant (Brussels), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), Kunsthalle Osnabrück (Osnabrück), Varia (Rotterdam), Rupert (Vilnius) and Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin). With Isabel Paehr as MELT they operate as an art-design duo, questioning how coloniality, climate change and technological developments are intertwined. To pursue these questions, MELT boils up insights from chemistry, crip technoscience and trans *feminism to study and set in motion transformative material-discursive processes. MELT is currently a Fellow with the project ACCESS SERVER at the Het Nieuew Instituut in Rotterdam, NL and an associate fellow with MELT's project Data for\ldots? (trans* and disabled lives) with the Digital Curation Institute at the University of Toronto, CA.
\textbf{Ren Loren Britton} is a white trans* interdisciplinary artist and researcher tuning with practices of Critical Pedagogy, Trans*FeministTechno Science, and Disability Justice. Playing with the queer potential of undoing norms they practice joyful accountability to matters of collaboration, access, Black Feminisms, instability, and trans*politics. They love slowness, reading, following non-linear processes, and experimenting towards greater accessibility.~Ren has presented work with multiple institutions including Transmediale (Berlin), ALT\_CPH Biennale (Copenhagen), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Constant (Brussels), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), Kunsthalle Osnabrück (Osnabrück), Varia (Rotterdam), Rupert (Vilnius) and Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin). With Isabel Paehr as MELT they operate as an art-design duo, questioning how coloniality, climate change, and technological developments are intertwined. To pursue these questions, MELT boils up insights from chemistry, crip technoscience, and trans *feminism to study and set in motion transformative material-discursive processes. MELT is currently a Fellow with the project \emph{ACCESS SERVER} at the Het Nieuew Instituut in Rotterdam, NL and an Associate Fellow with MELT's project \emph{Data for\ldots? (trans* and disabled lives)} with the Digital Curation Institute at the University of Toronto, CA.
\textbf{Cristina Cochior} is a researcher and designer working in the Netherlands. With an interest in automation, situated software and peer to peer knowledge production, her work largely consists of investigations into the intimate bureaucracy of knowledge organisation systems and building collective, non-extractive digital infrastructures. She is a member of Varia and teaches at Willem de Kooning Academy.
\textbf{Cristina Cochior} is a researcher and designer working in The Netherlands. With an interest in automation, situated software, and peer to peer knowledge production, her work largely consists of investigations into the intimate bureaucracy of knowledge organisation systems and building collective, non-extractive digital infrastructures. She is a member of Varia and teaches at Willem de Kooning Academy.
\enlargethispage{1\baselineskip}
\textbf{Rosemary Grennan} is the co-director of MayDay Rooms, an archive and educational space in London which seeks to connect histories and documents of radicalism and resistance to contemporary struggle. She is also completing a PhD in Media Anthropology from University College London.
\textbf{Silvio Lorusso} is a writer, artist and designer based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In 2018 he published his first book entitled \emph{Entreprecariat}. He is an assistant professor and vice-director of the Centre for Other Worlds at the Lusófona University in Lisbon. Lorusso holds a Ph.D. in Design Sciences from the Iuav University of Venice.
\textbf{Silvio Lorusso} is a writer, artist, and designer based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. In 2018 he published his first book entitled \emph{Entreprecariat}. He is an assistant professor and vice-director of the Centre for Other Worlds at the Lusófona University in Lisbon. Lorusso holds a PhD. in Design Sciences from the Iuav University of Venice.
\textbf{Cengiz Mengüç} is a graphic designer and visual artist interested in diasporic identity expressed through the vernacular visual culture and architecture of the everyday. His current practice moves between commissioned art and design work, street-level~advertising work and self-initiated projects, working mostly across the mediums of installation, print and publishing. Currently, he is developing new work based on his ongoing research. Cengiz Mengüç graduated from the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts with a Bachelor degree in graphic design and works and lives in Rotterdam.
\textbf{Cengiz Mengüç} is a graphic designer and visual artist interested in diasporic identity expressed through the vernacular visual culture and architecture of the everyday. His current practice moves between commissioned art and design work, street-level~advertising work, and self-initiated projects, working mostly across the mediums of installation, print, and publishing. Currently, he is developing new work based on his ongoing research. Cengiz Mengüç graduated from the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts with a Bachelor degree in graphic design and works and lives in Rotterdam.
\textbf{Michael Murtaugh} is a computer programmer who researches community databases, interactive documentaries and tools for new forms of online reading and writing. He contributes to projects such as the Institute for Computational Vandalism and Active Archives, is a member of Constant and involved in Piet Zwart Media Design where he teaches at the Experimental Publishing Masters course. \url{http://automatist.org/}
\textbf{Michael Murtaugh} is a computer programmer who researches community databases, interactive documentaries, and tools for new forms of online reading and writing. He contributes to projects such as the Institute for Computational Vandalism and Active Archives, is a member of Constant, and involved in Piet Zwart Media Design where he teaches at the Experimental Publishing Masters course. \url{http://automatist.org/}
\textbf{Varia} is a small member-based organisation in Rotterdam (Charlois), focused on everyday technology. It uses the term everyday technology to break through the vision of old and new~technology, or smart and not so smart technology by looking more at the appropriateness of what~each technology does in a particular situation, while trying to understand whose everyday~is meant by the term, to not include one single~world view, but to acknowledge that everyone~engages with technology in a different way. \url{https://varia.zone}
What you are holding in your hands or browsing on your screen is the first book published by the EverydayTechnologyPress, an imprint run by the Rotterdam-based collective space Varia. Everyday technology is not just a moniker for the tools and devices we use on a daily basis, but a formula that identifies a perspective on technical artefacts and a programmatic goal. Everyday technology means that a sewing machine is no less important than a laptop, that a seamstress’s work is by no means less meaningful than that of a computer scientist. Focusing on everyday technology means questioning the hierarchies that surround technical objects and therefore the valorisation of skills needed to design or use them. Everyday technology means also reconsidering the hegemony of high tech: with our publications, we try to show that low-tech approaches can be complex, inventive, and joyful.
What you are holding in your hands or browsing on your screen is the first book published by the \nohyphens{Everyday}\nohyphens{Technology}\nohyphens{Press}, an imprint run by the Rotterdam-based collective space Varia. Everyday technology is not just a moniker for the tools and devices we use on a daily basis, but a formula that identifies a perspective on technical artefacts and a programmatic goal. Everyday technology means that a sewing machine is no less important than a laptop, that a seamstress’s work is by no means less meaningful than that of a computer scientist. Focusing on everyday technology means questioning the hierarchies that surround technical objects and therefore the valorisation of skills needed to design or use them. \nohyphens{Everyday} technology means also reconsidering the hegemony of high tech: with our publications, we try to show that low-tech approaches can be complex, inventive, and joyful.
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At Everyday Technology Press, we believe that not only experts should have access and decisive power in regards to how things should work. This is why our publications show and document convivial tools; tools that guarantee a certain degree of autonomy to their users. We understand autonomy in Ivan Illich’s terms, namely, the possibility for each and everyone to use a tool in order to realise their own intentions and create meaning by leaving a mark, however small, in the world.\footnote{ Ivan Illich, \emph{Tools for conviviality} (New York: Harper and Row,1973).} We strive to include multiple and entangled perspectives, needs, and aspirations that are at play when it comes to technology. We think of theory as a practice and practice as a form of knowledge production. True to this belief, in our publications we complement analyses with instructions and code; tutorials and methods with essays. Here, the \emph{know what} goes hand in hand with the \emph{know how}.
At \nohyphens{Everyday}\nohyphens{Technology}\nohyphens{Press}, we believe that not only experts should have access and decisive power in regards to how things should work. This is why our publications show and document convivial tools; tools that guarantee a certain degree of autonomy to their users. We understand autonomy in Ivan Illich’s terms, namely, the possibility for each and everyone to use a tool in order to realise their own intentions and create meaning by leaving a mark, however small, in the world.\footnote{ Ivan Illich, \emph{Tools for conviviality} (New York: Harper and Row,1973).} We strive to include multiple and entangled perspectives, needs, and aspirations that are at play when it comes to technology. We think of theory as a practice and practice as a form of knowledge production. True to this belief, in our publications we complement analyses with instructions and code; tutorials and methods with essays. Here, the \emph{know what} goes hand in hand with the \emph{know how}.
\fontdimen3\font=0.1em
Through its engagement with vernacular languages, \emph{VLTK} suggests another meaning of everyday technology. Technology is often not recognised as such. Language, for example, is something that many take for granted and deem and call “natural.” However, a variety of technical procedures, rules, and constraints operate on top of its roots, which are, according to Jorge Luis Borges, “irrational and magical.”\footnote{Jorge Luis Borges, \emph{El otro, el mismo} (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2005).} This is how language becomes a technology. The technologisation of language tends to be a singular, reductive operation that produces a language with a capital “L” as a technology with a capital “T.” \emph{VLTK} counterbalances that: this book does not only show that a wealth of linguistic modes of being exist, but also that they can thrive, given enough space and the proper amount of attention.
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\hspace{-2pt}Through its engagement with vernacular languages,\thinspace\emph{Vernaculars come to matter} suggests another meaning of everyday technology. Technology is often not recognised as such. Language, for example, is something that many take for granted and deem and call “natural.” However, a variety of technical procedures, rules, and constraints operate on top of its roots, which are, according to Jorge Luis Borges, “irrational and magical.”\footnote{Jorge Luis Borges, \emph{El otro, el mismo} (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2005).} This is how language becomes a technology. The technologisation of language tends to be a singular, reductive operation that produces language with a capital “L” as a technology with a capital “T.” \emph{Vernaculars come to \nohyphens{matter}} counterbalances that: this book does not only show that a wealth of \nohyphens{linguistic} modes of being exist, but also that they can thrive, given enough space and the proper amount of attention.
