Tags: web-building note-taking

As someone who has recently become a digital humanist by profession, and has only recently become a developer, and has only recently learned how to code in any significant way, I’m probably not qualified enough for the opinions that follow. And my presumption is not that anyone will want to read this, but more that I may want to read this in the future so that I can remember what my soapbox was and see if it’s shifted, lifted, shrunk, or changed as I gain more skills, talk to more people, and learn more things.

I don’t like the word self-taught in the sense that the resources I used to learn how code were not in any particular course or dedicated space, but they were still written, laboured upon, and shared by a person consciously somewhere on the web and made accessible to me, for which I’m grateful. I learned quickly that borrowing code from webpages and then trying to work backward to figure out how it came together was a lot more effective for me that following a teleological tutorial. As Vannevar Bush says in his 1940s article As We May Think, humans don’t think in linear, chronological, or teleological arrangements, but rather jump around through associations between memories, words, thoughts, and ideas we’ve got stored in the ol’ noggin’.

I remember the Web of my childhood as primary a playground: we went online to play flash games like Run and take weird typing tests with a piano or a guitar, we looked up lots of facts as Wikipedia and went down unguided Wikipedia rabbit holes, we took personality quizzes on which Disney princess we were or how many kids we’d have or what flavour donut we’d be, and we shared all of this with each other through email, huddled physically together around a single screen, or running around the school computer room looking at each other’s monitors. I still see remnants of this sometimes: I’ll notice that in a big classroom of 30, where there’s inevitably someone not paying attention, that person will be playing 2048 on their laptop or sometimes even Wizard 101. But for the most part, our relationship to the web seems to have increasingly become one of “first search syndrome,” a condition where we expect to find exactly what we’re looking for and nothing else as the first result at the top of the first page after our first search in Google.

I don’t even think I though critically at all about the web until I started to put stuff up there and carve out my own little spaces myself. My father is a software engineer and cybersecurity architect, and while he passed down none of the technical skills to me, he did instil a discomfort with social media that has stuck with me. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have never appealed to me, in part because I think they’re not quite satisfying enough. I always want more, more behind the photo (what’s the story?), more behind the cryptic caption, more writing and less clicking. Selfishly, I want to hear and be heard, and these sites accomplish this for millions of people; just not my cup of tea. My father has been blogging, and is a strong supporter of the personal connections made through blogging, for decades. A select group of people he’s never met in person comment on his posts regularly, know about his family and his hobbies, the way he thinks and what he finds interesting, and he in turn knows them from their personal web spaces. They correct each other, share thoughts about life, writing, reading, aquascaping, coffee, photography, and any other number of interests (my dad’s got a lot of hobbies). They are friends, commentators, collaborators, and a circle of critical thinkers and editors. The web gives them this connection.

I’m currently prepping for a workshop I’m hoping to teach about the history of Black digital humanities, as a companion or extension of a workshop my colleague and I already teach, “Intro to Black Digital Humanities.” In my research on Black digital humanities and its formation and impact, however, I’ve my experience has been one of “being bogged down today as specialization extends” (Bush 1945) i.e. finding an overwhelming amount of articles all on highly specific, disparate opinions and topics, without any embedded backlinks or topical connections. It doesn’t make sense to me that while I’m doing this research, I can’t find a single article that’s just “the history of Black DH” or “the history of Black data”. Sure, the amalgamated information from various sources is wonderful, but the encyclopaedia entry is really what I needed for this class. As Mike Caulfield puts it in The Garden and the Stream- A Technopastoral: “Nobody can find good OER on certain subjects,” because everyone is so busy being hyperspecific and hyperfocused on individual arguments. I’m a huge defender of Wikipedia in part for this reason, but also because it’s gotten a bad rap in academia for reasons that are simply untrue. My school librarians were always on about “Wikipedia is not fact-checked,” when in fact Wikipedia is a citation-based, crowd-sourced, peer-reviewed resource and articles that lack any of these elements make that plain. Wikipedia is one of the (if not the number one) most useful, accessible, and robust OER out there, and it behooves us to create more things like it and for it.

I guess my soapbox also includes the de-structuralization of expertise, in that it scares me to think that we’ve lost so much potent knowledge by maligning blogs, personal essays, non-academy/institution-supported scholarship as “non-authoritative.” I am a librarian, so misinformation and disinformation is not a problem I take lightly or ignore, but I think it’s also often used in ways that reinforce a destructive and harmful power structure, one in which you must listen to corporation-produced textbooks, subscription material, and Big Academia/Big Tech publications.

• The web should be a diverse place filled with diverse thoughts, aesthetics, epistemologies, opinions, resources, pathways, etc.
  • Web space is real estate, in the sense that claiming it, having it, and using it is power.
    - Web-building shouldn’t be a process of just constructing identical cookie-cutter houses or high-rise condos, but of rambling cottages and shacks mixed into these highly architecturally-curated spaces.
• The web should be a place where people can get to know one another, create communities, and build genuine relationships
• The web should be used in the service of the most possible human good. Ameliorating suffering, increasing access, and preventing harm rather than creating it.