Thankfully, the new rules allow circumvention for reproducing short clips in cases of noncommercial videos, documentary filmmaking, and educational uses.  But while the first two of these are just defined by the act itself, educational uses are additionally restricted to certain kinds of people: “college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students.”  It is this last element that causes huge ambiguity — college and university professors are easy to define, but just who are “film and media studies students?”  Sure, there are a good number of students who would fit the clearest metric of this — officially majoring or a degree candidate in a department/program of film and media studies — but there are a lot of border cases, myself included.

Actually, the first problem I have with this rule is that I’m not a border case; these exemptions clearly don’t apply to me.  That is because it clearly defines students and professors while leaving out a sizable chunk of academic labor: non-faculty researchers.  See, for the past year or so, I’ve neither been a student nor a professor, despite being very much affiliated with a university and performing quite a lot of scholarly work.  Because of my limbo status, none of these exemptions apply to me, even if all the other logical ambiguities resolve themselves in my favor.  Other people in this situation include: post-docs, adjuncts titled ‘instructor’ instead of ‘professor’, and, depending on definitions quite possibly include students hired in the summer, if they aren’t taking classes.

That said, quite a large number of students could possibly be excluded from this definition, and it’s that could which frustrates me almost as much as being flat-out denied.  Even in some of the supplementary documentation that was included to clarify and explain the decision, there is still much left undefined, despite the fact that they claim that “College and university professors can easily be distinguished from K-12 teachers, and college and university film and media studies students can easily be distinguished from other college and university students, as well as from K-12 students.”

Now, college professors are indeed easy (though adjuncts are an issue), but film and media studies students are impossibly hard to define!  First off, what is the formal criteria for being a student of such studies?  If the courts asked me, I would say it is an activity-based criteria, where if I am studying film or media I should be considered a film or media studies student, even if my assignment is for a class in anthropology, information science, or history.  However, the ease with which the Librarian explicitly states in the documentation that the education exemption differs from the other two in that it is not activity-based.  This means it has to be one based on membership, and there is nowhere in the documentation where this is to be defined.

Now, before I get into all the different ways of determining who is and isn’t a student in a given program, there first a massive logical ambiguity here with ‘film and media studies’.  Does it evaluate to ‘film studies’ and/or ‘media studies’ student, or does it just include students who are part of ‘film AND media studies’?    I thought this was trivial until I saw that USC’s department of Film and Media Studies did a lot of work to get this passed — they’re mentioned in the documentation.  Kudos to them on this, but my fear is that it stems from an assumption that all applicable programs follow this similar naming convention.  I’d hate to see departments of Film Studies, Media Studies, or Radio, Television, and Film get excluded from this on some bureaucratic ambiguity.

Now, I’m going to assume the saner option and say that any student in a program or department with ‘media’ or ‘film’ in the title is safe, but that interpretation still leaves out a bunch of ambiguous cases.  What about a student whose degree has ‘media’ or ‘film’ in the title, but their department, program, or school does not?   I’m thinking of the students at Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture who are getting their Ph.Ds in Digital Media, for example.  There are many more examples, but defining a film/media studies student by the title of their department or program is problematic.  Also, what about all the students getting a certificate or designated emphasis in media or film studies?  This goes to the ‘who is a student’ question, and I don’t think this is adequately solved by looking at the title of a student’s degree and/or the department, program, or school from which they are receiving that degree.

What about freshmen who haven’t declared a major yet?  What about a biochem major who is taking an elective in film studies?  What about students at liberal arts colleges that don’t even have students major in a particular discipline or field?  At this point, I thought that the easy mechanism to which the Librarian was referring could be courses: if you’re taking a class in a media or film studies department, program, or school, then congratulations, you’re a media or film studies student.  It’s a good fit, but it doesn’t include students who aren’t taking a media or film studies class that semester yet might need to do media or film studies scholarship during that time.  There are many times when you might not be taking a class in your major but might want to do some film/media studies work: working as a summer RA, doing a project on film for a class in history or anthropology, writing a thesis or dissertation, or simply doing your own side project that may never go anywhere.  If we limit to current classes taken, all of these may be excluded.

Next to last is a big one: students who happen to be entirely outside of departments and programs with the magic keywords ‘media’ or ‘film’, but are nonetheless doing research about these topics.   For example, the program I’m currently in at Georgetown has the official name of “Communication, Culture, and Technology.”  We’re an interdisciplinary program, and good number of our faculty would heavily self-identify with media or film studies.  They teach courses with ‘media’ or ‘film’ in the title, present at media studies conferences, publish in media studies journals, and do research on film and television.  I personally know they many could benefit significantly from these new rules. They obviously qualify because they are faculty, but what about our many students who think of themselves as media or film studies students?  In the eyes of the law, are any of them ‘actually’ film or media studies students because though their degree program neither contains the words ‘film’ nor ‘media’?   Are if we do end up using a course-based definition, are they only media/film studies students when taking a course with one of those words in the title?

My final issue is less of an ambiguity and more of an explicit exclusion that frustrates me.  Media and film studies are somewhat solidified fields, but there is a massive amount of academic research outside of those fields that could benefit from such legal exemptions.  I mentioned that many of the students and faculty in my program self-identify as media or film studies.  However, many do not, and instead consider themselves historians, anthropologists, sociologists, cultural theorists, communication scholars, and information scientists, among others.  Neither their research nor their classes are primarily about media or film, yet they sometimes find themselves caring about the cultural content that is encoded onto DVD disks and protected with CSS.  While the professors are protected, their students are not, and this includes graduate students working on their dissertations.  It’s a huge problem, and hopefully it won’t take as long to rectify as it did to issue the initial fix.

Harman is amazing on a number of levels, and if you’re someone who comes from STS and/or contemporary philosophy, you should definitely be reading him for his academic musings.  Even if you don’t care about recent developments in post-Heideggerian object-oriented actor-network sociotechnicopistemology, the American sportswriter turned Egyptian professor is worth reading for his insights into academia, life, and academic life (which are three way different things).  But back to my original point, the man is prolific – he blogs as often as most people tweet, giving his thoughts on everything from the recent crisis at Middlesex philosophy to personal reflections on the writing process.

Obviously he formats his posts and checks them for errors, but it doesn’t seem like he spends that much time thinking about what he should blog about or if some particular topic is worth posting.  He just writes about what ever is interesting to him, sometimes just sharing a link, other times giving commentary, and (where I find him most invaluable) doing both, sharing an excerpt of something that someone wrote with his thoughts on the matter.  It might be an essay one of his colleagues wrote regarding speculative realism’s view of innate qualities of objects, but it is more likely to be about plagiarism by students, whatever fiction or non-fiction book he’s reading, the latest conference he went to, or the English-speaking abilities of Cairo taxi drivers.  This can sometimes be overwhelming — say, when I open up my feed reader and find ten posts written while I was sleeping — but I’ve realized it is the right approach.  Not only has he kept me informed about topics, ideas, books, conferences, controversies, and so on that I would otherwise not know about, but he also offers a window into his world. I’ve never met him, but I feel like I know Graham Harman.

Contrast this with me.  I haven’t posted an update in months, and the last one I did was formatted much like a short academic paper and took a good hour or two to write.  I have about a half dozen drafts of posts that I’ve spent way too much time on — not writing, but thinking, second-guessing myself, googling to see if I’m original, and so on.  They are long, but that’s not a inherent problem.  Rather, they are filled with things that just don’t need to be in a blog post: no specific words or phrasings, but  instead the awkward insecurities that permeate all formal academic writing at the beginning stages.

Maybe it is part of being a grad student, where I feel afraid that I’ll accidentally offend someone or, more likely, just say something stupid.  Maybe it is because my site is first and foremost an academic portfolio constructed with blogging software, a professional, polished, public space in which I can present a slightly more interactive CV.   Maybe it is because I’ve been part of an pedagogic culture in which blogging is overwhelmingly just a digital form of the standard one-page essay summarizing and responding to the week’s course readings.  And as I write that last sentence — which may be interpreted as a slight jab towards some of my favorite professors — I realize exactly what my problem is: I have to stop myself from obsessing too much, or else I’ll never actually blog.

Thus comes the title of this post (which, by the way, is a riff on the amazing We Have Never Been Blogging, a Latourian blog which itself is a rift on the book We Have Never Been Modern).  I haven’t been writing blog posts, I’ve been writing short essays about topics that are only worth the time and energy for blog post.  That’s not to disparage the people who do publish academic essays with blogging software, it’s just a different thing.  And having broken my new rule again with a good ten minutes of rewriting that last sentence, I’m just going to end this post now.

So all this to say that I’m going to be blogging again, and with a new understanding of what that means.  I don’t think I’m as interesting as Graham Harman and I don’t plan on being as prolific as him, but I do plan on easing up on the slack.  For me, blogging is an immediate activity, something that you  put out there when you think of something that you find interesting.  I hope you do and that is the ultimate point of this, but not something that can be dwelled on.

If you are interested in the history of contemporary science, particularly in the 1980s and ’90s, citation analysis can be a useful tool to discover broad trends in scientific research.  In this area, the ISI’s Web of Science is the de-facto source for this data, claiming to be the most comprehensive database of articles and journals. They index articles using a number of categories, including author, title, publication, subject, topic, and more. With a built-in results analyzer, it is very easy to chart the top authors in a subject, the journals that publish the most in a given field, or, as I was interested in, the growth of a particular topic over time.

I’m currently researching the history of a software suite for the simulation and modeling of molecules, and it is commonplace to cite its debut article if research has been done using the tool, making citation analysis quite painless. I learned though archival research that a certain feature was added in 1990 that would make the simulation of enzymes much easier.  The obvious question is if it had any measurable effect on the amount of research being done with this tool to study enzymes. So I told ISI to give me a list of all articles citing the original software article with the topic “enzyme” between 1985 and 1994. I found the most beautiful results:

According to the citation counts, it seems pretty clear that enzyme research using this program took off dramatically after 1990.  Knowing that correlation doesn’t equal causation, I restrained myself from thinking that the introduction of this new feature in 1990 caused the growth, but I knew that there had to be something here.   Perhaps enzymes were getting interesting after 1990 for some external reason (increased funding or relevance, new discoveries, etc) that caused both the new feature and the increased research.  So I did a database-wide search for all articles on the topic “enzyme” and analyzed it by year.  What I found was even more remarkable:

After 1990, all enzyme research appears to take off dramatically, with a 300% increase a single year.  I knew I was onto something here, and candidates kept coming into my mind: did the Human Genome Project spur this massive interest in enzymes?  Was there a general increase in science funding at this time, a worldwide biology research initiative (like the International Geophysical Year), or the takeoff of the biomedical/biochemical industries?  Whatever it was, I had a lead on something big, something that I hadn’t seen in any of the literature on the history of contemporary bioscience.

I began to search the literature for bibliometric research with phrases like “after 1990″ and “after 1991″, combined with various synonyms for rapid growth.  I found a number of other historians and sociologists of science who were making the same kind of argument that I was considering: important events happened in 1988-1990, and these events had to have at least some effect on the massive explosion of articles in a given discipline, subject area, or sub-specialty.  All of them used ISI, and all of them narrowed their search by topic.  While my intent was to find something in fields related to biochemistry, I these articles were making the argument across the sciences, including nanotechnology, materials science, mental health, oceanography, and more.  So I ran the same kind of analysis as before, but this time with a wide range of topic keywords (and scaled the results by the relative increase in citations from the previous year):

As is clear, topics from numerous disciplines and interdisciplinary fields remain steady until 1990, have a massive increase, and then plateau.  The effect is anywhere from 140% to 330%, but the fact that they all occur in the exact same year seems too perfect.  Even if there was a massive, across-the-board increase in science funding, research cycles are so varied – some kinds of studies can expect findings in six months, while others can take years.  The lack of residual effects after 1991 makes this even more unlikely: while the percent increase from 1990 to 1991 is varied, the growth from ’91 to ’92 is no more than +/- 10%.

Occam’s razor leads me to believe that these anomalies are an artifact of ISI’s Web of Science, not scientific publishing itself.  The most likely situations would be that in 1990, 1) a large number of new journals (most likely less popular ones) were added, 2) new kinds of research materials (books, conference proceedings, data sets, etc) were added, or 3) ISI’s method for determining article topics was changed (such as including author keywords or abstracts).  I suspect #3, and after far too much digging, I found some confirmation in a 1994 essay written by ISI’s founder:

Through large test samples, we concluded that the titles of papers cited in reviews and other articles were sufficient to add useful descriptive words and phrases to the citing paper. This was later confirmed in studies by A. J. Harley, as Irv Sher and I recently reported.11, 12

In 1990, ISI (now Thomson Reuters) was able to introduce this citation-based method of derivative (algorithmic) subject indexing, called KeyWords Plus®. 7, 8 In addition to title words, author-supplied keywords, and/or abstract words, KeyWords Plus supplies words and phrases to enhance these other descriptors and thereby retrievability. These KeyWords Plus terms are derived from the titles of cited papers, which have been algorithmically processed to identify the most-commonly recurring words and phrases.

Unfortunately, this new algorithm for topic indexing appears to have been introduced without distinguishing it from the old one.  As far as I can tell, there is no way to just search for pre-1990 style keywords in post-1990 articles, meaning that ISI’s topics and keywords are useless for historical bibliometrics that span across this date.   And thanks to what I’m calling ‘the 1990 effect’ (someone give me a better term, please!), many researchers are being led down a deceptively misleading path!

Abstract:  Is computer-mediated discourse leading to collective political action in the public sphere, or simply more fragmentation? This question has been asked by social and political theorists ever since the Internet entered academia in the early 90s. However, this debate has been recently rekindled by Jurgen Habermas – one of the leading theorists of the public sphere – who recently broke a longstanding silence and spoke out against the Internet as a potentially democratizing medium. Instead of directly intervening in this debate, I interrogate the techno-epistemic conditions of possibility for ‘the blogosphere’ to exist as a sociopolitical entity. Specifically, I analyze social aggregation sites like Technorati, Delicious, Digg, and even Google, which make it possible for collective action to precipitate out of the Internet. I find that Habermasians should not fear fragmentation, but instead integration: the blogosphere as a public sphere is constructed and unified not by ideal discourse, but algorithms.

“Internet” is often spelled with a capital “I.” In keeping with current trends in internet studies, we prefer the lower case “i.” Capitalizing suggests that “internet” is a proper noun, and implies either that it is a being, like Nancy or Annette, or that it is a specific place, like Madison or Lawrence. Both metaphors lead to granting the internet agency and power that is better granted to those  who develop and use it.

I cannot disagree more.  First off, as someone who considers myself part of the emerging ‘Internet studies’ field, I did not know that this was a “recent trend” and had difficulty finding confirmation outside of this volume – although that can be forgiven, considering that we are at a very fragmented, even pre-paradigmatic point. (Readers: If you’ve seen this trend before, please comment!)

However, my most basic and linguistic objection is that the Internet satisfies the general conditions for being a proper noun: it refers to a unique entity.  While I do believe that the best category for the Internet is place-based, we capitalize far more than beings or places – which are the only classes that Markham and Baym give.  However, we don’t need to go into the whole ontological debate about whether the internet is a being, a place, an organization, a nation, a brand, an ideology, or any other class of entities that we capitalize.  There is only one Internet, and we can cleanly divide between on-line and off-line in the abstract – even if it becomes a lot murkier in practice, as with God and the Third World.

Given that the famed lowercase scholar danah boyd is one of the authors in the edited volume, I next thought that the editors may be taking from both boyd and feminist author bell hooks, who explicitly defy standard grammatical conventions in order to to make a political and/or philosophical point (they claim to de-capitalize their names to draw attention to their works and not themselves).  So I think it is better to focus not on the correct grammatical rules of Standard English, but the core motivation that they give: does capitalizing ‘Internet’ give it a kind of agency and power that we should instead attribute to the Internet’s developers and users?  I would argue that capitalization does give the Internet agency and power – and that this is a well-needed move.  Or to be more specific, this move does not magically give the Internet a power or agency it previously did not have, but rather acknowledges that the Internet’s technological infrastructure does things beyond what its developers and users intend.

In fact, one of my biggest frustrations with the proto-discipline of ‘Internet studies’ is that many scholars pass over the important roles played by the material technology upon which all of our interactions are mediated.  Now, I’m certainly not advocating a return to the technological determinism that was all the rage in the 60’s and 70’s. However, I do believe that the 80’s and 90’s have left us in a state where many of us are too wary of swinging back to Martin Heidegger and Lewis Mumford in order to seriously examine the materiality of the technologies that support the communities and practices we study.  A large amount of research in Internet studies focuses exclusively on human/social behavior in technological spaces, with only a few token gestures towards the way in which the ‘tubes’ fundamentally transform our interactions.  I think this is because we spend most of our time demonstrating that technology is socially constructed, leaving ourselves blind to how society is also technologically constructed.

Abstract: In this paper, we examine the social roles of software tools in the English-language Wikipedia, specifically focusing on autonomous editing programs and assisted editing tools. This qualitative research builds on recent research in which we quantitatively demonstrate the growing prevalence of such software in recent years. Using trace ethnography, we show how these often-unofficial technologies have fundamentally transformed the nature of editing and administration in Wikipedia. Specifically, we analyze „vandal fighting‟ as an epistemic process of distributed cognition, highlighting the role of non-human actors in enabling a decentralized activity of collective intelligence. In all, this case shows that software programs are used for more than enforcing policies and standards. These tools enable coordinated yet decentralized action, independent of the specific norms currently in force.

Download the full paper (PDF)

This week, I’m presenting a poster at WikiSym 2009 on “The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools.”  Most of the work is distilled from my thesis.

Abstract: This project investigates various software programs as non-human social actors in Wikipedia, arguing that their influence must not be overlooked in research of the on-line encyclopedia project. Using statistical and archival methods, the roles of assisted editing programs and bots are examined. First, the proportion of edits made by these non-human actors is significantly more than previously described in earlier research. Second, these actors have moved into new spaces, changing not just the practice of article writing and reviewing, but also administrative work.

Download the Poster (PDF)

Download the Extended Abstract (PDF)

And if you are interested in this topic, check out the full paper, The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal.

Jimmy Wales speaking at the conference keynote, by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of presenting at the first (hopefully annual) WikiConference New York, sponsored by the Wikimedia New York City chapter with assistance from Free Culture @ NYU and the Information Law Institute at NYU’s law school. I know that I am atrociously late in writing this post, but I’m not really writing it for the Wikipedians out there. Rather, the WikiConference was an interesting experiment that seemed to apply Wikipedia’s philosophy towards editing to a conference, resulting in what the organizers called a “modified unconference.”

I had never heard of unconferences before, but they are apparently growing increasingly common in tech/programming circles, especially as precursors or followups to traditional conferences. The idea is that in order to keep administratve costs low, you don’t really organize the conference into pre-determined panels, roundtables, and keynotes. Instead, you have a general theme, a good number of open rooms, and a good number of eager participants, who set the topics of individual sessions for themselves and move from room to room on a fluid, ad-hoc basis.  The only rule is the “rule of two feet” – if you don’t like what is going on in the room you are in, leave and find another one.

The conference organizers apparently decided that this was too anarchistic, and instead opted to have a limited number of traditional sessions.  I was on one of the structured sessions, presenting my research on bots and assisted editing tools on the “Quality and Governance” panel.  It was also decided that the “open space”  time was to be segmented into blocks of concurrent sessions.  There was going to be a specific agenda for each of the open space sessions, but they were to be determined at the conference, not before; in addition, the process was to be open to anyone who wanted to propose a session.  While it seemed like an odd way to run a conference (and a bit scary seeing blank space dominate the schedule), it worked incredibly well.

Open space board at WikiConference NYC, by me, CC BY-SA 3.0

We had use of five rooms of various sizes, and one of them was dedicated for refreshments and mingling.  Outside of the largest room (which was used for each day’s opening keynote), there were sheets of paper taped to the wall, creating a table for rooms and timeslots.  After the first day’s opening keynote, sheets of paper, tape, and markers were passed around, and anybody could write something down, tape it to the wall under a timeslot/room combination, and that would be part of the initial schedule.

Given that most of us had never participated in this before, there was a good amount of milling around in front of the schedule wall – five minutes in, nobody had put up a single topic for any timeslot.  Feeling compelled to ake some initiative, I asked someone who was going to be on my panel that afternoon how he felt about a topic on macro-level decision making.  Specifically, I was interested in the approval of flagged revisions – the controversial software feature that would require some edits be approved before going live.  He suggested that I make it broader, and simply write “How do we make decisions?”

The open space wall, by Cary Bass, CC BY-SA 2.5

That seemed like a better and broader topic, so I grabbed some paper and one of the markers, wrote it down in my chicken-scratch handwriting, and taped it to the wall under the first timeslot for the second-biggest room.  Shortly after, three other sheets came up, on quite diverse topics: notability standards, libraries and librarians in Wikipedia, and translation/foreign languages.  Some had even put up sheets for other time slots, touching on nineteen issues that touched on just about every topic in and around Wikipedia.

According to the conventions of open space, the person who put the topic up was expected to start the session on time, say a few words to frame the issue, and then wrap things up at the end.  As the session began, I did just that, telling the room that I had originally thought of this as a discussion about the decision-making around large scale issues like flagged revisions.  However, it is probably good that I was not the moderator, because the room quickly got off the topic of macro-level decision-making and moved into the micro.  We ended up talking extensively about the wide variety of decisions that are made every day – whether to keep or delete a potentially unnotable article, to make an editor into an administrator, and more.

NewYorkBrad asking a question, by Sage Ross, CC BY 3.0

While this was not what I originally envisioned for the session, I was glad that the format had allowed such a swift change.  Had I been delegated to craft a speech, panel, discussion, or roundtable in a traditional conference, I probably would have taken it into a direction that most people did not want to go – of the twenty-something open sessions in the two days, nobody proposed a session on flagged revisions.  Unconferences are supposed to be directed by and for the benefit of the participants, and this was certainly the case.  In any case, the discussion on decision-making went rather well, although a moderator did end up emerging because our session ended up being one of the most popular open sessions, filling up the 75-person classroom.

Yet like in Wikipedia, the unconference didn’t simply devolve into a mass populist mob, reaching for the lowest common denominator.  The fact that we had multiple rooms, a couple of them small conference rooms, meant that less popular topics got their fair share of space.  One open session that I found interesting was on systemic bias – the fact that Wikipedia tends to implicitly favor certain topics, styles, or stances because of the demographic makeup of its contributors.  This tends to not be that popular of a topic, and only a handful of us showed up to discuss this (in my opinion) quite important issue.  However, this resulted in a very thought-provoking discussion among the five of us – that’s about three percent of the conference – who felt a need to identify, theorize, and fix Wikipedia’s systemic biases.

Open session: editing an article for the Wikipedia Signpost

Taken by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0

Another strength of the open unconference is its radical flexibility.  On the second day, the question/answer session in opening keynote speech turned into a strong debate among a few of the participants.  Because this stops others from asking questions, the typical move at conferences is to stop the debate and pledge to continue it later.  I’ve seen it happen at many conferences, but due to the rigid structure of most conferences, the continuing discussion rarely happens.  Yet in this case, the keynote speech was to be followed by open space sessions.  Realizing that there was an empty slot avaliable in one of the small rooms, the debate that emerged in the keynote Q/A was instantly given its own session.

We also had sets of lightning talks, which were presented in a keynote style.  For those of you who don’t know, lighting talks are short 3-7 minute presentations that anyone can give on the fly.  While lightning talks are held in many conferences I have been to, they tend to be pushed to the background.  Like poster sessions, lightning talks usually take place during established break periods (like lunch), or during other sessions.  This means that the only people who view them are other lightning talkers.  In our case, the lightning talks were after the lunch hour and when no other sessions were being held.  This way, I feel that the presenters got a much broader audience.

Andrew Gradman giving a lightning talk, by Sage Ross, CC BY-SA 3.0

In all, I think that the open unconference was a great success.  However, I don’t think that the “open space” model is adequate on its own – which is why I was glad that there were a limited number of keynotes and pre-arranged panels.  I was on one of the panels (discussing “Quality and Governance”), and got to give a standard 15 minute structured conference presentation, as did my fellow panelists.  I feel that that format is valuble, because I don’t think my research findings on bots and assisted editing tools (or any research findings, for that matter) could have been presented in an open space session or a lightning talk.  The two kinds of sessions are meant to facilitate two different kinds of activities: structured panels and keynotes frame discussions, while the open spaces let participants take it in any way they desire.  For example, I was very excited when the last open session of the conference turned into a user-driven showcase of assisted editing tools – completely unprovoked by myself, I promise.  Another session (one of my favorite) was a workshop in which all the participants worked collectively on writing a news article about the conference for Wikipedia’s community newspaper, the Wikipedia Signpost.

I’m not sure if these kinds of activities would have happened at a more traditional conference – and if they did, they would have probably required a lot more planning. One thing is certain though: the cost of the conference, which was the main reason for the unconference movement, was practically nil. It was completely run by volunteers, and only expenses were refreshments and food.

We throw around the words “collective intelligence” and “wisdom of the crowds” quite a bit to describe “Web 2.0″ sites like Wikipedia, but we hardly define what we mean when we use any of those terms, which is why they largely remain scare-quoted. Because of this, the door has been left wide open for scientists and journalistic defenders of science to critique Wikipedia and other social media sites as being relativist, collectivist mobs who can do no more than aggregate the baseline opinion of what the masses perceive to be Truth. While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced. To answer such a question, I examine Wikipedia in light of a distinction between an infrastructure of knowing (everything required to evaluate a statement as true/false) and an infrastructure of knowledge production (everything required to bring forth new statements with claims to truth/falsity). While the Wikipedian epistemology on the encyclopedic level is purely evaluative, refusing to publish original research and instead relying on reliable sources, this process is made possible by a non-encyclopedic form of knowledge production.

In short, in order for there to exist an infrastructure of knowing such that the evaluation of encyclopedia articles becomes possible, there must exist an infrastructure of knowledge production to generate and evaluate claims regarding the acts of editing. These include statements like “this edit is vandalism and needs to be reverted” or “this user is disruptive and needs to be blocked” – which require their own epistemic order for evaluation. Taking a cue from laboratory studies of scientific practice, I detail the way in which epistemic standards are “black boxed” into material technologies. In the same way that a mass spectrometer is the reification of dozens of now-unproblematic theories from physics, chemistry, and mathematics, so do various technological programs used by self-described “vandal fighters” reify Wikipedia’s epistemic standards. Similarly, in the same way that various technologies had to be developed to allow experimental science to trump philosophical reasoning (like laboratory reports, which made experimental findings circulatable), so have various technologies been developed that make Wikipedia’s mechanisms of epistemic verification and enforcement possible.

By detailing all the human and non-human actors at work in the banning of a vandal, I show how a group of seemingly-disconnected editors contributed to a process of knowledge production necessary for the enforcement of epistemic standards. In this way, collective intelligence was made possible in Wikipedia, but not because of a mystical or anarchistic wisdom of crowds. Instead, these encyclopedic epistemic standards were able to be enforced because various human and non-human actors were constantly working to hold together an infrastructure of non-encyclopedic knowledge production.

Link: Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production (PDF, 901 KB)

These non-encyclopedic wikispaces in and around Wikipedia are used to organize most of the largely invisible work required to maintain and further develop the encyclopedia. In fact, some of the project’s most active pages are not hotly-contested encyclopedia articles, but rather these ‘meta’ pages which are used to make collective consensus decisions about various issues. In maintaining and developing this aspect of the encyclopedia, the Wikipedian community takes advantage of the wiki media to do so in a unique form of digital governance. Social power structures still exist, but the wiki-based nature of the site allows authority to be largely distributed and decentralized, in stark contrast to traditional forms of knowledge production.

However, such a social structure and media use has not always been present in Wikipedia. In the first year of its existence, most of the coordination of invisible maintenance work and resolution of ‘meta’ issues took place almost exclusively on e-mail listservs. I demonstrate that this media use corresponded to a social structure that took founder Jimmy Wales to be the unquestioned leader of the project, in charge of resolving issues when they arose among the small community of editors. Yet as the project grew, this listserv-mediated, “benevolent dictator” governance model did not scale to meet the rapid increase of both individual editors and editorial issues.

In response to various controversies in which the benevolent dictator model led to backlashes from the project’s growing editorial base, I show how pages in the wiki began to be used for a new, distributed form of governance. Instead of a monarchical model tempered by a centralized discussion forum, this model took advantage of features in the wiki media to enable a more direct and participatory system of governance. However, both the wiki media and the governance model proved inadequate and were subsequently refined in response to various issues faced by the project. The result, I show in this historical account, is the current instantiation of authority and media technology in and around Wikipedia, which has evolved significantly since in the project’s seven year history.

Scholars have long theorized how media technologies fundamentally reshapes the way in which we exist both as individuals and as a society. In an age of information overload, the history of Wikipedia’s co-evolving media use and governance model gives us a powerful lesson regarding the way in which the development of social structures and media technologies are fundamentally interrelated in the digital era.