The consequences of this are legion. It means that protocological analysis must focus not on the sciences of meaning (representation/interpretation/reading), but rather on the sciences of possibility (physics or logic)… (52)

This is from Alex Galloway’s Protocol, which I’ve been rereading during the last few days. Galloway’s book is closely related to the project I’m currently working on. The primary difference is that I’m focusing on the relationship of protocol and standardization to writing and rhetoric whereas his argument focused on protocol and standardization through the lens of critical social theory.

This passage is significant in the way that it turns the interpretive method on its head. For Galloway, protocological (standards) analysis explores possibility rather than underlying meaning. This type of analysis explores possible worlds that may not yet exist as a type of research, but are enabled through media, or in my favored terminology: infrastructure.

Galloway calls this type of research hacking.

Before reading this, I’d formed an uncomfortable alliance with design study research, something I’m not trained in, but found useful because of the its focus on producing possibilities rather than interpreting existing texts. As I’ve worked on my own research, I’ve found it odd that rhetorical studies hadn’t frequently taken the turn to possibilities and text production more enthusiastically. Rhetoric had historically at one point been focused on creating heuristics for producing new texts, not interpreting old ones. While a few rhetoricians pursue that idea (Kaufer and Butler’s Rhetoric and the Arts of Design for example) and others have suggested that rhetorical analysis is primarily a heuristic for production rather than interpretation (like in Dilip Gaonkar’s infamous attack on the rhetoric of science), research in rhetorical studies in the modern university has largely remained a critical act of interpretation. I’m not sure why that is, perhaps there is more political power in the humanities for being an interpretive discipline rather than productive one. Anyway, I had taken to reading design scholarship because it embraces production as research rather instead of the interpretive critical approach.

Galloway’s work is motivating because he takes the productive perspective from within media studies, which is more closely aligned with rhetoric than design is, at least in North America.

One part in particular has stood out as particularly useful so far: Brooke’s discussion of rhetorical ecologies. Brooke describes a rhetorical ecology by way of the classical rhetorical canons: invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery. An invention ecology, for example, is “a personal sensitivity to the conditions under which invention takes place in my own writing” (44).

It’s his example of an inventional ecology that drew my attention:

I attend a couple of conferences per year and each time, starting about halfway through the conference and extending to as long as a week following my return trip home, I am a particularly productive writer. I suspect that many people share this experience .… When I began blogging, I noticed a shift in my perceptions of the world around me.… Over time, the subtle obligation of the weblog has sometimes encouraged me to write when otherwise I would not” (44).

Although Brooke is writing largely about social conventions affecting the writing process, I couldn’t help but think of a Howard Becker book (Art Worlds) in which he explores the infrastructure of musical concerts. The typical concert lasts about three hours and systematic dependencies like concert labor, parking space, and occupant spaces become hopelessly entwined into that 3 hour time period. The odds of being able to run an eight-hour concert must work against a slew of preconfigured and embedded conventions of practice. The time of the concert, once established, literally becomes infrastructured into the social practice of the concert. When these conventions become embedded within technical systems, this infrastructuring process becomes significantly more complex.

Material objects are built because of social convention but then push back and solidify convention (ANT theorists will be yawning at how rudimentary that seems). Getting back to Brooke and his book, the thing I find interesting about rhetorical ecologies is the infrastructure involved in each. Yes, to some extent rhetorical ecologies are dynamic, but they also consist of infrastructured, material technologies. Just to begin thinking about blogging, it seems that one part of the structured ecology the HTML form field that is used in many content management systems as a way to shuttle text to the server. The interface provides an easy way to write a ton of text, but it resists composing with something more like a mind mapping piece of software. This is to say that it’s hard to doodle with bubbles in a blog. I need to think a little bit more about this, but standardized components provide resistance to writing and rhetoric.

This is all just a long way of saying that I’m finding a lot I like about Brooke’s book. It’s smart, and I see some great places to add infrastructural theory to his conception of rhetoric.

I’m a fan of Elichirigoity’s work. His Planet Management book is a creative analysis of how ocular technology bootstrapped the concept of globalization. He looks at how techniques drawn from systems theory helped to generate that idea. I draw a lot of inspiration from Elichirigoity because he thinks with many of the same theorists I do.

This particular article was published in one of my core journals, and the subject matter is a little bit closer to what I study: classifications, standards, and information infrastructure of the web. I shouldn’t undersell Cheryl Malone, either, who has done some important research on information access and public libraries. I saw Cheryl Malone speak at SLIS in 2008 on Eliza Atkins. Malone gives lucid, intelligent, and inspiring talks. If you’re looking for a library historian to speak, she’s worth getting in contact with.

This article is about the adoption of the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). NAICS was created as a replacement for the existing Standard Industry Classification (SIC) that had been in use in the United States since 1937. NAICS is used by North American government officials and businesses for gathering and organizing information on the economy. As an example, the NAICS is used to collect data for the U.S. Economic Census that’s given every five years. That data is added to the FactFinder site. This data is used to chart economic trends and statisticians and researchers analyze for a variety of purposes.

Malone and Elichirigoity show how the NAICS was organized around one central principle: industry would be organized around production. This isn’t part of their analysis, this is just something that the organizers aspired to. They saw it as a way to create a better classification system (library scientists would likely give you a different opinion).

To say this another way, the NAICS was written so that it could be reduced to one simple rule. To give this idea some legs, consider some of the other ways that industry could be organized. In the ICS, for example, some parts of industry were organized around services or business organizations. In the ICS, Libraries formed a basic classification category. It was listed in terminology consistent with being an organization. In the NAICS, libraries were listed as a subcategory of Information Services and Data Processing Services. In the NAICS, the emphasis is on the process of working with information.

Malone and Elichirigoity say the classification creates a discursive formation that changes the concept of information and its related economies. They take a Foucauldian approach to argue that this creates a new way of knowing, or regime, of informational economics, one that depends on the organizing principle of the NAICS. Because the NAICS is so central for understanding large economies, this regime has significant consequences for the activities being classified.

I like this piece, but not because it’s groundbreaking or new. It combines some old analytic concepts from LIS and discourse analysis into one think piece about the North American economy. It’s clear, well-written, and about a topic that seems particularly timely given the current global economic situation. It would be great to see this analysis extended to include some contemporary data, which wouldn’t be too difficult since the census data is made available to the public. Also, the authors say that this creates a new regime of information economics — it would have been awesome if they provided even a rudimentary critique of how that regime was different than the previous rather than ending with that provocative claim.

This article is a lead up to a few chapters that ended up in Bowker and Star’s Sorting Things Out. I found my reading copy in a book called Historical Studies in Information Science.

There are several payoffs for reading this article. One is that this is an early piece that shows how Bowker was thinking about writing histories of information infrastructure. Because the article is in a bit of a primordial state, reading it helps to see how Bowker was thinking during some of his later work.

This article also describes several key terms and concepts that are enormously helpful for analyzing information infrastructure: imbrication, bootstrapping, figure/ground, and a short discussion of infrastructural inversion. “Imbrication” is an analytic concept that helps to asking questions about historical data. A good example from my own work: I’m currently working backwards through methods of computer programming to see which programming concepts, classifications, and techniques are passed forward to new languages and standards. Computer languages (unsurprisingly) borrow lots from the work that people have already done. Concerns, values, and politics of the past are passed forward with those concepts.

“Bootstrapping” is the idea that infrastructure must already exist in order to exist. Another way to say this is that infrastructure forms an important part of social context. To create an infrastructure as part of social context, people must already be working with the imaginary concepts of that context. This becomes particularly messy as an infrastructure is used across large spans of time and space, yet its original design is context-dependent and built with the knowledge of the cultures that instigated the project. So to bootstrap is to build the existing assumptions and politics about what infrastructure is useful for into infrastructure while realizing that the design of infrastructure will simultaneously build those assumptions and politics into other times and spaces as the infrastructure is adopted elsewhere. An example might be useful here. Bowker’s article deals mostly with the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which has a rich classification system for categorizing death. These classifications reflect the time that they were created (more people dying of tuberculosis at the beginning of the 20th century; fewer deaths can be attributed to multiple causes) and the politics (why exactly does a state want to know that people are dying in “accidents from transport, accidents in mines and quarries, agricultural and forestry accidents, or accidents due to machinery” and why is it ok to group those together?).

“Figure/ground” builds on the idea of bootstrapping. It’s a way of thinking about infrastructure that doesn’t see it solely as the product of human construction or as a context shaping human activity. Infrastructure is both at the same time. When a classification becomes a part of an infrastructure, for example, it is embedded by someone applying agency.That agent is influenced by the larger assumptions of the larger infrastructure. That is, new classifications and standards only make sense within the larger ecology of existing infrastructure. That classification then simultaneously becomes part of the ecology for thinking about the infrastructure. Further development of infrastructures will thereafter have to fight with the original standards and classifications.

Figure/ground is important for thinking broadly about infrastructure. It’s not that someone can’t remove a classification such as “died from tuberculosis,” although this could become difficult as well if the standards have become widely materially and socially enforced (think electrical power lines, pipe fittings, or voting procedures) it’s more that the entire infrastructure was conceptually established as a whole with that classification as a part of it. If you’re familiar with the parole/langue idea from Saussure, figure/ground is an elaboration that has been filtered through infrastructural theory.

Bowker calls the sum of these analytic methods infrastructural inversion, a concept with contributes to a good part of his work.

So nothing new for infrastructural theorists, but a good breakdown and discussion of key concepts. The article serves as primer/recap  for those interested in thinking theoretically about infrastructure.

Ron Day writes for JASIST alot.  His work develops critical theory in a journal that is largely devoted to empirical social science. I have a conflicted relationship with most of his work that ends up in JASIST. Ron is super intelligent, but the general audience he ends up writing for works from a very different theoretical perspective. This is great on the one hand because it generates articles that are accessible to a number of differing perspectives. But on the other hand, it also leads to some strange passages that seem out of place because they read like direct responses to a peer reviewer–kind of like a short one-on-one Q & A session in the middle of an article. Case in point:

… the method of this article requires explanation. One charge against it may be that the article involves intellectual bricolage. This is true.

Anyway, this particular article analyzes the concept of the user in several theories central to Library & Information Science, most notably Nick Belkin’s Anomalous States of Knowledge (ASK). My interest with this article had to do with Day’s use of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a way to critique “the information user.” I’ve been working on a similar topic for  understanding information architecture.

One of the most important sections of this essay, at least for LIS, is Day’s explanation of Lacanian theory.

It is not at all the intention of this section or this article to propose psychoanalysis as a new ‘approach’ for empirical analysis, but rather, to examine the construction of the subject within psychoanalysis, particularly, Lacanian psychoanalysis, as a bridge between the LIS user model—based on need—and a fuller and more precise theoretical, sociocultural model. (82)

It seems to me that resistance to critical approaches within LIS has often understood critical theory as constructing empirical theory. This confusion has drawn critique which argues that the critical theory is a poor model for empirical information behavior, and not without warrant. Absolutely!

The issue here is that critical theory does something very different than empirical theory. The confusion of the two approaches in LIS doesn’t seem productive, and it’s nice to see Day clearly say that critical theory doesn’t necessarily provide a model for empirical analysis. I should point out, that I think this theoretical confusion is primarily due to the different theoretical worlds that various LIS scholars tend to approach their work with. One of the most useful exercises I did in grad school was to try and place the work of different LIS academics onto a spectrum of research approaches. Although the exercise was necessarily reductive, it was also a useful tool for understanding why people that seem to disagree with each other are different. (Thanks to both Kristin Eschenfelder and Steve Paling for asking me to do those exercises!) Differences in cognitive frames make disciplinary discussion primarily difficult at the theoretical level.

One of the great things about this article is that it is a descriptive romp through Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts, discursive psychology, and quasi-objects in the tradition of Serres and Latour. From my point of view, this is great: Day does some powerful work summarizing dense concepts. The article isn’t a quick read, but because of its brevity and publication venue, it should be accessible to those who don’t follow the theorists that Day describes.

The one thing I’m unsatisfied with, though, is that Day doesn’t ever get around to really critiquing the information-seeking models he mentions. He suggests that the other information-seeking models participate in a folk psychology and mechanistic view of information behavior, but that’s the extent of critique. It’s a little unsatisfying to have the information behavior literature treated as if it is largely the same. (I should say that in a few places Day says that not all information behavior models have the same problems he addresses, but that many do.) Maybe it’s just my personal preference as a rhetorical critic, but I wanted to see more critique of a model like ASK (hopefully contemporary uses of ASK!) after the lengthy theoretical description.

One reason I want to see that type of critique: it seems to me that an information behavior researcher’s easiest appeal would be that they don’t actually use the information behavior models in the way that Day suggests. So give them an example of how they do! (A hedge here: this paper came out of a conference panel — perhaps a critique wasn’t addedbecause there was a very obvious real disagreement during the panel. If that is the case, perhaps the people that Day is writing for don’t need examples of how they are using information behavior models mechanistically. Perhaps they were looking for a well-written description of Day’s POV?) I guess my primary concern is for Day to demonstrate that the target of his critique is legitimately a contemporary issue.

For my own work, I found his recap of imaginary/symbolic orders, affect, part-objects, and quasi-objects useful for further thinking about standards, classifications, and information infrastructure. Technical standards, standards documents, classification systems, and the people interacting with them can be critiqued with those concepts. Sometimes it’s nice to have a well-written reminder of dense theory. Day does a nice job of that with this article.

UPDATE: Just a few notes after thinking about this article a bit more.

Day’s discussion about differences between subjects and identities is a useful discussion for enriching information behavior studies. Day puts it better than I could as he writes that in his understanding of the world includes  “the expression and emergence of bodies, particularly subjects, as singularities, and then only later—through the overlay of representational categories of recognition and even classification—their being named as identities” (79: Check out the passages around that area if you want to know more. It’s a good set of passages.) As far as I know, I hadn’t seen this difference mentioned in the LIS literature before. I hope it gets further explored in user studies.

Day’s concept of double mediation is also quite good. He describes a way of thinking about information behavior in terms of two axes. The first is a social/cultural/historical axis. That is, a way of understanding how a person is situated within contexts that afford their ability to act in the world. The second axis, which I’m still thinking about, he describes with heavy-handed term affect (I say heavy-handed, because this term has really taken off everywhere. It’s hard to keep track of how it’s being used). He uses Deleuze and Guatarri’s writing to talk about affect. By affect, he seems to mean the ways that bodies move through and interact in physical space. The reason this part of his discussion isn’t quite clear to me is because I’m trying to figure out how to conceptualize both axes together. It’s hard to focus on one axis without losing focus of the other.

Day describes the ideas he puts forth in this article as formal causation. I know this term has some disciplinary leverage elsewhere, but I think that, at least within LIS, it would be useful to find a different term to describe the same idea. Formal causation, as a term, is a speed bump for me. I have to stop and think about it every time I see it. Because it’s conceptually related to mechanistic causation, it also isn’t very cordial about the ways that it suggests other approaches to scholarship. There needs to be a better way to get at the same set of ideas.

One last thought: this article reminds me a lot of Josh Gunn’s “Refitting Fantasy” from a 1994 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Speech. Like Day, much of Gunn’s writing is devoted to sketching out concepts for an audience that may be resistant to the ideas from Lacan (and in Gunn’s case, Slavoj Žižek). One reason that both are good articles is because each author stretches to bring a extradisciplinary ideas into the mainstream of their own discipline.

Geoff Bowker is a fascinating person to read. In his writing, he consistently transitions from historical analysis to critical theory, which makes him both a pleasure to read and frustrating as hell. At some points, his books are completely lucid, and then they’ll throw in an aside, footnote, or single sentence that seems completely indecipherable. It’s awesome, because he draws readers in and then makes them think really hard.

This chapter from the Global Assemblages collection (I believe it also informs much of his book Memory Practices in the Sciences, too) is largely about biodiversity and ecological policy, but the parts that are most intriguing are his discussions about modalities for dealing with biodiversity: essentially, the theory behind the research.  By modality, I’m assuming he is talking about significant critical points for understanding biodiversity and related infrastructures. Because he’s interested in complex informational ecosystems that are classified and standardized by biologists, ecologists, etc, etc, this paper dovetails well with his other writing on information infrastructure.

He describes two modalities that are typically used for talking about biodiversity. The first he calls implosion, which I’ll focus on here. (In case you’re curious, the second is classification and taxonomy, which means making huge lists and hierarchies to catalog all types of flora and fauna). Implosion describes a way of assigning value to ecosystems and ecosystem components. Implosion involves creating something akin to a currency for talking about biodiversity. If you’re familiar with the carbon trading concept, it seems that the same form of discourse is used to assign value for biodiversity. Bowker explains implosion by using money as a metaphor. In Bowker’s description, scientists come up with a currency that will enable exchange among different parts of ecosystems. Implosion works by projecting a certain type of value across different things and suggesting that those things are actually similar (or at least focusing on one similar aspect). For instance, suggesting that tiger is worth more than that flea, for example, because the number of species of fleas far outnumber that of felines.  If a flea species goes away, it’s not as important as if panthera tigris disappears. After all, we have dozens of similar flea species and not nearly as many tigers.  Ecosystems are reduced to exchange. (This example was hypothetical — don’t quote me on it).

Clearly, there are some issues with this. For one, how would one talk about the fact that a certain flea species might have a symbiotic relationship with the tiger and that allowing habitats of that flea species to be altered would significantly alter the tiger species. What if a less valuable ecosystem part actually enables things that would seem more valuable. Second, how can a value exchange rate deal with the concept of time? Species emerge and die off frequently. Can a value exchange rate handle talking about biodiversity in terms of time, evolution, or species adaption? Last, and maybe most significantly, to assign value to ecosystem parts simultaneously creates a self/other relationship with nature. Are humans left out of discussions of value? Do we have a value as well? Does that include all types of humans? If so, do we label ourselves as the most valuable part of ecosystems? Why?

The most interesting part of this chapter for me was when he discussed how people considered indigenous will often be swept up into the discourse as the other side of a self/other binary. That is, in the language of value and biodiversity, some people are less “human” and more “nature” than others. Fascinating and scary at the same time.

Bowker does an awesome job of showing the real world implications of implosion for biodiversity discourse, but this is also an interesting way to think about a huge number of other information infrastructures. For example, the concept of implosion could work well for thinking about technical standardization of contemporary technologies. Technical standards work to flatten real world differences into one value exchange rate. Even technical documents like those of the W3C and ISO, despite their usually utopian claims for a better tomorrow, embed priorities and values that do work to disempower some groups, objects, and ecologies. (Patrick Feng wrote a good overview of standards — check it out). Bowker’s chapter is a great read.

1. Jackson, Steven J., Paul N. Edwards, Geoffrey C. Bowker, and Cory P. Knobel. “Understanding Infrastructure: History, Heuristics and Cyberinfrastructure Policy.“First Monday 12, no. 6 (2007)
2. Edwards, Paul N., Steven J. Jackson,  Geoffrey C. Bowker, Cory P. Knobel. “Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions, and Design.” NSF Grant 0630263 (2007)

All this is to say that I had been a fan of Knobel’s involvement in that project, and I was looking forward to reading his diss. I haven’t made it all the way through yet, but I thought highly enough of a part of the lit review that I wanted to write it here.

Knobel’s review has an extended discussion on ontologies, a research area that I’m working on as a part of my work on information infrastructure. The word ontology is used differently across disciplines, and one of the impressive parts of Knobel’s dissertation is the way he handles this issue. He describes notions of ontology originating in philosophy, STS, and computer science, among others. He recognize each and delineates differences and similarities among each disciplinary constellation.

That was fascinating, but what mostly drew my attention was his breakdown of ontologies vs. ontic is, because I hadn’t been thinking of the terms in the same way I read him.

Knobel describes ontologies as the exhaustion of all possible modes of being. An ontology consists of all possibilities. Conversely, the ontic consists of the ontological parts that are materialized through human practice. It seems to me that the ontic is a smaller subset of the ontology, at least to an extent. I say to an extent because parts of Knobel’s definition of ontology would conflict with the ontic, so the ontic isn’t a problem free subset of ontological objects and concepts: although conceptual space exists for an exhaustion of being, some of those modes aren’t compatible with other modes. Maybe another way to say that is this: although a vast set of objects and things are part of an ontology, some of those objects would conflict with other parts of that ontology — subsets of ontologies wouldn’t be able to co-exist in practical lived reality. If this is the case (and I think this is the way Knobel was thinking of an ontology), then the ontic isn’t so much a subset of an ontology, so much as a refraction of ontological concepts. My distinction isn’t quite clear to me, yet, and I’ll think about it to try and make it clearer in the future.

The interesting part to me that Knobel helped with was that I wasn’t distinguishing ontologies and the ontic the way he was. The way that I imagined it was that ontology is always a human construction. There is a world out there that is unknown by humans, but to be able to speak of it as an ontology is to simultaneously call it forth in its ontic reality. Ontology and ontic aren’t necessarily separate things. Ontologies (the concept) exist as a matter of the human ability to refract the material world and hence any ontology is necessarily ontic.

This might seem unimportant, but think a little about the difference in human agency in the two definitions. In the first I described (clear separation between ontology and ontic), there is a set of things that can be called forth. We as people simply discover ontic out of the possible ontology. In the second (the blurring of ontology and ontic), we recognize that any ontology that we recognize is the product of our own particular situation. To speak of an ontology is to simultaneously call it into being as the ontic, even if that ontic is to suggest that there is being beyond what we describe. By blurring the ontology/ontic definition, I think there is a better critical space to recognize the discussion of ontology is already a product of a human epistemology.

This isn’t to deny the existence of material, it’s simply to recognize that conceptual work involving ontology is indebted to our position in describing them. I’m struggling for a practical example to give this difference legs, but I think about it and add in the comments.

I started reading this article because I was interested in revisiting what a critical theory article looked like in JASIST. This article showed up on my radar because it was recently published and because I had been meaning to read Blanchette for a while. Several friends had suggested that his writing would be right up my alley: this article didn’t disappoint. Smart people like Blanchette make any subject interesting.

To sum, “A Material History of Bits” describes a critical approach to sociotechnical systems. His focus is on materiality. That is, he looks at how the physical computer’s components, particularly its memory, can serve as a lens for undermining popular rhetorics of technical immateriality. I see it as analogous to an article I’m writing describing the concept of an infrastructural monster, a critical approach that I derive from Susan Leigh Star and Donna Haraway. Like Blanchette, I’m interested in developing ways to better understand the politicality of technology. Like the essay I’ve been developing, Blanchette’s describes an approach designed to intervene in a technology that can be difficult to begin interrogating. In my case, I’ve been using the idea of information infrastructure, which seems similar to the computing infrastructure from this Blanchette’s article.

The article describes how programming, code, and algorithms work to hide the physical constraints of computing infrastructure. He provides several examples: the one I like the best is a discussion of the von Neumann architecture of data modeling. The von Neumann model uses a high-level of abstraction in order to provide more usable resources for programmers. It acts as an intermediary between machine language and programmer. If you’re a web designer, a helpful analogy might be to imagine the von Neumann architecture as similar to a WYSIWYG text editor. The software acts as a go-between to a more fundamental level of code. Like a WYSIWYG, the model also builds inefficiencies into the final program. The von Neumann architecture makes software design easier, but with the tradeoffs. The von Neumann architecture abstracts and refracts access to the machine.

One of the trade-offs of this architecture is a decrease in processing power. The ease of use coincides with inefficiencies in using chip resources. As computer processors have developed over time, the von Neumann model becomes increasingly inefficient, creating a processing bottleneck that impedes computing speed. Simultaneously, several generations of programmers have been trained with the von Neumann architecture, and working to re-train or provide alternative methods works against an entire system of human infrastructure. This is despite the fact that faster architectures exist. The social impedes on the technical. This social infrastructure “resulted in economies of scale that defeated repeated attemptsat creating a viable market for alternative, parallel architectures,despite their promise for increased processing power” (1049).

What this analysis makes visible is the social constraints of computing. Despite suggests of immateriality, what Blanchette shows with this example are the material practices coupled with the constraints of processors. There are very real human commitments that are a part of computing hardware.

I like to think of this concept in terms of infrastructure, as its the research area I’m most interested in. Infrastructures work because they become standardized. In order for them to span across time and space, coupling resources together, they resist change. Indeed, rapid changes in technology or disruptions in technologies can break infrastructure. In the case of new technologies, they most likely simply can’t be worked into the existing system without a significant commitment to changing years of infrastructure. In the case of disruption, we might imagine the work and life wiped out by natural disasters, as when hurricanes take out cell phone networks, wreaking havoc with real human lives. Infrastructure resists change because of its material constraints. (1054)

The article also dovetails into my interest in infrastructure as Blanchette writes:

Thus, in contrast to the perception of computing as movingat a furious pace of technical evolution, its infrastructureevolves very slowly. Because of the need to maintain backwardcompatibility, the incorporation of major changes inthe material basis of computing—e.g., multi-core processing,cloud-based, and wireless computing—proceeds conservativelythrough mutation and hybridization, rather thanoutright break with the past.

I like Blanchette’s approach, because it makes technologies like software more palpable. Software may not be something that can be touched like I could a keyboard, but there is a great deal of human life behind it. Questioning the interface of human computer practices and the material of those practices–a keyboard, or a processor’s memory space, or another seemingly mundane computing resource-provides a good way to better understand social commitments.

This list was started by Leah Ceccarelli at the University of Washington when I took an independent reading seminar with her. My original intention was to use it to write my own metacriticism, but it’s a difficult genre to break into. In addition to knowing a lot about rhetorical criticism, you also need to be able to navigate the often polarized perspectives of rhetorical critics. I’ve added to the original list, and will continue to edit it as I read more.

• Baskerville, Barnet. “Selected Writings on the Criticism of Public Address.” Western Speech 21, no. 2 (1957): 110–118.
• Black, Edwin. “A Note on Theory and Practice in Rhetorical Criticism.”Western Journal of Speech Communication 44, no. 4 (1980): 331–336.
• Black, Edwin. Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. New York: Macmillan, 1965.
• Blair, Carole. “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public Places.” Western Journal of Communication 65, no. 3 (2001): 271–294.
• Blau, Joseph L. “Public Address as Intellectual Revelation.” Western Speech 21, no. 2 (1957): 77–83.
• Browne, Stephen Howard. “Response: Context in Critical Theory and Practice.” Western Journal of Communication 65, no. 3 (2001): 330–335.
• Bryant, Donald C. “Of Style.” Western Speech 21, no. 2 (1957): 103–110.
• Campbell, John Angus. “Between the Fragment and the Icon: Prospect for a Rhetorical House of the Middle Way.” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54, no. 3 (1990): 346–376.
• Campbell, John Angus. “Special Issue on Rhetorical Criticism.” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54, no. 3 (1990): 249–251.
• Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. “Cultural Challenges to Rhetorical Criticism.” Rhetoric Review 25, no. 4 (2006): 358–361.
• Ceccarelli, Leah. “Rhetorical Criticism and the Rhetoric of Science.” Western Journal of Communication 65, no. 3 (2001): 314–329.
• Clark, Robert D. “Lessons from the Literary Critics.” Western Speech 21, no. 2 (1957): 83–89.
• Condit, Celeste M. “Contemporary Rhetorical Criticism: Diverse Bodies Learning New Languages.” Rhetoric Review 25, no. 4 (2006): 368–372.
• Condit, Celeste. “Rhetorical Criticism and Audiences: The Extremes of McGee and Leff.” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54, no. 3 (1990): 330–345.
• Cox, J. Robert. “On ‘Interpreting’ Public Discourse in Post-Modernity.” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54, no. 3 (1990): 317–329.
• deWinter, Jennifer. “A Bibliographic Synthesis of Rhetorical Criticism.” Rhetoric Review 25, no. 4 (2006): 388–407.
• Dickinson, Greg. “Introduction to Special Issue.” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 1 (2010): 1–3.
• Dow, Bonnie J. “Response: Criticism and Authority in the Artistic Mode.” Western Journal of Communication 65, no. 3 (2001): 336–348.
• Enos, Richard Leo. “Classical Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism.” Rhetoric Review 25, no. 4 (2006): 361–365.
• Enos, Richard Leo. “Introduction: The Inclusiveness of Rhetorical Criticism.” Rhetoric Review 25, no. 4 (2006): 357–358.
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