Francesca Giannetti
February 25, 2022
It suffers from the societal devaluing of maintenance and care work
Reliance on an institution to “help” reduces our control over the means of production
.@jotis13 DH projects like cars are resource-intensive, useful status symbols. They need gas, registration, and they chug along for 5-7 years and they begin to break down in various ways. It'll either become a classic worth preserving at whatever the cost, or it'll die. #DHSI21 pic.twitter.com/tqsGfw9r1z
— Quinn Dombrowski (@quinnanya) June 15, 2021
Source: Shane Lin
“The help is not coming.” We are our own help. Omg. Alex. Stop it. Am I devastated or empowered? Am I devastated and then empowered? #minicomp #DreamLab21 pic.twitter.com/mdf3ZK6uXP
— Jessica Marie Johnson (@jmjafrx) June 14, 2021
Source: Pirate Care
Where infrastructures are absent or unreliable, the gaps are filled by illegal water taps, grafted cables, pirate radio stations, backyard boreholes, shadow networks, and so forth. Many regions have their own distinctive “repair ecologies,”
I will discuss two projects in which I used minimal computing technologies, and describe the workflow involved in each
I’ll ask you to respond to a brief survey about your web publishing habits and wishes, with the goal of establishing some concrete practices that can foster more widespread use of digital tech
My own posing of the question “what do we need?” comes from an acknowledgement of the hybrid and global future we see being shaped for the scholarly record: parts digital, parts analog. In this new mediatic environment we continue to protect, study and renew the analog, as we attempt to harness the new media in smart, ethical and sustainable ways. For several reasons, this implies learning how to produce, disseminate and preserve digital scholarship ourselves, without the help we can’t get, even as we fight to build the infrastructures we need at the intersection of and beyond our libraries and schools. This means that my minimal computing does not stand in as a universal call, but rather as a space for new questions and practices, an injunction to constantly repeat the question, “what do we need?”
Source: Alex Gil, “THe User, the Learner, and the Machines We Make”
So, admittedly, this project isn’t so minimal. The instructions for student participation are semi-elaborate. I then edit the students’ work. There’s a required pre-processing step to go from TEI XML to what Ed/Jekyll needs to generate the website’s files. I research the alumni to write their bios and write messy JavaScript for correspondence maps. I am still actively looking for corners to cut to speed up the pipeline between student encoding and web publication.
Francesca Giannetti
Digital Humanities Librarian
francescagiannetti.com
@jo_frankie | fg162@rutgers.edu