The Hand that Feeds...

Lately it seems like it has become fashionable to take issue with the once darling of the progressive academic world, Academia.edu; the irony that this has mostly happened in articles and pieces themselves published on Academia.edu seems to have escaped most. I have briefly commented on a couple already in the past, and more have weighted in on the academic repository's perceived connivance with the neo-liberal, capital guided agenda of the official university world - see, for example, Kathleen Fitzpatrick's "Academia, not Edu".

While the site certainly needs improvements, the benefits it had and has for a certain subset of the academic world cannot be overstated: being an independent at the beginning of his career, with little to no support network and (seemingly always too) few publications under his belt, Academia.edu has been a great platform to know and get to know like-minded scholars - even if only through their work.

It is therefore a pleasure when an academic from the 'old guard', so to speak, recognises that even a partial and imperfect context can still bring benefits for those who need them the most. Eileen Joy's  "Open Letter to Rosemary Feal, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and the Modern Language Association" goes a long way in restoring my faith on some established scholars not being completely out of touch with reality, when she states that 'nothing has been more critical than Academia.edu to my ability to connect my work with the work of others across the globe, and to forming new discourse communities and scholarly collectives."

The issue,I would say, is that many etablished scholars can afford to shoot down Academia.edu exactly because they are established: they either entered the academic world when tenures weren't still a pipe dream; the already have well-developed networks of support who could carry them over should they ever fall off official academia's graces; they, simply, can afford to criticise a resource they do not direly need (or no longer do). Usually, this is also accompained by little or no attempt to offer a viable alternative, as Joy again underlines in the same open letter.

While healthy and balanced criticism is always welcome and needed, the holier than thou, top-down view that many notable critics have adopted lately does nothing to improve, or offer alternatives to what 'those below' have to make do with on a daily basis. Rather, it shows that a large subset of academia is still in the habit of throwing the baby with the bathwater without bothering to check if someone is actually forced to drink off that water on a daily basis.

IT'S HAPPENING

My ICOFOM 2014 paper 'Museum Crowdsourcing as Playful Labour' is now available on academia.edu, and soon on ICOFOM Study Series 43. Not *entirely* outdated either.

My dissertation, reviewed

Yes, new posts are not up yet. Yes, they are coming along. Other... stuff happened in the past few days.
In the meantime, please enjoy a review of my dissertation by Dissertation Reviews.

All is well

While waiting for a new longer post to be out in the next few days, here is a recommendation: 'Radical Academia: Beyond the Audit Culture Treadmill' by Rowan Cahill and Terry Irving of the University of Wollongong.

It's exactly about what the title says. Any one who is even remotely invested in the current intellectually and morally bankrupt state of academia should read it; anyone who, like me, has committed the grave mistake of entering such bankrupt dominion full of hopes soon to be squashed should read it. It has worldwide applicability and it would have been a sobering read for me, if I wasn't the very subject the article talks about.

Wonderful.

Edit: also, a little bit of subjective data in support of alternative ways of knowledge dissemination. This very blog, according to numbers, has gotten me about 8 times more exposure than all my academic papers and conference proceedings combined. Even assuming automated crawls and such, still nothing to  scoff at for the very, very junior academic.

Academia.edu and Me

Shamefully, I must admit my weekly intake of academic reading has been steadily going downhill over the past two years. Not all of it was, however, entirely my fault. One of the biggest downsides of moving from the doctoral world, into that in-between that is postdoc hunting, has been the sudden choke of academic resources at my disposal. At the University of Edinburgh I would log into the library page, search for an article and have it delivered in pdf form, with little thought on my side. Lists upon lists of new resources were fed to me by email daily, in quantities I could barely hope to parse.

Now, it's all gone. An used academic text, with few exceptions, can cost alone up to all of my monthly income. I can count the databases I have access to on the fingers of one mangled hand: everything else is locked behind paywalls that, to me and undoubtedly other 'independent' early careers like me are simply unaffordable. Most of all, every search for scholarly material has suddenly turned into a disjointed hunt for free, pirated or public domain material, often at the expenses of breadth. Not to mention keeping up to date with current research.

Then came Academia.edu. Now don't get me wrong, I will be the first one to admit that the platform has many, many faults and shortcoming, some of them crippling. More or less anyone can sign up, and often I have been tricked by an interesting title only to dig up some 1000 words undergrad paper. The material's quality is largely fluctuating, and there is definitely an issue of disjointment as well: it would be difficult to argue that the papers collected under the 'digital humanities' tag accurately represent the current zeitgeist in the digital humanities (or maybe they do, through metrics I have no access to?). Nonetheless, the platform somewhat broadened the number of scholars I was aware of, including some souls around my own age; it provided valuable material on fringe topics official journals didn't seem to have time for; and, most of all, it allowed me to keep my academic gears running on no budget.

Then, I read today Gary Hall's short conference piece 'Shoud this be the least thing you read on academia.edu?' and the scales fell off my eyes. Or rather, they weren't there to begin with, but the article still made me take a second glance at the savior I had put so much stock into for the past two years. The argument can, very summarily, boiled down to: Academia.edu is a for-profit company just like any other, which is run by a CEO and is mostly exploited by a userbase which is committed to self-promotion, rather than free access and culture and justice for all - a kind of critique most late capitalism academic dwellers will be familiar with. This is all, perhaps, true: in years of presence on Academia.edu most of my contacts with peers have been 'silent': you watch my stuff, I watch yours, not a word of feedback is exchanged. Hardly what one would call a free and open, collaborative environment, no? All the while, Academia.edu likey collected vast amounts of data which have then been turned over to businesses I am not even aware of (which use the site actually does of gathered data is, to me, still somewhat nebulous).

Still, I think it might be a bit too early to throw away the baby along with the bathwater. On the same day, I have also read ' Me and my shadow CV' by Devoney Looser, which painfulyl reminded me of the rather dire stage of my academic career I am currently into. With little to no resources at my disposal, no support from any acknowledged institution and rapidly deteriorating perspectives, it seems self-harmful to renounce such a resource on the basis of issue which, I realise now, seem rather abstract given my current day-to-day situation. A big part of my doctoral research, ironically, was a critique of free access to images as disguised marketing: now I come full circle and realise that whichever semblance of an academic activity I have kept up in the past two years is largely thanks to such 'exploiters', Academia.edu included. Sure, you can have my Facebook friends list - at least I can now get my hands on more than an open access paper a month.

The hardships of getting by while waiting for the golden rope of academia to descend upon me have made me reconsider the animosity I once had toward late capitalism's cultural market of 'free content for free data'. I still loathe it, yet I realise it is, for users like me, merely a matter of urgently using whichever tools are at one's disposal, even when this means relinquishing control over one's production of value.

To which I could add - Academia.edu doesn't pay me for the content and data I produce, but none of my 'RL' publishers do either. And I am still jobless. Where is the value?

Updates - Artribune and ICOFOM 2014

For interested parties: I had a short editorial piece published on Artribune about a very interesting initiative which intends to get closer Italian museums and the digital - TuoMuseo. Worth a read, although it's way too early to tell if the project will have any long-term meaningful impact on the - poor- way Italian museums face the digital.

Also, it seems like the by now mythological article I wrote and presented for ICOFOM 2014 might actually come out before the end of the year. Definitely looking forward to that!

Still Alive...

As I had a few queries on the topic - I am very much still alive, and so is this blog, which has simply gone into temporary hibernation. The opening of a family business and my debut as a fiction writer has slightly shifted my priorities at the moment, rest assured that things will pick up full steam again around September.

Digital Presence and Bodily Interfaces - New Article

I have recently published a new article in Leicester's School of Museum Studies' Museological Review journal - the title is "Digital Presence and Bodily Interfaces: "Digital-Beings" and Google Art Project", and comes out of a presentation I did at the School's Museum Alive! conference last year. A thank you to the staff and PhD students at Leicester for making both the conference and the publication happen.

Museums and Reality Checks

Just a quick note to point out a very good paper (actually a keynote address) given this past January by one of my former supervisors at the University of Edinburgh. "Reality Check: From Culture and Difference to Possession and Dispossession" by Angela Dimitrakaki should be a very good read for those who are more interested in the political and labour aspects of the contemporary museum, and also gives a few interesting pointers toward possible best practises in a global context. Highly reccomended.

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Who is "We"?

I have recently begun sifting through the AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2015, a document published by Acciòn Cultural Española which endeavours to illustrate, through key concept selected by professionals in the field, technological innovations that will change, within the near future, the way museums work - particular attention being paid to the Internet as the context for such emergent models. While the think-tank behind the project is markedly Spanish in scope, the report does not concern itself with Spanish museums only, and remains rather general in its potential geographical area of application.

 The report is quite long and varied, touching on a number of very disparate topics sometimes only tangential to museums: a review of the whole thing would be, therefore, daunting and probably useless once all is said and done. What I would like to comment on is the opening article, written by E-commerce expert Rodolfo Carpintier Santana, titled 'Challenges of the twenty-first century. How to adapt a company to the twenty-first century'. The article is actually rather philosophical and general in scope, arguing for certain paradigmatic innovations that, should we play along with them instead of resisting them, will lead us toward an utopian state of perfect coincidence between human needs and technology akin to a post-scarcity 'singularity' (p.16).

Throughout the article, Santana keeps referring back to an unspecified, vaguely perceived 'we' as the subject who will undertake, experience, and reap the benefits of a smart technology serving our every need at little or no cost. I have seen similar use of the pronoun in other techno-utopian pieces of writing, and I always found it highly dubious. After all, if all the new technologies Santana and the AC/E report talk about will change 'our' lives radically, it is not trivial to define who 'we' is: who will exactly put the work for technoutopia to happen? who will reap the benefits? who will be excluded? To me one of the greatest limits of technoutopian thinking is how it systematically pushes to the wayside the uncomfortable truth that, likely, the 'we' it envisions will constitute a very, very small fraction of the global human population. This is an issue that is particularly close to my research into paradigms of online museum - visitor interaction; and that in Santana's article coexists in addition to the 'usual' hallmarks of techno -utopianism, such as: the projection of every problem's solution into a near future which is visible, yet still out of reach; the millennial-like hype for a 'new age' of peace and concord; the positivist faith in best case scenarios as the implicitly inevitable outcome.

On page 15, Santana enumerates some of the new marvels the Internet-integrated technoutopia will bring us, including but not limited to 3d workshops capable of producing more or less anything on demand; smart home appliances; health services 'on the fly' thanks to chip implants and 24/7 remote monitoring. In the words of the author, 'we will soon see...' and 'we will have...' (p.15). But who is 'we'? The sweatshop worker who mined the elements necessary to the production of the chip? one of the hundreds of millions who do not have access to basic treatment in the wake of an Ebola epidemic? Considering that, so far, technologically driven progress has mostly contributed to global capital's marginalisation of large swathes of humanity to the provinces of Empire (Hardt & Negri, 2000) it seems unlikely that technological development would suddenly become the solution to the divides it created itself (see Mardikyan et al, 2015, for a recent analysis).

Similarly, according to the author, we must also be ready to meet the challenges that the digital revolution will bring, including new production; business; and distribution models (p. 18). Yet, even in this case, does the 'other half' who gets by on a subsistence economy really have the surplus, and political option of engaging the economical and business issues of a digital it can't afford in the first place? (this is, hopefully, subject to change. See here for an interesting overview describing a few future scenarios).

My brief and far from exhaustive comments above should not be taken as a damnation of certain parts of the world into perpetual serfdom to global capital; neither should be taken as an attempt to enforce liberal guilt onto discourses that, once their eminently Western scope is acknowledged, are valid and important. I would like, however, to see more conscious and explicit efforts by techno- positivists to recognise that, by generalising one's target under the broad stroke of a pronoun, a great deal of political and social depth is lost - that very depth which many are actively attempting to wrestle off global capital's grasp. The same holds true, of course, for museum studies' 'them' and 'audiences', two other terms that could bear more ontological scrutiny.

 

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2000.

Mardikyan, Sona, et al. "Examining the Global Digital Divide: A Cross-Country Analysis." (2015).

A Free Museum Course for You

I have enrolled into the free online course, offered by the University of Leicester's School of Museum Studies in collaboration with the National Museum Liverpool on the Futurelearn Platform, titled 'Behind the Scenes at the 21st Century Museum'. While there is still little information out on the actual contents of the course, I have been a guest of the fine museum people at Leicester more than once (including their recent Museum Alive! conference), and have no doubt that the course will be informative to professionals, academics and the curious alike. It will be particularly interesting to see, I think, how these different audiences respond to the same educational content - maybe there will be a way to gauge interest and responses?

The course starts on June 1, so there is still plenty of time to enroll. If the contents warrant it (which is more or less guaranteed) I will blog about it in some form or another.

Crowdsourcing Made in Italy

On March 5th I have given a hour and a half presentation at Ca'Foscari University, for the Museology class of prof. Luca Baldin, on the topic of the digital museum within the framework of global capital. Slides can be found here. An overall very positive experience, the students being particularly reactive (for a class of 150!) and willing to delve into slightly more politically invested theory than the usual italian university fare.

One surprise that I had was the unfamiliarity of most students with crowdsourcing, both as a concept and as a platform. Most of them did not seem to know what crowdsourcing was, and more or less all of them did not have any sense of its relevance as a cultural platform, as a a museum tool of any significance. I wonder it that's due to their lack of exposure to museum crowdsourcing from institutions outside Italy, given the fact - well bemoaned throughout the lecture - that there are no examples of such practice in Italy that can stand toe to toe with the kind of enterprises that, for example, the Brooklyn museum routinely deploys. Aside from a few initiatives by the Palazzo Madama staff, and vague promises from Rovereto's MART, there is essentially no museum crowdsourcing in Italy to speak of.

The students seemed to be even less familiar with other kinds of social tools routinely used by European and overseas museums, such as crowdfunding; but also museum gaming - whose existence seemed to come as quite a surprise to them (even the first-liners gave me strange looks when I mentioned the Smithsonian's Ghost of a Chance)! Hoping to give some food for thought, I concluded the presentation with a necessarily brief discussion of a new initiative, unveiled merely days ago: TuoMuseo. The project, still mostly veiled in mystery, seems to present itself as a sort of meta-museum AR game, born from a Hackathon session (some information can be gleaned by the slides of this presentation given on Feb.27 2015). TuoMuseo will offer a free platform that will allow users to plan visits, discuss artwork and engage museums 'thanks to the deployment of practises and design culled from the world of video games' (TuoMuseum, 2015): through the museum 'missions' that the app will propose to its users, the latter will be involved into a bona fide AR game, where completing the missions will reward both a score and, in some cases, actual prizes (discounted tickets, museum parking and so on). The development of the platform is undertaken by a remote team that, among others, also includes the first 'gamification designer' I have come across, Fabio Viola. A new qualification I was not aware of, yet one that makes sense considering how much closer to a game, and in what danger of 'pointsification' (Ridge, 2011) a platform like TuoMuseo is.

The project seems to still be in its crowdfunding phase: hopefully it will manage to break through, and students in museology courses will finally have something significant and Italian that they can discuss, without necessarily having to resort to the 'usual suspects'.

 

- Mia Ridge. 'Everyone Wins: Crowdsourcing Games and Museums', 2011. http://www.slideshare.net/miaridge/everyone-wins-crowdsourcing-games-and-museums

- TuoMuseo team. 'TuoMuseo: la Nuova Piattaforma del Patrimonio Culturale'. 2015.

The Politics of Book Clubs in Web 2.0

While digging through the usual archives of digital scholarship, I have stumbled on an interesting short article, a 2012 editorial by Marla Mallette of Binghamton University, titled "Web 2.0 and Literacy: Enacting a Vision, Imagining the Possibilities". The short editorial, written for an issue of Research In the Schools dedicated to Web 2.0 and literacy, is overall one of the many techno-positivist commentaries that, periodically, enthusiastically rehash the utopian possibilities of the Web's famous second iteration. It offers very little of new as far as apologies or the cautionary goes, and one gets the sense that, since the early 2000s, very little of paradigmatically new has happened on the Web- especially as the various Semantic Web / Internet of Things revolutions still offer little tangible improvement over the 'Internet of People".

 What really interests me about the editorial is a side note: the first person retelling by the author of an encounter with Oprah Winfrey's "Oprah's Book Club 2.0", a 2012 revitalisation of the media mogul's Book Club with an added twist: users could interact and discuss with other club members also through Twitter, Facebook and e-Readers. It should be noted that the original Book Club was mostly known for skyrocketing obscure titles into fame, the so-called 'Oprah Effect', a phenomenon that seems to have carried over into the club's digital incarnation up to its petering out in 2014.

Marla Mallette has an interesting and, in many ways, typically 'Web 2.0' reaction toward Oprah's Book Club 2.0. In the main body of the article, the author identifies six key points that make up the Web 2.0's ideology: 1) User-generated content 2) Harness the power of the crowds 3) Big Data 4) Architecture of participation 5) Network effect 6) Openness. A fairly standard list of what sets apart Web 1.0 ad Web 2.0. She then applies these six traits of Web 2.0 to the case of Oprah's Book Club 2.0, arguing that each one of them but openness is displayed there: users can generate relevant responses and content through a networked architecture of participation that is not radically, but still somewhat open. The metrics by which the success, or the 'amelioration' provided by the meeting of the Book Club and Web 2.0 is, however, eminently quantitative. A fair amount of data is presented as a sign of the success of Oprah's enterprise: the first featured book went from near-obscurity all the way to the top positions of Amazon's sales, thanks to the grassroots effort of Oprah's 7,000,000 Facebook and 12,000,000 Twitter followers (Mallette, iii).

There is, however, no attempt to even suggest that metrics and quantitative data (aka numbers) might not tell the whole, or the most important story. The Book Club, in both of its incarnations, is one extreme example of how one personality, well positioned in the commodity flux of contemporary social and emotive capital, can act as a cultural gatekeeper that sets trends and agendas that could potentially become culturally hegemonic. These agendas are not, of course, guaranteed to be adopted by the public of the capitalist spectacle; nonetheless, the Book Club's propelling power suggests in this direction, at least in our specific case.

When such ambigious dynamics enter the supposedly user-oriented environment of Web 2.0, the matter further complicates. Is the presence of such powerful cultural gatekeepers tolerable, when the Web is supposed to be about grassroots power and the 'wisdom of the crowd'? how far can this wisdom of the crowd be, or should be directed by big players, and to what more or less acceptable levels and ends? In this sense, true success stories of 'gatekeeping from below' are far and in between: much more frequent is the scenario in which the users' work and efforts to be social and networked are datamined for profit by a few big players (Facebook; Amazon; a myriad of casual games); and the Web seems, for the most part, a context in which consensus is formed and carefully piloted in ways that do not differ too much from the real world.

In the end, when technopositivism and the Web meet, Big Data-fuelled enthusiasm over big numbers and the success stories they seem to tell overshadow deeper issues that cannot be easily measured, but remain within the realm of possibility and have much deeper ethical implications that the few notes above can hope to cover. We remain with the problem of understanding how far numbers, the new academic obsession, can represent social dynamics that could, potentially, endanger a culturally significant space such as the Web.

The Trouble with Data

While browsing my usual purveyors of up-to-date academic research in museology and museum studies, I have come across what I would consider a notable effort in making sense of the varied, often criticised yet always poorly understood panorama of italian museums: Sociometrica's "Musei Index: Cultura e Big Data", a quantitative survey of online reactions by visitors to italian cultural sites, made under the direction of economist Antonio Preiti. This research piece semantically mined over 90 thousand online reactions to important italian cultural sites (ranging from Torino's Egyptian Museum to the Colosseum and Villa Tivoli) in order to capture, order and classify the 'measure of attraction' of a site: that is to say, how well it ranks according to the emotional reactions expressed, after the visit. Essentially, an exercise in the gathering and (surface) analysis of Big Data; which, while a well established practice abroad and not entirely new in the Italian context (see, for example, commentary by Elisa Bonacini), in this country has so far not been attempted in a systematic manner, nor has gathered much interest from administrative policymakers (at least that's my perception: I would gladly hear dissenting voices).

There surely is a value in daring innovation and novelty, and therefore I can easily symphatize with the enthusiastic tone throughout the report, fortunately well balanced by acknowledgement that much still needs to be done in order to transform these sporadic experiments into a common practice. Nonetheless, there are a few key arguments that leave me slightly perpelexed, and perhaps merit further thinking by Sociometrica, me or anyone else that feels up to the challenge.

A first possible problem that I see has to do with the materials that have been mined for information. According to the report, the semantic analysis has avoided factoring in 'neutral information' (such as opening hours, directions and so on) and focused on information that actually expressed a judgement, be it positive or negative. Conjugated with the large array of data considered (almost 90000 entries) the authors would seem justified in thinking that their research 'fully represents the point of view of a foreigner's experience in an Italian place of culture' (p. 8) without any a priori jdugement (p.6).
Nonetheless, I feel that the whole story is probably more complicated than this. First of all, the categories of materials analysed remain overall quite nebulous and poorly defined: as any Internet denizen will know, there is a gamut of extremely 'opinionated' literature around great cultural attractions to be found online; more often than not it is vague, or even malicious with regard to who actually produced it, and it is not rare to see automatically generated pages taking the form of an enthusiastic travelogue for advertising, spamming or scamming purposes. This, added to the necessary incompleteness of any dataset culled from an online setting; and to the poorly understood nature of opinion-forming and expression in the remote Web context, makes statements such as the above disingenuous. One would wish that more care was put in selecting, or at least in explaining the selection of the actual sources, since the mere appearance of relevant semantic data cannot and should not be the only deciding factor.

Equally suspect are, therefore, assertions that the resulting report would be an unbiased, authentic and immediate expression of visitors, clean from judgement and interpretations (p. 6). We should all, by now, be familiar with the idea that gathering Big Data is in no way a guarantee of impartiality and transparency: every data set that is not the whole will always be selective, and the macro-scale of Big Data does not resolve this fundamental issue that underlies quantitative analysis.
Similarly, a report such as this one is bound to have all kinds of interpretations and a priori evaluations involved: starting from the selection of sites, fifteen out of hundreds of thousands (Istat). Then comes the choice of grading reactions from 0 to 100, establishing reasonable but still arbitrary parameters as to what constitutes a positive or a negative response (p.7).

These considerations do not lessen the value of the report, and its innovative potential within the Italian context; nonetheless, as it often happens in first applications of novel systems and metodologies, proclamations and enthusiasm must be kept in check and counterbalanced by the knowledge that no methodology and no system can or should aspire to express the whole of an experience; especially when such experience is eminently qualitative yet measured with quantitative instruments.