Platforms Problematics: Where Provenance Becomes Influence

Though Jarrett M. Drake’s Article “RadTech Meets RadArch” has only been assigned reading twice during my MLIS coursework (surprising!), I have returned to it often since my first exposure in the Fall of 2020 (through May Hong HaDuong’s Media Description and Access syllabus). I think the pull of Drake’s article, for me at least, resides in its optimism about the potentials of digital affordances. What keeps Drake’s optimism from the trap of techno-solutionism is his clear assertion that “the descriptive challenges facing born-digital archival records is not technical or social, but both technical and social.” [1]. Indeed, while these platforms open exciting potentials, they also raise worrying social-technical challenges, such as platform influence (the way that platform design and infrastructure shape users, their actions, and the cultural and material impact of those actions). Considering the origins and influence of provenance, I worry about the ways its cultural values can persist just as perniciously in digital tools, but see further cause for optimism in scholars and projects that interrogate the continuities between past and future principles and systems of information and knowledge organization.

A key thread of Drake’s argument in “RadTech” is that the affordances of digital platforms (e.g., shared custody of a folder in GoogleDrive) introduce descriptive challenges (e.g., lack of clarity on a file’s originator) that unsettle traditional notions of provenance (i.e., “that records of different origins be kept separate to preserve their context” per SAA). These unique challenges present an opportunity for a radical new approach to description–a new approach better suited to born digital records, perhaps so much better that archivists might find description structured by provenance (with its white, western, male, and colonial assumptions about ownership and hierarchy) to be of little to no use if not outright obsolete. 

Of course, by the time Drake is making this point in 2016, the concept of provenance had already undergone considerable augmentation, expansion, and critique. One might be tempted to consider provenance a principle that is always already obsolete, always already re-invented. Shelley Sweeny explains “history tells us that so many concepts and nuances have been associated with the term through the past three-plus centuries that to argue on behalf of one privileged meaning is fruitless if not counterproductive.” [2]. It would seem as though provenance has continued to reproduce itself through active reappraisals of its values, enduring through archivists who’d rather expand the principle to accommodate their practice than leave it behind. When archivists reform provenance to suit their needs, they blur the line between critique and endorsement. 

Concluding her updated chapter for the second edition of Currents of Archival Thinking, Jennifer Douglas reflects on provenance’s continuing evolution, stating “should I be asked again at some future date to revise this chapter, I am certain I will be able to report on more change, as archivists continue to react to and anticipate what they discover ‘in the air,’ on the ground, and through our collective conscience.” [3]. The air she mentions here is a metonym standing for the broader community of professional practice; it is also a play on the well-written-about quote attributed to Dutch archivist Samuel Muller, who claimed that when Provenienz Prinzip (german for provenance principle) appeared in the 1898 Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives, he and his co-authors had certainly not invented the concept, but rather put to paper something that was already “in the air.” [4]. It would seem that the provenance of provenance itself is fundamentally unascertainable. 

Sweeny explains that while the concept is certainly western European in origin and rises to prominence in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, because it “was honored in practice generally before it was named, the claims of several separate origins all have airs of legitimacy.” [5]. In these historical accounts the “air” in which provenance circulates is both a social network or professional practice and a technology of legitimization. More specifically it is a nineteenth-century European socio-technical network–that is to say, a white, western, colonial one. The air from which provenance came surrounds us still. To this point, when white practitioners in an overwhelmingly white field advocate for the conceptual expansion of provenance they risk sounding an awful lot like sharks asking for more water. [6]. Suffice to say, reconfigurations of provenance–even if they de-prioritize origin, ownership, or hierarchy within the description process–do little to address how historic and contemporary forms of oppression underwrite the principle itself. 

Outlining a decolonial archival praxis, Michelle Caswell and J.J. Ghaddar describe how “western colonialism, empire and race” as “defining features of modernity everywhere, including the neoliberal form today,” exert far more influence on archival practice than the field acknowledges. [7] In other words, even a non-essentialist view of provenance can leave forms of symbolic and material violence unaddressed. This is not to say that provenance cannot be useful to acknowledge or plumb for accountability, but that analysis of provenance must be both social and technical, considering historical dynamics of power from the concepts outset, and the conditions in which such dynamics persist today whether we name them or not. Further, I believe, as I understand from Drake, that in certain contexts there can be important gains in the abandonment of provenance altogether, but such abandonment must be coupled with continued critical attention to power that surrounds and constructs the systems which take its place. 

Often digital platforms can hold a staggering influence over which users, functions, and outcomes are possible. Consider Bergis Jules’ observation that “for digital collections, who gets represented is closely tied to who writes the software, who builds the tools, who produces the technical standards, and who provides the funding or other resources for that work.” [8]. As Carbajal and Caswell affirm: “whenever we access a digital record,” we must remember “that people are behind it.” [9]. Whether it takes place in a commercial or archival context (or both, as is often the case today), the design and infrastructure of digital platforms exert influence over the cultural and material dimensions of its digital objects and records. Therefore, archivists and information professionals would do well to consider the modes of critique and design that can provide guidance in leveraging these platforms while reducing the potential harms of platform influence.

As such, I’ll conclude with an affirmation of Drake’s call for collaboration. A better form of description is possible. Better platform design and infrastructure are possible too. So, which modes of critique and design might scaffold the way forward? First, perhaps a reckoning with how the interests of empire manifest in what political economist Nick Srniceck calls platform capitalism and the logics that structure digital platform design. Another productive framework might be the distinction research physicist Ursula Franklin makes between prescriptive and holistic technologies. (Listen to her lectures here). Critical digital scholars like Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Tara McPhereson, Mark Sample and Legacy Russell also provide essential theorization, historical context, and intervention. In terms of design practice, several examples light the way such as the  Design Justice Network, the Consentful Tech Project, the Algorithmic Justice League, and the Archiving the Black Web Project to name a few. These scholars, projects, and working groups produce a different social-professional context, one out of which socio-technical strategies and principles can emerge to challenge platform influence. The pull of their radical digital optimism is quite strong too. To me, that optimism brings closer the abandonment of both provenance and its ‘air’ in the digital age. I hope this post has also made a convincing case for understanding how digital platforms might carry assumptions plucked from the ‘air’ in a manner similar to provenance, and in doing so, has made a point to extend the same critiques we take up against archival principles to digital interfaces and infrastructures as they continue to emerge.

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[1] Drake, Jarrett M. “RadTech Meets RadArch: Towards A New Principle for Archives and Archival Description.” On Archivy (blog), April 7, 2016. https://medium.com/on-archivy/radtech-meets-radarch-towards-a-new-principle-for-archives-and-archival-description-568f133e4325.

[2] Sweeney, Shelley. “The Ambiguous Origins of the Archival Principle of ‘Provenance.’” Libraries & the Cultural Record 43, no. 2 (2008): 193–213. 207. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25549475.

[3] Jennifer Douglas, “Origins: Evolving Ideas about the Principle of Provenance,” In Terry Eastwood and Heather MacNeil (eds.), Currents in Archival Thinking (Santa Barbara, California, Libraries Unlimited, 2010), pp. 23-43. 46.

[4] Douglas quoting Peter Horsman quoting Muller. Douglas, 30, 46.

See also: Horsman, Peter. 1994. “Taming the Elephant: An Orthodox Approach to the Principle of Provenance.” In The Principle of Provenance: Report from the First Stockholm Conference on the Archival Principle of Provenance, 2–3 September 1993, edited by Kerstin Abukhanfusa and Jan Sydbeck, 51–63. Stockholm: Swedish National Archives

[5] Sweeney, 207.

[6] Chiu, Anastasia, Fobazi M. Ettarh, and Jennifer A. Ferretti. “Not the Shark, but the Water: How Neutrality and Vocational Awe Intertwine to Uphold White Supremacy.” In Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory, edited by Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight, 0. The MIT Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11969.003.0005.

[7] J.J. Ghaddar and Michelle Caswell, “’To Go Beyond’: Towards a Decolonial Archival Praxis,” Introduction to the Special Issue on Decolonization, Archival Science 19 (Spring 2019): 71-85. 78.

[8] Jules, Bergis. “Confronting Our Failure of Care Around the Legacies of Marginalized People in the Archives.” On Archivy (blog), November 12, 2016. https://medium.com/on-archivy/confronting-our-failure-of-care-around-the-legacies-of-marginalized-people-in-the-archives-dc4180397280.

[9] Carbajal, Itza A., and Michelle Caswell. “Critical Digital Archives: A Review from Archival Studies.” The American Historical Review 126, no. 3 (September 1, 2021): 1102–20. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab359.

The Queer Indexers by Natalie Mattox

 

The Queer Indexers

"Losers, freaks, and deviants started this movement, not these control freaks.” 

                                                                                    - Penny Arcade in the 2017 documentary
                                                                                        Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution [1]

    Queering Library and Information Science (LIS) methods comes with possibilities as expansive and beautiful as the expanse of gender and sexual identity. Reconsidering and reimagining LIS practices in classification, subject heading, cataloging, and means of access to records of memory and experience through a Queer Theory lens is essential for the affirmation and consideration of those who live, and those who struggle to live, within the dominant societal margins. The foundation of current hegemonic library and archival practice was constructed through strict binaries, controlled vocabularies, white supremacy, and proclaimed objectivity under the guise of neutrality. These values unsurprisingly parallel and reinforce the harmful gender and sexual binaries that permeate society today. In her article “Queer Theory”, Katherine Watson argues that “Being ‘queer’… is perhaps to be like someone in therapy; that is, to be a person in flux, contesting boundaries, eliding definition and exhibiting the constructedness of categorization.”[2]  How are LIS professionals and scholars to validate and affirm those of us who exist outside the binary, exist in flux, under these rigid structures?

    In “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction”, Emily Drabinski writes of current, dominant classification and description methods: “The materials themselves are linguistically controlled, corralled in classification structures that fix items in place, and they are described using controlled vocabularies that reduce and universalize language, remarkably resistant to change. In terms of organization and access, libraries are sites constructed by the disciplinary power of language.”[3]  She then argues that “Viewing classification and cataloging from a queer perspective—one that challenges the idea that classification and subject language can ever be corrected once and for all, outside of the context in which those decisions take on meaning—requires new ways of thinking about how to be ethically and politically engaged on behalf of marginal knowledge formations and identities who quite reasonably expect to be able to locate themselves in the library.”[4]  If even one single person cannot find themselves in the library, LIS has a lot work to do.

    I am fascinated by The Circle of Lesbian Indexers that Cait McKinney investigates in her book Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies.[5]  From 1979 through 1986 this circle of a rotating group of four to seven women worked collectively towards creating an accessible and complete “subject-based” index of lesbian literature outside of any formalized institution. This group of pioneering women developed an early “predigital” method of organizing and cataloging that existed entirely outside of traditional practice, adapting their indexing process and “designed systems for their work built out of deep community knowledge and a lesbian-feminist understanding of classification as a material, social, and ethical process.”[6]  McKinney describes the group’s efforts as “not merely ‘documenting’ experience but necessarily “organizing it,” a process that required ongoing choices about what to include and exclude, what words to assign to subjects and their politics, and ultimately what mattered enough to constitute a high-level subject heading for the lesbian public this index imagined. These were deeply political choices caught up in broader lesbian-feminist critiques of language, self-representation, and movement making.”[7]  For example, at the time that The Circle was doing this work and most libraries utilized the standard subject headings of the Library of Congress to organize lesbian materials, “Lesbian” had a cross reference to “Sexual Perversion.”[8]  Their work had to start completely from scratch to design a system that appropriately and compassionately reflected their own experience. McKinney adds, “Materials were produced using low-cost, quick-and-dirty strategies such as self- publishing, small print runs, diy periodicals and pamphlets, and other kinds of gray literature inclined toward ephemerality.”[9]  There’s something very punk about their work.

    The Circle of Lesbian Indexers operated nearly four decades ago when, one could argue, their work could be considered revolutionary for its time. Today, however, this documenting and classifying endeavor should be pushed further to adopt a method as fluid as the fluidity of gender and sexuality. For as Drabinski states, “Queer theory… argued that this recuperative approach was dangerous. It froze identities in time and universalized them, erasing the real differences that accompany same-sex sexuality on the scales of time and place… Rather than taking these identities as stable and fixed, queer theory sees these identities as shifting and contextual.”[10]  In a patriarchal society that continuously oppresses nonbinary, transgender, and other fluid queer identities that fall outside the binary, and exponentially so for queer people of color, it is urgent and imperative that LIS practitioners work towards preserving and maintaining records, memories, and histories of the marginalized in ways that affirm and intentionally serve the most unaffirmed, violated, and silenced in the LGBTQIA+ community.

    Although many have come before us to propel library and archival practice towards queerer possibilities, the rigidity and control still cemented today is woefully outdated and harmfully oppressive. I ask myself what a collaborative, collective cataloging system would look like. What if every individual had the power to create their own vocabularies in cataloging, documentation, and description? What if we could start from scratch? I invite you to ask yourself these same questions. As current and future LIS practitioners we have much to learn from queer theorists, and a small circle of revolutionary lesbian women like The Circle of Lesbian Indexers, who have laid a groundwork for a self-determined, punk revolution of disruption and celebration of identity in LIS. 

__________________

[1] Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution. DVD. United States: Altered Innocence, 2019. 

  

[2] Watson, Katherine. “Queer Theory.” Sage Journals. Sage Journals, 2005. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0533316405049369?ssource=mfc&rss=1. 

[3] Drabinski, Emily. “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction.” The Library Quarterly 83, no. 2 (2013): 94–111. https://doi.org/10.1086/669547. 

[4] Drabinski, “Queering the Catalog”, 94.

  

[5] McKinney, Cait. Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

[6] McKinney, Information Activism, 106.

[7] McKinney, Information Activism, 111.

[8] McKinney, Information Activism, 129.

[9] McKinney, Information Activism, 112-113.

  

[10] Drabinski, “Queering the Catalog”, 96.

Queering from the Ivory Tower: A Critique of Olson and Drabinski’s Ideas of Subversion and Resistance in Cataloging and Classification Systems, by Cameron Lazo

 

    Librarianship seems like a perpetual tug-of-war between theory and practice, in which many bright ideas are frequently proposed about what could be done to advance one issue or another, but do not always have such an impact in real life.  Both Hope Olson and Emily Drabinski propose strategies to subvert traditional library classifications and cataloging, especially related to the Dewey Decimal Classification and Library of Congress Subject Headings.  The strategies are proposed to reject the systems of classification and cataloging practices that put forth universality as an ideal,[i] and instead hope to subvert the systems through Queer Theory’s methods of disruption and resistance.[ii]  While these strategies can prove useful in disrupting particular parts of these systems, especially as it pertains to cataloging and databases, I fear they may prove less useful, even harmful, to the library patron’s user experience.     

In “Patriarchal Structures of Subject Access and Subversive Techniques for Change”, Olson rejects the universality of naming in processes of classification and cataloging,[iii] instead seeking to subvert these practices through encouraging alternative techniques that will “breach limits” and “make space”.^[iv]  A “limit” refers to an identified instance where universal naming has been used, and created norms around a term (in the contexts of classification and subject headings), simultaneously othering any other interpretation of the word.  Olson suggests “breaching the limits”, or subverting these practices through use of technology[v] to “make space” for other voices to be heard.  Some of the suggested techniques include allowing user-created social tagging in the catalog, or incorporating specialized vocabularies in the systems that are better suited to a subject.[vi]  Both of these suggestions allow for more specific language to be used to capture more representative and nuanced understandings of a given term, providing a potential solution to the problems that arise from the system of universal naming.  It is important to note here that while Olson does encourage alternative techniques to act in opposition to the standard practice of universal naming, she does not seek to replace it.[vii]  Instead of attempting to replace a flawed system, Olson hopes to empower the voices that have been excluded,[viii] creating space in the system in a way that had not existed before.

Drabinski takes the idea of leaving the flawed system intact a step further, saying that it is not merely a flawed standard to be subverted, but to be engaged with and learned from as a pedagogical tool.[ix]  The flawed system itself is as important, as necessary as the resistant discourse that ensues, in that the resistant discourse is born out of opposition to it.[x]  Keeping the flawed system leaves the problems more overt, unchanged, and allows future library patrons to identify and engage more easily and historically with the discourse.[xi]

The idea of leaving a flawed system intact may come with problematic implications, potentially even harmful ones, to the library patron.  While there will be many folks able and willing to engage with the problematic classification and cataloging structures, there will also be plenty of people who will not be equipped with the knowledge and tools to deal with them productively.  Olson and Drabinski presuppose some level of tech literacy that not everybody has, and a level information literacy that is often not obtained until at least the university level.[xii] This discounts a great portion of the population, such as children and teenagers who have not reached these levels of cognition or schooling, or even adults who have never been taught these tools.  These populations could encounter this flawed system as an obstacle that they are unable to navigate, and at worst might even be hurt by what they find.  This kind of system will not, in these circumstances, pose as either a subversive, resistant, or productive tool, but rather as a hindrance and pain to many library patrons that do not fit Olson and Drabinski’s idea of a patron.

There does seem to be a simple solution to this problem though: ask a librarian for help!  Indeed, an important intervention posed by Drabinski includes the discursive engagement of librarians.  It becomes apparent that Drabinski is angled more strictly at academic libraries, given the level of critical engagement expected, the references to instruction sessions, and the later reference to the ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) framework,[xiii] though it does not seem to be very explicit throughout the article.  However, even within the context of an academic library, there are multiple difficulties that may yet arise.  Beyond the fact that many students or patrons may not be willing to ask for help, you still encounter problems related to information literacy itself. 

Information literacy sessions by many academic librarians are given in one-shot rounds,[xiv] in which the librarian has a very limited amount of time to explain the basic toolkit of information literacy to a class.  Most often, this is not enough time to explain the more theoretical or conceptual aspects of information literacy, let alone a specific critical theory on systemic and structural flaws.  While pedagogy in librarianship is always seeking ways to be able to incorporate critical frameworks into information literacy, the reality is that there is usually little chance to do so.[xv]  In this regard, there will still likely be barriers to many students/patrons seeking to utilize the systems put forth by Olson and Drabinski, causing user experience issues of various kinds in the process.

While I worry that some of Olson and Drabinski’s ideas come from lofty heights, some suggestions were useful.  The concept of social tagging has indeed taken off in many systems, allowing for patrons to engage more personally with cataloging systems.  Allowing the patrons or students to engage on their own terms, at their own pace, and not merely according to a theoretical framework, might point to more useful systems and ideas.  Sometimes in looking towards end-goals, we forget that our services should be first and foremost patron/student-centered.  Critical theory, grounded by patrons’ and students’ experiences and needs, can form the building blocks to both novel and useful ideas and systems that can serve a greater population even better. 

                    

 

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[i] Olson, Hope. “Patriarchal Structures of Subject Access and Subversive Techniques for Change”.
The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science 26:2/3 (2001): 8

[ii] Watson, Katherine. “Queer Theory”. Group Analysis 38:1 (2005): 74.

[iii] Olson 7

[iv] Olson 21

[v] Olson 22-23

[vi] Olson 25

[vii] Olson 21

[viii] Olson 25

[ix] Drabinski, Emily. “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction”. Library
Quarterly 83 (12) (2013): 101.

[x] Drabinski 102

[xi] Drabinski 104-105

[xii] Gross, Melissa and Don Latham. “What’s Skill Got to Do With It?: Information Literacy Skills and Self-Views of Ability Among First-year College Students”. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63(3) (2012): 574

[xiii] Drabinski 107

[xiv] Wengler, Susan and Christine Wolff-Eisenberg. “Community College Librarians and the ACRL Framework: Findings From a National Study”. College & Research Libraries, Vol 81, No 1 (2020): 7.

[xv] Wengler and Wolff-Eisenberg 13