Tiffany Chan has an MA degree in English Literature from the University of Victoria. She is a Senior Developer/Analyst (Digital Scholarship) at the University of Victoria Libraries.
Jentery Sayers is an associate professor of English and the director of the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies at the University of Victoria.
This is the source
The process of making digital objects available and discoverable demands a great deal
of labor, from digitization, to creating metadata, to preservation, to importing it
into a digital asset management system, and finally to presenting it. We begin this
essay with a case study of one such system, called Vault,
in the University of
Victoria Libraries, and the work required to migrate from a Software as a Service
(SAAS) model (called ContentDM) to a free and open-source software (FOSS) model (a
customized instance of Samvera).
Vault illustrates what we call minimal computing from the labor
perspective,
which seeks to reduce the opacity of software through
low-tech
practices such as pseudocode, thereby reducing the alienation of
practitioners from their projects. Drawing from feminist ecological work on
capitalism, affective labor, and care, we advocate for the degrowth
of digital
projects by resisting tendencies to reinvest surplus labor and value into increased
productivity. Instead, degrowth as minimal computing prompts practitioners to
articulate a project’s needs and desires; what work is required and from whom; and
how or whether to sustain this labor for the future.
A brief exploration of Vault, a digital asset management system, and how it illustrates minimal computing from the labor perspective.
For some practitioners, research begins in library collections or archives at the moment of contact with an object of interest. In the case of digital objects, this encounter is usually mediated by a digital asset management system. Although screens afford the allure of immediacy, the process of making digital objects available and discoverable demands a great deal of labor, from digitizing a physical object to creating metadata, to maintaining the object, to importing it into the system, and finally to presenting it.
We begin this essay with a case study of one such digital asset management system,
called Vault,
in the University of Victoria Libraries, and we focus on the
work required to not only keep it running but also advance the migration process from
Software as a Service (SAAS)Software as a Service
is a business model where a vendor owns and deploys
software from a centralized server (such as a cloud server) and customers
subscribe to that service for a recurring fee free
to
obtain, modify, and/or redistribute. Often, software based on FOSS must also be
distributed with the same free license as the original widespread inspection, modification, and correction of
the source code
by interested parties fosters high quality software
minimal computing from the labor perspective,
which seeks to
degrow
digital projects.
Here, our use of degrow
corresponds with ongoing feminist ecological work on
capitalism, labor, and care ultimately means eliminating the
productive reinvestment of surplus value
Taken together, these practical, political, and design approaches to digital projects speak to the primary aim of minimal computing from the labor perspective: to degrow computation’s alienation of practitioners from their own projects and from social organization and collective expertise. Rather than asserting this perspective and then applying it to examples, we begin with Chan’s argument, based on experience, which describes the conditions and practices that gave rise to Vault and her contributions to it. From there, we extrapolate lessons from Vault to further define and historicize minimal computing from the labor perspective and outline its real and potential effects on the habits, cultures, and values of computing.
I am one of two developers at University of Victoria Libraries (Libraries
) who
knows and uses Ruby on Rails.I
here and throughout this article is Tiffany Chan.
Changing platforms from CONTENTdm to Vault will gradually increase public access to
the Libraries’ collections by reducing UVic’s use of proprietary software.maximum access
:
reduc[ing] the use of proprietary technologies and
paywalls to increase access to content, data, and/or source files
have the freedom to run, copy,
distribute, study, change, and improve the software
At the Libraries, switching from CONTENTdm to Vault will also help to reduce SAAS
costs; however, implementing open-source software, and implementing it well, is
obviously not free.provide a feasible workflow for breaking with
CONTENTdm and strategies for modifying alternative systems to accommodate
archival digital collections
breaking up
with CONTENTdm
Although maintenance is rarely discussed in research and academic publications, it is
part of the routine work and decision-making processes in memory institutions such as
the Libraries.Although much emphasis is placed on
the delivery of new systems, the maintenance of existing software consumes at
least 50% of the lifetime cost of a software system
The largest humanities
computing projects are likely to require continuing care and maintenance, if
not more radical representation and reinterpretation in light of the advance of
scholarship, and yet they seem unlikely ever to be funded comprehensively for
these tasks. The best way forward is to create some sort of stable
institutional setting for large projects that will provide continuity and
baseline resources for the work
We are only just beginning to find processes
that will genuinely assist our software engineering tasks. There are now a
handful of broadly accepted methodologies that claim [to] — and generally do
— make the task of software engineering and maintenance easier (RUP, AGILE,
PRINCE 2, ITIL), but few organisations have either the will or the means to
deploy these approaches in a ‘purist’ sense
Both [Women Writers Online] and Orlando depend on scholarly collaboration to
create and maintain their materials. At this point in most digital scholarly
projects, collaboration is happening between a small set of trained graduate
students, faculty, and IT and library staff. This is often due to a complex
nexus of concerns, including interest, scholarly expectations, expertise, and
where funding and labor cycles are consistently available
minimal maintenance,
or reduc[ing] dependencies and
the use of features to decrease the labor of updating, moderating, and
stewarding a project over time
The end result,
Dohe declares, is elite
institutions making products for other elite institutions, and every year the
technical and economic barriers to entry grow higher
master
branch of
their GitHub repositories (i.e., the default or core version of their code) to
main.
The former term, often used in coding jargon with “slave,” both
originates from and perpetuates racist language. See https://groups.google.com/g/samvera-community/c/pbKs4nj5gBU for
more.
While Hyku may be more transparent than CONTENTdm, the technical expertise required
to read or write its code nevertheless creates barriers to participation that
existing governance structures often exacerbate
My typical day can involve working with three to six types of code, depending on the
task and how code
is defined. Coding a single web page for Vault requires
knowledge of HTML (the marked-up content of the page), CSS (the style or display),
JavaScript (animation and interface elements), and Ruby on Rails (the page
interacting with the server or database). Each of these languages has its own syntax
and quirks while also relying or building on other languages. Programming a simple
hide/show animation in JavaScript, for example, requires knowing which HTML element
to animate — an element I will likely mark with a CSS selector or class before
passing it into JavaScript. A task that may at the outset appear simple requires
familiarity with three different languages that, in turn, require a non-trivial
amount of time and labor to learn. The difficulties of this work are compounded when
people are not compensated or supported for developing technical expertise, or where
a lack of resources or staff means one person must juggle many separate tasks in
addition to debugging software.
Errors and error messages are, like maintenance, largely ignored in broader
discussions of technological innovation and software, except in minute conversations
between developers or as lingering comment threads in forums such as Stack
Overflow.seamless
experience of technology, and they are mostly forgotten as soon
as a problem is fixed and an error disappears. But they are also ubiquitous, not to
mention fundamental, to the composition of code and the maintenance of software such
as Vault. Errors highlight the messiness of migration, localization, and upkeep. They
emphasize how code resists exact or straightforward replication over time or across
platforms. Although some code can be reused, people still need to modify it to fit a
different context (e.g., renaming variables), match changes elsewhere in the software
(e.g., updating to a code module needed for an existing application), or accommodate
an unexpected edge case (e.g., data that does not easily fit within an existing
database schema and thus requires an update to that database’s structure). Other
common maintenance and debugging issues I might anticipate during a project like
Vault include typos or syntax errors, libraries deprecated for performance issues or
security vulnerabilities, adding or deleting columns in a database, cascading errors
introduced by a bug fix, reference errors, or — worst of all — code that fails
silently, without any indication of where the problem may be. Such errors are in fact
so common they become banal, at least for developers.
Pseudocode:
In the example
above, someone might reasonably guess that tst
is a misspelling of
test
and therefore that tst + 6
should equal 10. But the
computer in this scenario has labelled this a reference error because the computer
assumes there is an entity tst
to which the programmer has forgotten to
assign a value. By the computer’s understanding, the programmer is referring to
something that does not exist. This is a very simplified version of a
miscommunication, but it demonstrates how the assumptions people and machines make
are not necessarily identical. Is tst
a misspelling of a variable
test,
or is it a variable on its own? In this scenario, if not generally
speaking, computers do not tolerate ambiguity well; they rely on and require both
assistance and interpretation.
Software development is associated mostly with writing new code; however, in practice
I work with non-functioning code — that is, code that does not operate how my
colleagues or I want or expect it to — as often as I do with functioning code. And I
am not alone. Nathan Ensmenger notes that software maintenance is the single most time consuming and expensive phase of [software]
development,
representing 50-70% of total expenditures from the early
1960s to 2014 All software has bugs; the
question is simply whether [or] not they are known, and the degree to which they
affect the general consensus on whether or not the software is ‘working’
The development and maintenance of Vault, like research across maintenance studies,
demonstrates quite clearly why code is not source [or] . . . representation of action
: something that
simply works, untouched by the messy world of people and things
[Fetishization] assumes no difference between source code and execution, between instruction and result
enclosed object— not only since it is always breaking down, but also because it is deeply enmeshed in social and material relations that enable it to run and continue running
software . . . is like a contract, a constitution, or a covenantunder constant revision and negotiation
history, organization, and social relationships made tangible
code does what it saysversus
code is a service— both isolate code from social dimensions of its workflow. Projects such as Vault and Hyku may be understood as a response, if not a corrective, to this isolation. With them comes increased, localized attention to the contingencies of code: software moves from
As Vault demonstrates, code and software are contingent on the needs of the Libraries’ catalogers. Responding to those needs, Justice and I implemented a CONTENTdm migrator tool, which lets catalogers map metadata terms from one system to another before exporting CONTENTdm data to a comma-separated values (CSV) file with a row for each item and its metadata. Importantly, each row contains a file path to the digital object that the metadata describes so Vault can link them together. After refining the CSV, catalogers upload it to Vault. Vault parses the CSV, ingests both the metadata and objects, and performs various other tasks, such as indexing metadata or creating thumbnails. Previously, an empty file path in the CSV would cause the entire batch upload job to fail without any notification to the uploader. So, based on feedback, Justice and I also implemented a file path checker tool that determines whether a file actually exists at the path indicated before Vault tries to import the object or metadata. The path checker then prints a list of empty paths for catalogers to correct. Accurately typing long file paths is often difficult and frustrating for people, especially if they are accustomed to graphical interfaces or different operating systems (for instance, Linux paths use forward slashes while Windows paths use backslashes). During the migration and localization processes, the Libraries are able to address some of these difficulties and frustrations through customization by way of automation, which may not be available to SAAS customers.
Vault’s features are also contingent on what the Libraries do not need or choose to
avoid. Justice removed Hyku’s built-in notifications feature to decrease the number
of internal system requests, which impede server performance. To restrict access, he
also removed the option to register for an account without an explicit invitation
from an administrator. I included an option for the Libraries to allow people who are
not affiliated with UVic to view an item without being able to download it. Hyku’s
default settings coupled viewable
with downloadable,
but the Libraries
needed to restrict downloads for items that are in copyright or have protocols
governing their use. These sorts of customizations fall under the broader umbrella of
maintenance as they not only speak to the ongoing, local needs of the Libraries but
also affect, or cascade across, Vault as a whole over time. Although they are quite
technical in the particular cases of programming and debugging, they need to be
communicated more generally to everyone in the Libraries who relies on Vault.
Otherwise, code and software are once again isolated from who and what keep them
running.
Pseudocode, or an informal description of how a computer program operates, is useful
for such translation practices, and for instilling a sense of trust when labor is
divided and individuals contribute only to specific parts of a platform based on
their roles within the Libraries. Consider an example based on writing a Ruby on
Rails web application (app
). When digitizing objects such as periodicals or
books for archiving purposes, the Libraries’ digitization team scans each page as a
.tiff image (Tagged Image File Format, or TIFF
) at about 600 dots per inch
(DPI) and a file size of hundreds of megabytes each. However, people who access the
Libraries’ collections may prefer to view these images as .pdf documents (Portable
Document Format, or PDF
) in which every image is a page. Justice, Greg
Lanning, and I begin by talking with the Libraries’ digitization unit about which
Ruby functions and features may help to address this issue of format needs and
preferences. Then the three of us compile a list of specifications, written in rather
plain language. The list may look something like this:
This imagined app considers the fact that converting the TIFFs to a linearized PDF is a time-consuming task that cannot be done easily through a graphical user interface (GUI). Even proprietary software such as Adobe Acrobat, which allows for some automatic conversion, will crash when given a significant number of high-quality, information-dense image files. And so, rather than jumping immediately into the Adobe Creative suite, I begin writing pseudocode for the Libraries.
Pseudocode enables me to draft code as a series of actions the code will perform. To
increase accessibility and bypass assumptions of shared technical language, I write
in prose instead of code. Linearize the PDF
would, for example, be expressed
in Ruby as `qpdf #{input_pdf_name} — linearize #{output_pdf_name}`
.
Here is sample pseudocode for the specifications list above:
Pseudocode is important for describing what a project should or must do without becoming tangled in the particular syntax of a programming language. As intellectual work, it helps practitioners to clarify what they need and how to judge whether, how, or to what degree a resulting program succeeds. It is also advantageous from a maintenance perspective because the potential for error in digitization projects is high, and it is far easier to debug a small program (in terms of number of lines) than a large one. By avoiding resource-heavy interfaces and scope creep, and by adding complexity incrementally and only when necessary, the Libraries can thoroughly test one part of a program and confirm it is working before moving to another feature or function of Vault.
Along the way, I may use a “low-tech,” non-GUI interface such as a text editor, command line, or interactive shell or console called a Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL) when composing code. I may also draw or sketch a workflow on paper before touching a keyboard. Such interfaces narrow attention and tend to reduce complexity when testing and debugging. They focus the work on describing details concretely. What functions are needed? What do those functions need — which data types, variables, or parameters? What are some errors that could occur? What alternative functions or workarounds exist if initial attempts fail? What information is needed from people, and what can be provided, calculated, or expressed by the computer? If the Libraries are creating profiles in Vault, for example, do we need a person’s first or last name or email address? Where and how will this data be stored, used, displayed, and retrieved?
After writing preliminary pseudocode, I build these steps using logical statements —
such as if/then clauses or loops — to guide the computer in its decision-making
process. If/then statements are like forks in the road: they describe two (or more)
conditions that a computer calculates and pair each condition with a specific action
the computer will take if the corresponding condition is met. Loops are repeated or
repeatable if/then statements. They say, As long as condition X
is met, repeat action Y.
For instance, I can loop through a list of files
in a folder (for every file . . .
). Here is the revised
pseudocode for the TIFF-to-PDF conversion process, including if/then statements and
loops:
After I create a pseudocode roadmap for my app, I begin to translate it into Ruby on
Rails. Ruby contains a number of built-in methods: algorithms that transform some
input into an output. Where possible, I look for these built-in methods as well as
external code libraries (called gems
in Ruby) to achieve common programming
tasks such as creating, moving, or removing files. This step avoids reinventing the
wheel. Why write code entirely from scratch if someone else has already created an
effective approach to the problem? In some cases, writing code entirely from scratch
is not reasonable. When converting a TIFF into a PDF, for example, I would have to
know the byte-by-byte values of image headers (data placed at the beginning of a file
that tells a viewer to parse or interpret the file as a TIFF) and replace them with
PDF headers, all without corrupting the content of the file itself. In this scenario,
programmers usually rely on image manipulation libraries, such as ImageMagick, for
conversion. Offloading the task in this way would allow me to concentrate on the
scope of the app I am writing. It also saves me significant time and labor in the
short term. Yet shortcuts like ImageMagick depend on external code not written or
hosted by the Libraries. The use of such dependencies as part of Vault may therefore
be vulnerable to obsolescence or deprecation, thus yet another tension at play in
project maintenance. A desire to reduce the complexity of code conflicts with another
desire to reduce dependencies and maximize a project’s persistence. Such tensions
are, for good reason, more likely to be accepted than resolved in projects like
Vault.
What does my work with Vault tell readers of this journal about minimal computing?
This may at first sound like a rather odd or misguided question. After all, Vault is
substantial in both its size and reach, and it draws upon a significant array of
resources in the Libraries.[A]t the end of my career I hope to have a
single project that consolidates and presents a lifetime of digital
scholarship. This aim is perhaps the larger challenge posed by
jamessmithies.org. For people with the requisite skills, does a minimal
computer + open source web framework + cloud service integration amount to the
ultimate VRE? The need for ongoing maintenance suggests not. Conceived as a
decades-long personal project, jamessmithies.org is likely to stay live for
some time as a by-product of intellectual and technical engagement, but it is
far from a model for general use
Wefrom here through the end of the article are Chan and Sayers, and we engage Wark via a technique she calls
substitutionby rewording her approach to labor in
Labor finds itself in and against nature
naturebecomes
computationor
computing.We are also striving to avoid what Wark identifies as a limitation of this philosophical approach:
The result tends to be the thought of activity without matter or of matter without activity
withinand
againstis key to our approach
a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature
betweenhere — the boundary between people (
man) and nature — differs from our use, via Wark, of
within and against.For a critique of the universal human subject in digital praxis, see Roopika Risam, who writes:
With the move to generate software and algorithms that replicate ‘human’ processes, particular forms of ‘human’ are authorized. As postcolonial scholars have argued, the Enlightenment gave rise to the idea of a homogeneous definition of ‘human,’ which centers the European subject and, in turn, marginalizes all whose cultures, lifestyles, and values deviate from the universal. Postcolonial theory, crucially, has made the case for the importance of the particular, grounded in the idea that, indeed, cultures — specifically the cultures of colonized or formerly colonized communities — are left out by universalist discourse
Labor is the mingling of many things, most of them not human
The logic of the labor perspective unfolds like so:
The most straightforward (yet admittedly narrow) definition of carework is labor performed to fulfill the needs of those who cannot do so themselves, such as food provision, cleaning, health, etc. Broader understandings of carework stress that such work is often performed in tandem with and complementary to other types of (unpaid) reproductive labor and cannot be considered separate from the broader sphere of social reproduction. That is to say, carework is better seen as themore comprehensive field of paid and unpaid labor that ensures social reproduction in general
A century of feminist calls to seize the means of reproduction, to take control of one’s own body, to love oneself, to embrace reproductive rights, to end racism, to denounce reproductive technologies, to enjoy sex, to situate bodies intersectionally and so on are all quintessentially biopolitical
The labor point of view has to reject ontologies of abstract exchange with nature. . . . Labor is always firstly in nature, subsumed within a totality greater than itself. Labor is secondly against nature. It comes into being through an effort to bend resisting nature to its purposes. . . . Labor experiments with nature, finding new uses for it
convivial computing
[T]he project of building a degrowth society can only start from fostering dealienation by reopening the possibility for workers control and economic democracy, from the workplace to society at large
Illich uses the term ‘conviviality’ to connote the following characteristics of technologies: ease of use, flexibility in implementation, harmony with the environment, and ease of integration into truly democratic forms of social life. Obviously, Illich’s vision is a utopian one, but his measure of a technology’s conviviality seems relevant to the question of computer trash. We need a ‘convivial’ computer
All of these aspects are more than metaphors, and they can be unpacked with attention to the particulars of Vault as a computing project and labor issue.
We would be remiss, however, if we did not first recognize how minimalism is often an
expression of power, if not an exaltation of it. Google’s reduction of search to a
single input field on a mostly blank page is a canonical example of such power.less is more
), Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe,
Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and Samuel Beckett to Frederick Barthelme, Ann
Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Raymond Carver, not to mention the rationalism of
a certain mathematician and philosopher: [A]fter the excesses
of scholasticism comes Descartes’s radical reductionism — let us doubt and
discard everything not self-evident and see whether anything indubitable
remains upon which to rebuild
Minimalism
is the reducing of painting to the minimum ingredients for the sake of
discovering the ultimate, logical destination of painting in the process of
abstracting
The minimalist story . . . speaks of a
simplicity arrived at through the disciplined process of reduction
The popular concept of the minimal as an aesthetic
of refusal, of reduction, became so omnivorous that it quickly overtook the
practices it was first applied to
great misreading
designing simplicity
and
designing the minimal
in a pragmatist reduction resonating with the
economy of Occam’s razor: The practitioner should be able to
consciously choose his/her tools and make informed design decisions . . . To
this end, this book defines an ideal for design, focuses on reduction as a
technique, and draws on the notion of minimalism to differentiate understanding
of simplicity
Reduction,
where the term serves as a starting point for
understanding minimalism and what else it may mean or do plain power
What you see
is what you see
A persuasive case can be made, after all, that the
patriarchal overevaluation of power and control — at the expense of mutuality,
toleration, or nurturance — can be held to account for almost all that is
politically reprehensible and morally lamentable in the world. The case can be
made as well that what is most badly needed are, at least for a start, visions
of something different, something else
While minimalists preach universality — you don’t
have to be rich to own fewer things — the authors behind the most influential
minimalist-themed titles and #minimalism posts tell a different story.
Influencers that frequently appear on lists of influential minimalist Instagram
accounts are predominantly white and East Asian (today’s Japanese minimalism
arises from Zen and Buddhist traditions). The best known minimalist authors
today — Marie Kondo, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, Francine Jay,
Joshua Becker, Fumio Sasaki — fit within the same demographics
Despite the new movement’s lack of
diversity on the surface, there are a small number of black individuals who
proudly call themselves minimalists in 2017
Minimalism, if defined to me, is the practice of
looking around at what you have and living your abundant life in the
now
I didn’t make a drawing; I just picked up the phone and
ordered it
minimalism considers perception in phenomenological terms, as somehow before
or outside history, language, sexuality, and power. In other words, it does not
regard the subject as a sexed body positioned in a symbolic order any more than
it regards the gallery or the museum as an ideological apparatus
anti-artifice
rather than art in
the making laying bare
the means
does not necessitate attribution, let alone transparency, of labor.
This labor issue persists in the exhibition and care of minimalist sculpture found in public parks and plazas. Consider, for instance, Chave’s analysis of Richard Serra’s
In its site on Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan, Serra’s mammoth,
perilously titled steel arc formed a divisive barrier too tall (12 feet) to see
over, and a protracted trip (120 feet) to walk around. In the severity of its
material, the austerity of its form, and in its gargantuan size, it served almost
as a grotesque amplification of Minimalism’s power rhetoric. Something about the
public reaction to that rhetoric can be deduced from the graffiti and the urine
that liberally covered the work almost from the first, as well as from the
petitions demanding its removal (a demand met last year).
Here, minimalism was so assertive, so aggressive in its will to power, that people
responded by tagging it and relieving themselves on it.
While minimalist sculpture in New York may not appear immediately relevant to Vault,
it does provide an example of how minimalism is value-laden, and it may serve as a
model for how
The technical labor of Vault engages the recalcitrance
of computing there
of CONTENTdm to the here
of Vault in the Libraries. This by no
means makes Vault unique. Thousands of these stories exist across the world, and — as
noted previously in this article — more and more institutions are moving from SAAS to
FOSS for the purposes of management. But
When viewed in the aggregate, these issues of mediation demonstrate why maintenance,
rather than innovation or disruption, is a fundamental term for Vault and the labor
around it. The lived reality of Vault and other FOSS projects is one of constant
negotiation with software, of moving from one moment of stabilization to the next,
between past and future. As Vault reduces UVic’s alienation from its own collections,
and the Libraries from their own labor and computing, all as an alternative to
proprietary software in the academy, it also makes everyone involved more aware of
the means available for asset management. This awareness of means underscores the
fact that technical labor — like all creative and critical work — carries both
negative and affirmative connotations, from managing endless bugs and implementing
updates to experimenting with code, building knowledge around historical materials,
and imagining new uses for computing.
An awareness of means has been an appeal of minimalism for some time now. In his
examination of minimalist tendencies in music and plastic arts, Edward Strickland
asserts: In much Minimal music . . . overt and immediately
audible repetition of simple, even simplistic material, is the predominant
structural principle. In dance, film, sculpture, and literature, similarly,
Minimalism exposes the components of its medium in skeletal form
Hyku: A multi-tenant Hyrax application built on the latest and
greatest Samvera community components. Brought to you by the Hydra-in-a-Box
project partners and IMLS; maintained by the Hyku Interest
Group.
ready made science
and science in the making
: The word black box is used by cyberneticians whenever a piece of
machinery or a set of commands is too complex. In its place they draw a little
box about which they need to know nothing but its input and output
closely resembles an organised whole
With Vault, the Libraries see the component parts and their relations, and the UVic
team may adjust the platform’s settings to allow or disallow file downloads and
increase granularity in access protocols, making only a subset of collections
downloadable or permitting downloads of specific works in a given collection. This
sort of technical labor, including customization, applies to the general maintenance
and care for Vault: the living activity of ensuring the social and technical
reproduction of the Libraries’ holdings through code and software. It is also central
to reproducing scholarship and, by extension, the academy Wax is a minimal computing (minicomp) project led by
Marii Nyröp. The project is currently maintained by Marii Nyröp and Alex Gil at
Columbia University Libraries. It uses open source libraries and frameworks
including Jekyll, IIIF, OpenSeaDragon, Rake, and ElasticLunr. Wax builds upon
work by Peter Binkley, David Newbury, and others.
authors are not creating small, isolated archives on the Scalar
server. Although they can upload their own videos, audio, and images to that
space, they are instead encouraged to house them with a partner archive. Or, in
the case where assets are already online, they are encouraged to embed those
assets in their Scalar projects. That way, systems point to existing URIs
rather than duplicating resources and producing redundancies. Here, the
advantage is that media playback is overseen by groups that not only have
institutional support but also specialise in metadata, asset categorisation,
provenance, and interoperability
Low-tech practices such as pseudocode help to render an otherwise recalcitrant stack
intelligible to a group — to keep code mingling, and to degrow its alienating
effects. The labor question is not whether everyone in the Libraries knows how to
code (where programming is a means to power) or whether code does what it says (where
code as what you see is what you see,
plain power
assumptions of common sense, also popular in minimalist design
principles like Keep It Simple, Stupid
(KISS), where simplicity is presented
overtly in ableist terms, as if it is obvious or readily apparent to whomever.a form of ‘everyday thinking’ which offers us frameworks
of meaning with which to make sense of the world. It is a form of popular,
easily-available knowledge which contains no complicated ideas, requires no
sophisticated argument and does not depend on deep thought or wide reading. It
works intuitively, without forethought or reflection. It is pragmatic and
empirical, giving the illusion of arising directly from experience, reflecting
only the realities of daily life and answering the needs of ‘the common people’
for practical guidance and advice
Common
sense, tends to be socially conservative, leaning toward tradition
do
or keep doing.
Without attention to the labor perspective (among other social and cultural
approaches), the minimalist dimensions of minimal computing lend themselves to
demands for the easily-available, intuitive, pragmatic, empirical, and socially
conservative. On common sense, see also the work of Antonio Gramsci as well Linda
Åhäll, who considers common sense to be a vehicle for apolitical activity
The organizational labor of Vault addresses people’s everyday negotiations with
computing but also thread[s] people together around their
tasks
More Canadians are working in precarious conditions,
employed in contract, temporary, and/or part-time jobs with low wages. The
increase has been concentrated in accommodation and food services, education,
information, culture and recreation services — and particularly among young
workers aged 15 to 24 and older workers aged 65+. The [Canadian Centre for
Policy Alternatives] recently reported that among the university and college
workforce, as many as half are employed in precarious conditions. A
disproportionate share of those are the 68,000 CUPE workers employed in this
sector. Permanent jobs make up a declining share of the overall jobs in the
post-secondary workforce. They’re being replaced by people working in
temporary, involuntary part-time and multiple jobs
Expounding Donna Haraway’s cyborg point of view, Wark says an apparatus renders
(1) apparatuses are specific
material-discursive practices (they are not merely laboratory setups that
embody human concepts and take measurements); (2) apparatuses produce
differences that matter — they are boundary-making practices that are formative
of matter and meaning, productive of, and part of, the phenomena produced; (3)
apparatuses are material configurations/dynamic reconfigurings of the world;
(4) apparatuses are themselves phenomena (constituted and dynamically
reconstituted as part of the ongoing intra-activity of the world); (5)
apparatuses have no intrinsic boundaries but are open-ended practices; and (6)
apparatuses are not located in the world but are material configurations or
reconfigurings of the world that re(con)figure spatiality and temporality as
well as (the traditional notion of) dynamics (i.e., they do not exist as static
structures, nor do they merely unfold or evolve in space and time)
speak
more often to each other, or to
machines, than to (most) people. Recall, for instance, this line of Ruby: `qpdf
#{input_pdf_name} — linearize #{output_pdf_name}`
. It is not exactly
human-readable, even if aspects of it are intelligible. Or, approaching the business
of mediation more broadly, people are unable to witness what a project like Vault is
doing behind the scenes
or on the back end.
So much process is
indecipherable or invisible, and this can all be quite alienating in the absence of
organizational labor. After all, people rely upon software and instill their trust in
it, usually without being proximate to those who keep it running.project
rather than product,
for example, or minimal computing as
labor first, then style, specification, file, or theme, if need be. With such
changes, a project’s design process may begin with maintenance considerations rather
than ignoring them (acting as if they do not exist), deferring them (acting as if
they matter less than other considerations), or attending to them as they emerge
(acting as if they are isolated incidents rather than patterns or cascades).
The affective labor of Vault engages the feeling of being directed
by
computing and computing projects many hats
involves various cultural factors that are entwined with the
everyday experiences of programming and carework. A labor approach to Vault
underscores the need for structures and guidelines that protect employees from
outside demands for increased efficiency or motivate institutions to reinvest a
project’s surplus in productivity. UVic’s
Grant menu.For more on in-kind contributions in a Canadian context, see the Social Science and Humanities Research Council's guidelines: https://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/policies-politiques/cash_inkind-especes_en_nature-eng.aspx.
power as directionality
As you become aware of how the social world is organized, norms appear as palpable things. I think of those times, say, when you walk into a toy shop and it is striking. You might pick up the vacuum cleaner, a toy vacuum cleaner, and feel like you are holding the future for girls in a tangible thing. You can pick up a toy gun, and also feel this: the future for boys held as a tangible thing. Norms become striking: holdable as palpable things. Once we are stricken, there is still much work left to do. The hardest work can be recognizing how one’s own life is shaped by norms in ways that we did not realize, in ways that cannot simply be transcended. A norm is also a way of living, a way of connecting with others over or around something. We cannot ‘not’ live in relation to norms.
Minimal computing from the labor perspective is thus premised on supporting (and not
just accommodating
) people who are marginalized or silenced by systemic
directionality. It aims to name problems, call attention to norms, slow down
investments in productivity, discuss difficult topics, experiment, and refuse to
feign happiness when maintenance and carework are devalued. This means the degrowth
of computing’s alienating effects must at the same time recognize alienation as a
critical position, even if the result is a contradiction.how feminism can be experienced as life alienation, how we can
become estranged from the lives we are living in the very process of
recognizing how our lives have been shaped or have taken shape
affect alien
If
alienation is sensation, it is not . . . just or only the sensation of
negation
studious
; it is wonder
killjoy survival kit
In our work we use the acronym MEALS as shorthand for a feminist emphasis on how the ‘material, embodied, affective, labor-intensive, and situated character of engagements with computation can operate experientially for users in shared spaces’
recommend that affective labour be formally recognized, through: Acknowledgement on project, course, and department websites. Acknowledgement in publications and other forms of dissemination. Evaluation for tenure and promotion. Evaluation for grants and other forms of funding
Hail the maintainers!) and romantic celebrations of maintenance without devaluing or abstracting it from social and material relations.
What is largely missing from the celebration of care as the cornerstone of the post-growth transition is how carework is to be organized in a socio-ecologically just future. This is crucial, since re-centering a society around care does not imply gender justice. Quite the contrary, carework has historically been one of the most exploitative, flexible and invisible forms of labor performed by women
Degrowth in minimal computing instigates a shift from using technologies to reinvest
in productivity (“crunch,” increased output, longer hours, more data, jobs rather
than careers, and technology as a service, for instance) to designing shared
structures that support technical, organizational, and affective labor as critical
and creative activities. This is frequently achieved by reducing scope creep, and
thus we might echo Alex Gil’s question, What do we need?
[W]e have thought through our platform with the same critical eye we cast on the archive, and our resulting infrastructure embodies our principles. We are fully open access and charge no author fees. Our authors retain their copyright. We pursue best indexing, accessibility, and archival practices. We emphasize the primacy ofsustainable authorship in plain text.In this quoted text, Glover and Gil encode a link to Dennis Tenen and Grant Wythoff’s Our website and PDFs are generated from the same markdown files using Jekyll and ConTeXt, respectively. The resulting website is light-weight and mobile-friendly, acknowledging the importance of mobile phones, bandwidth differentials, and data costs in the Caribbean.Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown .
The skeleton of the project, not to mention its editorial and commit history, are
accessible to readers along with the journal’s technological stack. Readers are also
allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search,
or link to the full texts of the articles in [the] journal without asking prior
permission from the publishers
How might we encourage collaboration with, increase accessibility
for, and otherwise work to narrow the gap between Caribbeanist researchers,
especially those in the North Atlantic academy, and the communities we are
committed to serving?
From the labor perspective, Glover and Gil also articulate minimalism with sustainability. They publish the journal’s workflow, render clear its standards and structure, bypass subscription fees (including SAAS fees), credit all team members (including the designer, architect, and editorial board), and ensure the journal is available in English, French, and Spanish. Even though
The Microsoft-owned software development platform company continues to contract with ICE, despite CEO Nat Friedman sharing in a blog post last year that he strongly disagrees with the Trump administration’s immigration policies
a whole convivial system of digital components, a convivial digital infrastructure
The labor of minimal computing may also emerge from a desire to degrow “forever”
projects. Here, we might ask what relationships we want with technologies and each
other as we are propelled into the future.Of the projects analyzed in this study, 26 focused on
digitizing the work and intellectual legacies of individual people. Of these,
only one woman was singled out for individual treatment: the ‘Ida M. Tarbell
Papers Digitization Project,’ awarded $30,000. Similarly, only one
African-American was at the center of a project: ‘Digitizing W.E.B. Du Bois,’
awarded $314,787. This means that projects on individual women and black
Americans were awarded only 8% of the total $4,225,061 awarded to projects on
individuals. All of the rest focused on white men of historical importance.
Several, such as Walt Whitman and Thomas Jefferson, had multiple projects
representing them
While
white men were likely to be treated as individuals in a given project, other
race/ethnic categories and women were treated as groups almost exclusively.
Instead of a project focusing on specific historical figures, the narrative and
documentary history of these groups is considered at the aggregate level. This
disparity is important to note because it speaks to a larger social phenomenon
whereby great (white) men stand out for their achievements, but other groups
have been largely left to be remembered for their collective struggle
Users now firmly expect that
scholarly digital publications will be kept up-to-the-minute and respond to user
suggestions
messy affair
Part of this degrowth may imply attention to, if not an embrace of, ephemerality in
scholarly communication done
or enough,
a refutation of the assumption that practitioners
are service-providers who accumulate piles of technical debt that must be paid
indefinitely back to users expecting fresh content on demand.In this moment, one in which we are forced to
confront our own fragility, our own ephemerality as (potentially) disappearing
bodies amid a global pandemic, minimal computing impels us toward a
reassessment of our individual and communal practices and makes apparent the
ways we might reject circulating notions of a
new normal
as we think
about the potential to reclaim and reshape community. What might that look
like? What is sustainable? What is not? What do we need?[M]ust everything be permanent? Must we insist that every cultural object be
subjected to the archive?
maximum
ephemerality
: Reduce an impulse to inscribe,
measure, or visualize with technologies in order to increase the likelihood of
experimentation and collective participation
Alienation of the producers from the products of their work is what
leads to the reinvestment of surplus into increased production,
and weak unions and virtually non-existent enforcement of labor
regulations play a major role in determining the environmental impact of
production
At UVic, the Endings Project (2020) at the Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(HCMC) has begun addressing degrowth via technical labor practices.degrow,
they argue that projects — even digital ones — need to end
build a static website with no
databases,
[d]ata is stored only in formats which conform to open standards
and which are amenable to processing,
and every
entity in the site has a unique page with a simple URL
endings principles
would make for
an interesting comparison with phoning in
projects for others to build and maintain.
And ultimately, that is what we hope minimal computing from the labor perspective may achieve through degrowth: a change in habits, culture, and values, not just technologies. We admit it is no small task.