Book Out: The No-nonsense Guide to Born-Digital Content

9781783301959

I have a new book out with my colleague Heather Ryan, The No-nonsense Guide to Born-Digital Content.

I started drafting chapters for this book in late 2016 when Heather, then the head of the Archives here and now director of the department, approached me about coauthoring the title. I had never written in chapter form before, nor for more a general audience. Approaching my usual stomping ground of born-digital collection material from this vantage was really intriguing, so I jumped at the chance.

To back up a little, our subject here is collecting, receiving, processing, describing and otherwise taking care of born-digital content for cultural heritage institutions. With that scope, we have oriented this book to students and instructors, as well as current practitioners who are aiming to begin or improve their existing born-digital strategy. We’ve included lots of real world examples to demonstrate points, and the whole of the book is designed to cover all aspects of managing born-digital content. We really discuss everything from collecting policy and forensic acquisition to grabbing social media content and designing workflows. In other words, I’m hoping this provides a fantastic overview of the current field of practice.

Our title is part of Facet Publishing’s No-nonsense series, which provides an ongoing run of books on topics in information science. Facet in general is a great publisher in this space (if you haven’t checked out Adrian Brown’s Archiving Websites, I recommend it), and I’m happy to be a part of it. I thank them for their interest in the book and their immense help in getting it published!

Update: The book is now available stateside in the ALA store.

Who Owns the Future?

Excerpts from Who Owns the Future?, by Jaron Lanier.

Lanier defines “Siren Servers” as

an elite computer, or coordinated collection of computers, on a network. It is characterized by narcissism, hyperamplified risk aversion, and extreme information asymmetry. It is the winner of an all-or-nothing contest, and it inflicts smaller all-or-nothing contests on those who interact with it.

Hm, I think I can count a few companies running such servers. On the formation of these servers:

Every attempt to create a pure bottom-up, emergent network to coordinate human affairs also facilitates some new hub that inevitably becomes a center of power, even if that was not the intent…. These days, if everything is open, anonymous, and copyable, then a search/analysis company with a bigger computer than normal people have access to will come along to measure and model everything that takes place, and then sell the resulting ability to influence events to third parties. The whole supposedly open system will contort itself to that Siren Server, creating a new form of centralized power. Mere openness doesn’t work.

Further:

In what sense is becoming dependent on private spy agencies crossed with ad agencies, which are licensed by us to spy on all of us all the time in order to accumulate billions of dollars by manipulating what’s put in front of us over supposedly open and public networks, a way of defeating elites? And yet that is precisely what the “free” model has meant.

The start of his premise:

To restate the premise of this project, it’s ultimately better to have paid information in order to create a middle class.

I’ve excerpted some of the author’s more forceful passages, but I found Lanier’s take on the future of an information economy — and his alternative model to it — very smart, and very humane.

Disk Imaging Workflow at BitCurator.net

Early in January I attended the first-ever BitCurator Users Forum in Chapel Hill. This was a fantastic day with a group of folks interested in the BitCurator project and digital forensics in an archive setting — definitely one of the most information-packed and directly applicable conferences or forums I’ve attended. I’m very much looking forward to next year’s.

I have a post on the BitCurator site on the disk imaging workflow I’m using with students presently, and there’s a great wrap-up of the day as well.

Aaron Swartz

Noam Schieber at The New Republic:

Like too many other computer prodigies of his generation, Aaron Swartz was used long before he was invented. He hadn’t lived long enough to know that not every mistake he made would reverberate for all time or haunt him until the end of his days. In this, he was not so different from any other teenager who sweats the pop quiz he failed or the fender he banged up. What distinguished Swartz was that, from a young age, he was handed a fantastically powerful set of tools—“you can do magic,” he would exhort his fellow programmers—and told it was his destiny to create a more free and just society.

For Swartz and his fellow computer prodigies, this was a deeply isolating existence.

I find Schieber’s article from last year a welcome addition to much of the coverage of Swartz’s life and career.

Realtechnik, Nausea and Technological Longing

I want to make a strong claim: realpolitik equilibria are only disrupted by technological changes. If there is no major technology change, political actors who are unhappy with the prevailing order, no matter how cleverly they attempt to reorganize, will not succeed in creating a stable new order with a different power structure. A reason to do things differently is not sufficient. Different means must become available.

Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm