Notes
Chapter 15 Making Infrastructure Writable
Lucie Kolb
We face digital interfaces whether we use the browser search window, ChatGPT, or library and archival catalogs. The interface is not merely a tool to access data; it also provides a “platform for interpretative work in knowledge production” (Drucker, 92). This platform strengthens some things, slows others down, or stops them by making them harder to use. It also defines what questions we can ask, often also what answers we get while rendering invisible, how the results became available, and what decisions regarding categorizations, descriptions, and classifications led to their use. As a form of “thinking infrastructure,” such interfaces create bureaucracy, channeling our behavior and thinking without us noticing that it is there (Kornberger et al.). Interfaces are powerful and deeply political technological-intellectual tools that often appear to be everything but that. Their internal logic and politics are usually hidden in the name of “user-friendly design” (Rossenova). However, “user-friendliness” applies only to those at home in a body, a discipline, and a world (Ahmed, 19). For those of us who live and work transversally, they fail to be useful.
Making Interfaces Tangible and Writable
I want to raise the question of how we negotiate such a “thinking infrastructure” in a way that lets us see and access it.1 This would be a way that helps us be mindful of how our actions and reflections are being shaped by it and creates the possibility for change—for writability.
I want to tackle these questions by discussing two interventions in the search interface in the library that help users understand the context of their search query: “Feminist Search Tools” and “Infrastructural Manoeuvres.” I will discuss how their interventions, modifications, or supplementation strategies work toward the possibility of a “writable library infrastructure”—a discursive and performative space exposing the ways that our actions and reflections are shaped by infrastructure and creating the possibility for a more emancipatory practice.
Feminist Search Tools
Feminist Search Tools2 is an ongoing artistic research project manifesting in workshops and experimental tool-making. The project is organized by members of the collectives Read-In (Sven Engels, Annette Krauss, and Laura Pardo) and Hackers & Designers (André Fincato, Anja Groten), Ola Hassanain and Aggeliki Diakrousi, and Alice Strete. Departing from a shared interest in hierarchies of knowledge that inhabit our bookshelves, reading practices, and library search movements, Feminist Search Tools challenges knowledge systems, articulates ways to operate within them, and explores different ways of retrieving knowledge.
The Role of Categories
Starting with the question, “Why are the authors of the books I read so white, so male, and so eurocentric?” the collective developed their own search interface for catalog items published between 2006 and 2016 in the Utrecht University Library (see Figure 15.1). The group activated the interface in the context of workshops that aim to discuss the biases around literature search and support collective processes of creating awareness toward biases that might be implicit and inherent in specific search movements in the Utrecht University library catalog.
Figure 15.1. The Feminist Search Tool’s alternative search interface for the Utrecht University library catalog (Aggeliki Diakrousi, Sven Engels, Anja Groten, and Annette Krauss), 2024. Prototype created in 2017.
Figure Description
Screenshot of website with bold title reading, “Why are the authors of the books I read so white, so male, so eurocentric?” and a search interface for users to type in keyword, author, or book title.
The Feminist Search Tools interface is not designed as an alternative to the library catalog search interface. Rather, it is a supplementary tool: instead of providing an item search or delivery search, Feminist Search Tools speaks to a more contextual approach. It asks, “In which context is our search embedded within the library catalog? What kind of books can we find in the library?” The interface showcases the catalog’s searchable categories, such as “original language,” “translated work,” and “place of publishing.” Furthermore, it articulates the lack of categories, such as “gender” and “race,” that are critical for answering the starting question, “Why are the authors of the books I read so white, male, and Eurocentric?”
Without these categories, this question cannot be answered directly. Although categories such as “place of publishing” can determine how many books in the catalog were published in Europe, it is questionable whether we can make a deduction based on this knowledge as to whether a book is Eurocentric or not. Based on the existing categories of the library catalog, the question as to how many books were authored by people who identify as nonmale and nonwhite cannot be evaluated at all.
The developers of Feminist Search Tools needed to engage differently with publications and available information to answer the initial question. They did so by retrieving information on the gender of the author from the free and open knowledge base Wikidata, which encompasses gender categories such as “female,” “male,” “transgender-male,” “transgender-female,” and “unknown”; and from Gender API, a commercial software assigning binary gender categories based on names. By supplementing the available fields with data from Wikidata and Gender API, the tool links different datasets. On the one hand, Feminist Search Tools demonstrates that the gender category is missing and points out that we cannot search and find books based on the gender of the author in library catalogs. On the other, it demonstrates the potential of enriching existing library systems and standards, such as the machine-readable description standard for libraries widely used in Europe, the cataloging standard MARC 21, which the Utrecht University library uses, with additional information from other datasets.
While the project reflects the lack of a wide spectrum of gender identification in the datasets (Groten, 198) and problematizes that it is impossible to reconstruct how gender categories are assigned in the case of Gender API, it does not consider the discussions of the context and history of the Wikidata datasets and their inherent biases (Zhang and Terveen).
Staying with the Trouble of Cataloging
Feminist Search Tools offer tools as conversation pieces and an occasion to speak about issues hands-on and make sense of the catalog by sorting and categorizing things differently or otherwise. In her PhD thesis, Anja Groten, a group member and designer, reflected on the process of collective tool building and how it created conditions in which “tools are not presumed as an inevitable outcome but as ongoing and discursive” (157). According to the collective, the tools are not supposed to resolve the problems; they are part of the group’s “unlearning” method, which works toward reinvestigating assumptions, prejudices, and histories and raising awareness about the search processes and how particular power dynamics are reproduced (Kolb and Weinmayr, “A Syllabus (Session 4): Read-ability”).
Therefore, the tools’ usage heavily relies on the discursive context of the workshop format. Embedded in a discussion context, the tools work toward making the catalog writable, in that they help us see our role in the collaborative process (i.e., literature search), where our decisions intersect with those of librarians, coders, and algorithms. Working with the tools and conversing with one another help to see our implication in reproducing particular power dynamics and proposes strategies of unlearning as constantly trying to find ways to search otherwise.
As one of the developers of Feminist Search Tools, Annette Krauss said, “What does it do to me if I am over-represented? If I’m constantly mirrored in the cataloging system, in the world, I live? I have not been equipped with many tools to look in this social-political-psychic mirroring that I’m constantly confronted with” (Kolb and Weinmayr, “A Syllabus (Session 4): Read-ability”). The processes proposed by Feminist Search Tools work toward filling this gap by providing tools that stay with the trouble of cataloging.
Infrastructural Manoeuvres
For Infrastructural Manoeuvres, librarian and designer Anita Burato collaborated with computer programmer and researcher Martino Morandi to modify the library catalog of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and Sandberg Institute (Rietveld/Sandberg Library) in Amsterdam (see Figure 15.2). Presented in the Infrastructural Manoeuvres search interface, the library catalog radically questions its nature and provides possibilities for different layers of usage and engagement by the library users.3 These modifications introduce a doorway into conversations about standard-making bodies in library systems. The “manoeuvres” aim at creating cracks in library infrastructure as a truth-telling mechanism by raising questions regarding authority, responsibility, and accountability in the representation of knowledge in the catalog and by making porous categories that were assumed to be stable and fixed.
Figure 15.2. Experimental interface of the Rietveld/Sandberg Library catalog by Infrastructural Manoeuvres (Anita Burato, Martino Morandi), 2023.
Figure Description
Screenshot the website of the Rietveld/Sandberg Library. The website is structured in three rows, the left row shows a list with book signatures, the middle row displays the signature “090 rao1” and the right row shows a menu with the options “Read”, “Mods/write”, “Evergreen” and “Splotr”. On the right bottom section of the website there is an overlay box with a menu and text reading “MODS are an experimental intervention that allow and invite non-librarians to engage with the ongoing writing of the library catalog. Use this form—with care—to propose an operation on a record, such as an ADDition, a REMoval, a MODification, or raising an issue with a BUT. Choose an operation in the menu to know more about it.”
Accessing the digital library catalog of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and Sandberg Institute, on the left side of the browser page, we see a long snake of field numbers such as “002 klu 1,” “020.1 ine 1,” and “090 rao 7,” corresponding to the respective MARC 21 fields. Clicking on one of these field numbers shows the typical metadata available about the corresponding book, such as title, publisher, and keywords, supplemented with their respective field numbers. On the right side of the browser page, a menu provides options for the user to modify the catalog. The first modification that we can choose is to switch off the librarian’s view displaying the MARC 21 field numbers.
By switching the field numbers off, we see the display of an entry that we would typically get when using any other library catalog. By default, Infrastructural Manoeuvres displays the view of the librarians for the user. This breaks down the barrier between the professional librarians’ view of the catalog and the users’ limited view, aiming to question this separation and the responsibilities and decision-making processes accompanying them. The second modification option is linked to the MODS tool, which offers options for the user to modify catalog entries. The tool includes four options: “addition,” “subtraction,” “modification,” and “but,” as in “objection.” The description reads: “Your proposal will be incorporated into the website and remain linked to this record, but librarians will need some time to integrate the proposal into the record itself. Please take care of motivating your proposed changes in the ‘comment’ field and of providing a contact email so that librarians can get in touch with you. Your email address will not be visible” (Rietveld/Sandberg Library).
Making Records Writable
Listed and displayed in the catalog, the proposals become part of the catalog. For Burato and Morandi, they serve the purpose of “conversations on the record” (Kolb and Weinmayr, “A Syllabus (Session 5): Write-ability”). They track and record the modifications to the catalog records and present them as cultural objects. Collecting and publishing these modifications, the project asks who is writing these records and with what agenda. Conceived as an ongoing project, Infrastructural Manoeuvres aims to foreground the role and possibilities of a library’s technical infrastructure, opening it up to reflection and experimentation. Burato and Morandi are experimenting with making the catalog (and its implicit limitations) not just readable but also, to a certain extent, writable, meaning that library records—which are usually untouchable—can be discussed and negotiated.
Writability here is educational because it creates critical literacy by showing how the catalog comes together. This process is also linked to introducing a new pedagogical role to the librarians. Burato talks about how in an art school, librarians are cashiers. Infrastructural Manoeuvres aims to carve out a space for education and a new teaching role for the librarian (Kolb and Weinmayr, “A Syllabus (Session 5): Write-ability”).
Another aspect of the writability of Infrastructural Manoeuvres is sensitivity to history, in that it documents discussions around categorizations. Books move through the library, says Burato, but also through the structures through time. “The conversations around these decisions are normally not shared; that is what we do” (Kolb and Weinmayr, “A Syllabus (Session 5): Write-ability”). Infrastructural Manoeuvres keeps the history of changes accessible in the MARC 21 “666” field, where deleted categories are stored. For Burato and Morandi, it is not about overwriting the catalog’s errors by implementing proposals but rather about creating an educational space. The collected proposals are a testament to processes of collective care about the catalog, providing context and connection. The proposals show and map some of the histories of categories, demonstrate how they might be linked, and carve out the meanings embedded there. Opening a discussion around categories in the catalog lets us see how certain words keep imaginaries in place and how others introduce reimagination. Sharing proposals, discussions, and decisions and being able to “write” the catalog create possibilities of reimagining and reordering the reality of the thinking infrastructure.
Learning from . . .
Both Feminist Search Tools and Infrastructural Manoeuvres use prototyping as a discursive tool to initiate continuous rethinking and reconfiguring processes of technological-intellectual infrastructure. They create “recursive publics,” in which users are engaged in maintaining and modifying the technical, legal, and practical means of the respective interfaces (Kelty, 256).
The projects rehearse the interface as a thinking infrastructure. Rehearsal is a tool that can be used to play with categories, probe rules, take on different roles, and, by doing so, become aware of them. It is a way to center change, center modification, of our patterns, proceedings, and protocols. By rehearsing, the projects find ways to make tangible the decisions, histories, and conditions inscribed in the tools that we use. Moreover, in the case of Feminist Search Tools, the project demonstrates how missing categories slow down questions such as “Why are the authors of the books I read so white, so male, and so eurocentric?” Neither Feminist Search Tools nor Infrastructural Manoeuvres provides a simple fix, a solution about what needs to be adjusted for us to be able to answer such questions. They rather complicate things: they have designed interfaces that reflect the sociotechnical context of the users and “act more like mirrors” (Rossenova). These interfaces create awareness of the infrastructural work and procedures behind it, demonstrating that this awareness is needed to understand where intervention is necessary.
The projects also demonstrate how critical infrastructure practices need to consider different aspects such as design, social, legal, and economic processes, as well as processes of classification and maintenance. Further, they show how entangled technical and social processes are, as the ways that the communities around these projects use the respective tools to inform the design of the interface and are, to a certain extent, mirrored in it.
I want to highlight the methodology that these projects developed, combing competencies and factors from design, coding, and critical thinking for hands-on approaches to reconfiguring infrastructure. Working on a structure while simultaneously questioning it and linking a critical activity with an engagement with its infrastructure provide the foundation for critical infrastructural practices. Such practices aim at learning from those of us who do not feel quite at home “in a body, a discipline, a world,” as Sara Ahmed (19) has put it. Through their interventions into existing library catalogs, they map out the cracks, the things disappearing in the unindexed abyss, or those not even disappearing but never becoming visible. Moreover, in these cracks, we should dig deeper and collectively map transversal infrastructures that render tangible the ways that they guide, shape, and inform us and help us notice it, and help us see how certain results became available to us and what led to their use.
Notes
1. This contribution draws on research conducted in “Teaching the Radical Catalog,” a collaborative artistic research project that the author conceived with Eva Weinmayr for the exhibition “Reading the Library” (2021) at the Art Library of the Sitterwerk Foundation, a cultural institution in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Weinmayr and I contributed to the exhibition by developing the online syllabus “Teaching the Radical Catalogue.” Taking City University of New York (CUNY) librarian Emily Drabinski’s homonymous text as an inspiration, the syllabus explores ways to teach library users how books are cataloged and categorized. It talks about the people, processes, and infrastructures involved in how a book ends up in a catalog. It demonstrates what decisions, standards, and conditions led to a book being searchable with specific keywords and information on the author and publisher. In her text “Teaching the Radical Catalog,” Drabinski points to the fact that by teaching how to use a catalog, libraries perpetuate the dominant story told by the classification, which carries traces of “all the intentional and unintentional racism, sexism, and classism of the workers who create them” (198). For library users to have critical literacy and to know why they find specific books and not others, Drabinski proposes to teach the catalog mechanisms instead of uncritically teaching the catalog (204). The online syllabus assembles a series of projects by artists, designers, activists, coders, and librarians who have developed experimental tools that work toward “teaching the catalog” in Drabinski’s sense, among those Feminist Search Tools and Infrastructural Manoeuvres.
3. For the catalog of the Rietveld/Sandberg Library, see https://library.rietveldacademie.nl. For the catalog’s entry about Infrastructural Manoeuvres, which provides the catalog’s interface, see https://library.rietveldacademie.nl/projects/infrastructural-manoeuvres.html.
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