Histories of Technology Culture Manifestos

Taking impetus from a collaborative conversation about writing a feminist repair manifesto, this article is focused on examining radical feminist manifestos, new technology manifestos, and their intersecting themes and influence upon cyberfeminist manifestos. Its theoretical underpinnings include histories of repair and maintenance and the manifesto as technological form. As a practice, repair and theorisations of repair regarding technology take into account invisible labour and create a relationship of care not only within communities, but in relation to everyday technologies. Since this work to write a feminist fixers’ manifesto was inspired by the iFixit Repair Manifesto, the NYC Fixers Collective manifesto, as well as manifestos from radical feminist technology movements, it seemed appropriate to consider and critically engage the function of manifestos in these various maker and digital technology communities, as well as the history of radical feminist manifestos in response to cultural oppression. By looking more deeply at specific historical instances and their function, I aim to uncover the importance of such artefacts to give voice to alternative narratives and practices, to subvert systemic oppressions while at other times reproducing them in their form. I argue that there is power in iterating and proliferating manifestos with a critical stance and work to establish the knowledge-producing and world-making potentials of manifesto writing.

Pioneers and Feminisms

Feminist historiography is rife with debates about the nature and boundaries of women’s movements. Arguments over who to call an activist or a feminist sit at the heart of these definitional debates, which provide the groundwork for how scholars understand contemporary feminisms. Given the heated nature of ongoing disputes over the complicated identity politics of feminism and its archives, it is surprising that scholars have afforded so little attention to the technical infrastructure that defines and provides access to digitized primary source material, which is increasingly the foundation for contemporary historical research. Metadata plays an outsized role in these definitions, especially for photographic material that cannot be made word-searchable but is favored by digitizers because of its popularity. This article uses qualitative content analysis to examine how two digital archives define the Swedish suffrage movement - a historically contested concept, here understood through the theory of Susan Leigh Star as a “boundary object” subject to “interpretive flexibility”. The study uses keywords attached to photographic material from the the National Resource Library for Gender Studies (KvinnSam) and metadata within the related Swedish Women’s Biographical Lexicon platform for women’s biographies. The findings indicate that the hierarchies of archival organization do not disappear with individual document digitization and description. Instead, the silences built into physical archives are redefined in digital collections, obscuring the tensions between individual and movement feminisms, as well as the contested nature of movement boundaries.

Paradata in Documentation Standards and Recommendations for Digital Archaeological Visualisations

Digitalisation of research data and massive efforts to make it findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable has revealed that in addition to an eventual lack of description of the data itself (metadata), data reuse is often obstructed by the lack of information about the datamaking and interpretation (i.e. paradata). In search of the extent and composition of categories for describing processes, this article reviews a selection of standards and recommendations frequently referred to as useful for documenting archaeological visualisations. It provides insight into 1) how current standards can be employed to document provenance and processing history (i.e. paradata), and 2) what aspects of the processing history can be made transparent using current standards and which aspects are pushed back or hidden. The findings show that processes are often either completely absent or only partially addressed in the standards. However, instead of criticising standards for bias and omissions as if a perfect description of everything would be attainable, the findings point to the need for a comprehensive consideration of the space a standard is operating in (e.g. national heritage administration or international harmonisation of data). When a standard is used in a specific space it makes particular processes, methods, or tools transparent. Given these premises, if the standard helps to document what needs to be documented (e.g. paradata), and if it provides a type of transparency required in a certain space, it is reasonable to deem the standard good enough for that purpose.

Minor Politics, Major Consequences

Metadata is part of our knowledge systems and, so, represents and perpetuates political hierarchies and perceptions of relevance. While some of these have come up for scrutiny in the discourses on digitization, some ‘minor’ issues have gone unnoticed and a few new mechanisms of imbalance have escaped attention as well. Yet, all of these, too, influence the usability of digital image collections. This paper traces three fields of ‘minor politics’ and their epistemic consequences, both in general and in particular, with respect to the study of architecture and its visual representation: first, the intrinsic logic of the original collections and their digital representation; second, the role of support staff in the course of digitization and data transfer; and, third, keywording as a matter of disciplinary habitus. It underlines the ‘political’ role of metadata within the context of knowledge production, even on the local level of a single database, and connects to the implementation of contemporary technologies like computer vision and artificial intelligence for image content classification and the creation of metadata. Given the abundance of digitally available (historical) images, image content recognition and the creation of metadata by artificial intelligence are sheer necessities in order to make millions of hitherto unexplored images available for research. At the same time, the challenge to overcome existing colonial and other biases in the training of AI remains. Hence, we are once again tasked to reflect on the delicate criterion of objectivity. The second part of this paper focuses on research done in the ArchiMediaL project (archimedial.eu); it demonstrates both the potentials and the risks of applying artificial intelligence for metadata creation by addressing the three fields mentioned above through the magnifying glass of programming.