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Queer theory parties on while Paris burns

This Spring, I took a feminist theory course. It was hard. It was hard because I am a scientist by training and trade, and the language and concepts of the course worked new and unfamiliar brain synapses. But I loved the material and stretching outside my positivist, empiricist self. And I love the teacher, but that's a different story.

Throughout the quarter we traveled the long roads of postcolonialsm, poststructuralism, orientalism, standpoint epistemology, etc., concluding our term with an exploration of queer theory. The discussion was anchored around a number of articles[1] and the film, Paris is Burning[2], a story about the ball scene in New York City in the late 1980s.

Part 1 - It's My Party

"A few swim in riches and the majority drown in poverty, pollution, and violence."

---John Perkins, Confessions of a Hit Man[3] 

Reclaiming Privilege. Queer theory, the pop culture wannabe of firmly landed theoretical models, is as intellectually substantive as a box of Frosted Flakes is nutritious. It’s genre of performative coolness arbitrates a collective suturing of hipness across otherwise disparate populations. Paris is Burning painfully illustrates the great distance between the queer theory haves and have nots, and quite-by-accident betrays the reality that the have nots aren’t going anywhere. The theoretical home base of (mostly) educated, white middle- and upper class people, queer theory shrewdly markets itself as the latest and greatest. Under exciting and trendy Fifth Avenue packaging, queer theory works to re-establish the (white) patriarchal stranglehold, covertly uninviting the disenfranchised from the party. You can almost hear the whiny power-elites reclaiming entitlement to power vis-à-vis their glamor theory. 

The intersections of race, class, and gender in America construct a clear hierarchy of social power. For the poor, non-White, gay, and transgendered men of Paris is Burning, a particularly unique form of social vulnerability is constructed. While fully aware of their low social location, the men of the New York City ball scene briefly escape it by simulating the privilege of others living far outside their local reality. 

The Filmmaker: An examination of class. Jennie Livingston was born into power. Her upper crust family endowed privilege. She had resources that allowed her to enter an exotic world of people far outside her material class, to objectify its subjects, to appropriate their culture for profit, then to exit, leaving her world intact but enriched, leaving their world infiltrated and exploited. The advantaged have never been slow to use others for their own profit. Paris is Burning has grossed nearly four million dollars. The Paris performers had to bring suit before Livingston honored her promise to share in the revenues. Fifty-five thousand dollars was ultimately distributed to the performers.

Material life is a reflection of power. Power is a reflection of material wealth:  housing, health care, safe neighborhoods, consistent and good nutrition, and access to of goods and services. Living in a precarious social position—hungry, homeless, under- and unemployed—the men of Paris fantasized wealth, beauty, and leisure that imitated the materiality of those in power. “I want to be a spoiled white girl,” said one performer, “They don’t need anything.” Another performer wished, “I want to be a woman. White. Rich. Successful. Happy.” (When one is not crushed by oppressive hegemonic structures or hunting down the next meal, “happy” seems like such a simple thing.)  Because the performers weren’t invited to the real ball, they made up their own, an excursion into class and power, followed all too quickly by a return ticket back to their daily reality. “The ballroom tells them ‘I’m somebody.’ But when they go home, they have to tell themselves they’re somebody. And that’s where people get lost.” 

Later ... Part 2: Race, Gender, Death

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[1] Walters , Suzanna Danuta. 1996. “From Here to Queer: Radical Feminism, Postmodernism, and the Lesbian Menace (Or, Why Can't a Woman Be More like a Fag?).” Signs 21(4): 830-869.

[2] Paris is Burning. 2005. DVD. Directed by Livingston, Jennie, Paul Gibson, and Jonathan Oppenheim. 1991; Burbank, CA: Miramax Home Entertainment. 
[3] Perkins, John.  2004.  Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.  New York: Plume Publishers.

Postmodern Polar Bears and Paper Bags

The postmodern turn. Who would have expected to find that discussion buried in the evaluation and analysis of a digital finding aid?  “Postmodern archival theorists point to inadequacies in archival description…call[ing] for the researcher input and assert[ing] that the record is not a static artifact, but rather a ‘mediated and ever-changing construction’ affected by its use.” (Krause & Yakel, 288).  Let’s start with some definitions and then examine how postmodernism might fit with the digital archive.

Finding Aid:  Narrowing the scope of this definition for this brief reaction paper, “finding aid” will mean a search tool for digitized materials made available to (re)searchers online. Whether available online via the rather vague cloud (out there somewhere) or on a locked down on a local area network, finding aids assist in site and archival access, linking, understanding, participation, browsing and searching activities.

Positivism:  The scientific method which values empiricism; an analytic movement basing knowledge on quantitative results.

Postmodern:  Made famous by Jacques Derrida in 1966, “postmodern” has shifted the arts and social sciences. It approaches truth as an objective, qualitative experience, difficult to pin down, suspect if a claim is made that it has indeed been pinned down, and with an emphasis on the meta-narrative, a master (universal) narrative. Which brings us to a phrase for digital archivists: meta-data, “data about data” or “content about content.”

Finding Aid + Positivism + Postmodern = Archival Revolution?

The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections developed a “next generation” finding aid which invites user contribution to the archival content.  Believing that the prejudices of the archivists’ interpretations create a condition of subjugated knowledge, the Polar Bear team has an open and participatory format, which collects macro-appraisals from the population of visitors in the belief that collections of artifacts take on meaning in a societal context.

Aldred S. Buckler in a multiple image taken in Murmansk, Russia.  Buckler served with the U.S. 339th Infantry during the American intervention in North Russia, 1918-1919.  http://polarbears.si.umich.edu/index.pl?node=Aldred%20S.%20Buckler%20photograph%20collection&lastnode_id=356

Beyond Brown Paper, a collaborative effort at Plymouth State University, invited participation from an interested public at their 2008 exhibition around the closing of the pulp mill in Berlin, New Hampshire.  A transcript and interview from the Brown Paper team is available in the New Hampshire public radio archives.  Public participation at the physical and online exhibits places the objects in a social context that would have been lost if only the archivists meta-tags had been attached to the digitized images.

Archived Image and the online public comment: "The Cole Primary School was built in 1895, which replaced the first Cole School that was moved almost across the street. In the late 1920’s it became Berlin’s police station, which before was in the basement of the City Hall. They remained there until going into the present building in the late 1960’s. It was on the corner of Cole Street and Mason Street. It is now a parking lot." http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/item/40854#comment-20181

The physical sciences have been slower to pick up the linguistic turn, and archivists, members of this group, have a particular attachment to the physical object within the laboratory backdrop.  The postmodern archivist distrusts the positivist process as incomplete and tries to incorporate cumulative evidence of the populace in the broader understanding of archival collections and materials.  It is a contemporary tool of the digital archivists skill set.

Week 5 Reaction - Copyright

What’s the difference?

  

Copyright protects expression

Copyright:  Copyright is a form of intellectual property protected under Constitutional law covering both published and unpublished “original works of authorship,” including scholarly, literary, and artistic works including stage and theater, musical scores, soundtracks and songs, poetry, novels, movies, and computer software. The copyright protects the form of authorship but does not protect the actual facts, ideas, or systems being represented. Essentially, copyright covers the way subject matter is expressed. A photo or a soundtrack are also methods of describing a location or an emotion.  The location cannot be copyrighted, nor the emotion, but the expression of each can be. If you understand the operation or usefulness of a safety pin in a uniquely different way, and describe in original language your conceptualization of it, then only your description is protected under copyright.  Copyrights are registered by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress.  

Trademarks protect branding

Trademark:  Trademarks protects words, phrases, designs, symbols, or devices used in trade which identify the source of good and distinguishes them from goods of others. A trademark prevents others from using similar and misleading marks, but does not prevent others from manufacturing or selling the same goods under a distinctly different mark. Controversies about the use of trademarks in the branding of geographic areas (“The Branding of America”) have created civic debates and litigation when popular regional vernacular, part of the public domain, is trademarked by a corporation.  In Montana, the Paws Up luxury resort in the verdant Blackfoot Valley (owned by an out–of–state Las Vegas businessman) tried to trademark the shared, common use, and locally beloved phrase, “Last Best Place.”  A statewide uprising ended with Federally sponsored legislation to prevent that particular trademarking. Trademarks are registered with the Patent and Trademark Office.  

Servicemark:  A servicemark is the same as a trademark except that it identifies, distinguishes, and protects the source of a service rather than an actual and tangible product. The terms "trademark" and "mark" are commonly used to refer to both trademarks and servicemarks.

The safety pin, patented in 1849

Patent:  Patents are issued for inventions and grant property rights to the inventor. Those property rights conferred by the patent are "the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling" the invention in the United States or "importing" the invention into the United States.   Essentially, a patent excludes others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the invention.  Back to that safety pin.  Let’s say that rather than having an artistic epiphany about the use of the safety pin, you actually invent a completely different (and hopefully better) safety pin.  Here is where you protect the actual object from re-creation.  The idea is not new (the safety pin was first patented in 1849).  The scientific description of the safety pin is factual, so not protected. Only the object itself, an original invention, is protected from replication.

How this translates: An example. The “Omeka” name is trademarked, as is the logo, which prevents others from marketing products under similar branding. The Omeka website is copyrighted, and the original form of authorship cannot be copied.  The software application behind Omeka, GNU operating system and web-publishing platform, are both open source, which means the software is freely available and may be redistributed with or without modification.

Week 4 Reaction - Collecting History Online

Cohen and Rosenzweig, in “Collecting History Online,” use the example of the ancient Greek historian, Herodotus as a model for how one might engage the project of collecting historical accounts, data, and artifacts.  Basically, collect everything.

Go Digital, Get Current.  Using modern computing and communications technologies, the digital historian can leverage diverse opportunities to reach out to many different publics and to maximize one-way collection and two-way participation.  “The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has supported dozens of online collecting projects on science and technology,” Dan Cohen states in a 2005 CRM journal publication made available on his web site, “in the belief that the history of these subjects is growing much faster than our ability to gather it through more conventional means.”  (Cohen does not explain what is meant by this, so the reader is left to gather a posse of friendly digital historians for a round of exploratory discussion.)  As an example, National Public Radio offers not only traditional radio news and entertainment, but also a broad range of oral history, interviews, and mash-media content through a partnership with Hearing Voices and Story Corps, delivered to consumers in audio, written, podcast, social media, and email formats.  Story Corps has an easy-to-reach web page on recording your own story, including a downloadable Do-It-Yourself Guide.

Create Alliances and Diversify the Delivery.  Parallel to Cohen’s claim of historical growth, technology is growing faster than our ability to consume and learn it. We all have information and skill gaps, and have to specialize around and into the complexities of the many abundant tools available. There will never be enough time to learn everything we need to learn.  Digital historians must collaboratively combine their specialties—putting pieces together to create the whole—and undertake communal learning philosophies.  Creating alliances with contributors, in addition to professionals, means appropriate and targeted marketing, seizing and maintaining momentum once established, building a trust environment that encourages visitors, and providing tools that collect reliable information from participants.  Contributors, like professionals, have multiple online skills and strengths.  Having a clear definition and understanding of the data to be collected will help define and manage the decisions around how to collect data.  Knowing the target audience and having sensitivity to their expected skills will also contribute to successful tools selection and marketing approaches. 

Be Aware the Temporality.  Data, software tools, and hardware have an amazingly brief lifespan.  This may seem obvious, but 1) follow best practices, 2) document, 3) if possible, use non-proprietary storage formats, and 4) backup.

Flickr Commons.  Backed by an impressive group of participating institutions, including NASA, Cornell University Library, Smithsonian Institution, and many more national and international organizations, the Flickr Commons launched in 2008 in partnership with The Library of Congress.

The Commons has two main objectives:

1. To increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and
2. To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge. (Then watch what happens when they do!)

Paul Strand, Spokane Baseball

The idea is simple: “The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.”  An easy to find and easy to use search box provides near instant return of images with a supporting list of contributors.  A search for “Spokane” returned 21 historic pictures from the U.S. National Archives, The Library of Congress, and the US Digital Collections.  Click on the contributor link and only those images that belong to the contributing institution are displayed.  Copyright information is provided with the picture specifically and more generally at the Commons Usage site.

Picasa Slideshow and Map

Twenty pictures: one slide show, one map.

View 20 Pictures in a larger map

Week 3 Reaction - Historical Information Online

Reaction-Part 1:  Cohen & Rosenzweig
 

Traditional teaching and learning methods and complementary online opportunities are approaching a point of permanent intersection as their two trajectories approach in an inevitable collision.  Technology is so accessible, entrenched in society*, that it creates challenges and opportunities for traditional pedagogies.  Educators and researchers have new models of incorporating technology tools into their teaching, learning, and research.  Traditional scholarship and classroom opportunities are enhanced by new sources of streaming audio and video, social media, databases with smart search functionalities, and digitized records, photographs, and documents.

Cohen and Rosenzweig, in their chapter on “Designing for the History Web,” encourage historical web site developers to create sites that “enable and inspire [the visitor] to think about and grasp the past,” and to avoid design schemas that “relegate thinking to a secondary status.”  They optimistically assert that “good [online] writing produces willing readers.”  This sounds a little bit like the 1989 movie Field of Dreams and sloga, “If you build it, he will come.”  Critical and engaged reading is not as simple as making a movie or writing well.  Only with careful attention to new relationships and opportunities created by the collision of the traditional learning and technologies, will pedagogy and content be combined to create judicious and analytic online learning.  One inspired tool engaging this early collaboration of scholarship and technology is the Kindle handheld reader, bridging the traditional hard copy book and online ebooks.

Digital historians, among other academics using online content delivery, necessarily need to be attentive to initiatives in the K-through-HigherEd cohort, and actively pursue holistic learning that imparts critical thinking and careful reading whether on paper or online.

*  Accessibility and entrenchment in this case includes primarily the One-Thirds world populations, and within this group, to that subpopulation with contemporary in-home technologies or ready, open, and affordable access to up-to-date technology resources.

Reaction-Part 2:  The Proceedings of the Old Bailey

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey website is a significant effort to organize hundreds of years of court documents into useable online data, a painstaking attempt to provide access and robust searching of these proceedings. The Old Bailey is a “fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.”  A search for “Irish" and "Priest” yielded one Daniel Macarty (also spelled “Macarte,” “Maccharty,” and “Mackarty) who was put to death in 1680 for being a practicing Catholic Priest, against the English Statute of 27 Eliz, a capital religious offense.  Macarty was an Irishman in England, a Papist in a Protestant state, and put to death for high treason as a “Popish Priest or Jesuit.”  He was one of 24 condemned to die, “14 burn'd in the hand, one to stand in the Pillory, three to be transported, and three to be whipt.”  (I cannot reconcile the difference between the 24 condemned and the accounting of only 21 punishments.)

Image of the original document of Danial Macarty's court proceedings.

There are so many questions to ask about Macarty and those condemned with him, but so little information is actually available. How do we turn limited information from transcribed documents into a meaningful and coherent project?  How do we successfully use contemporary computer applications and tools to explore and learn the archeology of words, how language was used, the relations between the dominate power group and dominated, and what may have been missed, lost, or mistranslated? How are complex human variables engaged?

The XML-model of content analysis used by the Old Bailey cannot, on its own, adequately take into account the nuances of relationships between different social hierarchies—gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, age, religion, class, etc.—and the multiplicity of intersections as they truly existed under old English law.  Constructing these intricacies can only be performed by a researcher who respects that the Old Bailey and similar sites are limited tools.  It is the researcher's job to engage in the valuable exercise of interrogating and analyzing the many different voices and lives sparingly represented in the digitized court documents.