Models

This past week, a very interesting discussion has been emerging around the role of models, in the course of work on a new programme of the KNAW on computational humanities. The representational role of models tends to be at the forefront of people’s minds in this discussion. This means that models are seen as representations of the world. In this line of thinking, the power of models is in simplifying or emphasizing certain elements. In being less complex than reality, models enable specific dynamics to be explored. And, in this view of models, they can be evaluated as good or bad representations, depending on their proper relationship to the world.

Models, however, like any other tool, also have a performative function. This means that in building and using them, they shape our understanding of the world and of the questions we pose using models.

In trying to find good ways to bring forward this aspect of models, I have been thinking about the work collected by de Chadarevian and Hopwood and Natasha Myers’ Molecular Embodiments. But mostly I was thinking about David Gooding’s work on Faraday’s drawings, on his visual reasoning, and subsequent work on the role of visual models in scientific discovery. The reasons for drawing on this work are multiple. David’s work can be considered a kind of historical ethnography, which is a very difficult kind of work to do, and one that is especially well done in David’s work on Faraday.  David’s cases are also ‘hard’—because of the areas he looks at, and because of his demonstrations of just how essential the visual was in taking particular steps in the development of knowledge. And finally, David’s orientation to cognitive issues and use of a cognitive vocabulary will go down well with the crowd I’m hoping to engage.

While David’s work remains for me to share with others, I have just heard the sad news of his death.

David was designated as mentor for me, as a new staff member at the Science Studies Center at the University of Bath in 1999. These were tumultuous times for us both (for David: new MSc programme, new love and shortly after new wife, daughters leaving home for uni, diagnosis of a very serious illness…. for me: first job, finishing my PhD, having a baby, figuring out life in the UK with my new husband…). David was a consistently supportive presence throughout all of this, though, not surprisingly, most of our intellectual exchanges took place in writing, and our meetings focused on putting out various fires, admin- or student-related.

More recently, as life seemed to quiet down a bit and as our research interests were again converging, I was looking forward to further working with David, and invited him to join the advisory board for this project.  In this too, David was very supportive.

He was an insightful scholar and a generous and thoughtful man. Besides his work, the memory of the kind gaze he invariably turned on the world also remains with me.

A case of network realism

This post contains spoilers–please stop reading if you think you want to try this application (and I think you should!)

Go to this site (http://www.tackfilm.se/) and upload a picture of yourself. Then come back and read further!

I encountered this site via Hanna Wyrman’s updates on Facebook on Friday. She kindly informed me that this was an ad to encourage Swedish residents to pay for their license and support public television (I’m assuming that it is the same system as the UK/BBC).

Here’s what happens: after uploading a photo (I think the point is to upload your own, playing the vanity card here), a film starts. Its esthetic is that of a highly edited news report, with high production values. The stage is set for a press conference, interspered with multiple shots of people getting together around various media, tuning in to the news in different ways. An identity is going to be revealed, and, quite predictably, the main speaker at the press conference pulls out a photo out of an enveloppe and, voila, there is your picture! YOU are this mystery person.

But then the fun starts, as the ‘reporting’ continutes. And the ‘hero’ is celebrated in the range of settings foreshadowed in the first part of the film. And, the fun part, the photo continues to travel and shows up across a wide variety of settings, from public to intimate, from institutional to counter-cultural, from commercial to private. In the process, it’s hard not to get at least a bit caught up in the iconization of the image that is going on.

Of course, this is a highly artificial pastiche of how images circulate and are valued. But this little interactive media production does capture something that I think is crucial to contemporary visual culture: the effect of the combination of circulation and reinscription of images in different settings, and a combination of digital and optical approaches to photography, which amounts to ‘network realism’.

Constructing the Flickr site (2)

A few days ago, I wrote about some of the conceptual aspects of creating our fields. In today’s post, I reflect on the nitty-gritty of identifying what is relevant, and on the potential conservatism of my approach so far.

Of the four case studies in Network Realism, three are already underway. Sarah de Rijcke has been doing fieldwork on the practices around digital images of the collection of the Tropenmuseum, and has just started fieldwork on the practices around the documentation of artwork at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Meanwhile, I’ve been developing fieldwork on the use of Flickr by researchers and curators who study street art. One of the important dimensions of the Flickr case is a relation to ‘research’ or academic work. This is partly to link up the project to other work at the VKS (which focuses on academic knowledge production). But the use of a resource such as Flickr by academics is also interesting in its own right, since it was not developed to support research: How does Flickr get inserted into academic work? How do academics present themselves and their work on this platform?

In developing fieldwork, I’ve tried a number of approaches. Most successful so far has been to identify researchers who work on street art and make use of photography. I’ve found these researchers from websites such as artcrimes, which has a section with l(inks to) publications and from searching journals, such as Photographies. From these, I have identified scholars doing relevant work. I’ve contacted them by email, and traced their activities on the web and in publications–and of course on Flickr. I’m also using citation patterns to identify, in a snowball way, other relevant academics. (For example, following Schacter’s publication ‘An Ethnography of Iconoclash’, in the Journal of Material Culture.)

In the coming weeks, I’ll be interviewing these scholars about their work practices. (When Sarah and I travel to London later this week, we will take part in CHArt’s annual conferece (Sarah’s abstract is here) and meet up with colleagues and informants (Edgar Gomez, Rafael Schacter, and maybe Lane DeNicola?).)

These past few weeks, as I have been constituting the field, I keep coming back to the question: what would it mean for Flickr to be used for research? At this point, I can’t look at a photostream, and say, yes, this is produced by a researcher, or this collection is linked to a piece of research, or look at the membership of a group and say, yes, this one has a high percentage of scholars and curators. And I can’t say either whether these would be meaningful questions. As I learn about what these scholars do and how they use Flickr (or not!), academic or research-oriented activities on Flickr will become increasingly visible to me.

This uncertainty about what practices would look like underlies the motivation for following this ‘successful’ strategy of taking scholars and publications as starting points. While starting from traditional output such as publications introduces a conservative bias in the way I’m constituting the field, I’m well-aware of this and will be interrogating the effects of this starting point as fieldwork develops, and in the course of the analysis.

Data Riches and Visualization

Last week, I was in Washington, D.C. to present our work at the annual conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science. Here is a link to our abstract. The session we were in was organized by Catelijne Koopmans, National University of Singapore, under the title “Data Riches: The Practices and Politics of Exploiting Digital Data Sets’. There were lovely papers by Simon N. Williams, Cardiff University (on the democratic use of digital data in electronic public engagement), Catelijne herself (on how in practices of data handling notions of ‘riches’ are maintained, illustrated via the case of visual analytics), Corinna Bath, Humboldt University Berlin (on gendered orders of knowledge in the semantic web), and Martin Hand & Ashley Scarlett, Queens University (on epistemic and ethical performativity of images in web-based photo-sharing practices). One of the session participants, Denisa Kera, wasn’t able to attend the conference, so unfortunately we had to do without her presentation on data realism of visualizations and application mashups.

Lane DeNicola was kind enough to act as session discussant. Lane works as a lecturer at a newly developed program in digital anthropology at UCL. He did a great job of tying some of the themes together that surfaced in our respective presentations. For our Network Realism project, the digitization processes Lane mentioned as a distinct point of intersection was indeed interesting. He gave the example of the British museum, where a high resolution scanner is used to make 3d visualizations of parts of the collection. These are not only used in the museum, but also for digital repatriation, where the vizualizations are offered for use by indigeneous people. As Lane argued, the process also raises the question of what exactly is left in the artifact itself that the BM wants to hold on to. Lane also raised the issue of the interface, what it does to data when it is presented in visual form, and how that relates to the interpretative power of the human. In addition, he noted that the terminology of data mining presupposes the ‘riches’ we refer to in our session title, while obscuring the interpretative process, and who controls production.

After the session, some of us talked further on how to pursue ethnographic work via networked interactions with our informants, and we discussed possible ways to stay in touch on the topic. There is of course much more to discuss and many more avenues to explore, as there were indeed interesting intersections between several of the presentations. This post is meant as a step in that direction, and as an invitation to all readers to share their thoughts with us.

Constructing the Flickr site (1)

The project Network Realism embraces four different sites. The sites contrast in the extent to which, at first sight, they are associated with easily discernable institutions. The physical presence of the Tropenmuseum and of the Rijksakademie lend a certain tangibility to those sites, making them seem more amenable to fieldwork. The buildings, the spaces these institutions occupy are an important ressources in constructing the site.  In other words, there is an obviousness (vanzelfsprekendheid) of the buildings that seems to extend to the ’site’… and that seem to raise questions about the ‘where’ or ‘how ‘of the Flickr- and Funda-associated sites.

Yet, across the cases, we do our best to systematically formulate our sites as being “the practices associated with the web-based databases of Rijksakademie, Tropenmuseum, Flickr and Funda.” Though we are probably guilty of using ‘Tropenmuseum’ or ‘Funda’ as shorthands for what is quite a mouthful!

The point is that all these sites require constitution, and this involves:

• having theoretical leanings that make certain starting points seem desirable or obvious
• having practical constraints (whether physical, based on history with certain people, timing, etc) that make it more feasible to chose certain points of entry
• recognizing that affinities that can be both intellectual and affective, which makes us more likely to engage with certain activities

In terms of these, there isn’t really a difference between sites. The import of physical space for constituting sites, however, derives from a long tradition of fieldwork.  This is why the concept of co-presence is so useful, because it helps to bypass the primacy of location as a way of constituting sites.

Visual Studies for Modelers

In the framework of the conference Modeling Science, I presented a paper entitled ‘The view from nowhere: digital visualizations of science and the God-trick’. The audience was mainly made up of model and simulation builders, working from a very data-driven tradition. Many of them had a physics background, and very little affinity with social theory or cultural analysis. A main part of my presentation was a visual argument, in which I contrasted Powers of Ten and Zoom, and tried to make visible the difference in epistemologies of these two zooms. I’m not sure I was able to convince the entire room to embrace situated knowledge, but they did laugh in the right places, which is an indication that we connected. And I think the talk contributed to creating that interface between modeling and science studies that has been developing over the past few years, thanks to Andrea Scharnhorst’s work, and to activities at the VKS.

Here is the abstract of my talk:

This contribution is an invitation to consider models and simulations as forms of visual knowing. This approach enables the analysis of two tendencies in many visualisations of science: the ‘view from nowhere’ and the seamless zoom. The epistemological and political implications of these tendencies will be teased out in a visual argument that contrasts two versions of a ‘zoom’ in the world (the film Powers of Ten and the book Zoom). The value of situatedness (i.e. acknowledging points of view, mediation or origin) in order to produce responsible representations of science will be explained. Conceptually, the talk will draw on the work of Donna Haraway, Svetlana Alpers, and Bolter & Grusin among others. Forms of visual knowing are further explored in a number of projects of the Virtual Knowledge Studio (Knowledge Space Lab, ‘Can you see what I know?’ and Network Realism).

Museums and measuring performance, part I

Last week, Trilce Navarrete and I attended a debate at the Reinwardt Academy of cultural heritage in Amsterdam on performance indicators and changing roles of museums in the present “information society.” The debate was part of a monthly series called Erfgoedarena (Heritage Arena), co-organised by the Reinwardt Academy and the Netherlands Institute for Heritage (NIH). In this first part of the post, I’ll provide a brief overview of the debate. In part II, I’ll link the debate to two books on the politics of policy making, and will raise some points for discussion.

The NIH asked freelance consultant Natasja Wehman last year to explore the particular shapes the changing roles of museums might take.  Her report can be found here (in Dutch). Wehman signalled 4 possible scenarios, or roles:

1. the museum as networker: the institute is up-to-speed about things happening around the museum, functions as a conduit, facilitates existing (knowledge) networks. This can take different shapes, depending on the museum

2. the museum as a laboratory: also comes in different guises, f.i. as a space for contemporary (new media) artists to experiment, or art-science lab, or cooperation with creative industry

3. the validator: museum as knowledge and information expert, but with a 21st century twist: the museum as cultural producer instead of reproducer

4. the innovator: combination of the three scenarios above. According to Wehman, this is the ideal museum of the future. ‘Possession’, either the possession of a collection and/or of knowledge, she argues,  is now usually put first. But museums are losing their monopoly on these ‘possessions’. They need to innovate, or transform. The representatives she interviewed mentioned a number of relevant preconditions for that transformation: a. work together, b. create opportunities for research & development, c. create time, d. be aware of relevance for society at large. Wehman adds that museums need to create new ways to engage with audiences, and need to realize that the meaning and relevance of a museum is not static but in flux.  (post continues in part two)

Museums and measuring performance, part II

This brings us back to  last week’s debate. There were 3 discussants: Gitta Luiten, director of the Mondriaan Foundation (supports projects in the visual arts, design, and cultural heritage); Arnoud Odding, head of the National Glass Museum; and Marc Jacobs, senior advisor Culture and Cultural History for one of the Dutch provinces. Their job was to set the stage for a discussion with the audience, consisting of representatives of heritage institutes, researchers, Reinwardt Academy students and a strikingly small number of new media people. While all discussants agreed that museums needed to innovate, and traditional performance indicators did not suffice, they differed in their analysis of the situation, and in the kinds of alternatives they brought forth. Luiten and a small number of other people in the audience stressed that museums could be more flexible in the way they account for past performance – they tend to come up with numbers (of visitors, acquisitions, etc.) themselves, while for instance the Mondriaan Foundation would be open to other formats. If it fits a particular project, Luiten argued, why not send in a video instead? Marc Jacobs took a pragmatic position. He argued that museums would do well to think very thoroughly about their audiences, and just simply focus on what delivers. This is where he diverged from Arnoud Odding’s position. Oddding was invited because his museum is successful in engaging new audiences, in experimenting, and in making smart use of new media. Odding’s position was clear: Don’t go looking out for a particular audience, don’t focus on numbers, just focus on what you as a museum think is exciting and stimulating. In a network society, museums can benefit greatly from the many communities of interested people already out there. Maybe that means that your number of visitors to the museum declines, but that’s too narrow a focus anyway, he argued. He himself experienced that, indirectly, smart new media use created new and unexpected partnerships with craftsmen and companies. This is perhaps hard to capture in numbers, but certainly no less relevant.

The debate afterward again highlighted that while museums realize the need for change, they also feel that innovation conflicts with the way their performance is now usually measured by for instance governmental grant providers, etc. These parties, they argue, keep asking for traditional performance indicators like amount of visitors, number of times mentioned in the press, number of exhibitions or publications, or number of website visitors.

While it is interesting to bring to mind what Gitta Luiten said about the Mondriaan Foundation being open to, even challenging institutions to come up with, alternative indicators of past performance, the centrality of the relationship between performance and numbers was striking. Coming from the field of science studies (where researchers analyze ’science in action’, to borrow a phrase from Latour), it struck me how much the debate resonated with similar discussions in the sciences. There, too, quantification is the ‘preferred’ way to measure performance or ‘output’. I think it is worth translating  some of the work done in sciences studies to the current debate in the cultural heritage field. The work of historian of science Ted Porter was the first that came to my mind. In his book Trust in Numbers, Porter argued that using numbers to judge and measure quality is a way to manage trust between parties that are at a distance. Numbers travel over larger distances (not only geographically, but also more ‘psychologically’) and are today seen as more ‘objective’ than other ways to build trust, based on more informal rules and agreements.

A related issue: administrators themselves usually have to justify their own work and their decisions in impersonal terms. When decisions about distribution of funding etc. are made, they try to avoid arbitrariness by using instrumental, standardized tools. In Policy Paradox, Deborah Stone tackles this rationalist approach by laying bare the complexity of policy making. She shows that policy making is a “constant struggle over the criteria for classification, the boundaries of categories, and the definition of ideals that guide the way people behave” (Stone, p. 11).  Stone contends that there are multiple ways to define a problem, present relevant issues, creating relevant categories, leaving things out. This is not, and can never be, a neutral process. Policy making is done by parties with a vested interest in presenting the problem in a certain light.

When I translate the above to the topic of the debate on performance indicators and changing roles of museums, I think that further interaction between institutions and funding agencies would benefit from explicitating the following points:

• What particular policy is supported by this portrayal of information via numbers?

• Which categories are constructed behind the numbers, and what are the consequences? A simple and seemingly innocent example: counting the annual number of visitors implies that you define what you consider as a ‘visitor’ first. These decisions are not neutral, and shape all kinds of work processes in and outside of museums (hiring staff or technologies to register these numbers, defining what a visit is, how that changes when a museum ‘goes virtual’ etc).

• What shape do the trade-offs take between the goals of different parties?

• If this is clear, what would be workable alternatives to deal with the inherent ambiguity in these particular decision making processes?

Postdoc fellowship at the VKS

The topic/discipline of the fellowship is open! If anyone is interested in applying to do work related to the topics of Network Realism, do get in touch.

Applications are invited for three-month fellowships within the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences (VKS) for Spring 2010. The fellowship is designed for junior scholars who have recently received their PhDs in order to provide the following:

• experience of working within an interdisciplinary research group
• an opportunity to prepare material for publication
• the chance to develop new research ideas

Deadline for applications is 15 November 2009. Please find more information on the VKS website.

After Visual Methods

Panel

Originally uploaded by Mediacciones Group

Looking back on the conference, we are both really pleased with the keynotes and papers we heard, the many new contacts we made, and with the exposure to the many versions of ‘visual methods’ that the conference afforded. Notably, much work involved ‘giving voice’ strategies (where researchers provide cameras to participants, and use the resulting images to empower or document). During our last visit to Leeds, when we visited an ethnography conference in March, we had heard an impressive presentation of research using similar approaches by Emanuela de Cecco.

We did find that our research was somewhat unusual at this conference in its combination of the visual as both method and object.  Interestingly, other work that focused on visual culture (i.e. Cox and Gomez Cruz) also addressed digital forms. Also came back thinking that one of the issues we need to pursue is how this category of ‘the visual’ is operating in our research.

What is the effect of this distinction between the visual as method and object? What could be gained by bringing them closer? One argument, which underlies our paper, is that more visual methods are likely to yield to better ethnographic work on visual culture. Our own paper from the conference,  on how to study a networked image, is now available here.

And in several research projects we heard about, it also seemed like more awareness of the visual ecology in which research was being done would have meant better use of digital methods and better insights. (What does it mean to give kids disposable cameras for a research project when they are in possession of camphones in their daily lives…) In other words, it would be valuable to consider the place of ‘researcher produced’ or ‘participant generated’ images  in relation to the visual culture of the research setting.