Too many topics, too little time

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The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture(CDDC) is announcing an expanded call for proposal for our Research E-ditions, Hosting Services, and our new Digital Originals publishing series.

CDDC in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University is accepting new manuscripts for digital modes of publication in its Research E-ditions series. The CDDC ( http://www.cddc.vt.edu ) has been in operation for nearly two years, and it publishes hypertext journals, hosts digital research archives, and cooperates with many international cyberculture organizations.

As an entirely digital point-of-publication, the CDDC will review and then produce professional academic research works–either single-authored or edited collections–in a digital format. Proposals could take the form of an “e-book” that simply makes available a scholarly monograph in online format, or a collection of academic papers organized around a central theme, or a fully hypertextual experiment with new forms of digital discourse. Arrangements can be made for “print on demand” (POD) paper versions of these works, but the main focus of the CDDC is to explore the new communicative potentials of hypertext, hypermedia, and web-centered publication. The review processes will be as extensive and rigorous as those experienced in print academic communication, but it too will be conducted in a fully on-line format.

Research E-ditions

All topics are potentially of interest in the Research E-ditions series, however, we are particularly interested in manuscripts, digital archives, and hypertexts from the humanities and social sciences relating to the areas of cyberculture, social theory, literary studies, digital art, and cultural studies. In addition, the CDDC is committed to proposals from applied and natural sciences that relate directly to the fields of bioinformatics, energy and environmental studies, and information technology and communications.

Hosting@CDDC

All topics and projects of academic interest that require hosting are solicited for the Hosting@CDDC project. We host and mirror several major projects and have space for many more. We host projects serving a broad set of communities. We provide basic facilities of web hosting and listserv hosting. Any requirements beyond basic hosting should be outlined in the proposal. Hosting is frequently used in conjuction with various forms of community software, e-journal software, or related software to support artistic, academic, and related content.

Digital Originals

Digital Originals is open access publishing for book-like digital projects. We are soliciting submissions from people who have materials that originate in the digital arena, and want them to be released either under a Creative Commons license or under an Open Content License. The original documents will be peer-reviewed, edited, and published with an ISBN assigned and made freely downloadable on the CDDC Website.

Proposals:

Initial proposals should take the form of a 1 page description of the project, including a description of the services requested, a description of the project’s audience, and provide current examples of the work (URLS) that is to be hosted or published. All proposals will be peer reviewed with at least two reviewers and further information may be requested. The review process is as rigorous as any academic publisher.

Proposals should be sent to CDDC@vt.edu

When information explodes, systems fail. In our current age, the ability to govern is predicated on the control and distribution of information. This paper confronts the inability to do that, it examines the techniques and systems of informational governance, notes some their defects, demonstrates the incapacities and draws the conclusion parallel to Virilio’s Information Bomb, we are due for a failure.

Informational power is a power of control, control of distribution, control of origination. It is a power of establishing borders, territories, and limiting access. It is predicated on assumptions of normality, and when the normal becomes too fast, too informationally productive, and generates enormous surpluses of capacity, like a bomb, the excessive power; the excessive information explodes. It breaks the boundaries, overwhelms the territory, and forces humans to develop new tactics for management, for governance. I argue that this is the state we are in, a state of excess, of being overwhelmed by information and power, because we have built an informational infrastructure based on speed and power.

There is no end in sight for the progressive development of this infrastructure. With terabit/sec speeds already in place, it is likely already beyond the limits of real human understanding, and we are beginning to see how it manifests itself as a tool of transformation or weapon of destruction of the institutions built on fordist and post-fordist understandings of information, such as music, movies, banking, which have strong informational ties, but this is just the start of a more pervasive creative destruction.

Faced with these issues and their immanent explosion, I look at the proposals for governance, for creating a sustainable political economy that governments are using around the world, such as defining information as artifacts and allowing patents, redefining copyrights, and developing international trade regimes surrounding information. I contrast the governmental systems with the growing cultural awareness of the issue and introduce the question: what if governments fail? how does society reterritorialize information, and what cultural toolkits seem to be arising in the face of speed and excess, such as open source, open content, and related movements that arise out of and restructure the excess into new cultural systems.

This panel is located at the interface between social studies of science and technology and the emerging area of ’software studies.’ Code, from binary machine language to its readable form, takes on numerous powers in the information society. It structures, orders, and governs relationships between humans and amongst technologies, allowing certain actions while preventing others. While information technology and software development have been the focus of intensive study in STS work over the last few decades, the area of software studies has emerged in response to a proliferation of code or software-related cultural and political processes. These include wide-ranging changes in the character of media and communications, the mobilities of code across legal, institutional, economic, national and infrastructural boundaries, the proliferation of discourses of code in many different domains, and the way in which code has become the tool of a comprehensively transnational knowledge class identified in part by the relationship to code in everyday life.

The panel will coalesce around questions concerning the modes of change associated with software, computer code in various senses, and its adjacent practices. It conceptualises code as a hybrid, mobile construction of a technical-culture industry. Code is understood as a political and empowered social construction, which is not purely focused on the enablement of a singular group or social movement, but is systematically distributed across networks spanning nationalities and cultures. The increased visibility of code as cultural-technical entity, and as an object of public attention will be one focus. In the context of massive proliferations of unwanted or ‘junk’ code (viruses, operating systems, ‘bloatware’), the legal struggles over the difference between code as speech and code as technology will be a second focus. Finally, the panel will explore questions concerning the increased visibility of software or code (understood in a range of different ways) as cultural, political, economic and technical entities. Among questions to be addressed by the panel: how have code, programming, ‘cutting code’, hacking, scripting, etc. moved from technical practices carried out in ‘centres of calculation’ to generalised, popularised and politicised techniques? Do code objects challenge existing ontologies of technology and politics? How can we understand the mobility of code and coding practices without reducing them to standard accounts of ‘information society’?

This paper presents the theory that software code and the practice of coding is a system of communication above and beyond the code itself. It posits that the language and practices of coding are a method that allows knowledge and culture to move from one cultural milieu to another, and creates through that movement, a transnational coding culture that is built upon the shared experiences and understandings that surround coding practices. By analyzing the modes of cultural transmission available to a particular group of programmers that use the internet extensively, I show that these modes tend to discipline and educate, and slowly indoctrinate newer members into the community of knowledge that embodies this transnational class. This power of code to bridge and then hybridize cultures is significant in that it is highly formalized and rigorous, and thus provides a stable platform for coding expertise to transition, however, as we will see coding expertise is not all that becomes hybridized.

In this paper, I argue that Information Schools are on the cusp of a very difficult transition. The ubiquity of information is pervading previously disciplinary endeavors. Not only is computing found in all disciplines, both in general use, but also in fields such as Humanities computing, Social Science computing/E-Social Science, Biological systems computing, but so is information and information technology, with parallel fields. Those fields are traditionally interdisciplinary in nature, in which people use techniques, methods, and knowledges from different fields and use them to produce new knowledge. A transdisciplinary field is different, it’s object of study cannot be captured by interdisciplinary techniques, It requires the development of new foundations, such as those found in informational concepts and models. Transdisciplinary fields are ones in which the globality of the object cannot be fully understood from any single disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspective. The conceptual and thus linguistic tools for understanding

The transdisciplinary opportunities of information science and technology were noted before, (Lyotard). They were a popular in certain optimistic and utopian discourse from the 1970’s and 1980’s, until the popularization and formalization of commodity computing and specialized tools transformed many viewpoints away. The discourse of transdisciplinary informatics still exists in the background of many discussions. As informatics has pervaded other disciplines with the growing number of hobbyists and hackers, a new set of institutional transformations is arising. This institutional transformation could have significant effects on information schools, either opening up a world of opportunity or isolate them

Internet Research is research that investigates the way individuals, communities, and nations, use computer network technologies and the interconnections those technologies provide in their everyday lives as parents, researchers, workers, entertainers, institutions, governments or whatever they were, are or are becoming. It is an expansive field for research and has become accepted Since its first Internet Research conference in 2000, the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) has produced a solid body of research, exemplified in its Research Annual and numerous publications.This presentation will provide an overview of several trends and methods within the field of internet research as exemplified by the AoIR’s first five conferences, and extrapolates some future directions for research based on those trends and methods. Some of the specific trends that will be discussed are: the internationalization of collaborative internet research, the development of an understanding of community norms and self-governance of internet-based organizations, and the needs for ethical internet based research. Some of the methods that will be introduced will be qualitative research, ethnographic research, community and/or network modeling, and mixed methodology internet research. These trends and methods in internet research point toward a future in which ethical, transdisciplinary research, pursued across national boundaries will become the core of the major projects for internet research.

Founded in Bataille’s theory of the general economy as descriptive of a general theory of organizations, this paper relates Bataille’s conceptions of knowledge and non-knowledge to his conception of evil in order to reconstruct the importance of excess to the production of subjectivities, both good and evil, in organizations. In reading contemporary organizational thought through the body of Bataille’s works, I find that Bataille provides us with several innovative ways of understanding the organization as an aspect of society. In On Nietzsche, Bataille locates evil as symbolized through the negation of Christ, a component of good, and a necessary component to human life in the forms of egotism and freedom. These constructions of evil compliment the ecological model of production found in the Accursed Share in that evil functions as part of the Western model of subjectivity, and thus is fixed by both the human and non-human elements into its representations of knowledge and non-knowledge. The idea that the production of excess in organizations, not just excess commodity, but also excess subjectivity is the idea that unites the general economy to the production of evil because evil arises both from the overproduction of symbols and the inadequate faculties of interpretation to confront the interpretations. of those symbols. This exasperation of the organization’s capacity to interpret the world in which they exist produces non-knowledge, and opens up the space for the production of evil. Thus the logic of my argument reduces to:

Organizations produce subjectivities, commodities, knowledges, and non-knowledges as parts of symbolic systems.

In a general commodity, production of subjectivities is the production of knowledges and non-knowledges in excess.

The overproduction of symbols in the system combined with a differential production of subjectivities creates a critical space for non-knowledge, or the unknowable to exist.

As parts non-knowledge become othered and alienated they enter the realm of the individual’s ego or freedom.

When individuals act upon those non-knowledges in organizations, they become the outsider, or the evil from within the organization.

Thus the overproduction or excess production of symbolic systems creates evil.

In conclusion, this Bataille-based thesis is comparable to Baudrillard’s argument about the origin of evil in society, as found in the Transparency of Evil. Thus, we can see the need to build more deeply into the realm of semiology in order to understand the functioning of evil in organizations.

Towards Archiving a Generative Culture: the Australian Creative Resources Online project. This paper explores the possibilities of moving beyond the archiving of digital objects as fixed and unchanging reference points for culture and demonstrates that we can archive those cultural objects but we must also archive the mutations that cultural objects go through as they become new objects over time. Digitization of cultural objects creates a new source of mutability and a new location to generate cultural meanings through the combination, reinvention and serialized appropriation of cultural objects in their ever changing digital milieu. An object then is really fixed in place when it is archived, but it is a living document both of the digital and cultural world. It is not enough then, to just create the ‘archival copy’ with its manifold copies of the digital object, because people will manipulate it, will inscribe it with new meanings, with those meanings’ new points of negotiation, and new interpretations. These new meanings and the changes that occur to the objects over time need to be traced in order for the original meaning to be preserved in relation to the newer meanings. Without the documentation of change, the objects that we digitally archive lose meanings, much like when you move a document from its original context in a paper archive and place it in another context. Without documenting the change in the paper document, you change the meanings both of it, and those knowledges that stand in relation to it. In this paper, I am showing the beta copy of a database engine that is made to track and follow those changes.

In the ACRO project, we archiving the digital detritus of film, photographic, and musical production with an eye to their reuse. The purpose is to provide the common open foundation for future high quality production of cultural objects. We are forced to confront the problem of both derivative, remixed, and novel uses of digital objects. Objects that in fact are in a constant state of multiple use, and thus their meanings are changing in relation to each other. In order to resolve this, we are turning to socially constructed ontologies in order to both track changes over time, so authors can tell us that their contribution is a derivative of another contribution, but also to tag or label these new contributions more thoroughly with their own interpretation. Allowing users to both tag, to discuss and to maintain a glossary of meanings related to their discussion and tagging, allows the ACRO beta to maintain and track the mutations that digital media from within the system. By using microformat data in relation to user constructed data, we hope to operate in parallel relation to the growing standards in the cultural object arena, mapping the microformat and user constructed data into standards compliant metadata.

In What is Democracy, Alain Touraine presents a theory of the constitutive necessities for a capitalist democracy. This paper argues that Open Source as a property system based in licensing parallels and extends the Touraine’s theory and in that matter enables more fully the theory of equality found there, but it moves the property relationships from those prominent in monopoly capitalism to those prominent in late capitalism. Open source goes beyond the models of equality of nature, or equality of opportunity that constitutes democratic culture and introduces several forms of equality of access, such as an equality of learning, an equality of innovation or creativity. These modes of equality are also foundational to the development of the democratic state. Where the development of proprietary systems, and their institutional technics based in absolutist models of property are perpetuating in monopoly capitalism and centralizing wealth thus promoting economic inequality, they do not provide for the equality of innovation which perpetuates the growth of equality in the state. Touraine promotes education as a primary tool to move toward an equality of access to capital, but in the information age, open source combined with cheap access to computers becomes access and control of the means of production. This moves the possibility of the unification of the conceptualization of the productive act and the democratic act in a very profound way. In this paper, I describe the open source system of property relations as an entryway into the unification of the constitutive requirements of production in the information age with the the constitutive elements of democracy in any age.