Too many topics, too little time

This is fundamentally a paper about the movement of techno-socialobjects which we call digital archives.  It is about the effects of those movements considered transversally.    The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture hosts several archives that are changing, becoming, and revising the relations between themselves, their users, and other communities. The archives that we host are to some people  unknown, but to others world reknowned. They include the Feminist  Theory Online archive http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/, the Situationists International Online Archive http://www.cddc.vt.edu/SIOnline/ , the April16archive http://april16archive.org/, a mirror of The  Marxist Archive http://www.marxists.org/, and a mirror of the the  Bureau of Public Secrets. Those are just the more major archives   These archives are in part alive and in part dead, some are constantly updated and upgraded by their communities, others have not been  updated for ages. However the knowledge and meanings of these  archives construct relations to moving beings and their artifacts. This paper attempts to tell some of the stories of time, place, and movement of these archives within and through the beings and artifacts  in which they become embedded.  In doing that, the paper describes the  everyday life of the archives themselves as they are ambulant in  everyday life.

Using short narratives, this paper center several events and relationships that changed the archives and mobilized them in some relation to everyday life. The stories used will deal with the ambulations of the Marxists archive in 2007 when it was attacked by computers in China, the movements of Feminist theory websites as it becomes embedded in and migrates through textbooks and academic papers  becoming something new, while remaining unchanged, the Tragedy of  April16archive and its relationship to the Northern Illinois  University shooting, and possibly the trials and tribulations of  Situationists International and the Bureau of Public Secrets in  relation to their original print existences.

Through telling the stories of these techno-social ambulants as archives in everyday life, I hope to show their movements and embeddedness in everyday life; their capacity for change and becoming  in relation to all varieties of institutions and communities, from  local users to nation states and to show how their existence allows  for a transversal analysis of cultural relations in relation to the  archives as they migrate through and among those institutions and  communities.

Were I to pursue an MLS, MLIS or Ph.D. related to Cultural Informatics, I would go to UCLA, Illinois or Maryland in the United States. UCLA, Illinois, and Maryland have leaders in the field that will get you jobs.

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Common sense dictates that if you want to work in this field, go to the best school you can, then leverage that to get an internship where you wish to work over your summer off, then get a job there when you graduate.

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In Canada, I would choose Toronto or UWO to go into this field, but for different reasons. I think Toronto addresses Cultural Informatics most strongly in their Museum Studies program and UWO addresses it most strongly through their integration of Media Studies.

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Other interesting programs are at York University in the U.K., and the University of the Aegean with its Centre for Cultural Informatics

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I would not go to any school in or around NYC for this for a wide variety of reasons, but primarily because I have seen none where there curriculum actually deals with cultural informatics in any substantive way. , I”ve not seen that in NYC at any school, though some make claims. If i were to choose a school close to NYC to take a degree related to cultural informatics, I would go to Rutgers, though if I wanted a more technologically oriented cultural informatics, Long Island University would be sufficient also.

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I think that claims toward leadership in many fields in relation to cultural informatics should be investigated before one applies to that field. Leadership comes from research, publishing, and service to the greater community of cultural informatics. If you cannot find substantive evidence of such work in fields in and around cultural informatics, then you should be very curious about the school. Remember that if you are serious about your career, you want to find senior leaders in the field who have a record of notable students in the field. If you go to a school which graduates a hundred of students per year, with few faculty, you need to wonder about the quality of education you will receive. Also schools with a substantive number of adjunct faculty or very few senior faculty with tenure, and a large number of junior faculty are schools you should be worried about.

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I would be careful to separate hype and reality. Be sure to talk to other people at the University or School before you decide to attend. Also be sure to use google and look for complaints about the programs.

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Also, while ALA accreditation is important, you should also be sure that the school has not had any problem with regional or other accreditting agencies. Usually this can be found on the schools website, but digging deeper might show that the capacity of the school to actually deliver the education it claims is seriously in question.

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To conclude, Cultural Informatics is a up and coming field, and some people might use its relative obscurity to promote their programs as cultural informatics. As such, students have to be wary consumers in the field of cultural informatics. There are great programs out there, but I think they are few and far between.

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This is written as part of the cultural informatics series.

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What is Actor-Network Theory: various ANT definitions. The possibility of applying the actor-network theory and its methodology to different disciplines and fields of study is evident by the many senses in which it has been used. The What is Actor-Network Theory? site provides various definitions. These and many other colors and flavors of ANT represent a very… [infoSophy: Socio-technological Rendering of Information]

however, the fixation on the actor is still present. get rid of it, stop thinking about it, think about networks, only networks, and then think about how it constructs the actor, then i think you have a theoretically interesting actor-network theory.

Here is my current definition of cultural informatics

Cultural Informatics is the application and understandings of information technology in the broadest senses of cultures and cultural institutions.

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Here is an expansion and clarification:

To that end, it deals with understandings of culturally centered information, cultural heritage, cultural communities, the transmission of information through cultures and relations between culture and information technology. While there are productive, design and creative elements to cultural informatics, that design has to be understood as constructed within a rich cultural milieu, and situated as such as part of a process to generate understanding within and across cultures. Cultural informatics must continually be reflexive and critical of the systems we create and participate in order to generate new possibilities that will work across cultural domains. It is not enough to build the tool, we build the tool in a culture, and we build cultural and political assumptions into that tool which have clear implications for the positioning of cultures, peoples, and technologies.