In the latest issue of Information Professional magazine, I interview cybersecurity expert Nicole van der Meulen.
You can read or download a PDF of our interview below.
Tag: Scripturient
Scripturient Interview: Karen Levy, Road Scholar
In the latest issue of Information Professional, my column ‘Scripturient’ features an interview with Cornell University’s Karen Levy. An assistant professor in the Department of Information Science, and associate member of the faculty of Cornell Law School, Karen researches how law and technology interact to regulate social life, with particular focus on social and organizational aspects of surveillance. We spoke as her new book Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance was being released in the UK. You can download a PDF of my Scripturient column featuring Karen here, and a transcript of our conversation is below.
Read moreScripturient: Computing Taste – Interview with Nick Seaver
For the latest issue of Information Professional magazine, my Scripturient column features an interview with Nick Seaver, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University.
Nick’s new book Computing Taste uses ethnographic fieldwork to explore how the makers of music recommendation algorithms understand and go about their work – from product managers thinking about their relationship with users to scientists theorising the act of listening itself as a kind of data processing and engineers for whom the world of music is a geography to be cared for and controlled.
You can read the latest Scripturient column featuring Nick as a PDF download here, and there’s a full transcript of our conversation, digging even deeper into these issues and other elements of Nick’s research, below.
Scripturient: Information and Exformation
For years you think talking means finding, discovering, understanding, understanding at last, being illuminated by the truth. But no: when it takes place, all you know is that it is taking place; it’s there, you’re talking, you’re writing: talking is only talking, simply talking, writing is only writing, making the shapes of letters on a blank piece of paper.
– Georges Perec
How do you talk about a thing without talking about it? What is concealed by our efforts to make ourselves understood?
Scripturient: Sanchita Balachandran on Conservation through Generations
In the latest instalment of Information Professional‘s ‘Scripturient‘ column, guest writer Sanchita Balachandran tells the story of meeting her late maternal grandfather for the first time among the collections of a colonial archive.
Born in Nagercoil, South India and trained in forest management at the University of Edinburgh in the early 1930s, her grandfather’s journey is part of a wider network of relationships spanning the generations, and stretching from the Indian state of Travancore to Baltimore and beyond.
In her column, Sanchita explores the resonances between her grandfather’s work as a conservator of forests and her own role as Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum; she reflects on the necessary, mundane, often invisible work of cultural heritage professionals; and she considers the complex emotions experienced when “harm and recovery, disconnection and reunion” are entangled in our experience of the colonial archive.
What do we owe to the families and loved ones of the long deceased? How do objects bear witness to our lives, and how is that act of witnessing complicated by questions of power, justice, and belonging?
You can read ‘Conservation through Generations’ (PDF download) here.
Informatics of the Oppressed? Interview with Rodrigo Ochigame
For the latest edition of Information Professional magazine, I interviewed MIT’s Rodrigo Ochigame about researching and building alternative systems to search, index, and filter the information we want, need, or require.
From social media protests over Brazilian land rights disputes to liberation theology, information technology in socialist Cuba and contemporary attempts to produce “alternative metadata”, you can read about Rodrigo’s work in the latest edition of my column “Scripturient”, here.
Songs That Set The Archive Free: Interview with Jonatha Brooke
For the latest edition of Information Professional magazine, I interviewed singer-songwriter Jonatha Brooke about her experiences creating an album of new songs from Woody Guthrie’s archives.
You can read the Information Professional article here, and I’ve also included the full conversation with Jonatha below.
Matt: Guthrie’s archive is a blend of images and words, sketches and paintings – it’s not just a collection of texts, let alone ready-made lyrics waiting to be put to music. What surprised you when you started to explore what he’d left behind?
Read moreFandom and literacy – A conversation with Ludi Price
The latest instalment of Scripturient, my column for Information Professional, is out now.
In this series, I’m looking at how we can push the boundaries of literacy in the 21st century, to encompass new areas of representation. What does it mean to read the future? To read risks? To read the forces that underpin our relationships and drive us psychologically? To read the signs and signals which exist in the natural world? If we look outside of the institutional and habitual ways of doing things, will we find fresh and useful insights?
In the latest issue of Information Professional, I talk to the librarian and scholar Ludi Price about her research into fan information behaviour: the ways in which communities of people with a shared passion for pop culture manage, organise, and distribute information relating to their fandom.
You can read Ludi’s thoughts about “fan literacy” in a PDF download here, or get your own copy of Informational Professional magazine here. And you can also hear our full conversation in podcast form on Soundcloud.
Poetry and information – A conversation with Helen Heath
The latest instalment of Scripturient, my column for Information Professional, is out now.
In this series, I’m looking at how we can push the boundaries of literacy in the 21st century, to encompass new areas of representation. What does it mean to read the future? To read risks? To read the forces that underpin our relationships and drive us psychologically? To read the signs and signals which exist in the natural world?
In the latest issue of Information Professional, I talk to writer Helen Heath from Aotearoa New Zealand about birdsong, technology, poetry, and the natural world.
What would change about your work if you read, or even wrote, a poem on waking up every morning? To what new things would you attend? What would you learn about information, and our relationship to it?
You can read the column in a PDF download here, or get your own copy of Informational Professional magazine here.
Psychodynamic literacy? New column for Information Professional
“Group dynamics are ‘like an iceberg – you see some of the relationship on the surface and then there is also everything beneath the water. There are the explicit, seen, and formal aspects; then all that is implicit, unseen, unspoken, and even unconscious.'”
The second instalment of “Scripturient”, my new quarterly column for Information Professional magazine, is out now.
In this series, I’m looking at how we can push the boundaries of literacy in the 21st century, to encompass new areas of representation. What does it mean to read the future? To read risks? To read the forces that underpin our relationships and drive us psychologically? To read the signs and signals which exist in the natural world?
The latest instalment explores questions of “psychodynamic literacy”. If we were better at reading the forces that shape our relationships, could we rewrite them to get better, happier outcomes?
I talked to two expert practitioners, a leadership coach and a mediator, to find out more. Find out what they had to say in the article (PDF download).
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 
