Author: Michael A. Innes

Left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane

~ Michael A. Innes

Trawl industry news or employment classifieds (pick your preferred sector) using keywords like “research” and “information”, and you might find yourself thinking that the sum total of reality is digital, too big for mere human minds to process, and that making sense of it is best left to machines and software. It’s a world in which understanding is less contingent on a cognitive capacity for critical engagement and creative insight than it is on the accessibility of information. Access is all. It trumps (sorry) the value that large volumes of data imply. It trumps (where is William Safire when you need to pick apart a travesty of a word and find a pallatable substitute for it?) the value that fast data processing speed implies.

Access can be about a lot of different things.  It can be about decryption of safeguarded secrets, conversion to a usable medium, or translation of foreign language script into one that’s comprehensible.  At its most basic, it can be about the ability to directly observe information or physically possess it, on a drive, on paper, in a photograph, on a stone tablet. Sometimes it’s about finding a keeper of the secrets, and a place where the secrets are kept. Secrecy is a relative thing. It correlates directly with notions of access, and one of my favorite archetypal keepers, the archivist, is also the one I most frequently invoke when I’m talking to  colleagues, clients and friends about research specialties like  data science, e-discovery and open source intelligence.

According to this piece in the Village Voice on archivists, one of their number may well be  – with apologies for repeating a brutalized meme  – the most interesting man in the world. The “paradox of being an archivist,” it tells us, is that while archivists should know things so that they can help others know those things, “it’s not really the archivist’s place to impose his knowledge on anyone else… [i]ndeed, if the field could be said to have a creed, it’s that archivists aren’t there to tell you what’s important.” It’s a view that misses one of the most fundamental aspects of archival work, in that archivists routinely select what to preserve and what not to preserve, and so by definition impose their knowledge on others. It’s a point that the author explores and explains well. Ideal types are fine in isolation, and archival work is nothing if not isolating, but relegating keepers of secrets to the role of neutral, disinterested arbiters of knowledge strikes me as more than a little self-indulgent.

Archivists and archival investigators have a role to play as activists, especially if there’s a forensic element to the materials buried amid unprocessed and uncatalogued holdings. I can sympathize with the romantic view that “Historically momentous documents are to be left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane — because who’s to say what’s actually mundane or not?” But that’s about preservation, not discovery, and once discovered, one would hope that the discovering archivist would do more than just stare wanly at the information in question and then file it dutifully away, with nary a word of imposition about its singificance to anyone.

Archival investigation undertaken by living, breathing human beings unfolds at a comparatively soporific pace, and for investigators and researchers used to fast search engines and aggregate query results, it’s a practice that’s surely too musty and staid and boring  to be taken seriously or ascribed much worth. But plodding historical gumshoes poking about the stacks and sifting yellowed documents, for all their retrograde pathos, embody a particular spirit of discovery. Tech-savvy number crunchers and online seekers of insight surely experience their own versions of this. Smoking guns appear in all shapes and forms. But there’s a tactile, sensory difference between the two. “The need to pore through boxes forces you to connect with them,” writes our Village Voice author. It may well be, he notes, “one of the few kinds of formal research left. You can’t google — you have to think about what you want. You have to talk to an archivist, and find the right box, and go through that box.”

 

 

Confronted by a fate that restricts their lives

~ Michael A. Innes

I know nothing of Korea, other than having a general sense of the roles its politically divided geographies play vis-a-vis US and global security, two subjects that I follow closely.  Occasionally a blockbluster headline will focus the mind. The past few weeks have produced two: a very public and messy political assassination, tracked in near-real time; and revelations of a (formerly) sub-rosa cyber war the US has been waging on North Korea’s nuclear missile program.

Of Korean culture north or south I know even less. I do, however, have a good unstanding of the interplay between language, identity, geography and politics. So a crisp, pithy and intriguing (sorry) TLS piece on  “The Korean Sense of Place“, coming as it does fast on the heels of recent events, leapt off the page. Han Yujoo, the award winning author of The Impossible Fairy Tale, writing on the 100th anniversary of the publication of Mujong (“Heartless”) – “known as the first modern Korean novel”:

I’ve read it many times, and it’s always made me wonder about the linguistic confusion that Korean writers active at the beginning of the twentieth century must have felt. During the Japanese colonial period, from a young age Koreans had to absorb Japanese as the official language, and Korean as their mother tongue, along with Western modern culture; intellectuals, moreover, would have had to study Western languages such as English, French and German. What could their literary language have been like? I’m also interested in the fact that most of the characters who appear in the fiction of the time are unable to find a place for themselves, a destination towards which to direct their energies both physically and psychologically. Such a place fundamentally does not exist.

The senses of place that Han Yujoo teases out of other works of Korean fiction are liminal and interstitial – the invented geographies, countries of the mind and sanctuaries of the soul favored of dissidents, the disaffected and the displaced. “Choe In-hun’s novel The Square (Kwangjang, 1960),” she writes, “also takes the sense of place as its subject. It ends with the protagonist Lee Myeong-jun, feeling unable to go either south or north after the peninsula’s division, choosing a (non-existent) neutral country.” Or: “In more recent Korean fiction, too, movement never appears easy. From the ICF crisis of 1997, the sub-prime disaster of 2007, and the low growth that has continued ever since, to the recent breakdown of national politics, our protagonists are confronted by a fate that restricts their lives.”

“Sense of place” is a term of art among French philosophers, literary theorists, public historians, critical geographers and architectural design specialists.* It’s a notion that’s part of a larger canon of spatial concepts  (like “territory”, “terrain”, “place”, “space”, “location”, “lieux de memoires” and so on) that have migrated between academic disciplines with varying degrees of sophistication and meaning. Those turns of phrase often find their way into pop culture and public discourse. The opposite is also sometimes true:  academia being the fad-oriented beast that it is, elements of pop culture and public discourse sometimes come first, only to be chased by scholars clinging for dear life to contemporary public relevance.

I usually perk up when spatial concepts worm their way into written and verbal expressions of political life, like Presidential and executive speeches, official policy, congressional testimony, diplomatic dispatches and the like. Political scientists and international relations specialists are notorious among critical spatial thinkers for their narrow brutalization of spatial concepts, which – so the criticism goes – has tended to favor measurable, material (ie. physical) aspects of space and place over the subject’s softer, fluffier social dimensions.

In my view, that sort of criticism has itself varied in sophistication, and it’s now at least a few years out of date. Approaches to political science and international relations are just as varied as any other set of academic disciplines, especially when it comes to problems of political communication and international security. Look closely and you’ll find plenty ways in which cultural content like The Korean Sense of Place, and the corpus of Korean fiction its author surveys, is (or should be) relevant to the study of high politics.

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*The volume of work that’s been done on the subject is substantial enough – it’s enormous, really – that the links I’ve provided barely scratch the surface.

A signed statement on the failure of language

~ Michael A. Innes

I’ve stayed away from commenting publicly on the new US administration. There’s so much fodder, so much grist, that it could easily overwhelm. It does overwhelm. Daily news feeds are prefaced and filled with coverage of Trump, his family, his appointments, his interests. My instinct is to stay completely away from it, for at least three reasons:

  • First, there is paranoia: we have yet to fully understand and appreciate the consequences of speaking ill or in any way that might be construed negatively. Trump is self-admittedly and famously vindictive, so paranoia in this case is more  a matter of healthy circumspection.
  • Second, there is the usual historian’s caution about offering premature commentary: let’s wait and witness the full unfolding of events, and allow the time needed for all the primary source materials about them to be made available, before crafting an account of events that might help make sense of it all.
  • Third, there are other things going on in the world, which is one of the larger points of the current D.C. diorama – in which it should be apparent to anyone with their peripherals fully engaged and calibrated: every spectacularly dissonant media event  obscures or distracts from an equally disturbing series of events elsewhere in the world.

But today’s meme, which focuses on Donald Trump’s handshake, is full of  the sort of communicative content that will delight symbolic interactionists, frame theorists, specialists in broadcast and rhetorical dominance, and anyone else who thinks about such things. Trump’s physical presence and its role in his political theatre has come up before. One prominent example arose during his campaign debates with Hilary Clinton. There have been others, including Trump’s 19 second long handshake with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his awkward handholding with British Prime Minister Theresa May.

It is precisely Trump’s violent handshake style that has caught the media eye over the last 24 hours, after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, apparely very well prepared  for the event, visibly countered Trump’s grasp. The ensuing commentary has been full of snapshot hilarity. One of the more literary pieces I’ve seen is Vice’s semi-satirical analysis  of the meaning of Trump’s handshake:

This is a handshake buried under the weight of its own meaninglessness, a black hole of metacommentary in a world where sense sloshes chaotically across a flat surface of signifiers unmoored from any attachment to truth or reason or even an orderly presentation of images. Donald Trump’s handshake is a signed statement on the failure of language here at the end of the world.

The Vice piece is worth reading in full.

A brief foray into distraction’s history

~ Michael A. Innes

This looks interesting:

A Crisis of Short Attention Spans, 250 Years Ago

By Natalie M. Phillips | January 01, 2017

When most people think of distraction, they think of flooded inboxes, cellphone beeps, Twitter feeds. An ever-present and unavoidable consequence of our fast-paced contemporary world, distraction is cast as a — if not the — mental state of modernity. Whatever came before — childhood, our parents’ generation, the Enlightenment — must have been, it seems, a more attentive age.

Yet even a brief foray into distraction’s history discourages nostalgia about an idyllic past of easy attention, particularly when we consider the history of reading. Rather than a quiet environment in which audiences were always found absorbed, or “lost in a book,” 18th-century poets and artists describe reading as occurring amid high cacophony: chamber pots sloshing and street hubbub. John Gay’s poem “Trivia” offers us this soundscape of London street life: “Now industry awakes her busy sons, / Full charg’d with news the breathless hawker runs: / Shops open, coaches roll, carts shake the ground, / And all the streets with passing cries resound.” If we complain today of media, and social-media, oversaturation, writers then worried about industrial, vocal, and literary tumult.

Many people both presumed and complained of novels’ unusual ability to capture attention, but fiction competed with a flood of essays, poems, sermons, and histories. The expansion of the book trade inspired a further flourishing of reviews, anthologies, and summaries that were meant to manage this literary surplus but only added to it.

But if inattention was a worry for writers, it also became a literary theme.

Read the rest at the Chronicle of Higher Education, here.

What “post-factual news” means for researchers

~ Michael A. Innes

Some semi-random thoughts, as headlines continue to focus on “post-factual” news:

There is a lot in common between what we’re seeing now in Britain and the US, and  researchable “news” in fragile and conflict affected states. The recent Brexit referendum and US Presidential campaigns are just the two, latest and possibly most prominent cases that come to mind wherein the tone and content of open media forces a radical rethink of how researchers can use it.

Fact-free politicians (and their allegedly fact-free constituencies) are just part of an emerging landscape. Analysts are barely able to make sense of the political framing of reality in their attempts to decipher what parties and politicians actually stand for, what they actually think and believe, or how much damage or disruption they actually intend to cause in future. It won’t be any easier for future historians of US and British politics who will have to contend with the morass of today’s media output as they attempt to reconstruct our present reality.

Guerrilla archiving efforts –  undertaken by climate scientists who fear political interence in the US in the form of mass deletions of decades of scientific research –  suggest that the stakes are substantially higher and that the problems associated with it are likely to become much more acute. Wilfully created gaps in current understanding are consequential, with more or less immediate resource, budgetary and policy  implications. By comparison, gaps in the future historical record are a problem for historians, and deciphering and validating the details of past events and developments that can be found in archived yellow press doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

There are some basic reasons why researchers should pay close attention to this. They revolve around the fundamental importance of context, precision and analytical judgement.  The lessons here are a bit more subtle, but they’re worth noting, especially among knowledge workers who rely heavily on “open source intelligence” and among the legions of people whose understanding of research process doesn’t get much more sophisticated than Google or Wikipedia.

It’s a challenge I’ve dealt with in the research and consulting projects I’ve done on guerrilla vernacular communications in West Africa, Afghanistan and elsewhere. I had the pleasure and privilege of working for a short time with the late and eminent Africanist, Stephen Ellis, before he left us in 2015. He expressed it best, in his books and in his work. In West Africa, oral culture prevailed and information was more often than not broadcast through cultural filters and images. Stephen always held that sense could still be made of documentary evidence (like local newsprint). These were sources that on the surface of it only transmitted utterly sensational and fantastic details. To use them effectively required a particular sensitivity to meaning – to the truth of a matter – that could only really develop when well supported by deep knowledge and additional, supplementary forms of inquiry.

Media outlets come in all shapes and sizes.  Some are loud and boisterous, while others are more stoic. “Newspapers of record” are a recognized form of the latter.  Some try to report what happened, while others try to convince readers why and how they happened. Media output, in other words, can serve more than one purpose, and only one of them is to provide researchers and analysts with a source of evidence needed to  determine the factual basis of past events: what happened, when it happened, who was involved, what they said about what happened and so on.  Reconstructing past events is a tricky business, and some media environments are so highly politicized – the rhetoric so overheated and contentious – that verifiable facts are almost impossible to discern from the collection of color and misdirection in which they’re embedded. Propaganda in wartime and in crisis environments is especially difficult to parse for verifiable details – here, the “facts” have less to do with manifest content  –  explicitly used words and text – than with the latent meaning that can be teased out of the wider contextual landscape and from more technical meta-data.