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The ORCID US consortium, managed by Lyrasis, is five years old in 2023 - hear about their progress so far and plans for the future in Alice Meadows' interview with their PID Program Leader, Sheila Raybun
The post The ORCID US Consortium at Five: What’s Worked, What Hasn’t, and Why? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Rebecca Lawrence discusses how connections across all aspects of the system are needed for open research to flourish and deliver upon its promise.
The post Guest Post — Why Interoperability Matters for Open Research – And More than Ever appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Download the transcript of this interview.
On the morning of Friday, March 10, 2023 Nick Seaver and I met over Zoom to talk about his new book Computing Taste: Algorithms and Makers of Music Recommendation, which was published in 2022 by the University of Chicago Press. In that meeting, we recorded an episode for the Playpod podcast, which is available at the link above.
Image by Christina Agapakis.
Nick Seaver is an anthropologist who, as he puts it, studies how people use technology to make sense of cultural things. He teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Tufts University, where he also directs the program of Science, Technology, and Society. His first book is Computing Taste: Algorithms and Makers of Music Recommendation. Nick has published several articles in academic journals on topics related to critical algorithm studies, as well as ethnographic stories and anthropological research methods. A more comprehensive list of his academic work can be found on this link.
Computing Taste is about the people who make music recommender systems and how they think about their work. The book is 216 pages long, divided into six chapters, plus a prologue, introduction, and epilogue. The book stems from Nick’s Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California Irvine. Each chapter of Computing Taste offers a dense, well-researched, and well-told story of how socio-technical arrangements giving life to music recommender systems come together in practice. Each chapter of the book also challenges conventional narratives about algorithmic systems and their “evil” impacts on society. In a way, Nick’s book surprises the reader by telling stories that we’re not expecting to hear.
Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Maker of Music Recommendation Systems
In our interview we covered several topics, including how Nick’s work has been received by the anthropological community and some major themes from the book. As a graduate student, I was especially interested in questions of how to conduct research. I encourage the reader to read the entire book and engage with the richness of information and anthropological analysis brilliantly conducted by Nick.
Nick has a sophisticated way of critiquing data metaphors. He is cautious and does not jump into precipitated conclusions and judgments that classify algorithms as good or evil, which ultimately excludes the socio from these technical systems. Nick reminds the reader that black boxes are constituted by legal regimes, a perspective that he builds on from Frank Pasquale’s book, The Black Box Society. According to Nick, these secret boxes are the story of legal intellectual property related to company secrets. The black box, as a metaphor, becomes a problem because it makes us want to know what’s in it. Nick thinks the black box figure is damaging to how we think about these systems as it encourages us to think about them as discrete or as individual entities that exist by themselves in the world. This metaphor can lead us to think that black boxes are openable, which they are not, since they’re being constantly changed, updated, trained with new datasets, and adapted to users’ behaviors. This makes Nick’s book even more fascinating, as the people behind algorithms for music recommendation are trying to capture, measure, retain, and work with these systems, which are always in flux.
As a reader, I noticed how the conventional idea of access used in much anthropological research does not translate well to the studies of objects bound by “legal regimes.” Nick mentions in the book that “access is not an event.” In discussing more access-related questions (access to information, people, and resources during the fieldwork), Nick explained he has a complicated relationship with this idea. There’s no way to show up at Facebook or other tech companies and just do “fieldwork inside the company.” Not all anthropologists can get to every place, Nick said, and what can we do in this case? Nick hinted in his response that we might need to change our questions and methods and, more importantly, what access even means. As anthropologists of tech, and more specifically in Nick’s case, as an anthropologist of tech and startups, we’re doing something more than just going to the field, finding something that everybody knows, and telling other people about it. “My job is not to go into a company, figure out how the algorithm works, write it down, and then sort of be a corporate espionage actor and bring it out,” he said. This disrupts, perhaps, what we conceive of as the point of anthropology. Is the point of anthropology just to share secrets? Nick does not think so, especially as these sociotechnical systems are protected by legal regimes and also because they simply don’t exist out there in the world as discrete things to unearth. As he says,
If you’re studying algorithms, there’s no algorithm. They [the company] don’t have that, like sitting out on the table somewhere, right? It’s not anything that you can see. And so, really, it’s this ongoing process as you access this kind of thing. It’s a relationship. It’s a negotiation. It’s an ongoing effort.
Nick described that an ethnography is also history, and in this light, an ethnography would rather narrate this ongoing effort of gaining access to fieldwork and also of telling stories that people might not be expecting to hear. In all, he moves away from an essentialized view of fieldwork, and talks about how parts of his fieldwork involved meeting people at rock climbing gyms, waiting rooms, conferences, and offices, as well as watching Youtube videos. He is also aware of his positionality and notes that he shares some identity markers with the developers of music recommender systems—predominantly white males, American, and in their thirties—and how that impacted his entrance into this fieldwork.
Nick thinks there is much work to do about the anthropology of “these systems”—algorithmic systems and their designers who try to capture, measure, retain users’ attention, etc. He highlights how his book is not explicitly critical enough about the systems he writes about in the way people might expect, and how he worries about the book “coming across as being very nice.” This is within the context of a public discourse around recommender systems right now that tend to portray them as either good or evil.
Rather, since Nick’s book stems from a moment in his career when he was an anthropologist in training, he ended up realizing that his goal as an anthropologist was to try to give an adequate representation of what was going on in these sociotechnical systems behind music recommender systems. He blended this idea with “a little bit of our sort of classic anthropological virtues of interpretive charity.” In this light, his book is rich not only in ethnographic descriptions and vivid stories from the field, but also in anthropological interpretation, and the reader can expect to encounter Bourdieu, Lévi-Strauss, Alberto Cosín Jiménez, and many other theorists in the book. During our interview, Nick noted that his book is about “music recommender system developers primarily based in the United States,” and the findings can’t be universalized. Still, he’s looking forward to new ethnographic works on streaming services focusing on non-hegemonic systems like the US, adding layers of technical and cultural specificity.
As we wrapped up the interview, Nick noted how being part of the broader CASTAC community means being in contact with brilliant researchers and their research.
During our interview, I told Nick about the impressions his book left on me as a reader. But it wasn’t just the book that left a positive impression on me. It was my first time recording an interview for a podcast. My anxiety and insecurity are noticeable in the recording, as well as my accent since English is not my first language. But Nick was extremely patient and kind. I thank him for the insightful and warm conversation, and my colleagues at Platypus for the opportunity to produce this episode of Platypod. I encourage you to listen to the entire episode and let us know if you have any authors or books you’d like us to record an episode about.
Christos Petrou takes a look at the Guest Editor model for publishing and its recent impact on Hindawi and MDPI, as Clarivate has delisted some of their journals.
The post Guest Post – Of Special Issues and Journal Purges appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
The transformative power of values-enacted scholarship is only really felt in lived-experience. Just before spring break, and only two weeks after the mass shooting on the MSU campus, a small group of staff, directors, and chairs gathered in a conference room in Linton Hall to consider how we might begin to work together in the wake of significant changes to the budget model connected to summer teaching.
Over the next few years, MSU will be moving to an all-funds budget and to a hybrid model that will include elements of responsibility centered management (RCM). We convened the committee to help us discern how to put our values into practice as we determine how to distribute funds connected to summer teaching and learning.
The experience we have gained over the years in bringing the HuMetricsHSS initiative to life in the College of Arts & Letters and through our Pathways of Presencing grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Science Research Council shaped our approach to the difficult work this committee has to undertake at this difficult time. So, Sonja Fritzsche and I asked Penny Weber and Bonnie Russell from the HuMetricsHSS team to help us develop a process that might best be called a “values-enacted committee charge.” Our approach is rooted in the recognition that transformative change is only possible when values are intentionally woven into every aspect of university life. Each interaction, each encounter, offers a new opportunity to put shared values into intentional practice. Indeed, values are enacted in every action we undertake. Whether we recognize them or not, values express themselves in action. Yet, too often the values that implicitly shape our institutional practices are not aligned with those we say we care most deeply about.
So to begin our work together as a committee, we replaced the traditional “charge meeting” with a set of activities designed to identify the core values of the group and to open a meaningful dialogue about how these shared values would be put into practice both in their work together as a group and in the recommendations they were being asked to make.
Following adrienne maree brown’s advice in *Holding Change*, we began with a deep breath. “Use breath to cultivate patience in yourself and in the group,” brown writes, “Values get lost in haste.”1 We then went around the room with a one-word check-in to begin to establish trusting connections among the group. The prompt we used was: “In one word, what is the value that has been most helpful to you as you have navigated the last few weeks?”
This short practice of breathing together and checking in with one another opened a space of trust among the group and prepared us for the work of surfacing the values that would shape the work ahead.
In preparing for the meeting, the leadership team identified three values that we thought would need to be activated in any successful work of a committee focused on reimagining the summer budget model: Equity, Inclusion, and Trust. So in framing the next phase of the meeting, we were explicit that these were the three values the leadership had identified. We invited the group then to consider other values that might be important to them in their work together. We asked: What values are missing and would you like to replace any of the proposed values.
We received a beautiful list of new values to consider, including: honesty, wholeness, responsibility, diversity, opportunity, listening, transparency, trust, consistency, humility, joy, and heart.
From this list, we reduced the values the group identified as shared to the following: Equity, Inclusion, Trust, Vulnerability/Patience, and Community.
Articulating Principles
With these values in hand, we took the last 35 minutes of the meeting to consider how we would enact these values 1) in our work together and 2) in the recommendations the committee would make. The HuMetricsHSS team has learned over time how important it is to be clear before the practical work begins about what these values mean in practice.
The conversation deepened as we moved into this phase of the discussion as colleagues began to imagine how they would activate these values in their work together and in the work they would produce. Let me provide two examples here, one for how the group agreed to put equity into practice and one for how they agreed to enact the value of trust.
So, for example, we agreed that Equity in our work together means:
We agreed that Equity in our recommendations would mean:
We agreed that in relation to our work together, trust would mean:
In relation to our recommendations, we agreed that trust would mean:
Moving from the abstract practice of identifying values to a concrete account of how these values would be put into practice deepened the trust the group was committed to cultivating.
We ended the meeting with one-word check-outs, asking each person to offer the values with which they were leaving the meeting. For me as Dean, my word was gratitude, both for the time our colleagues committed to this meeting, but also for the wholeheartedness they bring to the work we are doing together.
Thirty years ago, Parker Palmer wrote a new preface for the paperback edition of his book, To Know as We are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey.1 Reporting there on his experience traveling the country to explore the issues raised by the book, he writes:
Everywhere I go, I meet faculty who feel disconnected from their colleagues, from their students, from their own hearts.2
Thirty years later, that sense of disconnection has calcified into alienation.
The processes and practices that shape our academic lives are badly out of joint with the purposes that give our lives meaning.
Palmer puts it this way:
Most of us go into teaching not for fame or fortune but because of a passion to connect. We feel deep kinship with some subject; we want to bring students into that relationship, to link them with the knowledge that is so life-giving to us; we want to work in community with colleagues who share our values and our vocation. But when institutional conditions create more combat than community, when the life of the mind alienates more than it connects, the heart goes out of things, and there is little left to sustain us.3
It’s not just that institutional conditions have an alienating effect on the communities that give them life, but our institutions themselves are disconnected from the mission they profess to advance. As we put it in the HuMetricsHSS white paper:
The values that institutions of higher education profess to care most deeply about — articulated through university mission statements, promotional materials, and talking points — are often not the values enacted in the policies and practices that shape academic life. This disparity has led to a growing sense of alienation among faculty who entered higher education with a deep commitment to certain core values, values that are themselves very often articulated in the founding documents of institutions of higher education.4
Palmer’s book looks to spiritual traditions for a path forward in the face of such pervasive personal and institutional alienation. He writes:
In the midst of such pain, the spiritual traditions offer hope that is hard to find elsewhere, for all of them are ultimately concerned with getting us reconnected. These traditions build on the great truth that beneath the broken surface of our lives there remains — in the words of Thomas Merton — “a hidden wholeness.” The hope of every wisdom tradition is to recall us to that wholeness in the midst of our torn world, to reweave us into the community that is so threadbare today.5
To cultivate the wholeness to which Palmer points requires discipline and intentional practice. To reweave ourselves into community, reconnect ourselves with our purpose, and realign university values with institutional practice, we need to create structures and cultivate habits that reinforce the work that gives our personal and institutional lives meaning.
In this effort, it is helpful to have examples. I am grateful to work with imaginative colleagues who have managed to create a few. The appointment of Morgan Shipley as the inaugural Foglio Chair of Spirituality is a tangible effort to integrate what Palmer called “authentic spirituality” into the life of the University. “Authentic spirituality,” writes Palmer,
wants to open us to truth—whatever truth may be, wherever truth may take us. Such a spirituality does not dictate where we must go, but trusts that any path walked with integrity will take us to a place of knowledge. Such a spirituality encourages us to welcome diversity and conflict, to tolerate ambiguity, and to embrace paradox.6
This fall, a trusted path led us to a place of wholeness where we celebrated the Ascension of the new Department of African American and African Studies. This event marked the opening not only of a new Department, but also of new possibilities for deepening our connections with one another and with the reciprocal, community engaged work our torn world needs most urgently.
At the heart of these efforts to put the heart back into things beats the Charting Pathways of Intellectual Leadership initiative, a framework and a process designed to elevate the quality of teaching, research, and engagement by integrating practices of wholeness into the life of the university. We have tried to capture something of the spirit of this initiative in the video below.
Beneath the din of anxiety that animates our public conversations about the future of education, concrete steps are being taken to reconnect higher education with the “hidden wholeness” that gives it life and purpose and transformative power.
The brave new world post-Twitter, or post-the Old Twitter, or has anything really changed? Chefs ponder the new social media.
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