Dear Pierre and everybody,
sorry for this late reply. While this thread started I was at the IGF2019 in Berlin where, among other things, I came across some great initiatives and projects regarding the global south. Some of these are also related to our discussion, and I think should inspire our global community. In particular, I'd like to draw your attention to the Just Net Coalition that has just released this important manifesto (which perhaps GO::DH could endorse?):
https://justnetcoalition.org/digital-justice-manifesto
All IGF2019 presentations, videos and transcripts are available online and I'm sure they will be of great interest for many of us:
https://www.igf2019.berlin/IGF/Redaktion/EN/Artikel/webcasts-from-igf-2019.h...
As opposed to Pierre, whenever I use Microsoft or Google, I do feel ashamed. The fact that there appear to be no alternatives - which is not entirely true - does not mean that these oligopolies are making a huge, possibly irreversible damage to our cultural diversity, let alone the threat to human rights that have been continuously documented. So to a certain degree, yes, we're all accomplices. And we can't wait our goverments build different infrastructures, because it's not going to happen. As in the Fridays for Future movement, we need to change our habits, and in this respect I agree with Marcello.
I know as humanists and social scientists we are very good at analysis. But with my email I was rather calling for a collective action: I believe as representatives and members of a global scholarly community historically concerned with the digitisation of cultural artifacts, we should act now. The time has come to make a stand, and many other groups in the world have already done so.
And speaking about oligopolies of knowledge...
Don't know how many of you read Humanist, but this has been recently posted by one of our colleagues, Miran Hladnik. If we think that Scopus-Elsevier-etc have little to do with Google or Facebook, than we're going to miss the entire point. Either the effect or the conscious will (honestly at this point I don't care which) of all these behemoths is the eradication of cultural and linguistic diversity. Yes, because they don't just want to colonize: they need to standardize you.
Date: 2019-12-12 09:03:30+00:00 From: Miran Hladnik hladnikmiran@gmail.com
Subject: Indexing problems with non-Latin scripts
The following will hardly spark sympathy among English speaking members of Humanist. But maybe it should, concerning that the word humanist indicates also a person respecting human dignity. It is about respecting other scripts and languages. Some months ago a Russian author in the journal I edit noticed that his paper hadn't been indexed by Elsevier Scopus. Being aware that articles and references in the Cyrillic script cause indexing problems with Scopus, the journal sticks to the instructions from the Scopus officials and transliterates every single Cyrillic entry into the Latin script. In spite of that the references were not indexed. I've intervened with Scopus. After a while I received the astonishing answer from the content account manager: The paper cannot be processed because the references are not in English! The new demand and the argument by Scopus sound like mocking: it would be unacceptable for a resarch paper to list the titles in a non-existing English translation instead of in original languages. Our journal publishes predominantly non-English papers, nevertheless it has been successfully processed by the same institution so far. The problem seems to be burning only regarding the use of the Cyrillic alphabet, which evidently disturbs some Scopus employees and raises suspicion, that someone is after expelling Russian out of the scientific community to maintain the dominance of English. I would appreciate your indexing experience with other languages and with non-Latin scripts, e. g. Hebrew or Greek. Apart from this, it seems necessary to tell, that in the times when every mobile device is capable of recognizing and translating a text of a deliberate script and language, the terror of English exercised by Elsevier Scopus is discriminating and indecent. -- miran hladnik (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miran_Hladnik)
-------- Messaggio originale --------
Dear all,
the word you are looking for is : "infrastructure". If we are driven to use the GAFAM services as scholars, it is just because we have no open, efficient, sustainable, user-friendly, trustable alternative infrastructure. The problem comes from higher : there is a notorious lack of public investment at this level of the infrastructure supporting scholarly work. There is investment beneath it (hard infrastructures like network backbones, hosting facilities, computing power, semi-soft infrastructures such as AAI), there is investment above (data management infrastructures), but very few in the middle. How could we name this intermediate level ? When we use Google and Facebook to write, discuss with colleagues, share documents, collaborate, find and disseminate information, this is communication in a scholarly context AKA "scholarly communication". A lot of wonderful initiatives exist across the world that aim at giving to the scholars the knowledge production tools they need, starting with Stylo https://blog.sens-public.org/marcellovitalirosati/stylo/ , but they lack sustainable funding.
That's why I agree with you when you say scholars should avoid using GAFAM tools, but I disagree when it comes to lecturing them and making them feel guilty for not shifting to something else. As an individual, I rely heavily on Apple and Google infrastructure and I am not ashamed of it. I am just waiting for a best alternative, meaning an open infrastructure that offers the same level of service. Collectively, I am engaged into collective efforts to make funders understand they have to invest in open scholarly communication infrastructures, for the SSH, with OPERAS : https://operas.hypotheses.org/ , for all disciplines with Invest in Open : https://investinopen.org/ And I can tell you it is not an easy task. But we need collective efforts - policies - as much as individual choices. And it starts by understanding and making the policy makers understand that communication tools and services for research are not commodities that can be outsourced, but are strategic assets they should invest in, because those tools and services literally shape the way research is done and knowledge produced.
All the best,
-- Pierre Mounier OPERAS Coordinator (Community) - [http://operas-eu.org%5D(http://operas-eu.org/) OpenEdition Associate Director - [http://openedition.org%5D(http://openedition.org/) DOAB Co-Director - [http://doabooks.org%5D(http://doabooks.org/) orcid.org/0000-0003-0691-6063
EHESS 54, boulevard Raspail 75006 Paris Bureau/Office A-43-4 Mob. +33 (0)6 61 98 31 86 Skype : piotrr19701 Schedule a meeting with me : https://doodle.com/pierremounier
On Sun, Nov 24, 2019 at 11:45 PM Bordalejo, Barbara bab995@mail.usask.ca wrote:
Dear all,
After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I considered quitting some social media (starting with Facebook). I was torn between my need to communicate with family and friends living in far away countries (and some intensely active work groups I belong to), and the sheer immorality of the way in which these companies were using personal information to create profit or manipulate people. I weighed the pros and cons, and decided the price for leaving was too high at the time.
As you know, there are other initiatives intending to replace Facebook (Minds, MeWe, WT social), each of them with its own problems, and none of them is popular enough, good enough, whatever enough.
There is a serious argument in the Amnesty International post Domenico shared, which focuses mostly on the indiscriminate access to private data and how this can be prevented. Somehow, this doesn’t seem to be a determining factor for me (although I understand why it is for others). What I consider much more serious is the refusal from Facebook (and other social media giants) to deal with the spreading of misinformation and the rise of radical hate groups.
Marcello also points out that we are being forced to use certain companies by our institutions and this shows how deeply the giants of Silicon Valley have taken root in all parts of our society (including those which should be independent and free). On top of that, these are services institutions have to pay for. When we use the “free” alternatives, we are using the exact same companies. Of course, “free” is never really free. I often tell my students that if they don’t have to pay for a service and they don’t see what they are being sold, they are the product.
I agree that we should be writing about how to disengage from certain social media (I have various articles saved on how to quit those, but they were all written by well-intentioned journalists, not academics), what alternatives we might be using, or whether they are even necessary. Perhaps someone here might consider leading this work.
BB
P.S.: As I was writing this, I logged into Facebook to check on the name of one of the alternative social media platforms and I found a post from a colleague about the 160 anniversary of The Origin of Species. As a side note, he reminded me that it is now the tenth anniversary of my online variorum edition. Not all is evil about social media, and so I remain part of it for another day...
On Nov 23, 2019, at 9:22 PM, O'Donnell, Dan daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca wrote:
I agree that we should be talking about this. I am increasingly seeing our community, which was the original "early adopters" now becoming the "early unadopters." But a) that's easier in the North and out you're wealthy than in the south or poor (what a surprise) and b) it requires some expertise and understanding of how, why, and what's involved. And indeed, university leadership doesn't seem to be treating this as seriously as they should. I'm increasingly thinking that this is the major challenge for us--i.e. Digitally knowledgeable humanists--to take up. I also don't think we are addressing it as seriously as it requires. We should be writing guides about how to disengage as seriously as we wrote them about engaging. We need to start talking about the societal costs we are seeing.
From: globaloutlookdh-l globaloutlookdh-l-bounces@uleth.ca on behalf of Marcello Vitali-Rosati marcello@chiavedisvolta.org Sent: Sunday, November 24, 2019 6:41:40 AM To: globaloutlookdh-l, MailList globaloutlookdh-l@uleth.ca Subject: Re: [globaloutlookDH-l] A Faustian bargain
Dear Domenico,
I completely agree with you. I particularly liked your paper "Geopolitica della conoscenza digitale. Dal web aperto all’impero di GAFAM."
I think the stakes are huge. I have myself many ongoing project on what knowledge will be in few years if we do not do something (and what we could do).
A would like to underline here a simple fact (I think a discussion about it here could be useful): I think our institutions are completely deaf about this problem. At UdeM, we are obliged to use Microsoft mail for our institutional email address (for some other universities it is Gmail), it is impossible to write without using Word (I always have problem when I refuse to give a docx file and I send instead an HTML). There are many things I cannot do with my Linux on the digital infrastructure of the university (for example: to review student applications for admission, we can **only** use Internet Explorer; our VPN does not work with Linux, there is only documentation for Windows and Mac, etc.). Our colleagues find normal to use Facebook or Google Hangout to stream their conferences... And when I say something about that everybody answers: "but it is easier, I do not have time to lose with your geek things".
I am as sconsolato as you
best
m
On 2019-11-23 12:20 PM, Domenico Fiormonte wrote: > Dear all, > > as a DHer I was particularly struck by this report by Amnesty on surveillance giants: > > https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol30/1404/2019/en/ > > > "But despite the real value of the services they provide, Google and Facebook’s platforms come at a systemic cost. The companies’ surveillance-based business model forces people to make a Faustian bargain, whereby they are only able to enjoy their human rights online by submitting to a system predicated on human rights abuse." > > As some of you already know, I've been criticizing the political and social role of these platforms since long ago. And I'm increasingly wondering how the DH community - and especially our global community - can remain silent in the face of documented violations of human rights. Beacause this is exactly what's going on. It's not just about data. > > Would make any sense to start a discussion here on how to respond as digital scholars to these (not anymore just epistemological or cultural) abuses? > > Or should we just go on, using Google and Facebook as those and other documented abuses did not exist? > > Sconsolatamente Vostro, > > Domenico > > _______________________________________________ > globaloutlookdh-l mailing list > globaloutlookdh-l@uleth.ca > http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/globaloutlookdh-l > > You are currently subscribed to this list in NON-digest mode. This means you receive every message as it is posted. > > If this represents too much traffic, you can also subscribe in DIGEST mode. This sends out a single email once a day containing the entire day's postings. To change your settings go to http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/options/globaloutlookdh-l You can request a password reminder from this page if you have forgotten yours.
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