Hi Everyone,
After our talk about blogging in class on Wednesday, here’s a space to explore potential tools that might be useful in promoting greater online discussion possibilities. If you have a tool you’d like to suggest, leave it here in a comment with a little description of what it does.
Thanks!
For our small exploration into the world of Wikipedia editing, I took a crack at revising the entry on Theatre Journal, which is one of the top journals in theatre studies. Prior to the revisions I submitted yesterday afternoon (4 March 2015) at 19:36, the page had had no activity since 9 July 2014, but even the edits made last year were only minor; the content of the entry had not been substantially altered since March 2012. When I came upon the entry, it looked like this:
As Michael had suggested to me during our Wikipedia workshop, I began my edits by looking at entries on other academic journals. I quickly realized that at the very least I could add some information about the history of Theatre Journal, find some much-needed citations for the entry, and make minor corrections to the entry’s content (e.g. updating the name of the current editor). I thought that my edits took a huge step in improving the content (and usefulness) of the Wikipedia page.
And thus ends the editing process, right?!
Minutes before class last night, I decided to check on the entry and see if anyone had swooped in to revert my edits, and I was surprised to see that Randykitty published additional revisions to the Theatre Journal page less than an hour after my own revisions went up. Before I decided to get personally offended, I checked out the revision history page.
I synthesized the edits one at a time. “Cleanup” … okay. That’s generally a good thing. “Remove contents list” … I don’t like the idea of removing any of the material I added, but perhaps I added something to the entry that should not have been included. I am new to this and others out there know much more about it than I do. “Add abstracting info” … absolutely no idea what that means, so I’ll have to check it out on the page itself.
As you can tell from the revised page, Randykitty’s revisions did a lot to cleanup the entry and make it look more like a standard Wikipedia page–and by that I mean that there’s now magically a Contents box listing the page’s different headings.
I had added information about the journal’s history, but I hadn’t made a section heading. Thanks, Randykitty. The abstracting and indexing information is also something that I would never have done. Another positive improvement. My list of recent special issues was removed, but as Randykitty informed me, pages should not be used as directories. After some reflection (and my initial anger at having my own [perhaps not so] invisible labor become even more invisible), I understand Randykitty’s rationale behind removing my list as it was. Indeed, I had merely cataloged the last six special issues of the journal. However, there still might be cause to mention some of the journal’s past special issues in order to demonstrate the types of subjects that the journal considers noteworthy. Perhaps this is something that I should discuss on the talk page. It’s also interesting to note that my brief list of notable previous editors did not get removed. My list, which consists of Sue-Ellen Case, Susan Bennett, and Jean Graham-Jones, is factual, although the inclusion of prominent female scholars (and the omission of male editors) clearly demonstrates a political positioning on my part to fight back against systemic bias.
The only other noticeable deletion was a sentence taken from the front matter of the journal itself about the publication’s subject matter and approach. I had revised a simpler version of the statement in my own edits, so I had some attachment to its inclusion, and I haven’t yet decided if the removal of the statement helps or hinders the page’s content. My shift from “performing arts” to “theatre arts” (another conversation worthy of the talk page) was retained in a different sentence, which I like, but the deleted statement also included information about the journal’s scope, and I think that such information could be informative for Wikipedia users.
It’s interesting to consider that some of Randykitty’s revisions could have been made before my own. Certainly the abstracting and indexing information could have been generated previously, as could the LCCN and OCLC numbers (whatever the heck those are). Yet, Randykitty, whose user page indicates that s/he spends most of his/her time editing articles on academic journals, waited until after I had made some significant changes. At the moment, though, and having just finished reading Joseph Reagle’s book chapter “Nazis and Norms,” I’m deciding to perpetuate the notions of goodwill and collaboration. This is part of the process, right? If I want to continue to edit and talk about the Theatre Journal Wikipedia page, it looks like there’s someone else here with whom I can engage.
Perhaps some more discussion fodder for tonight!
Hi Folks,
If you have a Twitter account, you can follow @CUNYITP. I’ll post # of seats available updates usually a day prior or the same day of workshops this semester.
Best,
S
The readings I ended up with all focus on collecting and revealing the sexism and other forms of discrimination that seem to form the fabric of some developer communities’ culture, and that are being broadcast (often anonymously) through apps and websites.
Moya Z. Bailey explores how the very semantics of “geek” and “nerd” that we use to describe those working in web development are gendered male and white (though Steve Urkel does come to mind as a notable exception) She challenges us to move beyond an “‘“add and stir’ model of diversity, a practice of sprinkling in more women, people of color, disabled folks and assuming that is enough to change current paradigms.”Her solution is for DH scholars to be “brave” enough to expand the definition of the field to include projects created by and for people of color, and to push for structural change in how sites and apps are designed in order to include within them the needs of the disabled, women, etc.
Greek Feminism Timeline of Sexist Events is a wiki where folks compile sexist actions/statements coming out of the tech world. These include anything from rape at conferences; to the sharing of an app like Titstare, which lets you “stare at tits,” presented in September, 2013 at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 conference, to private incidents made public such as when Biologist Dr. Danielle N. Lee was asked,”Are you an urban whore?” by an editor at the Scientific American after she declined an offer to write for free. She wrote a snarky post in response which was originally taken down, but has been returned.
Reply All reports a story of racial minorities at Colgate College who felt uncomfortable in an all white environment. After creating a support group and demonstrating, they became targets of hateful speech and threats of violence on the anonymous YikYak app. The college was powerless to prevent the hate speech as YikYak would and could not block their access.
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These readings convinced me beyond a doubt that there are real structural problems in the evolving society we’re creating online.Further, I see real value in collecting evidence from around the web and bringing to light discrimination and the deeply troubling possibilities for bullying in an anonymous cyber world. In fact, one point these readings (and especially Reply All) drove home to me is that the web has great power to force conversations about issues that might otherwise fly under the radar. Because the internet with its possibilities for anonymity encourage people to say what they really mean, many deep-felt prejudices can be exposed and (maybe, hopefully!) addressed. It’s this “maybe, hopefully” part that stuck a bit in my craw in these readings. They are full of problems and severely lacking in solutions. (Beyond exposing and collecting this evidence which, again, is extremely important.)
How do we make a “structural change? in the cyberworld?” If just telling women to code isn’t going to fix the inequity, then what will? Is a better model the “separate” (and hopefully equal?!) model of HOTGirls, the Atlanta-based non-profit that works with young women of color to train young women in media literacy? (GoldieBlox, the engineering kit for girls, comes to mind here, especially when seeing the pink website.) This whole approach smacks to me of the “American Woman Novelists” problem Filpachi describes.
The only other solution I saw presented was the Colgate professors who try to “take back the YikYak” (my term, not theirs) through posting positive messages and attaching their signatures. The podcast hosts poo-pooed this idea though it did seem to make students feel less isolated and generated many more “likes” than the hate messages. Call me naieve, but I was shocked that students didn’t self-police and it came to the point of needing professors to step in at all. How could so great a proportion of the student body be so complacent/unaware of what was going on on campus? Is this indicative of larger trends in apathy/prejudice? Or about expectations of certain cyber spaces in which folks expect to see hate, and therefore those spaces don’t require policing? Does this mimic any other arena Americans have had for broadcasting hate in the past? And if so, how is this climate any different? And does it require different types of responses?
In short, I’m asking a pretty basic question: Is the cyberworld a reflection of our Analog society? And do the tactics we develop to address structural change in reality also work online? Or is the cyberworld a whole new society? If the latter is true, then there are huge possibilities about how etiquette, social relations, labor relations, gender roles, etc. will develop. If the table (to use one of Bailey’s metaphors) is still in the process of being set, then what tools might historically marginalized groups use to create a very different power dynamic in this new society?
