Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies
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The Quotidian Apocalypse and the Quixotic Cause: An Interview with Author Connie Willis
Get PDFThe writer Connie Willis lives in Greeley, Colorado, home to the University of Northern Colorado (UNC). She is an alumna of UNC and has chosen to deposit her papers in its archives. A pre-eminent science fiction author, her clock- and calendar-defying tales of time travel have transported many fans and won numerous awards. Her stellar reputation in fandom and among librarians as a mentor, peer, and public intellectual is well-deserved and hard-earned. She gives generously of her time at conventions, conferences, and community events. We finally caught up with her in the latter days of Summer 2018, after the Locus Awards and the Westercon science fiction and fantasy convention, and interviewed her about her recent novella “I Met a Traveler in an Antique Land” (first appearing in Asimov’s Science Fiction in 2017 and later published by Subterranean Press in 2018). It concerns a disappearing Manhattan bookshop that may also be a harbor for endangered books. The story’s subject matter is of great relevance for archivists and librarians of the Anthropocene—as is the content of our conversation with Ms. Willis, which ranges from the insidious nature of censorship to the nobility of fighting for lost causes.
Pre-print first published online 11/08/201
The Living Archive in the Anthropocene
Get PDFThis paper presents the concept of the living archive as a system which reflects how social behavior and cultural production are part of the Anthropocene. The authors explore how dominant narratives of both the Anthropocene and the archive work to consolidate power and maintain cultural and disciplinary divisions. The authors refute conceptions of the Anthropocene as a purely biophysical phenomenon that is alienated from cultural practice and of the archive as a comprehensive and nostalgic space. They then introduce the living archive as an alternative representational, creative, and reactive space and illustrate how the living archive can intervene in ecological reality. Finally, the authors explore how the concept of the living archive is enacted and invoked by the practices of the Interference Archive, an independent community archive in Brooklyn, New York.
Pre-print first published online 04/27/201
Documents for the Nonhuman
Get PDFAs the Anthropocene advances, questions about what life on earth will look like in the geological short term are varied and difficult to answer with much specificity. What the Anthropocene has made clear though is that the ongoing existence of life, or life as it is currently understood, is not at all a given. Memory institutions face a challenge on an unprecedented scale - how does one continue the ongoing work of documenting the human record, while at the same time considering how those documents, metadata, and ephemera can be used by the readers of the Anthropocene? How does one document for the nonhuman? While an understandably bleak situation, the Anthropocene allows for realistic questions about the nature of work in libraries, archives, and museums to be asked, and what it means to continue creating records and documentation when they are for entities humans may never encounter. Further, what does documenting for the long term and unknown mean about how we document for humans now? This paper explores the idea of the nonanthropocentric document to illuminate assumptions about the frameworks in which meaning can be communicated and codified and how, or if, this can used to assess what would otherwise be a problem of endless context.
Pre-print first published online 08/25/201
Re-Localizing the Library: Considerations for the Anthropocene
Get PDFThe preservation mission of libraries means that all librarians are futurists. When librarians curate collections, we have to make guesses, and those guesses tell a story about what we value and what we hope for. A dominant story about the Anthropocene is about a globalized, technological future in which libraries and librarians will become obsolete. An alternative, more human story is suggested by place-based scholarship regarding the relationship between human beings and the places we live. A place-based library is more than simply a portal or container for information; the library itself becomes part of a story about place and an active participant in cultural sustainability. Libraries exist as local nodes within a global information network, each with unique community concerns that should be reflected in collections and services.
Pre-print first published online 08/31/201
Troubled Worlds: A Course Syllabus about Information Work and the Anthropocene
Get PDFThe goal of this syllabus is to interrogate the material, and socioeconomic processes which underpin our everyday information work. In particular, we examine the relationships developing between contemporary information practices and what problematically gets configured as “nature”—that messy world of non-human entanglements that often exists beyond the purview of innovation work, whether digital software development or industrial engineering. Much recent work on the environmental conditions of computing has sought to break down technology-nature dualisms in order to expose the implication of information technology in broader social and material ecologies. Library and information professionals and researchers are well poised to deepen this inquiry by presenting alternative nature-technology epistemologies grounded in longstanding analyses of information resources and their consumption. The “Troubled Worlds” syllabus starts with a discussion of concerns most obviously germane to the work of most library and information science professionals: practices at the intersection of structuring information and computing. Building on this attention, we turn to humanistic approaches to thinking through the era of dominant human activities widely known as the “Anthropocene” by introducing poetic, artistic, and activist lenses. We explore how artistic objects representing an increasingly troubled natural world raise awareness of the challenges facing it, as well as how they may incorporate and reshape information for aesthetic ends. We then look to questions of disability justice and how it works in blended built and natural spaces as well as the many different ways in which bodies respond to the toxic environments produced by information technologies. We next consider the newer design approaches to library and information research, specifically asking how design perspectives on digital information objects get inscribed in the Anthropocene. Lastly, we consider paradigms of repair and making and analyze the different valences through which information researchers and professionals categorize and contextualize what is possible with them. This compilation does not provide a comprehensive review of the literature on the environment within the information fields. Instead, it extends this literature to promote experimental research and practice. The modules construct an interdisciplinary and provisional path through the related literature in a form that we hope may be continually adjusted, rearranged, and augmented.
Pre-print first published online 03/15/202
Review of Facing Gaia
Get PDFA review of Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime by Bruno Latour (2017).
Pre-print first published online 10/26/201
Passions Read & Hearts Fed: Science Fiction Orients Library Science to the Anthropocene—A Review of “I Met a Traveler in an Antique Land”
Get PDFA review of Connie Willis' recently-published story, “I Met a Traveler in an Antique Land,” (Asimov’s, December 2017). The setting for Willis’ cautionary tale is a chimeric Manhattan bookstore, Ozymandia’s. The labyrinthine business is a last refuge for endangered books. The protagonist, an ambitious, forward-thinking blogger, rethinks his penchant for all things innovative when he visits the store and becomes conscious of the havoc wreaked upon books by the circumstances of the Anthropocene (wars, weather, bookworms, bookburning, thoughtless culling, etc.). He comes to understand the urgent need for, and complexity of the systematic preservation of information.
Pre-print first published online 11/08/201
Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene: An Introduction
Get PDFIn this editors' note, guest editors Eira Tansey and Robert Montoya introduce the special issue for libraries and archives in the Anthropocene
Material Provocations in the Archives
Get PDFAs a name, “Anthropocene” would seem to signal that this geologic epoch is both because of humans and about humans. The latter implication draws on pervasive cultural ideas about nature which underlie the Anthropocene and its climatic impacts, namely nature as an extractable, endlessly-renewable resource. While scholars in the environmental humanities, animal studies, and critical plant studies have been quick to both diagnose and propose new directions for our engagements with the material universe, scholarship on archival materiality has continued to focus on the archives as an institution for and about human intellectual endeavors. In other words, the archives continues to be an extractable resource. Within the archives animal, plant, and abiotic changes which work against projects of human history are seen as failures, infestations, or disasters – they can never be properly archival. This essay offers a potential corrective to anthropocentric archiving, by bringing together Jane Bennett’s new materialist project of “vibrant matter,” Michael Marder’s vegetal philosophy, and Caitlin DeSilvey’s curation of decay to suggest avenues of engaging archival materiality as meaningful and provocative. As an analytic schema, this focus on the ‘vibrant archives’ does not aim to save records from planetary changes but to begin the work of re-thinking archival materiality (and its destruction) within the context of the Anthropocene.
Pre-print first published online 04/07/201
Information/Control – Control in the Age of Post-Truth: An Introduction
Get PDFGuest editors Stacy E. Wood, James Lowry, and Andrew J Lau introduce the issue on Information/Control – Control in the Age of Post-Truth