Maintain-ability : A Thesis On Life Alongside Computer Software

Cultural ideas about technology systematically exclude the mundane everyday of maintaining and taking care of them over longue durée. Popular as well as expert views of digital technologies and computer software in particular are oriented towards the novel, new and futuristic. Despite this amnesia, the future is always built on inherited material past, and extends its legacies. This thesis examines what lessons about living with technology can we learn from software maintainers, who behind the scenes keep necessary digital infrastructures – at least most of the time – in good running order. The empirical material of the research was collected through participant observation and unstructured interviews conducted at four events in Europe and USA. Drawing from science and technology studies and anthropology of technology, I identify themes which concern programmers as they give testimony of their lives lived alongside computer software. My analysis juxtaposes maintenance-oriented programming with maintenance practices in general, and contextualizes biographies of programmers in wider cultural, symbolic and technological infrastructures. The findings of this thesis challenge the imaginary of existing software as an atemporal object, and complicate the notions of maintenance as low-status work. Software maintainers exercise considerable agency over the immediate material in their care; code. However in doing so, they also find themselves having to articulate dynamic, interdependent and hybrid networks of relations which they are intimately entangled with, and whose durability depends on the success of their ongoing, indeterminate reconfiguration. Both the programmers and the software they maintain must continuously navigate risks of burnout, bugs or falling into obsolescence. Inspired by feminist technoscience and in response to so-called broken world thinking, I theorize the concept of maintain-ability and demonstrate its application to foreground the situated, fragile and often underappreciated capacity to give and receive care which holds together more-than-human worlds at the dawn of the third millennium

Data Sprint Learning. Exercising Proximity to Data in Teaching Situations

This paper reports on a data sprint conducted as part of a PhD course on digital methods and data critique at the [University name redacted for peer review]. We reflect on how our data sprint contributed to this higher educational setting, and point to ways in which the data sprint method can be developed further based on our experience. The paper discusses how the sprint fabricated a moment of “critical proximity” for students that were mainly working with qualitative social science methods. The data sprint allowed them to put their critique on “big data” into practice by working with selected sets of data from Twitter and Scopus. We reflect on our collective experience and draw conclusions on the use of data sprints in teaching. Data sprints encourage us to engage with feelings of being underwhelmed and overwhelmed by data that provoke our social science way of critique. Our data sprint tangibly demonstrates that data work is in fact “messy”: transgressing ideals of good data management, biassed, ambiguous and open-ended. But instead of turning away from this “wildness” , we urge to make use of it in teaching settings. This wildness allows to step out of conventional modes of critique, and into modes of action. We conclude with a protocol as a practical guide for everyone who wants to introduce data sprints in their teaching

Näkökulmia laatuun

Mace Ojalan esitys Kuvailun tiedotuspäivillä Helsingissä 20.3.2013

Absent Data: Engagements with Absence in a Twitter Collection Process

This paper considers the ways in which silences and absences are a central part of research that relies on automated data collection from social media or the internet. In recent years, automated data collection driven or supported research methods have gained popularity within the social sciences and humanities. With this increase in popularity, it becomes ever more pertinent to consider how to engage with digital data, and how both engagement and data are situated, messy, and contingent. Based on experiences with “missing” data, this paper mobilizes the framework of hauntology to make sense of what relationships may be built with missing data and how silences haunt research practices. Ultimately, we argue that it is possible to reimagine absent data not as a limitation but as an invitation to reflect on and establish new methods for working with automated data collections

Absent Data:Engagements with absence in a Twitter collection

This paper considers the ways in which silences and absences are a central part of research that relies on automated data collection from social media or the internet. In recent years, automated data collection driven or supported research methods have gained popularity within the social sciences and humanities. With this increase in popularity, it becomes ever more pertinent to consider how to engage with digital data, and how both engagement and data are situated, messy, and contingent. Based on experiences with “missing” data, this paper mobilizes the framework of hauntology to make sense of what relationships may be built with missing data and how silences haunt research practices. Ultimately, we argue that it is possible to reimagine absent data not as a limitation but as an invitation to reflect on and establish new methods for working with automated data collections

Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams

This dataset is an sqldump from the database (PostgreSQL version 12.5) that is used to power the open access platform https://www.dbbe.ugent.be/. Contents The database consists of 3 schemas: data - contains the actual data logic - contains other information required to run the database (user roles, revision information, feedback information, ...) migration - contains information on the mapping between the previous data platform and the current one The database dump contains the schema and table creation instruction for all 3 schemas, but only contains the data for the data schema. It can be used to create and populate a database that can be used to run the code hosted on https://github.com/GhentCDH/dbbe. Acknowledgements Acknowledgements can be reconstructed by mapping the acknowledgement to the document table using the document_acknowledgement join table. For translations, the source of a translation can be reconstructed by mapping the translation table with one of the bibliography tables (article, book, bookchapter, online_source, blog_post, phd, bib_varia) using the reference join table