Both radio activism and gender advocacy within F/OSS illustrate how
technologies acquire political meanings within technical communities. In
examining these sites, we can observe how activists who are concerned with
expressing political beliefs do so through engagement with technologies. Geek
communities are important because they are situated…[Read more]

At the turn of the millennium, scholars and pundits reflected on how communica- tion systems could shape events and societies, often while basking in the perceived glow of the then-novel Internet. Others pled for reasoned engagement with the interplay between communication infrastructures and the social life of knowledge, a much-needed corrective…[Read more]

Abstract: The freedom of research is a cornerstone of our civilisation; in many ways it can even be seen as a human right. However, freedom of research does not mean the liberty to cheat. Cheating in science – deliberate falsification of evidence to support a hypothesis – is not only academic misconduct; it is also a crime against society and the…[Read more]

Short description (video lecture) of what you can do, when you “do chresiology”, part 2 (slides).

Book review of Low Power to the People

Review of Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism

The United States ushered in a new era of small-scale broadcasting in 2000 when it began issuing low-power FM (LPFM) licenses for noncommercial radio stations around the country. Over the next decade, several hundred of these newly created low-wattage stations took to the airwaves. In Low Power to the People, Christina Dunbar-Hester describes the…[Read more]

Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. Hacking Diversity investigates…[Read more]

This chapter examines how activist ideals manifest in the realm of practice, emphasizing the reality of technical expertise running afoul of participatory goals in the practice of radio activism. A major plank of the radio activists’ work was the promotion of technical participation to novices through various activities such as radio s…[Read more]

Twenty people spent a weekend gathered around two refrigerator-sized FM radio transmitters inside a large truck parked on a busy street. These large machines were unwieldy: over thirty years old, they were heavy to move, frustratingly dark to work in, and required high electric current to operate. They were not in working order; they were filthy…[Read more]

This article follows radio activists engaged in a combination of policy advocacy and broadening access to technology and skills through hands-on work. In practice, this largely played out as a systematic elevation of “technical” work and downplaying of policy/advocacy expertise, even though both were salient features of their work. The article arg…[Read more]

This article names and examines carbon vitalism, a strain of climate denial centered on the moral recuperation of carbon dioxide—and thus fossil fuels. Drawing on interconnections between CO2, plant life, and human breath, carbon vitalists argue that carbon dioxide is not pollution but the stuff of life itself and thus possesses ethical and e…[Read more]

This paper examines imaginaries of work and labor in “open technology” projects (especially open source software and hackerspaces), based on ethnographic research in North America. It zeroes in on “diversity initiatives” within open technology projects. These initiatives are important because they expose many of the assumptions and tension…[Read more]

This is the presentation I gave in Global DH Symposium 2021. It is about training a Handwritten Text Recognition Model for 18th and early 19th century Ottoman Turkish bureaucratic documents. I am using a platform called Transkribus for the training. The project is still in its early phases and I am happy to chat about it!

El Archivo de Mujeres nace como un proyecto al interior del Grupo de Investigación de Escritos de Mujeres, que tiene entre sus objetivos rescatar y publicar escritos de mujeres para comprender mejor la experiencia vital de las mujeres en el relato histórico. Así, el Archivo de Mujeres es un repositorio creado para la memoria de las mujeres, un lu…[Read more]

This presentation introduced the pedagogy behind the 2020 course Digital Publishing with Minimal Computing, designed by researchers from the University of Maryland (United States) and CONICET (Argentina) to teach minimal computing approaches to North and South American students. The class is part of the Global Classroom Initiative at the…[Read more]

The Black Panther film is the nexus between the what could be and the what could have been of Black futurity. Afrofuturism and its incarnations is reflective and invested in recovery and reclamation. The bibliography, then, is a technology for recovering Black artifacts and resituating those artifacts alongside contemporary entries in an attempt…[Read more]

Drawing on archival research, this article introduces several Russian poems by the Arabic mahjar poet and writer Mikhail Naimy (Mīkhāʿīl Nu’aymah) (1889-1988) for the first time to scholarship. By examining the influence of Russian literature on Naimy’s literary output, we shed light on the role of multilingualism in generating literary identit…[Read more]

Medicine has long framed race relations in the Caribbean-that basin where African and European cultures have met from the beginning of the Colonial Period to the twentieth century. Whether Sir Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum and President of the Royal Society of London, who as a physician wrote about African medical beliefs and…[Read more]

En 1974 la administración del Partido Popular bajo el gobernador Rafael Hernández Colon adquirió exitosamente la Puerto Rico Telephone Company (PRTC), cuyo dueño previo había sido el conglomerado International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT.). El estudio busca entender las causas y consecuencias de lo que se consideró ser un cambio monumental en la…[Read more]