marcell mars 4 jan van eyck - extension proposal

8/6/2019 Marcell Mars 4 Jan van Eyck - Extension proposal

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RULING CLASS STUDIES EXTENSION PROPOSAL

NENAD ROMIC aka MARCELL MARSo EXTENSION PROPOSAL

Jan Van Eyck in the first six months of my research was a dynamic hub whichprovided me a number of collaborations,ideas and opportunities to work on myresearch. I would extract fewmilestones:

Tracing Concepts[i](collaboration with Edwin Gardner) a project exploring

traces of different ideas and conceptsin (and in between) differentdisciplines. The first phase of thiscollaboration materialized as acontribution (20/25 pages) to theforthcoming issue 28 of Volumemagazine where it got status aparteso it is possible it will be printed asseparate booklet.

Visualizar11[ii]Ruling ClassStudies was selected as one of the ten

projects for the international projectdevelopment workshop and a theoreticalseminar Visualizar11 at Medialab Pradoin Madrid. Ill work on mappingGoogles technical infrastructure aspart of Ruling Class Studies from June13 July 01.

Lets share books[iii] as part of myearly phase of research at Jan Van Eyckon Jan 30 I wrote a blog postexplaining how one can share bookstoday. It got quite some attention. I

was invited to give a lecture and run

workshop in London at Queen Mary andReally Free School. In April, I startedcollaboration with recently foundedIgnorant Schoolmaster And HisCommittees, a bookstore and publicspace in Belgrade focused on legacy ofYugoslav humanities. I ran workshopLets share books, initialized makinga DIY book scanner and gathered peoplefrom Ignorant Schoolmaster and hackersfrom Skill sharing project together.

Data Surfers (collaboration with Amber Frid Jimenez ) as part of

Ambers Computational design course weran three days workshop at BergenNational Academy of The Arts ondesigning after exploring the publiclyavailable datasets.

From January 2011 I also gave lectures atShare Conference (April), Nothing willhappen (April), Mikser Festival (May) inBelgrade where I presented my research.

BIBLIOGRAPHY, REFERENCES AND TOPICS FIRST 6 MONTHS

Working on Ruling Class Studies acertain number of topics stood out andbecame points around which my primarygoal of producing critical theoreticalinstruments to measure the political,

ethical and professional accountability

of GFAeB to their proclaimed missions,

advertised practices, and o a world

where their monopolies are taking root. will be structured. These themes are:

History of (software) labor and theboundary work construction ofboundary in between field of softwareprogramming/engineering/development andthe rest of the world in pursuit ofprofessional goals: acquisition of

intellectual authority and careeropportunities. The books and articles Iread were: James Beniger, The Control

Revolution: Technological and Economic

Origins of the Information Society

(Harvard University Press, 1989).;Martin Campbell Kelly, From airlinereservations to Sonic the Hedgehog : a

history of the software industry (MITPress, 2003); Nathan Ensmenger, Thecomputer boys take over: computers,

programmers, and the politics of

technical expertise (MIT Press, 2010)j

Thomas F. Gieryn, Boundary Work andthe Demarcation of Science from Non

Science: Strains and Interests in

Professional Ideologies of Scientists,American Sociological Review 48, no. 6(December 1, 1983): 781 795.

The traces and historical relationsto counterculture on todays hackers

and corporate world: Fred Turner, Fromcounterculture to cyberculture Stewart

Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and

the rise of digital utopianism

(University of Chicago Press, 2006);

Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving grace (BBC, May 23,

2011).


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NENAD ROMIC aka MARCELL MARS Collaborative research in the age of

digital networks. In my blog postLets share books I explained how touse Calibre and Zotero, free softwarethat allows us to cataloging andsharing books, and managebibliographies and references. Thatblog post was the foundation of the

workshop with the same name I ran in

London and Belgrade. The todays world of production, and

distribution of books: Journal ofLibrary Administration, Volume 47 Issue1 & 2 2008, Living with Google; SivaVaidhyanathan, The Googlization of

Everything and the Future of Copyright,University of California Davis LawReview, Volume 40 Issue 3 2007;

and in particular I focused on exploring the biography of Google:Steven Levy, In the plex : how Googlethinks, works, and shapes our lives

,1st ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster,2011).; Siva Vaidhyanathan, TheGooglization of Everything, 1st ed.(University of California Press,2011).; Ken Auletta, Googled : the endof the world as we knowit (New YorkN.Y.: Penguin Books, 2010).

PLANS FOR THE FUTURE: Visualizar11, The Present Of The Books, Auctions &Currencies

Visualizar11: July December 2012(and further)

The selection of Ruling Class Studiesfor the Visualizar11 gave me greatchance to focus on development ofmetrics of corporate involvement,development and investments on top ofpublic infrastructure of free software,but even more important is theopportunity to get feedback from peoplelike Dietmar Offenhuber, Amber Frid

Jimenez (she was invited to be tutor andsupervisor for Visualizar11) andAndrewVande Moere.Medialab Prado organizedthe logistics for others to join theteams of ten selected projects. Im veryhappy that Klemo Vladimir, one of thebest programmers I know joined my team.As one of the most important parts ofRuling Class Studies is to visualizeinfrastructure of GFAeB and devisemetrics for them, two weeks atVisualizar11 seems as the best possiblestart for the foundational development

of metrics I want to continue andmaintain for the years to come.

The proposal for first two weeks during

the Visualizar11 is production of themap of Google's technicalinfrastructure, analysis of its design,categorized by rules how Google governsusers' and developers' access to theirdata, services and developmentplatforms. The map covers the wholespectrum from trade secrets (e.g.distributed fs), commercial services

(e.g. gdocs), nontransparent FLOSSdevelopment (Android) to open process ofFLOSS (e.g. Chromium).

During the Visualizar11 for the firsttime I will couple two main tracks ofthe research I did up to now on RulingClass Studies:

collecting/aggregating, annotating and finally structuring data (I do someof these things from 2007. here:http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/17743766485180924817/label/rulingclassstudies &http://www.diigo.com/user/marcell/rulingclassstudies or both together at:http://friendfeed.com/rulingclassstudies)

representing the data. i hope we will be able to do that on Google's very owninfrastructure: e.g.http://code.google.com/apis/charttools/index.html)

After two weeks on Visualizar11 and

defining how to work with data aggregatedand visualization I hope that theoutlines will appear of what Im aimingat with Ruling Class Studies to showhow much Google depends on, builds on top, gives back to, invests in freesoftware movement and projects incomparison with their own closedsource/trade secret infrastructure.

In the future this project should be thefoundation for comparative analysis ofFacebook's, Amazon's and eBay's technical

infrastructures and their governance ofusers' and developers' access to theirdata, services and development platformsand I will continue to work on this andfurthering research of Google.

The Present Of The Books: July 2011 March 2012.

After I started working on Ruling ClassStudies I realized how much the themesthat stood out during the research onGFAeB are related to the medium of the

book. I guess that being in theenvironment of Jan van Eyck that is sopassionate about books as printed matterdraw my attention to this. That is why


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NENAD ROMIC aka MARCELL MARSduring the following period of myresearch and hopefully extension I wouldlike to focus and raise discussion aboutthis on JVE more.

The first thing I propose to do is theseries of small events titled ThePresent of the books focusing on thisset of common narrative in which many

issues of Ruling Class Studies overlap.

Together with scientific papers, booksare considered as the symbol of theknowledge society, therefore, thequestion of production and reproductionof books in the time of digital networksdraws attention to much broader audiencethan most of the other issues raised bydigital networks.

The implementation of advanceddistributed networks by Google on thisfield resulted in the crisis in many ofthe neighboring industries. In the caseof the digitalization of the entire

written intellectual heritage, theproblem of the politics of access toresources, but also to the furtherdevelopment of digitalization system,grew much bigger than what initiallyseemed as a simple result of thisprocess repository of the digitalmaterial.

Google entered this field while stillbeing a very small software corporationand digitalization of the books was morea side project whose connection to thecore business of Google (search) wasvague. In the short period of time,Google grew into the huge corporationthat can make relevant moves in the

whole set of industries. As the power ofGoogle grew, what was side project in2000. also grew into the quest fordigitalization of every book ever madein the history therefore becoming one of

the scarier scenarios of corporationtaking the complete control over therepository of the intellectual heritage.

Unfortunately, the other actors in thefield are not coming near to theefficiency of the corporative approach.It is important part of Ruling ClassStudies to reconsider what are thosepoints in which the rest of the worldlagged behind the opportunity todigitalise the knowledge and make ituniversally accessible. The question

should be: Whos supposed to organizethe worlds information and make it

universally accessible and useful[v].

To research this, I also propose togather those who are working on theissues of digitalization anddistribution of books both conceptuallyand practically, on both sides. Theproposed series will contain lectures,discussions, workshops and digitalpublishing case study at Jan van Eyck.

Lectures/discussions Two sidesseries:

Google Books vs Europeana.euDIY Book Scanners ( Daniel Reetz) vs

Google Scanning (Marin ari)Googlization ( Siva Vaidhyanathan) vs

In The Plex (Steven Levy)

Presentations Archive Interface:Ubu.com ( Kenneth Goldsmith)

PAD.MA(Shaina Anand & AshokSukumaran)

Internet Archive (Brewster Kahle) AAAAARG.ORG

Gigapedia/Library.nu

Workshops/Infrastructures Digitalpublishing case study: Jan Van Eyck:

bringing e readers/tablets (Kindle,Sony PRS950, BeBook Neo, iPad) to JVE

building DIY book scanner for JVErunning Zotero & Calibre workshop +

setting up network infrastructure forp2p libraries

design and typography for e inkdisplay distribution

Auctions & Currencies:January 2011 December 2012.

What perhaps is the largestaccomplishment of GFAeB is that theyhave managed to clear away bunch ofunadjusted middlemen that gained theirstatuses in the period before digitalnetworks and never got adjusted to them.

Probably the most difficult sector toconquer will be the one of speculativefinances.

Two ultimate optimizations are: auctionsin the field of trade and currency inthe field of abstraction.

In the final part of my research I wouldlike to focus exactly on those segmentsof GFAeBs business and functioning. Tobe more precise, I would like to focus

on the questions of digital currencies,crypto currencies [vi], micropayments, NFC(Near Field Communications) andauctions. Many industries/sectors were


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NENAD ROMIC aka MARCELL MARSconfronted and were radically changed byemerging network technologies. It seemsfinancial sector is the next one. I gavea lecture on Bitcoin on April 17. Hereis the graph of search popularity injust last two months:

CONCLUSION

For my research, that I think it isreally crucial in this moment in whichregulation of digital networks isbecoming one of the crucial politicalissues, to develop further it isessential to stay as researcher at JVEone more year, as I never had a time andresources like I got in this six months,but most importantly, the environment.

Staying additional year at JVE would alsoenable me to continue fruitful exchange

and collaboration I have already started with fellow researchers, most importantly Amber Frid Jimenez , Edwin Gardner and Haseeb Ahmed.

Notes:

[i] http://tracingconcepts.net

[ii] http://medialab prado.es/article/visualizar11_proyectos_y_comunicaciones_seleccionadas

[iii] http://kiberkomunist.posterous.com/41479850

[iv] http://www.shareconference.net/

[vi] http://google.com/about/corporate/company/

[vi] http://www.bitcoin.org/

marcell mars 4 jan van eyck - extension proposal

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