A shared space for slow reading, connecting and creating
Intellectual ownership
Anna Gerhardus - anna.gerhardus@gmx.at Daniel Moreno Medina - dani@photonbit.es
Expression / connections / entanglements
We are starting a experiment: A virtual library to embrace our cyborgness, connect with other cyborgs, and create entangled knowledge.
Let’s start with thinking about a library. You might imagine a place that contains books, provides a physical space to read and to work and might offer additional services. People might start reading clubs or organize lectures or other events. These libraries are very crucial to a community as they give access to knowledges. Of course, different libraries serve their purpose and have their audiences, communities and fields of interest. The same goes of course for virtual libraries or knowledge bases like wikipedia / wikidata or specific online data bases.
We want to experiment with libraries and want to create a library that allows users to express, share and trace what we will call entanglements based on Donna Haraway’s understanding, that we discover during shared reading sessions. We want to purposefully read, in a collective way and take the time to find shared understanding or the opposite.
What is the cyborg library?
The Cyborg Library is an experiment to allow the users/readers/beings/cyborgs to add their expressions to a common knowledge base. To be used and shared with others. When we are reading and learning we might want to express our ideas that sprout from the content and share it, connect other interesting readings, art pieces or knowledge to it, letting the library to slowly grow. This idea stems from the notion that knowledge is something that is not produced in a vacuum and that all of us might see connections with other work that others might enjoy.
The Cyborg Library is a virtual space that allows us to trace collective slow reading processes and share them with the community. We want to create a space where the connections of and between media we read, create, and find useful can be visualized and used by others. The cyborg library definition, this document, was and is being written with a relaxed understanding of the method of the library.
The Cyborg is you, the cyborg is me
We are inspired by the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway who is critical to the narrative of the division between the human and the non-human (animal), the organic (human and non-human) and the machine (technology), and physical and the non-physical (e.g. the fictional and the virtual) (this is from the text A Manifesto for Cyborgs. Science, Technology and the Socialist Feminism in the 1980s by Donna Haraway from 1985).
The Cyborg is an ironic figure created to overcome binary thinking and help us think beyond them and with them. In traditional libraries we will find all kinds of sources, mostly books and media, yet the division between knowledge production and knowledge consumption is made. Within the cyborg library we attempt to combine these and see production and consumption as an iterative process. We want to show that through our reading new unexpected connections emerge.
Media for us means any kind of input, so it could be books, texts, poems, videos, art, the relations between them, of any kind that could be modeled with the library. The library itself becomes the cyborg that derives its materials from a traditional thinking of book storage and space to interact with knowledge and our ways of processing and expressing new ideas through art and thoughts. From “I, myself, have read this book, and this is what my use of it was, or my opinion”, understanding that reading is a linear activity that ends in the key learnings, to visualizing the different trees that each of us, and as a group, are generating as it happens. En el mundo virtual, una conjetura no se diferencia de un hecho ( “In the virtual world, a speculation is no different from a fact.” ).
An image that can be derived from the last sentence: if we bring closer sharing and creation, and creating from what others shared, we can be aware of the different possibilities between more than one of a pair of linearities of each of our creative spamming trees. The library allow us to see these structures. And play with them. Symbolic and literal. Virtual and real.
To gently move the moment of publishing the more and more to the conception, for all the pathways we might take, artistic creation, academic publishing, to notice how they differ, how can open science influence open arts, or the other way around.
The idea is to gather a community of interested people who are sharing their ideas and allow us all to access new and creative expressions of the information we are reading. We do not provide access to the material but access to the expressions of the community for each other.
For the books we will have a catalog of a criteria that should be addressed so it qualifies for the library.
What is the method of the library?
The Cyborg Library is created to help us trace the connection we are building through the collective slow reading. It is based on two aspects: (1) tracing entangements and string figures and (2) slow collective reading:
- With the concept of the string figures we integrate another aspect of Donna Haraway’s work into the library: ““It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” (Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene) Giving the focus on the connections and the inbetween. Everything is connected to something, we want to look at the connection.
- Through collective slow reading, we want to emphasize the process of connecting through reading and expressing the thought of the material in a way that fits the reader and also the community.
How do we add new things to the library?
We follow a method in three steps whose names and meanings are inspired by the poem “Segador esforzado”, by León Felipe.
In the first step, “siega” (reaping), we identify what kind of thing is the thing we want to include into the library. It can be a book, a picture, a drawing, a poem, a knit, a note. We count with tools that help us reap the grain of the different things, so we will have at least a plain text file in markdown, with a frontmatter metadata. In this stage we only specify the title, the kind of thing, the author and who is writing.
---
class: note
title: Three steps to virtualization
author: photonbit
---
Reading anew the poem “Segador esforzado” by León Felipe, the analogy of making bread and including something into the virtual worlds appeared as delicious as accurate.
During the second step, “molino” (mill), we use other tools that help us identify the relation of this “thing” with other “things” that already inhabit the library. These relations can be by topic, author, time, spatiality. For example, in the first step we could have written a note indicating that the three steps of including a thing into the cyborg library was inspired by “Segador esforzado”, and during the mill step we explicitly create the relations with the poem and with the poet.
---
class: note
title: Three steps to virtualization
author: photonbit
relatesTo: ["Segador esforzado", "León Felipe", "The cyborg library"]
belongsTo: “Virtual Worlds Generation”
---
Reading anew the poem “Segador esforzado” by León Felipe, the analogy of making bread and including something into the virtual worlds appeared as delicious as accurate.
In the third step, the “artesa” (kneading trough), we select and mix the ingredients to form the dough. During this step we take the files from the previous steps and transform them to synchronize it with a wikibase server.
And then we have “horno” (oven), where we can export all the things from the previous steps into a text website, a virtual website, a virtual reality app. This step is currently as simple as collecting all the text and image files coming from the previous steps into a shared directory. Then we can either run the “Museum of some things” pointing to this directory to visualize the virtual world, or share the files with others for further collaboration.
How to participate?
There are three ways of participation in the cyborg library.
- Become a user of the online platform: as a registered user you have access to the website https://library.cyborgs.pt and can provide your expressions and new media to the library, to the community. Send us an email to know how.
- Join the reading and discussion sessions: we plan to have regular meetings at MILL (Makers In Little Lisbon) to discuss, share, and bring in new ideas to the library. This is the place where the community will be connecting with each other.
- Be a cyborg: create and express the ideas, share with the community and define and dilute your opposites / binarisms.