Strategic Legibility

Routledge eBooks · 2024 · 1 citations

• Computer Science
• Business
• Computer Science

This chapter considers three publicly engaged humanities projects connected to the Department of Public & Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona: LitLabs, Drag Story Hour, and the Learning Games Initiative Research Archive. The projects serve as case studies for a discussion of how publicly engaged humanities scholarship produces multiple meanings for those within and beyond academia, meanings that can be leveraged as different currencies at specific moments and over time. The chapter emphasizes the concept of strategic legibility, and explores the opportunities and challenges for thinking through publicly engaged humanities work as part of the everyday humanities experience in both higher education and community contexts.

In praise of stupid

Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

• Psychology
• Social psychology

The concept and the application of the smart city are increasingly being critiqued for their underlying neoliberal ideology, which privileges efficiency in capital accumulation and management over the subjectivity and necessities of everyday human life. There are similar concerns being expressed about smart games’ ‘invisible hand’, controlling rather than creating felicity and salubrity. In this chapter, we unpack these underlying and interlocking ideologies where they converge: in gamified smart city technologies. We are especially interested in the ways such technologies are used to solicit public participation or instead to create tokenised and disempowered forms of cooperation rather than foster deep democratic engagement. We argue for an appreciation of the ‘stupid’ in cities, games and politics, a prizing of the slow, the reflective and the critical as essential components of a just, humane and enjoyable world.

Sustaining Software Preservation Efforts Through Use and Communities of Practice

International Journal of Digital Curation · 2020 · 1 citations

• Computer Science
• Computer Science
• World Wide Web

The brief history of software preservation efforts illustrates one phenomenon repeatedly: not unlike spinning a plate on a broomstick, it is easy to get things going, but difficult to keep them stable and moving. Within the context of video games and other forms of cultural heritage (where most software preservation efforts have lately been focused), this challenge has several characteristic expressions, some technical (e.g., the difficulty of capturing and emulating protected binary files and proprietary hardware), and some legal (e.g., providing archive users with access to preserved games in the face of variously threatening end user licence agreements). In other contexts, such as the preservation of research-oriented software, there can be additional challenges, including insufficient awareness and training on unusual (or even unique) software and hardware systems, as well as a general lack of incentive for preserving “old data.” We believe that in both contexts, there is a relatively accessible solution: the fostering of communities of practice. Such groups are designed to bring together like-minded individuals to discuss, share, teach, implement, and sustain special interest groups—in this case, groups engaged in software preservation.
 In this paper, we present two approaches to sustaining software preservation efforts via community. The first is emphasizing within the community of practice the importance of “preservation through use,” that is, preserving software heritage by staying familiar with how it feels, looks, and works. The second approach for sustaining software preservation efforts is to convene direct and adjacent expertise to facilitate knowledge exchange across domain barriers to help address local needs; a sufficiently diverse community will be able (and eager) to provide these types of expertise on an as-needed basis. We outline here these sustainability mechanisms, then show how the networking of various domain-specific preservation efforts can be converted into a cohesive, transdisciplinary, and highly collaborative software preservation team.
 [This paper is a conference pre-print presented at IDCC 2020 after lightweight peer review.]