librarypunk - 034 - Political Economy and Radical Digital Humanities

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

This week we’re joined by Miriam Posner and Matthew Hannah to talk about digital humanities stuff! We talk about creating a Marxist political economy for DH, and what it means to do Radical DH. We mention map projections, labor issues, self identification, and why the Silent Hill III remake is bad. Student collaborator bill of rights Postdoctoral Laborers Bill of Rights | hc:26741 | Humanities CORE  Levels of Digital Preservation (DLF)  Do Better - Love(,) Us | Do Better Labor  Links to Miriam’s Stuff Miriam’s website On DH The Radical, Unrealized Potential of DH How Did They Make That? Bunch of tutorials (a lot of people use these in their teaching) Why is it so hard to do digital humanities in the library? On supply chains, etc. See No Evil The Software that Shapes Workers’ Lives Breakpoints and Black Boxes: Information in Global Supply Chains Links to Matthew’s Stuff Matthew’s website A Political Economy of Digital Humanities Vision Statement A Political Economy of Digital Humanities: New Directions CFP for ACH 2021 On DH  Inclusive Infrastructure: Digital Scholarship Centers and the Academic Library Liaison

What's up, you digital dreamers? It's library punk. I'm Justin. I'm a scholarly communications librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are she, they. I'm Jay. I'm an academic metadata librarian. My pronouns are he, him, and Arthur's here, too. What are Arthur's pronouns?

Arthur's pronouns are Your Majesty and Your Royal Highness, because he is a king. Oh, that's right. Put some respect on the name. I feel like I've asked that before. Fucking dumb. My name is Carrie. My pronouns are she, her, and I'm a health sciences librarian. And we have guests.

Would you like to introduce yourselves? My name is Mary Posner. I am a professor at UCLA in the Information Studies Department, and my pronouns are she and her. Hi, everyone. My name is Matt Hanna, and I'm an assistant. and professor of digital humanities at Purdue University, and my pronouns are he, him.

Yeah, thanks for coming on. We got talking, was it just last episode? No, the episode with Article Finder Network. We got talking about digital humanities because Jay and I saw a really cool digital humanities presentation a couple weeks ago that I saw some new tools that I hadn't seen in a while, and I was like, I have not been keeping up with digital humanities stuff since grad school when they were like,

this is where your job, this is where your history degree will get you a job. And it didn't. And did it get you a job? No. I think it's incredibly relevant. I select for the sciences. So, no, not really. William Mary didn't even do digital humanities when I was there.

Oh, I dabbled in digital humanities for a hot minute, too, from about 2010 to, 2013. So yeah, I've been there done that as well. Signs your child is dabbling with digital humanities. Yeah. Has your child been texting about digital humanity? L.O. L.L. L.L. L.L. L. L. L. L. L. L. L. L. L. L. L. L. L. L. L. L. L. We're going to talk about digital humanities and political economy. And so we're just going to jump right into it. And I wanted to ask for people who may not be familiar with the digital humanities, what are they? That is so contentious.

It's like the subject of a lot of agitaph always. A lot of debates. Yeah, a lot of debates about in the digital humanities. Indeed. I have a really simple definition that works for me, and I just say always digital

humanities is the use of digital tools to explore humanities questions, and both parts are important. important. Like, you're using the digital tools in hopefully exciting, interesting ways that are challenging. And then you're exploring the humanities questions because, of course, you don't ever answer a humanities question. That's not the way the humanities works. You don't ever find the true meaning of Jane Eyre or anything like that. So that's, that definition has always just served me just

fine. What about you, though, Matthew? See, my plan was to pause long enough. so that you would have to tackle that. But like a good Marxist, my definition is dialectical. Oh, I see. Half of it is applying computational tools to the humanities, and the other half is applying the humanities to computational tools and technology. And so one of the things I'm interested in is how can we use humanistic forms of critique to analyze things like data, algorithms, artificial intelligence, social media, things like that?

So I'm kind of trying to do both and. That's really good. I like that. He must be a communist. I feel like if I were in the movie stalker and like went through the zone to go to the room that grants your deepest desire, it would be like what the hell is the digital humanities I want to know. That would be what the zone would tell me. And then everybody else in the zone would just shake their head sadly. Like that's your deepest desire, huh?

Yeah, I'd be like, what? Fuck you, Jay. Fuck you. Go fuck you. yourself. Are we slandering Tarkovsky right now? No, no, that's what we'd be yelling at you for, for going to the zone to find out. I think we're specifically slandering you.

Three hours into the movie, we get to the zone. And then somebody says, what is digital humanities? God. 76 shots in to an 88 shot movie. Yeah. The crowd boost. There's the dog. Yeah.

I tried doing that many shots and I didn't finish the movie. Yeah. It's hard off scoff. I got sleepy. An acquired taste. I'll finish it one day. Maybe. I do get sleepy a lot, though.

Solaris. Yeah, that was more or less. There's societies called, like, what, the society of computers and humanities, humanities and computing. It sounds kind of really out of date now whenever I read it. It does, but they had a session where they were like, should we change it? And everyone was like, no, it's fine because it's as vague as everyone wants it to be. And I think we kind of had some, a little bit of this came up when Kyle from Agap, Labor Kyle, was talking about digital humanities being sort of like this tool that reaches out into, into,

between the academy and the community and gives us a way of defining new structures to do things in a different way. So in that situation, we were talking about providing video games as art and we were talking about industry issues.

But yeah, he's a big digital humanities person. That was, I think when I first started thinking about, we should do an episode about this. So then we were recommended you. I've reached out on Twitter and everyone, I was like,

tell me someone who's doing something cool, digital humanities and I want to hear about it. And everybody always says Miriam. Yeah. Everyone agrees that Miriam herself is not cool, but Miriam can talk about cool things when pressed. And the second definition I want to get out of the way is what is political economy because we're going to be talking about that a little bit. I'm going to let Matthew take that one.

Yeah. So, and you know, I just wrote a piece that's coming on debates in the digital humanities that's basically trying to advocate for a Marxist political economy for this discipline or field or whatever you want to call it. And so when I think of political economy and specifically Marxist political economy, I think what it refers to is moving beyond thinking of economics as some kind of independent force out in the world that exists and that structures our lives and our material conditions and that's sort of an objective sort of universal thing. And really thinking about it in terms of politics and in terms of ideology and in terms of social conditions and material conditions

and connecting those things together. And so for Marxists, this means thinking through things like class relations and putting class relations back into the equation. And so one of my sort of particular interests in digital humanities is trying to figure out what a class analysis of digital humanities might look like. And what a political, a political economy of digital humanities might look like and how we could make the discipline or field a little bit more egalitarian or fair or equal and respond really to a sort of persistent critique of DH, which is that it is part of a neoliberal takeover of the university. And, you know, in the article, I basically say, let's not say that DH is not part of the neoliberal

takeover of the university because everything is part of neoliberalism. You can't escape that, especially if you're not if you're at a major university in the United States. So instead, let's imagine how we can maneuver within and from below within this neoliberal sort of hegemony. And think about what ways can we mitigate those things, what ways can we promote solidarity and those kinds of questions. And so when I think about political economy in a Marxist sense, I think about really trying to connect things together that, that economists might say, well, it's just economics. You know, this is separate from class or from that sort of thing. I'm so happy you say that because for the longest time,

I was very like anti-digital humanities. I went into no part of it because it just felt this like hollow neoliberal nonsense of let's text mine haughty trust for no reason. Like it didn't feel like I had a purpose and that's all I ever heard about it doing. So thank you both for being on. having those really good definitions of things. Well, no one's saying it's not also that. It's not that.

It's also that. But yeah, I was so hesitant because I'm like, you know, they're just caring about things now because computers are involved. No, there is certainly. That's a valid critique. Yeah. But, you know, I think digital humanities has been around now long enough to pick up people who have different politics, perhaps,

than those of some of the founding members of the community or have different reasons for getting involved than some of the earlier administrators. I think probably Matthew and I are an example of a couple of people with different politics, but also from the beginning, especially women of color have critiqued digital humanities like vociferously from within. And if you look up some of the work that Moia Bailey and Anne Conquin and Amanda Phillips,

Fiona Barnett did, like, you know, back in 2010 when you guys were dismissing DH. You know, I mean, they've been levying those critiques for a long time. And I think they've made a real impact. Yeah, because I'm in a digital collections grant writing class right now, actually. And I'm trying to like, and it is very, the good thing about the course is it's very straightforward. It's like, here's what grant writers want. They want you to talk about DEI and they want you to talk about sustainability. And if you're not talking about those things, don't bother doing an application.

But there's also parts of it that are, you know, what kind of labor are you going to be writing into a grant? And so do you feel like that has kind of shaped how the digital humanity, have gotten sort of this reputation early on. I always got the feeling they were sort of doing it to keep history departments afloat or things like that. Just based on what the ALA was telling me as a recent graduate and as a graduate student, that was what it came off. Oh, there was a moment early on, I think, where I also have perpetuated this and been

part of it. And there was a narrative that if you do the digital humanities, You can get the grant funding. You can get the tenure line job or whatever it is. None of which is really true. None of which turned out to be true. Sadly. You know, there are ways you can leverage some of the DH stuff.

And I do believe, you know, like my job, I would not have gotten without the DH components. So I'm not totally a disbeliever either. But, you know, my question is, should we be doing things where we're basically the payoff is we'll get you a job, maybe? and I just don't think that's really a healthy model. And I think now most people would say they don't use that rhetoric anymore of like, oh, we're going to get everyone a job because they're doing digital humanities. And it was, you know, and the academy's falling apart. I mean, let's be real.

Like if you're in a large number of disciplines, you are watching the total collapse of your field in real time, especially in the post-COVID era. And so one of the questions I think Miriam and I have come together on is this notion of infrastructure and how we could speculate about better infrastructures that don't sort of promise things that can't be delivered and instead promote things like solidarity. You know, for example, and this is just my particular bugger bear, but for example, we are seeing unprecedented labor strikes across academia right now. Graduate students are on strike. It's like Columbia. You, Michigan was on strike.

And where are the posts in solidarity from the major D.H. organizations? There's just no attention to it at all that I can see. And that's just a shame. I mean, I think some of these associations, and they're great groups. I mean, I love being part of them. But I just think, why aren't we putting up solidarity posts, even putting out calls for fundraising from some of the folks that are tenure track faculty?

So that's one of the things we're working on right now in terms of infrastructure is thinking about, you know, what I've started calling solidarity infrastructure. I like that. Well, you know. Are you ideas on why that might be? Well, and I think like labor in the academy is just in crisis in general right now because, I mean, if you look at how student worker pay like shakes out, you can make more at Target than you can. working IT at a university as a student worker. So I mean, like, we can't stay. Like, the fact that universities have relied so heavily on building up student

employment as a means to fill labor gaps is really showing now because of how much COVID has changed that now. Well, I was listening as I was listening to. I think it was Jay, maybe Justin, talking about the grant writing class and how DH, you know, historically has been so tied up with grant writing. I mean, for a long time, like, and still, doing a DH project really depends on getting some outside funding from an outside funder, all of which are like large philanthropic organizations or federal organizations. And so because of that, I think. think many of the DHS organizations have developed a kind of Lisa Simpson complex where we all want to be better and raise our hand higher and do better within the system that we've been kind of assigned.

Rather than, as in some other fields like African American studies or ethnic studies, we haven't quite grasped that that system itself is something we need to work around rather than within speaking as a, you know, a perfect example of Elisa Simpson myself. I understand that intimately. I'm more of a Homer Simpson. I'm both vegetarian, vegan, and Buddhist. Yeah. I'm none of those things, but spiritually.

Where does Garfield fit into this universe? Yeah. Garfield energy. Yeah. That's you, Carrie. Where's the lasagna? God, that TikTok of that guy impersonating Matt Berry doing Garfield is living in my head for rent-free right now. I don't charge rent for anything that lives in my head because I'm not a fucking landlord.

Oh, wow. There you go. Wow. I was going to drink my wine. You took it to another level there. So when I was reading over some of the documents, you give us a lot, all of which are going to be in the notes, because there's plenty for people to read through. but I had to cut it down. Please.

Everyone had time to read something. That's the Lisa Simpson energy right there. That's right. You mentioned the lab model of digital humanities. Is that a good starting point? I really don't know. Or do you want to talk about field-level theories of political economy? Which way is the better way to tackle this political economy of digital humanities question?

Matthew, do you want to talk about the lab model? I think that was something you introduced. Sure. So one of the ways in which we could think about, and I don't know if this is what you mean by the lab model, but we've been thinking a lot about labs and things, and I've been doing some work with various collaborators on labs. And one of the places that digital humanities often gets criticized as neoliberal right-wing or neoliberal sort of administrative is from this notion of the lab. And so when you think about lab spaces as sucking up funding or thinking about, you know, absorbing resources that could go toward other areas of the university or maybe to pay student workers or whatever it might be. And Digital Humanities has really tried to build on the lab.

So the lab really became a centerpiece for a lot of the work that folks were interested in doing. So we're getting a lot of funding to build labs and whatnot. And so one of the ways we could think about labs is, you know, I kind of joke around about, collaborative places where you provide a space for redistribution of resources. So thinking of ways that if you are receiving funding from your university, what are you putting it toward? Obviously, some of that money might go toward equipment that you need for folks on campus, but are you thinking in a distributional way about folks that might exist in your area?

And so some of the work we did was think about library liaisons, for example, and how library liaisons often get sort of cut off from the digital humanities center, digital humanities lab, and while they're often the source of much of the expertise in the area and the source of connection to researchers, scholars, and things. And so, and, you know, we did a series of surveys of major digital humanities centers, and what we found is, yeah, exactly that. The liaisons rarely meet with the folks in the center. They're often sort of designed to be point people, but not actually integrated into any project. they're very, very rarely given opportunities to train on methodologies that they might be interested in, or digital humanities scholarship of any sort.

And so to me, that's just another example of the inherent elitism of academia, which is to say that certain labor gets valued way more higher than other forms of labor. And, you know, I think a lab could be a space on campus to mitigate some of that if it's done thoughtfully from the beginning. So for example, here at Purdue, I got, you know, I was tasked with building a small space and I got a small grant from a data science initiative. And I redistributed that funding for graduate student conference travel. And basically, the criteria to get the funding was you had to do something related to digital.

And that was basically up to me to decide. And so I just started giving out these small grants for students to go place. to do all kinds of interesting work in their disciplines. And, you know, that was very popular because there wasn't any other funding on campus for humanities graduate students to do that. The other thing I'd like to do, if I'm running a lab, I try to integrate staff, faculty, adjuncts, graduate students,

even undergraduates, because there's often a weird dichotomy where continuing lecturers and adjuncts aren't included in little grants like that, where they don't get funding because they're not expected to be around. Often though, they'll be around for like eight to ten years or something. So it's like some of the early experiences I had really opened my eyes to the fact that adjuncts often feel like they're not connected at all. And so if you can give a little pot of money to an adjunct instructor wants to build a really amazing digital humanities project, they're so excited about that because they just don't have those opportunities. Yeah, that stratification between tenure track faculty and everybody else is so real. It's so real, real, real, real.

If you're at an academic institution, and I spent five years as staff before I moved into a tenure track role, and it was like everything flipped immediately. Yeah, I can't say enough about how different everything became when I became tenure track. And I think that, yeah, a lot of faculty have no fucking clue how hard a lot of the staff work on campus. staff and adjunct faculty and librarians. And it is a, yeah, a continuing source of irritation that people are not rewarded, as they should be for their labor on campus.

Another component of this, too, I don't know about any of you, but, you know, when I went to graduate school, it was like I was at a public university, and I thought, well, I'm at a public uni, like, this will be cool. Everybody will be kind of like me, first-gen academic, you know, first-gen college student, first-gen grad student, whatever. And I was shocked at how elitist everything was. Like, I had, you know, in graduate school, I had colleagues who, their parents bought them a home while they were attending graduate school at a public university, you know, and not even like one of the top 20 public universities. So it was really shocking to realize that the elitism and the class structure goes all the way down. and that in fact most people who are in academia are upper middle class sort of backgrounds. And they just did a study recently that showed that most people who get a PhD,

I think something like a shocking amount, like 50% had a parent who also was an academic or had a PhD. So that's just another example of like the ways in which we can intervene. And digital humanities is a great space to do this because it is so inherently collaborative. and because it breaks down a lot of hierarchical structures and that it is interested in networks of collaboration. But sometimes I see the discipline falling into the same traps that it was putatively getting away from and reinforcing some of this thing.

And one of the things Miriam and I have become very interested in is why is there no Marxist digital humanities? Where are the Marxists? Where do they go? Marxism has been around in the academy and beyond for a long time, and we're seen since 2016 a real resurgence in the United States of left-wing political populism, and yet nobody's talking about Marxism in DH. Well, that seems to be a really interesting phenomenon that I'd like to explore.

Yeah, and sorry, this is just stuck in my head when you were talking about the lab model. That was also because a lot of universities got really interested in DH and then didn't have programs already happening, so they just tried to do it, and that was why, like, people ended up cut out. Yeah, well, now, yeah, you just got me thinking about that period when universities hired dumb postdocs like me to, like, start a center somehow on our own. And, you know, of course we failed and burnt ourselves out. But I guess what I wanted to say about DH and labor is that, you know, if you've talked to grad students or postdocs who've been around the block on DH projects, a lot of times they'll be a little bit cynical about like who gets billing like above the title as as the kind of project author and who's like below the line because because of the context the academic context of DH means that the hierarchy is replicated in the way that people are credited. So all of that is to say less bluntly that like Often the tenured faculty member whose name is on the project is not the one who's actually

been doing the work on the project. And obviously, that needs to change. One of the first things that I did when I got my job at UCLA was to sit down with a bunch of students and write a student collaborator's bill of rights because I saw that our program was growing and that as the program grew and as faculty we didn't know got attracted to the program, who could say exactly how they were going to decide who did what work, and particularly how many of them were going to ask students to do labor that should be compensated, but instead give them course credit. That was my particular concern.

And so I'm proud that like we said no, like that that should not happen. You know, if students are doing labor for you, they need to get paid. Got me to make that money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

So anyway, I'm sorry. I know someone else had something to say. No. I would feel bad if we talked more than the guests. But, yeah, when you said the faculty lead is not the person doing the work, I just wanted to jump in, but I didn't want to interrupt you. But I was like, yeah, it's me. Because I spent like yesterday uploading, you know, spent eight hours uploading oral histories, you know. I just see this happen all the time.

I don't even really call most of the projects I do digital humanities. It's just sort of like digital projects that need to live somewhere. And then no one else really provides any support. So it's kind of fall into the library. And I have a background in the humanities. So it's easy for me to jump in that role. But I worry about, you know, doing it equitably going forward. Well, in any digital humanities project worth the title of humanities,

will cite the people that are doing the work. They'll get some kind of recognition. And as Miriam says, they should get paid. So, you know, I think that's just good practice. If people are working on your project, students, librarians, postdocs, whoever they are, they should be cited on the project at least. And, you know, unfortunately, I mean, I think most folks see that, but I think sometimes, you know, the marquee.

And, you know, ironically, I've discovered that the marquee folks that lead those projects know less about digital humanities than the people doing all the work. Like, they know nothing. They don't know any tools. You know, you ask them about Geffi. They have no idea. And it's just kind of an interesting phenomenon where we still have these academic structures, these academic class systems that have persisted for hundreds of years. And, you know, one of the things I think I'm a. especially invested in is thinking about ways that digital humanities can at least help maneuver

us around some of that stuff because I think most folks I meet in DH are at least aware of it and interested in other models for the academy. Yeah. And I mean, if you establish a labor system that adjusts the model for compensation on projects like that, that potentially shifts the model going forward. So, like, I work in knowledge synthesis a little bit. So if that changes the work that potentially digital humanities librarians are doing on digital humanities scholarship in the labor relationship, that potentially changes the labor that knowledge synthesis librarians are doing in the labor relationship as well, potentially. I mean, depending on how you want to define a person's job or what deserves extra compensation on top of a person's basic job duties or

whatever. But anyway, if grant funding is involved or whatever. Well, and I think here is a, yeah, whereas like usually knowledge synthesis is published or grant funded, you know, it's, it's not always, you know, the grant funding is not always the same. I think like this is a question too about infrastructure. because we've seen the way that perpetually grant funding projects has resulted in a sort of unhealthy binge and purge model of projects and results in those situations where like the librarian is tasked with maintaining like an ancient server that no one thought about, no one thought about who was going to take care of it like five or six years down the road. And yet if it gets turned off, then like someone's dissertation goes down the drain. I mean, this has happened. I've seen it happen dozens of times.

And so we need to, this is a question for infrastructure. I mean, we really need to think about how we can make infrastructure that's enduring and persistent and reliable and equitable. Yeah, I was actually going to, I brought this up in my grant writing class and I asked specifically and no one got back to me. I'm going to have to bug the instructor. But it was when you create a digital humanities project, when do you sunset it when you're planning the grant? Which is, you know, is it, how long do granting agencies want it up? Do they want it up five years? They want up ten years?

They don't want to hear about it. I mean, they want you to have a plan for sustainability. But really, I mean, funding agencies aren't there to support something forever. You know what I mean? So it's really not their concern. after a few years. Yeah, I feel like there should just be a point where you just like wrap it up digitally and you put it in a repository and be like, if you want to access it, it's going to be a little bit harder,

but it's long-term preservation now. Yeah. Well, there are some people, thank God, who are thinking about this with a lot more nuance and knowledge than I could bring to the situation. But there are protocols for preserving very important. various layers of the project, for example, keeping the data separate from the interface and maintaining accessibility in various ways. So yeah, it's totally possible to do, but someone has to be knowledgeable enough to plan for it and someone has to be kind of recompensed for doing that work

of preservation. Yep, just taking some notes for myself there. And also I'm going to ask about that that student collaborator bill of rights, because I'm sure the first response we're going to get is Can I see it? Oh, yeah. Because I want to see it. So I'll get the link from you later. Well, here, yeah, let's, this will be an experiment because let's hope that it has retained its place on UCLA servers.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it should still be there. I was fixing some link rot today for like that when the NIH changed over to the new my NIH interface, whatever. And I just emailed our medical library and I said, do we still need this? And she said, yeah, we still need that. Remember when the Purdue owl change theirs? But I was like, do I still need to update this?

Do not get me started on the National Institutes of Health and everything that they have been up to? And they only wear running shoes? There's also a postdoctoral scholars Bill of Rights that's out there that was developed. That's right. You know, there's Miriams and then there was this other, this other. this other investment. And it was the same goal. It was basically to show scholars, students, you know, these are some of the rights that you should demand. It was kind of a guide toward, don't take a postdoc that's going to have you build a DH Center. There's also,

it's a little late for me. Tangentially related, but could definitely plan on this. I know the Digital Library Federation, one of their working groups or something, made a a best practices for digital projects that definitely talks about, especially contingent labor and precarious labor. Like if you are going to have a grant-funded position or student labor, how best do that in your project, especially if you are writing up a grant for it or designing the project or anything? I've been doing digital curation professional development for the past few months. So Justin, I will find that and then link it because it's a very good document. I feel like it could probably be very useful in the digital humanities, even though it's geared towards, like, librarians

working in, like, digital collections. I find that, like, a lot of the better informed things that I see come out of DLF, don't you think so? You know, people who actually get it. Yeah. Just a bunch of DILF's running around. I mean, one time I was a DLF forum fellow, and I posted about it on social media, people thought I was saying, like, DILF forum fellow. I mean, it's true. Yeah, I mean, it's not totally wrong. I always try to tell my students, like, look to DLF because I think, you know, that's a place where good things are happening. Students, look up to your DILFs.

Look to DILFs. Look to MILF. There's the future. Where would we be, honestly? Indeed. I've got a quote from one of the pieces. I probably should have put which one. But it's many of the problems we have faced supporting, quote unquote, digital humanities work may stem from the fact that digital humanities projects in general do not need supporters.

They need collaborators. Libraries need to provide infrastructure, access to digitization tools and servers, for example, to support digital humanities, but they need thoughtful, skilled, knowledgeable humanists to actually work on it. And so you were talking about infrastructure. And I think a lot of times when just in the library when we talk about infrastructure, we just mean platforms. And I have to explain again and again that I need labor to do stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

That's critical. Yeah, I think that that quote was from my piece about why it's so hard to do DH in the library, which I wrote when I was just a baby. postdoc. But it's true. I mean, you can get funding for, you know, software. You can get funding to, like, you know, get server space for a certain amount of time. But it's the labor that you need that will, that is, you know, paradoxically the hardest to fund. And paradoxically, also, some of the least theorized.

I mean, there are a few folks out there that, theorize labor and labor relations, but they're few and far between. And nobody's really doing sort of a theoretical Marxist approach toward labor and thinking about, you know, things like the, you know, the labor theory of value and how that impacts what we're getting out of our students and how we can use those tools that have been developed over hundreds of years to really ensure that we're working from solidarity and not from some kind of exploitative capitalist, you know, notion of labor. And so, you know, that's something that, surprisingly, there's not a lot of work being done in.

And yet there's so much work that needs to be done in developing these projects. And we're bringing in so many people from the libraries world and from students and all this. And so, you know, it's an opportunity, I think, but it's also sort of disturbing how few people are really talking about labor. at a very deep level. It's much more of a like, well, yeah, we should value labor and make sure people to treat it well. And, you know, I was in grad school, I was a union organizer

for a couple of years. And it's, it's, God bless those folks, but, you know, we're seeing this insurgents of labor activism and union activism. And, you know, if you're at a university that has a union, good for you. If you're not,

bummer. But how can we connect our DH organizations, which are so based in, like, our collective will to union organizations and really tie those things together in really interesting ways? And that's what I'd like to see happen is to see, like, the Association for Computers and the Humanities trying to team up with, you know, the AFT, the American Federation of Teachers and thinking about ways to promote solidarity and promote union activism. So, yeah, it's a growing area. I think Miriam and I are sort of hoping to generate more interest, and we shared a vision statement with you, which is really, really nascent, but we're hoping folks will build it with us and join this sort of growing interest area and help us build this thing up.

Yeah, hit us up. Yeah, I realize it's early days when I saw the paper, so I don't want to push you too hard on like, what have you already figured? out. But it is interesting to, yeah, it did get me thinking about like, then the grant writing class, I've just got me thinking about like the community aspect of it in terms of if I'm going to bring in someone, you know, I was writing down ideas and it's like, oh, should I get a graduate researcher for this? Because that does bring money into the area, this, you know, is rural area that I work in. And, you know, the whole reason we have a medical school is because we just

had no doctors, you know, so that's why we set up clinics all over the place that are run by the medical school. So, you know, if I'm bringing in this, this money from grants, how I'm I most ethically supposed to be using it. And that's weighing more heavily on me than just being a regular supervisor where I can be like, yeah, you know, your job's not doing too good. You should be applying like somewhere else. And maybe it'll give you more money if, if you get the offer. I can do that easily, but as a supervisor, but as someone who's like, you're going to work here six months and then you're gone. That's a whole different level of trying to be. like how, who's this benefiting?

Well, and I think the fact that swaying heavily on you is already a good sign. That's a good starting point because it means you're thinking ethically about the role that you're taking on with this grant. And, you know, there's only so much you can do with a grant, too. I mean, there are limitations on what you can spend money on. But I think being cognizant of the lived material existence of the people that you're interested in hiring is a good start, at least for me, to think about. out like, okay, you know, you're a student, what do you need? What would make your life better? And can the grant help supply that? So maybe it's giving them a higher wage than the university's, you know, sort of expectation for a minimum wage, or maybe it's figuring out if there's a way to, you know,

provide some sort of mentorship or something as part of this project where they're getting something out of it as well. And, you know, we're not going to solve any of these problems from within capitalism. I mean, that's just not likely to happen. But I think that those of us in library world and those of us in DH world can maybe think about ways to use our positions to help, at least, make it a little less onerous on those other folks that we are surrounded by. Yeah. Well, I think someone said something earlier about the fact that the market, the labor market, I mean, academia is falling apart and the labor market is trashed. And there's, a real sense right now about people just like grabbing for any resources they can before they float away.

And so in this environment, it's very difficult to do like long-term planning or to think hard about the kind of community we want to see. But, you know, to me, that's all the more reason that we have to do a better job of like looking to each other for. support and, you know, community because our institutions aren't going to, aren't going to do that for us. Yeah. Matt, I do like your idea of focusing more on labor. It's just kind of the drama I was beating during open education conference because open education conference was like two weeks, three weeks ago. And I presented there two years ago about labor in open education and got a packed room, which was great, and had a lot of people nodding while I was talking and I was saying, you know, if you're doing these open

pedagotchy projects because you can't hire people to curate your OER, you're exploiting your students. And most people were like, kind of like, I get it. Like, because they know the pressures that are on them to do this more affordable teaching style, but they don't have any labor. So they're rarely, really tempted to just have their students kind of do it as part of their assignments. And I think it was just, you know, I keep banging the drum.

We need a conference about open education that just focuses on labor because people have gotten to the part where they've realized, okay, you shouldn't be like asking minorized people for free, like sensitivity reading. So they've got that down this year. They figured it out. That's good. They're like, okay, we should compensate this labor. We're not going to, but we should.

We understand this. So they figured that out. It's something to bring in Robin DeAngelo. It'll be all being right. Yeah, I guess. It's the problem where things happen at a conference, and they just reinvent the wheel every year, and it gets really frustrating.

So it's really, I really want to radically just be like, you can only talk this year if you're going to talk about workflows and hiring and your actual retention of, like, black indigenous people of color in your institution. Otherwise, you can't present. So that's my dream.

It does make me think about intersectionality, though, because one of the things that I think I'm especially interested in in promoting a political economy of DH that's based in sort of a Marxist approach is recognizing intersectionality as a necessity for that kind of thing. Because it's become this weird phenomenon on the left. There are segments of the left, and I won't say who, but there are people out there who have become very sort of, you know, rigorously anti-identity politics. And there are reasons for that, and I don't want to go into all those reasons, and I understand some of the reasons, but I think that a better model is one in which we apply intersectionality in a way that thinks about economics

alongside race and class and gender and sexual identity and all of that, those questions, and ability and all of those questions. And in particular, as these DH organizations, have done a good job of sort of alleviating some of that early white male energy and have brought in a lot of this theoretical, critical theory about race and gender and identity. You know, I think now is the time to sort of connect those things to economics and to think about things like, you know, the fact that COVID-19 disproportionately affects, you know, black Americans economically than it does white Americans, you know, and the ways in which gendered labor is unequally distributed because folks are having to grapple with the pandemic.

And those are all economic questions. And right now the DH organizations just don't, you know, there's not a lot of energy around this. So I'd like to see more discussion, you know, about those questions as well as the other stuff. It's like people forget the identity politics comes out of black, feminist socialist theory. Right. Yes. is a company River Collective, yeah. Yeah.

I mean, they explicitly say we need a class-blazed, race, that approach. Yeah. Yeah. We're really fortunate to have Robin DG. Kelly at UCLA, and I was reading something he wrote about identity and economics,

like, in the 80s, and it was like, he laid it all out. He solved it. He, like, told us exactly what the fucking deal was, but it was, you know, this is like 40 years ago. I'll send you the link, but it's so good. And it's like the answer is so obvious that these two things are deeply intertwined. But we've taught ourselves to be very bad at recognizing those points of intersection.

Well, neoliberal capitalism has allowed us to do the same thing we do with DH, which is to say, if we just focus on this one identity question within a sort of capitalist frame, we don't have to think about how it's impacted economically. And separating those things really does us a disservice because then we say, oh, well, if we just add more, you know, whatever, if we just mix in a little bit more diversity, we'll solve the problem. You know, if we elect a black president, we'll suddenly be free of racism. And that's obviously not the case. And divorcing all of those questions from economics and capitalism is just not going to help us solve any of it. Wait, I thought we did fix that. Oh. Oh, Carrie.

I'm so sorry. I meant to tell you, and I forgot. He was on my calendar, but I didn't put a notice. Remember that guy from The Apprentice? Set yourself a reminder next time, Justin. He was in the calendar. It just didn't have the 15-minute reminder. It does that sometimes.

I love Tom Arnold. It's been a hard few years. He used to be married to Rosanne, you know. Yeah. Oh, working class icon Rosanne. Merrip his mom. I'm curious exactly how my muted laugh sounded. Sorry, I'm coughing.

I decided to take up smoking again because I, but I am also saving for retirement. So I have mixed signals about how I feel about the future. I get that. I get that. I did want to talk about radical digital humanities a bit because this is also a whole other, it could be a whole other episode, honestly, but I didn't want to leave it out because this is really interesting. So, Mary, you give us some articles that talked about radical digital humanities

and how things don't really fit into the tools we use. So we like to make interactive maps and stuff like that. And the concepts of time, space, and uncertainty don't map very well when you're trying to do a PowerPoint. So could you talk about that? And could you also explain topo time? Oh, yeah. I'm not sure I'm the best person to do. to explain Topo time, but I can talk about that bigger question.

Like El Topo? Oh, yeah. Like I. Hunter, you'd ask you? So, like, we know moving through the world that gender is fluid and non-binary and can sort of change from moment to moment and place to place. Race, in some ways, is similar. You know, two people can look at the same person and see, see race in two different ways. A lot of these sort of categories that we encounter, I don't need to

tell you this, your librarians are quite fluid. And yet most of the tools that were given to work with ask us to categorize entities in very straightforward, binary, kind of non-fluid ways. And so there are many, many examples of this. You know, well, for our metadata librarian, I mean, you've, you, it's gotten better, but I know that I was looking at like linked data ontologies and noticing that like there is one UID for mail that everything is male has to point to. And it's like, that's so weird, you know. I'm even on the editorial board of the homosaurus. Oh, yeah, I've seen that. Yeah, so I'm on that editorial board.

And even that, it's so hard to do the kind of work that we do because it's like, by the very act of trying to define something, we're putting boundaries on it and refusing that fluidity on it. So, like, our very thing of having a queer link data vocabulary is antithetical to its own project. It's a weird contradiction to exist. It's a, it's a, it's a question that will hurt your head if you think about it long enough. but that's also the nature of data. You have the option of like lumping things into like inadequate giant categories or you have the option of like parsing things so finely that you risk cutting off part of someone's identity, for example, or saying if someone is bi, they can't also be poly and who knows how people think about their sexuality. So in my mind, like, this is this kind of fluidity and contradictoriness is something that the humanities actually is pretty good at thinking about. Like, we have ways to talk about the fact that categories matter in the sense that, of course, like whether or not your black matters for, like, inherited wealth.

But of course, also there are gradations and various ways of thinking about race that defy those simple categories. So both things exist at the same time. And so what if we were to take on that challenge of thinking about a rhetoric for digital work, for data-driven work that could accommodate that kind of nuance and complexity. And I think it's really fun to think about. I don't think that I've devised any answers. But imagine, for example, a network graph that looked one way, you know, if you're viewing it from the point of view of the U.S. census,

and another way, if you're viewing it from the point of view of just like a person who's part of an extended family with family in different parts of the world. I mean, that could be really interesting because perspective changes depending on where you stand. But the tools that we have, like purport to a kind of universality and a kind of neutrality that doesn't exist anywhere in the world. So I'll pause there and see if that makes any sense. I just wanted to ask about self-ID because that was kind of what you're talking about. like the census data versus self-identification. Well, and even on census data, if you ID your nationality as Australia and it automatically classifies U.S. white.

Nope. Whoops. That was like a 20. That like actually just came out recently on like a census data interpretation. Yeah. So if you, there's a guy. You look like Paul Hogan. Yeah.

But yeah. Yeah. Crocodile Dundee. But if there's a, there's a guy, Hansi Lo Wong, who's the NPR census expert and like his reporting, I've been following his reporting for like the last like three years. And like he has like this whole Twitter thread of like census facts. And one of them is that like if you check the Australian box as your nationality, they report you as white. Wow. That is mind-blowing.

I got to follow that up. That's much fascinating. So really good demography information on there. Yeah. As a huge census geek and as a huge demography geek. Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, I work with a lot of public health people who are always doing. Like, there's a lot of crossover into the, like, I end up doing D.H things even though I don't work with the H.

Like, I do digital public health projects and digital, like, that's a, I do a lot of stuff like that with full. So we are often digging into census data and stuff. And so I'm like, this kind of stuff adds up. We're like, we're doing lead mapping and things like that. So they do stuff like that with our digital humanity center and things like that where we're doing equity-based like DH stuff. Or we've had a lot of like from the University of Minnesota like the mapping inequality project where they're doing some really cool stuff with like the redlining maps and the sand. born insurance maps with like doing really, really deep like street level like block by block analysis on all kinds of deep

level data on historic. Anyway, they came and did like a really cool webinar with our DH lab. Really cool DH project that you should check out if you're interested in equity based DH stuff. Anyway, I'm rambling. But it's interesting what Miriam's talking about because we did a session today in my D.H. class on mapping technology. We're looking at story maps. And I always have them watch that West Wing clip about the Peter's projection map versus the Mercator projection map where they're basically like the Mercator projection map. Did you just out yourself as a sorkin liver? Oh, Matthew. Yeah, I had to do a proper like, you know, I had to like explain the ideology of the Westwood for like 20 minutes before. I could show that clip.

That's good, though. I didn't know about that clip. I'm going to have to... Yeah, and it's great. And basically the clip... I mean, they're laughing at these people. They're like the Center for Concerned Carthagraphers or something, but they're basically like the Mercator map is a colonialist map.

And they go through this wonderful description of why. And I was like, oh, yeah. And by the way, now we're going to use the Mercator map and GIS to, like, do stuff. Right. Yeah. We're stuck with these tools that use not only the Mercator projection, but just like Cartesian coordinates in general. And so one benefit, I think, of being in a digital humanities class

is that you can trace the genesis of these tools all the way back to, you know, the origin of empire and then see how Cartesian coordinates are then very directly translated into the GIS software that we use today. That's so much better than using Aaron Sorkin, I guess. No, no, no, no. Just do a walk and talk. Yeah, do a walk and talk. Fast talking.

It's going. Get some banter. Get your banter. Get some bans going. I think, like, in the, you know, when I came to D.H, maybe in the late 2000s or something, there was a lot of excitement about, like, big D.H. projects that were immediately legible or tool-building projects that people could immediately understand. a lot of respect for that because it's not easy to build shit like that. But, you know, one thing that I've kind of appreciated about being at UCLA

and being among the colleagues that I have is that there's also a lot of interest, or there's a growing amount of interest, I think, projects that are just, like, weird that don't make sense at first view, that make people mad, that people find frustrating. Sorkin Archives. Wow, that could be really interesting, actually. That actually could. My God.

The West Wingnuts. You, Miriam, you were talking in your paper about a digital project that you show your students because it's frustrating to navigate. Yeah, they hate it. Which one is that? It's the knotted line, although I think lately it hasn't been working. This is our ye old sustainability project. But the interface relies on, you know, your ability to like discover points that only expand when you hover over them by accident. And it drives them fucking crazy.

They hate the sound it makes. They hate like how there's no menu. But it's a great occasion. I'm not saying like that automatically makes it good, but it's a great occasion to stop and say, where did we all say that like transparency is the best attitude to have for an interface? Like I don't remember agreeing to that. You know, I mean. More obfuscation.

More obfuscation. I don't know. I don't know. We talk about writing histories and exciting and nonlinear and non-chronological ways. Why don't we think about interface in that way? You know, I'm not saying everybody has to do it, but why have to? haven't we experimented with it a little bit more? Yeah, plus if you write about it, you have so many opportunities to make references to Kafka that people are going to enjoy.

So you can talk about the castle. Oh, yeah. They'll love that. Sadie, you muted. Fuck. Okay. This may be a reach, but kind of talking about how, like, frustration is built in deliberately sometimes for certain reasons. I was watching a video game stream of Silent Hill 3, which, yeah, was designed to be frustrating, like, via the controls.

So, like, as you're navigating through this, like, you know, horrifying hellscape, you are not supposed to be able to, like, turn the camera really easily because walking into a room and seeing, you know, your character first and most and not actually seeing the room at large, it was part of building the, the, suspense of it, but when they remastered it, they took all of that design decision out. And everybody hates the remastered version of the game. Interesting. So, yeah, so when you talk about like interfaces, there is that sort of experiential aspect to it, that simplicity in, you know, UX is not always necessarily the best facet to view it from, I guess. Yeah, I mean, we've all read books that like drive us fucking crazy and we want to throw across the room and yet they've broken our heads

like they're so good. House of leaves. Yeah. So why, I don't know. Why not think about that? I'm sorry, you were going to say something. Oh no, you all continue. I was just raising my hand to let people know that I had a thought. I just had a weird thought moment that when you said house of leaves, I was like, I've heard about House of Leaves from somewhere like today.

That's my favorite book. And then I was like, oh wait, it was from episodes of this podcast. I was listening to earlier today. We were talking about House of Leaves. That's awesome. Or the original House of Leaves, Hopscotch, Bricleu, Cortez-Az-Suh. Yes, hopscotch.

Fucking hopscotch, bitch. You wonder where it is on my bookshelves. So I'm working on a second masters right now and the director of the program I'm in. He studies, like, Latin American hypertext. Wow. And so I'm like, yes, Scott. He's the one who told me about hopscotch.

That's so I've been getting into that lately. Oh, Arthur, you're too sweet. I got through that. I did that shit like when I was a pretentious asshole in college. I'm still a pretentious asshole. I think you were the one talking about the large books phase where you were reading Infinite Jest. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I'm one of those people where it's like I am, if I feel like I'm fighting a book, that means like I love like, I'm very competitive, I'm an asshole. And so to channel that in healthy ways, I like reading, watching, and listening to things that are kind of complicated because then it feels like I win. Oh, that's really good. Yeah, that's how I get it out.

But no, what I was going to say is so as part of the second degree I'm working on. So as you all probably know, like librarians are like our terminal degree is a master's. There is a PhD, but most of us just get masters. But our library faculty, we are a tenure track, but to get tenure, we have to get a second master. So that's what I'm doing right now. And I'm taking a, yeah, so that's fun being a faculty member while also working on a second master's. I'm in a feminist theory seminar right now. And one thing I've really appreciated it and we've been talking about is, you know, how things build and critique on other things.

And, you know, it's a safe space to critique these theories. And one that we keep bringing up is Audrey Lord's, like you cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. And actually a lot of the critiques of that, especially, we recently talked about Carbe Wilson, who does performance art with Virginia Wolf. He's a wolf scholar. And he talks, one of the things, like his point is like, okay, if I don't have the master's tools, what tools do I have? Because in the world that we're in now, it's like with colonialism, we don't know what a world without colonialism would be like at this point. And so a lot of these projects that y'all are bringing up in this discussion that we're having are very much reminding me of how imperfect a lot of our tools, but then how to recognize what that imperfection and what those flaws are and then to work with them or to point them out.

And so that's just, especially when you were talking about like the maps and how like this is inherently like this framework that we're working in is inherently of an imperialist viewpoint. But what does that tell us? And I feel like if the digital humanities stays like does a lot of that work, then that says really good things about what. it can do it, where it can go, and maybe bring people out of this conception that I had of, it was just people tax mining haughty trust until the cows come home. Text mining for hotties. Hotties. Trust that.

I just call that going to the library. I'll text mine for hatties. Better trust it. I think, you know what, that's why I'm sure Matthews had the same experience. I love teaching digital humanities because, like, students come in the room and they already know about intersectionality. Like, they just expect it. They expect us to have a critique. They, you know, they expect us to not be idiots about race and ability and gender. And so they have no trouble seeing these problems with the tools. And so they're not going to, they're not going to accept. at digital humanities that doesn't critique. So, yeah, I just, I love hearing what they have to say about it. Well, Jay, what you were saying reminds me of, you know, the famous Frederick Jameson quote that was said that it's easier to imagine the end of the world

than to imagine the end of capitalism. I'm reading Mark Fisher right now, so, yeah. Oh, no. You've exited the Vampires Castle. Yes. But, you know, but I think that's a similar thing. It's hard to imagine a world in which we could have, complete tools that would respond to all of our ethical and social concerns.

And so the question then becomes, how do we deform or disrupt the tools that we have? You know, how can we take infrastructure and think about new ways of, you know, mixing it up or breaking it or disrupting it? And, you know, I think about some of the work in, like, developing a queer operating system, for example, that was really prominent for a while. You know, those kinds of creative approaches, I think, are really interesting for pushing digital humanities beyond just like, well, I built a new archive of, you know, whatever. More infrastructure weeks.

The people don't have them. More infrastructure weeks. It's like shark week, but. Shark infrastructure week. Infrastructure for sharks. Is that one app that tracks all the sharks and then people comment like, yes, queen go to Visa? Like, is that a digital humanities project?

I mean, absolutely. It's like, me. Names are digital humanities. Mapping which sharks eat what internet lines at the bottom of the ocean when. Those sharks are by heroes. I will say, okay, as someone who's been doing DH for, you know, quite a while now, I will get a little salty when people tell me they're doing digital humanities, and I do not believe that to be the case.

You know, I will. I will. Because, you know what, it is a thing. It does have, like, it has literature. It has a literature. It has, you know, some like canonical things that are important to know. So, yeah, I mean, I respect all kinds of digital practice. But when, I don't know, it's, it's disrespectful, I think, sometimes for people to, like, walk in the room and be like, nobody knows what DH is.

So, like, what I do, which is, like, curate memes on TikTok that is digital humanities and that's something but it's not in conversation with the field. Yeah, there's there are lines and I I'm a defender of the DEH. Thank you. Like I I will go up to bat for DH and I always have even as someone who like very early on in their career like dabbled in DH and like very quickly kind of abandoned it like I just kind of admired. it from afar. But like I I've always got up to bat for it like I you know and I think I very much understand what it is too. Like I could definitely define it if you if you put me in a box and like that was how I had to get out of the like escape hatch. That's how we inaugurate new DH

scholars actually. We get you it's like a it's like you know a scene from skulls we put you in a dark room we all wear robes and you have to define it you know and we all chant. I think I can do Star Trek with that one unbeatable tat like thing that they made Kirk do or whatever. I forget even what it's um. Kobayashi Maru. Kobayashi Maru. Yeah. I could do that.

You could do that. I think I could do that. Just cheat. Navigate this map without clicking it twice. The Kobayashi Maroo projection for maps. Yeah. So we're over an hour. I want to always close on like an hour.

action-oriented question, although I think we've kind of already gotten a lot of it. You've talked about organizing with professional organizations. Do you feel confident in doing this? Because when we talk about here, we talk about organizing with the ALA, we're always kind of pessimistic about it. That laughs says a lot. Yeah, we're not going to do that. You know, I think that Miriam and I would agree that a lot of the DH organizations are prime for this stuff. It's just that it hasn't yet percolated up to the surface. And so I think I'm very confident we'll be able to get something going. I don't know what it will be, but I think that folks will recognize the value of what we're talking about as we do it.

Now, there are certain realities that may impede that, and I don't know. Maybe I'm being too optimistic, you know, so there may be ideological reasons why this hasn't happened yet. And, you know, I like to speculate sometimes what those could be, why it is easier. to focus on certain topics and push those topics and not on economics and questions of solidarity. But for now I remain hopeful. And, you know, some of the organizations in DH are really, really, you know, progressive and interesting and are doing a lot of really good work. So I think it's just a question of connecting the dots and pushing forward. And I was inspired by, you know, some of the reactions we got to our conference panel at the Association for Computers and the Humanities,

which had a pretty good crowd of folks who were, like, radical and ready to talk about this stuff at a way I did not expect. You know, I thought a panel titled Political Economy of Digital Humanities would have, like, two people. But it had a pretty good crowd, and they were excited. So that's a good sign. Yeah, that's exciting. Hi, I want to talk about the Grundrisso for, this is more of a comment than a question. I was kind of afraid that would actually happen, but it didn't.

Yeah, and to tie it. up one last loose end when you were talking about why aren't these organizations getting on board with graduate unionization. It's because they're the supervisors and bosses of those graduate assistants. And I think that's you've got to do solidarity organizing and especially bringing in like adjuncts and temporary employees that kind of the people who are being proletarianized the most quickly and effectively are also going to be the people who are going to build. community solidarity. Yeah, one of the things I always try to remember is that, like, my intellectual commitments can help me figure out where I want to spend my political energy, but I am not in any way expert at organizing.

Like, there are other people who spend their lives learning to do that. So while I may love to walk in to a classroom and stand up at the head of the room and take over, like, that is not my role when it comes to organizing. My role is to like listen to what other people have to tell me. But also, you know, one of the first things I learned about organizing when I was doing some, you know, graduate level union organizing was that the most important thing is to have the conversations with folks and to go talk to people and say, you know, what are the material conditions of your life? Are they working for you? And what ways do you feel oppressed? And can we collaborate in solidarity to figure out how to benefit all of us?

And I think those conversations, even if you're not an organizer, having that conversation with people who are adjuncts or staff or librarians or undergraduates is such a key conversation to be having. And just having that conversation alone could produce a radical reorganization of the conditions in which we're all sort of laboring and working together. And I think that the more we can encourage tenure track faculty and administrators to think, think of, you know, those people underneath them as their colleagues and comrades, rather than some sort of problem to deal with, the more we're going to see a better and just academy. Now I think you are being optimistic. Oh, that was inspiring.

I thought that was inspiring. Well, if you can't have some utopian fantasy to work towards what you have, right? We demand eight days off a week. Only by imagining the impossible. Can we achieve what is possible? Correct. That Oscar Wild Anarchist book I read, it ended that way. Okay, I think that's everything unless anyone had any final questions for our guests. I just wanted to say, I'm new to your podcast. I hadn't heard of it until Miriam suggested I come on with her.

And I started listening to it today, and I'm a huge fan. So I'm going to start sharing it with folks. I trust anyway. And I was consuming episodes this afternoon and just loving it. And, you know, I thought, wow, I'd never even heard of this. So I will definitely be promoting your work and sharing it widely and keep doing what you're doing. Yeah. We know there was an Alexis Library Workers podcast. I did not know this existed.

So it's so cool. It's so cool that you're doing this. I'm going to tell all my students for sure. Oh, thanks. I think, Justin. He was the one that dragged us all into it. Yeah. We started in one February.

Oh, wow. We started in January. January? January? Okay. Yeah. It's almost a year. I'm not paying for this.

This podcast is about making friends on the internet. Yep. Forcing our hyperfocuses onto other people. Traumatizing people. Like I'm really getting into creative coding right now. So I'm like, I wonder if we can get Dan Schiffman on. Do it. Like learning processing.

I'm like, oh, what do we do? Yeah. There's a lot of processing people at UCLA. I just share strange things with people. And of course, we're about the book. What was the leaves book? That's the third thing we're about now. House of Leaves.

House of Leaves. We're House of Leaves podcast. So making friends on the internet, forcing our hyperfocuses on other people and House of Leaves. Nice. Well, I look forward to more of that content. As do I. Great. Thanks so much for coming on.

Is there anything upcoming? Of course, I'll retweet any work that comes out soon. But if there's anything you want people in particular, looking out for? Well, I know everyone really, really loves to read academic articles about global supply chains. Like, that's everybody's favorite thing. Oh, I read what you were saying

about SAP. I've used that before. Like, I worked retail up until like July. That's awesome. And I've used SAP before. And that product is fucking terrible. Yes. So in all of our favorite zine,

postmodern culture, I have a new piece out about supply chains and the software that supports them. So, you know, read to your heart's content. There's so much there. Can't wait. No, I was like, I was like sap. Oh, this is triggering because I used to do order fulfillment. That was like one of my specialties was like buy online pickup and store order

fulfillment. Oh, fuck. Like online order fulfillment. And like if I couldn't fill something like on, third pass, I would be like, I have to sap something and we would have to check containers. Oh, wow. I'm a sap.

And it would be like last, like, item last scene on and it would give you like item level information. Interesting. Yeah. Well, I took the same training that supply chain managers take to learn SAP to learn the supply chain modules. So, man, anytime you want to talk. But I know what it's like as like a store level

employee. That's fascinating. Yeah. It's like how I interacted with it and like I didn't even have a login for it so I'd have to have someone else log in for me and then type in the information like they'd type in the skew and do like searches for me and stuff. That's so cool.

And then we also ran store inventory on it too. Or like there was like some cross inventory systems anyway and then there was also like because it was outdoor retail too and especially when we started having supply chain issues during COVID. It sounds like an amazing job.

Yeah, I worked at REI for four years. Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah. That's like being Elizabeth Warren staffer or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it kind of is.

Wow. But how many regrettable tattoos do you carry? I have no tattoos. Okay. So I'm afraid of commitment. Aw. But I have a lot of. lot of gear.

Not House of I gave my copy to my nephew because it was time to move on. Mine sits on my bedside. Okay. Well, thanks for coming on.

Thanks, John. Anyway, I was really excited about the supply chain stuff. Oh, well, yeah. As a supply chain fan. Well, I mean, aren't we all? Big fan of supply chains. Aren't we all?

Huge fan. Huge fan of the supply chain. Huge, Jerry. Huge fan. Well, thank you, so much for having us. This is really, really fun. Thanks y'all for coming on. Yeah, thanks for coming on. It's been super interesting. Good night.