An annotated bibliography of the inside of my head

At Alex Bayley’s invitation, I compiled a short list of books that collectively explain, or at least excuse, the inside of my head. Books that say more about me than my resume. Well, my resume suggests I’m a chronic library overachiever, so here are some books that are not about libraries. I think it ended up mostly being an excuse to tell embarrassing bookish anecdotes about my childhood.

This list does not, and necessarily cannot, reflect the many periods of my life where I was so unwell I stopped being able to read books at all. Instead being portals of wonder, books became piles of words I couldn’t process. For someone who learned to read precociously early this has had a profound effect on my reading habits. I’ve become a slower and choosier reader. Words take longer to sink in, now.

At the moment, the inside of my head is mostly white noise and static. This list represents what my brain normally looks like when it’s not trying to eat itself.

These also aren’t in any particular order, except I read the ‘earlier’ books, uh, earlier.

Earlier

His Dark Materials / Philip Pullman
A primary school classmate who shared my name but spelt it wrong insisted our teacher read Northern Lights to us as part of class storytime. I was captivated. Mum bought me the trilogy for Christmas that year. I thought it was brilliant, full of suspense and intrigue and characters that felt real, and also not real. Looking back I think I read the series a touch too early; virtually all the adult references and a lot of the deeper mythology went way over my head. I haven’t seen the TV adaptation. I think I’d prefer to keep my imagination intact.

Antimatter: the ultimate mirror / Gordon Fraser
This was my favourite book when I was ten years old. I’m not even joking. I made a habit of going to the same shelf in the local public library and continually borrowing the same book on particle physics because I found it all so fascinating. I recall liking this book because it had less maths and more science, which I guess means the prose was engaging enough that I could skip the more mathsy parts.

One day someone else borrowed the book and returned it to a different library. I was devastated. I didn’t know how holds worked. I think I waited for the book to come back of its own accord. I’m not sure it ever did. They’ve weeded it now.

A young person’s guide to philosophy / Jeremy Weate
When I was nine I won a prize in the MS Readathon for reading the most books in the whole of the ACT. They abolished the prize the year after I won it, possibly because they could tell I rorted the system by reading all of my younger brother’s thoroughly boring Thomas the Tank Engine readers. (Mum foolishly agreed to pay me by the book.) The prize was a $20 gift voucher at Angus & Robertson.

Normal children would probably have bought a novel or two. I bought an illustrated philosophy book instead, and got the bookshop staff to photocopy the prize gift voucher and paste it in the front. I liked reading about Hypatia. She was illustrated wearing a purple toga and riding a chariot. I thought that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Descartes sitting in the stove was markedly less appealing.

Later

Sand Talk / Tyson Yunkaporta
I haven’t finished reading this yet but I also haven’t been able to shut up about it. It’s incredible. The sharp and clear-eyed prose belies a geo-socio-temporal intricacy that whitefella here can only begin to grasp, of the deep patterns that inform Indigenous knowledge, and how recognising, appreciating and ultimately following those knowledge paradigms might help us all live better on this land.

Nothing I say here will do this book justice. It’s one of the best things I’ve started reading in years.

Hope in the Dark / Rebecca Solnit
I now read this book medicinally. Take a chapter at bedtime, when the news is grim. It won’t fix the news, and it might not fix you, but it will give you some perspective back. I experience time differently when I’m unwell; my perspective narrows, time grows shorter and greyer, I forget the past and can’t see the future. Sometimes Hope in the Dark is a distraction, and sometimes that’s all I need, but other times it helps me contextualise things, reminds me that in many ways we have been here before. Perhaps we all ‘oppose the ravaging of the earth so that poetry too would survive in the world’.

I notice Hugh also included this book in his bibliography. I’ve still got his copy. I’ll return it soon, I promise. Just as soon as hope comes back.

The Anthrobscene / Jussi Parikka
Once upon a time we were all told that doing things electronically was good for the planet because it saved trees. We now know that’s not true, right? Everything that goes into a computer is mined from the ground, and this book combines media studies and earth science in exploring the effects of modern computing on the planet and the materiality of our digital habitat.

To be honest, I didn’t understand most of this book the first time I read it, largely because I found the prose is exceedingly dense. I learned a lot from it on subsequent reads, but I also learned that it was okay to finish a book and say, ‘I just didn’t get that.’

‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ / David Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker
This article radicalised me. I know this is a book list and not an article list, but this piece changed me utterly. I read it only once, on a nondescript evening in March or April last year. It terrified me half to death. I haven’t read it since. It sparked an extended period of climate anxiety, during which time I was convinced there wasn’t gonna be a next year why were all these people making life plans so far ahead didn’t they know the world was ending, but it also galvanised me into seeking the truth. I came out the other end with a very different perspective on ecology, society, and democracy.

‘Time to a Pin-Oak’ / Katie Holten and Chelsea Steinauder-Scudder, Emergence Magazine
The first five issues of Emergence were published in an enormous print volume so I’m counting it as a book.

I first met the word ‘dendrochronology’ on paper at age four, defined in my favourite compendium of miscellaneous facts as ‘dating by counting tree rings’. Unfortunately for me I didn’t hear the word spoken aloud for another twenty years, so I went around proudly telling everyone about ‘dend-roch-ron-ology’ and how nobody needed a calendar, only a tree. No wonder I got picked on at school.

The word stayed with me, though, and I rediscovered its magic through the magnificent Emergence Magazine, easily one of my favourite things to read, a nourishing blend of ecology, culture and spirituality. ‘Time to a Pin-Oak’ mirrors the birth of the universe with the birth of an oak tree, situating our short lives within the unfathomable vastness of the universe. I find this kind of temporal context deeply grounding and comforting. I love everything about Emergence.

That big report we’ve been waiting for has come out (mb you’ve seen it) / Bailey Sharp
In my head I call this ‘the synoptic zine’ because it has a dark wordless synoptic chart on the cover. I lost my shit the first time I read this. I was deep diving into one of Kassi’s latest zine hauls and I stopped everything and goggled at how real it felt. It’s a greyscale comic about the likely end of the world and how our children and their children, amorphous blobs the lot of them, might cope (or not) with the circumstances they will inherit. It hit me in every feel I had.

This later turned up in my zine cataloguing in-tray at work (it might have been from someone’s Other Worlds haul, but don’t quote me on that). I’ve never catalogued a zine so attentively. I made sure the word ‘synoptic’ was in the record. I’d never find it otherwise.

On anxiety: an anthology / 3 of Cups Press
I find this by turns a harrowing and soothing book, a crowdsourced compendium of contributions from mostly England. It came into my life at the end of 2018, the year of climate anxiety and employment anxiety and illness anxiety. I was a mess. I wanted to be heard, and this book hears me. Sometimes that’s all you can do for an anxious person. To say ‘I hear you’ and maybe ‘I feel this too’ and hopefully ‘You’re going to be okay’.

I resonated with ‘Stress reduction for companion birds’ and ‘(F)logging on’. The comic ‘Me I.R.L.’ is by a librarian. I, too, am often a rainy cloud.

On the nature of information: the best of #emptythepocket, issue 4

Reading A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit at Cataract Gorge, Launceston, January 2019. Photograph by the author

I got a lot out of a month’s holiday in Tasmania and in Melbourne, but perhaps the greatest gift was being able to read again. I don’t mean that I was previously illiterate, but rather that I no longer had the energy or interest in reading anything for longer than five minutes. I was (and still am) surrounded by books I longed to read, but knew I lacked the brainspace to absorb and make sense of them, and so I didn’t try.

Time away from work and the internet, and within nature, restored me to something like my former self. I realised I wanted to read again. I had forgotten what this felt like. My body had forgotten how to want to read books all day, and to be able to read books all day, and not have this gnawing pit of sad exhausted panic undercutting every paragraph. I hadn’t realised how profound a loss this was until I got it back.

I had packed four books for the trip:

  • one I immediately lent to a friend (Track Changes by Matthew Kirschenbaum)
  • one I didn’t get around to reading because I was too busy enjoying myself (Terra, volume 14 of the Dark Mountain Project)
  • one I read to contextualise that enjoyment (Into the Heart of Tasmania by Rebe Taylor)
  • and one I made a point of reading only in picturesque places (A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit). It’s an incredible book. I read it at Lake Wendouree, Ballarat; at Buckley Falls, Geelong; at Cataract Gorge, Launceston; at the blowhole in Bicheno. As it happened I read the last one and a half chapters of Field Guide on foot and on a tram, reaching the final line as I reached my final destination, bursting into the most hipster cafe in Fitzroy high as a kite on philosophy and the possible. Brunch was good that day.

Thankfully this spark has remained as I settle back into work and the internet. I still have loads of physical books to read, but I’m also finally making headway on my overstuffed Pocket account. Realising that it’s far easier to choose what to read when your selection is limited, my friend and comrade Hugh recently built an accidental serendipity machine called pocket-snack. It’s an experimental Python script for one’s pocket that presents you with a few randomly selected links per day, out of the several hundred you probably have saved (I had well over a thousand before we got the script to work). It’s helped me clear out stuff that it turns out I wasn’t actually interested in or that was no longer relevant to me, which freed up some brainspace for more worthwhile items. Emptying the pocket has truly never been so enjoyable.

Below are a few gems from the last little while, subconsciously themed around ‘the nature of information’:

Animism, Tree-consciousness, and the Religion of Life: Reflections on Richard Powers’ The Overstory / Bron Taylor, Humans and Nature
Full disclosure: I haven’t yet read The Overstory, the Booker-nominated 2018 novel whose central premise is that ‘entities in nature, and life itself, have agency, purpose, and personhood—and we have ethical obligations to all such persons.’ I’d had it in the back of my head to read at some point, noting that I seldom read fiction of any kind, and already have a to-read list as tall as I am. This review, however, propelled The Overstory to the top of my list.

I have a half-finished zine entitled ‘Five Epiphanies in Tasmania’. I’ve had a hard time pinning down the third, an experience in Ballroom Forest that I’ve likened to a moment of religious ecstasy. Reconciling this with my lifelong atheism has been somewhat challenging—whoever heard of an irreligious mystic? It seems my answer lies not in formal religious traditions, but in a kind of nature spirituality that recognises the consciousness of plants, natural features, and ultimately nature itself. Crucially, it also incorporates the responsibility of humankind to care for nature, while not situating ourselves above it. Review author Bron Taylor has dubbed this spirituality ‘dark green religion’, and his definition thereof is worth quoting at length:

It was within this complicated milieu that, over time, I began to notice patterns. These I eventually developed into the notion of dark green religion. This notion refers to diverse social phenomena in which people have animistic perceptions, emphasize ecological interdependence and mutual dependence, develop deep feelings of belonging and connection to nature, and understand the biosphere as a sacred, Gaia-like superorganism. These sorts of nature-based spiritualities generally cohere with and draw on evolutionary and ecological understandings and therefore stress continuity and kinship among all organisms. Uniting these Gaian and animistic perceptions is generally a deep sense of humility about the human place in the universe and suspicions of anthropocentric conceits, wherein human beings consider themselves to be superior to other living things and the only ones whose interests are morally significant.

To learn that this worldview not only had a name, but was a Thing that others felt and lived and wrote novels about, was overwhelming. I was slightly late to work from reading this article. I regret nothing.

If the map becomes the territory then we will be lost / Mita Williams, Librarian of Things
This sounds like a geography article but it’s not—Mita Williams, a scholarly communication librarian based in Canada, writes on how social graphs and scholcomm ecosystems are beginning to shape, rather than merely guide access to, academic output. The big 3 companies (Clarivate, Elsevier and Springer-Nature) are integrating their component services more and more tightly, which has the effect of widely automating—and locking humans, especially librarians, out of—the scholarly publishing process. Mita also discusses a higher education funding mechanism in Ontario that sounds a bit like the UK’s REF (Research Excellence Framework), in that it determines how much money is allocated to various institutions on the basis of some highly exclusionary and frustrating metrics.

Their models are no longer models. The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, and has begun to control, rather than simply catalog or index, human thought. No one is at the controls.

I won’t pretend to be anything near an expert on scholcomm but this all sounds fairly… rubbish. No wonder people want to dump Elsevier.

Computational Landscape Architecture / Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG
I love trees. I also love wifi. But the two are strange bedfellows. This article explores the impact different species of tree might have on phone and internet reception, leading to ‘the possibility that we might someday begin landscaping […] according to which species of vegetation are less likely to block WiFi’ and the potential use of pot plants in electronic subterfuge. I mean, Geoff also links to an article from Popular Science suggesting wifi is responsible for mass radiation poisoning in Dutch street trees, so I’m not entirely convinced wifiscaping is a good idea, but it’s yet another reminder that computing, like the rest of human ingenuity, exists within nature and not above it.

PROSPEKT. Organising information is never innocent / Regine, We Make Money Not Art
I initially read this before going on holidays, but VR performance artist Geraldine Juárez has some incisive comments for the GLAM sector that I thought deserve a wider audience. The bulk of this article discusses PROSPEKT, her 2018 performance situated within the Gothenburg Botanical Garden, Sweden. The first paragraph, however, is a neat summary of her 2017 essay ‘Intercolonial Technogalactic’ [large PDF, begins page 152]. In it, Juárez critiques the activities of the Google Cultural Institute, which has digitised and published online thousands of museum-held cultural artefacts from around the world, but which curiously offers very little information about its own origins. (It was intended as part of a PR move against French publishers who were suing Google in 2011 over Google Books and breaches of copyright.)

She notes that Google views libraries, museums and other cultural institutions not as true collaborative partners but as ‘gatekeepers of world cultures’: repositories of content to be mined and paywalled. Google reproduces the power structures and cultural biases that gave rise to it, prizing European high culture above all else, and viewing publicly-funded institutions as beacons of ‘inefficiency’ that need ‘disrupting’ by private enterprise. All information is organised for a purpose. It is never innocent. It is never neutral.

The colonial gaze was determined to scan the surface looking for specimens for study, fixing them as objects out of time and out of place, in the same way that digital documents offer imagings of the world at a distance via screens. This is a prospecting gaze – a wandering ogle that examines, sorts and determines meaning and value.

While re-reading this article I was violently reminded of a series of uncomfortable experiences at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart. I’ve never been wild about taxidermy, but TMAG’s hall of lovingly stuffed creatures, with mammals, birds and insects wrenched from their natural homes and drowned in formaldehyde, made me deeply uncomfortable. These poor animals deserve to return to the earth, not spend the next three eternities in suspended animation for the amusement of humans.

Natural Processes: information doesn’t grow on trees / Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Real Life
This piece has had such an impact on how I think about cataloguing that I’m including it again. It reminded me that the very notion of cataloguing and classification has deeply imperialist foundations that bode ill for our efforts at more inclusive collection description. It also reminded me of how my dear mother, a keen gardener, was able to identify every plant photo I texted to her during my trip. Sometimes it’s far better to ask mum than ask Google. Or an app reliant on crowdsourcing and machine learning.

The “herborizer,” a 17th-century nature enthusiast “armed with nothing more than a collector’s bag, a notebook, and some specimen bottles, desiring nothing more than a few peaceful hours alone with the bugs and flowers,” was the passive cousin of the conquistador or the diplomat […] His harmless assertion of taxonomical hegemony over Europe and her colonies actually produced commercially exploitable knowledge for the empire’s gain. He was a researcher, classifying, collecting, qualifying and quantifying imperial loot.

By cataloguing nature in ways that privileged only select facets of a living thing (those that could be seen, felt, or observed in isolation from its natural habitat), the burgeoning fields of taxonomy and scientific classification enabled Enlightenment-era Europeans to distance themselves from the natural world they ravaged. It continues to enable users of the aforementioned plant-identifying app, which propagates this classificatory, imperialist method of coming to know the earth. Taxonomy, with its discrete categories and precise hierarchies, primes us to see nature as a resource, as something to be mined, prospected and extracted for humanity’s benefit (such as improving our wifi). ‘It teaches us to see other life as proximate to us, rather than knowing ourselves as an extension of it.’

The antithesis of Bron Taylor’s dark green religion. The very anthropocentrism to which Richard Powers’ The Overstory stands opposed.

I titled this blog Cataloguing the Universe because it reflected a childhood impulse to never stop learning about the world, about space and time, about my place on this planet. Library catalogues have always been, for me, a path to knowledge: first as I browsed them, now as I contribute to their upkeep. It’s only within the last couple of years that I’ve learned how taxonomies and classification systems reflect the views, biases and priorities of those who create them. It’s only within the last hour that I’ve realised the binary character of natural history classification is echoed within my work as a cataloguer. I can assign a book only one call number. I can either include or not include a subject heading—no parts, shades or relevance rankings, no way to indicate just how well a work relates to the subjects I decide it’s about. It’s not a good system. How can I smash it?

This notion of cataloguing as a means of collecting and producing knowledge, like everything else about the culture I was raised in, is inherently Eurocentric and deeply flawed. I couldn’t quite articulate this in late January, but I can now. This is why I wanted to learn differently this year. To overcome my ecological illiteracy borne from spending 28 years inside on someone else’s land. To learn different ways of seeing the world, so that I might address the harm my settler presence has caused.

The article’s conclusion suggests the first step is ‘to take off our lenses and reckon with the humbling, bewildering condition of unknowing, to [quell] the appetite for legibility of the world that leaves us at a comfortable distance from what we cannot understand.’ I don’t think I’m comfortable enough yet with my own ignorance. I have so much to unlearn.

A #digipres reading list for the total beginner

This is part of an an occasional series, “Digital Preservation For the Rest of Us”.

Sorry, Kassi, I know I said I’d post this days ago!

If you’re a digital preservation beginner, you might be looking for a great resource to help you catch up on where the sector is at. This brief post will include a few choice books and other resources for digipres beginners. They’re in no particular order, and are totally my own opinions.

For the complete beginner, it’s hard to go past the Digital Preservation Handbook, hosted by the Digital Preservation Coalition. It provides lots of accessible, non-technical introductions to the topic, as well as lots of videos, task lists and links to other resources. Have a read of the ‘Digital Preservation Briefing’‘ if you need a gentle introduction.

For a holistic view of digital preservation, I can’t go past The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation by Trevor Owens. The preprint is on LISSA right now, with the monograph due out in early 2018. It does a magnificent job of explaining not just the nuts and bolts of digipres, but the underlying philosophy and theory that informs our practice. I’ve been recommending this since the day the preprint went up, and I fully expect this will be a widely-used textbook for students in the field.

If you’re near a print library or repository of some kind, you probably want a few things from this pile:

In particular, I recommend Practical Digital Preservation: a how-to guide for organizations of any size by Adrian Brown (full of firm, practical advice), Is Digital Different? edited by Michael Moss, Barbara Endicott-Popovsky and Marc J. Dupuis (hint: yes) and, if you’re new to archives and preservation in general, Archives: principles and practices by Laura Millar (I have the 1st edition, but I hear the 2nd is even better).

Due out in March next year is the third edition of Preserving Digital Materials by Ross Harvey and Jaye Weatherburn. Both Australian authors (woo!), the book promises to be a one-stop shop for digital preservation practitioners. I’ll definitely be getting a copy of this when it comes out.

Re-collection: Art, New Media and Social Memory by Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito examines the topic from a curatorial perspective, which may be more accessible to those with museum or gallery backgrounds. I admit I haven’t read this myself, so I’m recommending it sight unseen, but the authors definitely know their stuff.

Finally, for a light-hearted look at the access side of digital preservation, have a look at ‘Accessing born-digital content: a look at the challenges of born-digital content in our collection’ by the NLA’s Gareth Kay. It’s a nice illustration of why digital preservation matters—works will be lost forever if they’re not preserved!

I hope this list is a useful one! Let me know if I missed any good resources 🙂