Dear Humanist,
This project from a student at MIT (User Labor Markup Language (ULML)is pertinent given that today is May 1. And I find the question of the fair and productive use of labour online, including academic labour, one of the most interesting at the moment. For instance ‘My Experiment, a project from the Science community here is the UK, is a good model of ‘online collaboration’ as it ‘saves’ (or efficiently uses) academic labour through the process of sharing academic energies and resources. It doesn’t add unnecessary layers to the research process, but perhaps does what computing has always promised to do, and this is make our tasks more efficient and less labour intensive. http://www.myexperiment.org
We are probably on the verge of some major structural shifts in how universities manage academic labour through their computing networks and indeed this is reflected in broader social and economic arrangements. The city where I live, London, is the archetype of post-industrial city that doesn’t make a damn thing. All London makes are sandwiches for people who work in offices. It is almost impossible to get a decent pair of locally made boots and the idea of an English made car is a foreign to England in the 21st Century as sheep and whale blubber are to modern Australians.
The point is that a lot of universities and large organisations are building systems (cyberinfrastructure or otherwise) that exploit labour of some form, but often without an equal understanding of the labour relationships that occur through these systems. The value of any collaborative system, that are increasingly being used by humanists everywhere, is the value of the small steps taken to reach useful intellectual goals. However, it is how these small steps are managed and exploited that raises some very interesting questions. Are we creating ill-considered ‘Dikensian’ factories of the mind, or are we using our efforts and energies wisely to build useful knowledge about the world where we still critique the tools at our disposal to reach those goals?
Kind regards,
Craig Bellamy
Message: 1
Date: Thu, 1 May 2008 07:59:37 -0400
From: Burak Arikan <arikan@media.mit.edu>
Subject: [iDC] User Labor
To: idc@mailman.thing.net
Message-ID: <C1B300AA-927C-4214-94F9-4D324D12D35E@media.mit.edu>
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Hi everyone,
Today is May Day, we celebrate the social and economic achievements of the labor movement ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Labor_movement ). In this important day, we wanted to announce our project User Labor.
User Labor Markup Language (ULML), is an open data structure to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor for distribution. We believe that universality, transparency, and accessibility of user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable service cycles in social web.
Please see the examples on the User Labor website. Your feedback and contribution is very important to improve this project.
Thank you,
Burak
