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last time. reading technical texts (latour)positive and negative modalities (latour)who is tim berners-lee?an abbreviated reading of the world-wide web" by berners-lee, et al.what are URIs, universal resource identifiers?what is HTML, the hypertext markup language?what is HTTP, the hypertext
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2. last time reading technical texts (latour)
positive and negative modalities (latour)
who is tim berners-lee?
an abbreviated reading of “the world-wide web” by berners-lee, et al.
what are URIs, universal resource identifiers?
what is HTML, the hypertext markup language?
what is HTTP, the hypertext transfer protocol?
visualizing the web as a collaboratively author hypertext and/or technology and also as a heterogeneous network of people and machines
standards: iso, ietf & the w3c
visualizations: mapping the web
3. outline
general idea for today: networks are not just technologies; they can also be used as tool for understanding sociotechnical systems (i.e., as a semiotics)
what is the problem latour is trying to address with actor-network theory?
how can the world be visualized as sets of interconnected (actor-)networks?
actor-networks
some things they are not (only)
what are they?
as networks/rhizomes?
as inconnected actors (i.e., actants)?
general questions as actor-network questions
a reading of latour’s “clarifications”
4. general questions
what problem does this research address?
who is/are the author/s of the text?
who funded this research?
what is the economics of the work (i.e., who will buy it?, sell it?, use it?)
who are the “dramatis personae” of the article?
othering: who are “we”? who are “they”? what’s a “what” and who is a “who”?
who is the intended audience?
which texts are cited in this text?
what is the stated genealogy of the technology?
where was the text published?
what is “thinking”? what is “reading”? what is “writing”?
what narrative strategies are employed in the article?
what is the stated motivation of the research?
prior to their appearance in this text, who spoke or wrote which statements to whom? where? under what conditions?
5. problem: dichotomy: nature/culture
6. problem: dichotomy: technology/society
7. problem: dichotomy: human/machine
8. problem: dichotomy: real world/internet
9. proposed approach to the problem world as network and/or world as rhizome
look for attachments between people, between words or texts, between machines, between people and machines, between texts and machines, between people and texts, etc., etc.
10. the approach: attachments not dichotomies from bruno latour,
science in action:
how to follow scientists
and engineers through
society (1987)
11. the actor-network approach from bruno latour, science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society (1987)
...picture the following comic strip: we start with a technical sentence which is devoid of any trace of fabrication, construction or ownership; we then put it in quotation marks, add to this speaking character another character to whom it is speaking; then we place all of them in a specific situation, somewhere in time and space, surrounded by equipment, machines colleagues; then when the controversy heats up a bit we look at where the disputing people go and what sort of new elements they fetch, recruit or seduce in order to convince their colleagues; then, we see how the people being convinced stop discussing with one another; situations, localizations, even people start being slowly erased; on the last picture we see a new sentence, without any quotation marks, written in a text book [or technical manual; or piece of software] similar to the one we started with in the first picture.
12. example: text as network as hypertext
13. example: text network 1
14. example: text network 2
15. example: text network 3
16. example: text networks 1 + 2 + 3
17. example: networks of people (i.e., social networks)
18. example: networks of people (i.e., social networks)
19. example: networks of people and text (e.g., citation and co-authorship networks)
20. example: sociolinguistic networks
21. example: networks of machines (i.e, technical networks; e.g., computer networks)
22. rhizome:sociotechnicalinguisticulturalnetwork deleuze and guatarri on rhizomes:
“Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different signs, and even non-sign states. ...”
23. actor-networks: they are not (or not only)... technical networks: The first mistake would be to give it a common technical meaning in the sense of a sewage, or train, or subway, or telephone 'network’. ... A technical network in the engineer's sense is only one of the possible final and stabilized state of an actor-network.
social networks: ...actor-network theory (hence ANT) has very little to do with the study of social networks. ... Whereas social networks add information on the relations of humans in a social and natural world which is left untouched by the analysis, ANT aims at accounting for the very essence of societies and natures. It does not wish to add social networks to social theory but to rebuild social theory out of networks. It is as much an ontology or a metaphysics, as a sociology. Social networks will of course be included in the description but they will have no privilege nor prominence...
(anglo-american) “actors”: ... the word actor has been open to the same misunderstanding as the word network. 'Actor' in the Anglo-Saxon tradition is always a human intentional individual actor and is most often contrasted with mere 'behavior'. If one adds this definition of an actor to the social definition of a network then the bottom of misunderstanding is reached: an individual human -usually male- who wishes to grab power makes a network of allies and extend his power -- doing some 'networking' or 'liaising' as Americans say...
24. actor-network theory as fusion “The difficulty of grasping ANT is that it has been made by the fusion of three hitherto unrelated strands of preoccupations:
a semiotic definition of entity building (cf., “isotopy”);
a methodological framework to record the heterogeneity of such a building;
an ontological claim on the 'networky' character of actants themselves.
ANT asserts that the limits of these three unrelated interests are solved when, and only when, they are fused together into an integrated practice of study.”
25. actor-network theory: networks Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is a change of methaphors to describe essences: instead of surfaces one gets filaments (or rhizomes in Deleuze's parlance). More precisely it is a change of topology. Instead of thinking in terms of surfaces -- two dimensions -- or spheres -- three dimensions -- one is asked to think in terms of nodes that have as many dimensions as they have connections. As a first approximation, ANT claims that modern societies cannot be described without recognizing them as having a fibrous, thread-like, wiry, stringy, ropy, capillary character that is never captured by the notions of levels, layers, territories, spheres, categories, structure, systems. It aims at explaining the effects accounted for by those traditional words without having to buy the ontology, topology and politics that goes with them.
This is the most counter-intuitive aspect of ANT. Literally there is nothing but networks, there is nothing in between them, or, to use a metaphor from the history of physics, there is no ether in which the networks should be immersed.
26. actor-network theory: actors (actants) ANT makes use of some of the simplest properties of nets and then add to it an actor that does some work; the addition of such an ontological ingredient deeply modifies it. ... A network in mathematics or in engineering is something that is traced or inscribed by some other entity -- the mathematician, the engineer. An actor-network is an entity that does the tracing and the inscribing. It is an ontological definition and not a piece of inert matter in the hands of others, especially of human planners or designers. It is in order to point out this essential feature that the word 'actor' was added to it.
27. actor-network theory: actors (actants) “An 'actor' in ANT is a semiotic definition -- an actant --, that is, something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general. An actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of an action.”
cf., the narrative theory and semiotics of Greimas on “actants” and “isotopies”
“...actors are not conceived as fixed entities but as flows, as circulating objects, undergoing trials, and their stability, continuity, isotopies has to be obtained by other actions and other trials.”
28. actor-network theory: actors (actants) Building on the semiotic turn, ANT first brackets out society and nature to consider only meaning-productions; then breaking with the limits of semiotics without losing its tool box, it grants activity to the semiotic actors turning them into a new ontological hybrid, world making entities; by doing such a counter-copernican revolution it builds a completely empty frame for describing how any entity builds its world; finally, it retains from the descriptive project only a very few terms -its infralanguage- which are just enough to sail in between frames of reference and grants back to the actors themselves the ability to build precise accounts of one another by the very way they behave; the goal building of an overarching explanation -- that is, for ANT, a centre of calculation that would hold or replace or punctualise all the others -- is displaced by the search for ex-plicitations [cf., Deleuze] that is for the deployment of as many elements as possible accounted for through as many metalanguages as possible.
29. general questions as actor-network questions
who is/are the author/s of the text?
links between people, texts, and institutions; e.g., universities, companies, etc.
who funded this research?
links between institutions
what is the economics of the work
capital flows between institions and individuals
who are the “dramatis personae” of the article?
types of actants and their associations and/or “isotopies”
othering: who are “we”? who are “they”? what’s a “what” and who is a “who”?
attachments and divisions between actants; attributions of agency to some actants (e.g., humans) and not to others (e.g., machines)
what problem does this research address?
connections between problems; e.g., described causal links
30. general questions as actor-network questions
who is the intended audience?
oftentimes can be answered by examining where the text published; e.g., scientific journal, popular magazine, etc. examine the links between publications
which texts are cited in this text?
citation links: sociotextual links
what is the stated genealogy of the technology?
technical networks: which machines are (or are proposed to be) coupled together?
what is “thinking”? what is “reading”? what is “writing”?
thinking, reading, writing as means of attaching actants together
what narrative strategies are employed in the article?
what kinds of actants exist in the work? how do they remain stable or change over time (cf., their respective isotopies). the longer answer to this question is that the semiotics used by actor-network theorists (i.e., that of greimas) has been used for decades to study narratives of many different kinds.
what is the stated motivation of the research?
linking a central statement to the other statements of fact and discovery
31. general questions as actor network questions prior to their appearance in this text,
who spoke or wrote which statements to whom? where? under what conditions?
in this text,
who spoke or wrote which statements to whom? where? under what conditions?
after their appearance in this text,
who spoke or (re)wrote which statements to whom? where? under what conditions?
32. questions: “a few clarifications” who is the author?
Bruno Latour, born in 1947 in Beaune, Burgundy, from a wine grower family, was trained first as a philosopher and then an anthropologist. After field studies in Africa and California he specialized in the analysis of scientists and engineers at work. In addition to work in philosophy, history, sociology and anthropology of science, he has collaborated into many studies in science policy and research management.
Professor at the ENSMP/CSI; visiting professor in the history of science at Harvard; visiting professor at the London School of Economics
what is the stated motivation of the work?
“...to list some of the interesting properties of networks and to explain some of the misunderstandings that have arisen”
what problem does this research address?
articulating a methodology for science and technology studies
who funded this research?
see the website for the ENSMP/CSI: http://www.csi-mines.org/; see especially the list of projects: http://www.csi-mines.org/B3/index.html; under each project is a list of sponsors or partners for the project; many are governmental; corporate; and arts institutions.
33. questions (continued): “a few clarifications” what is the economics of the work?
some of the work is advisory, some is curatorial. this particular posting -- sent to nettime -- must be seen in light of the fact that (a) latour is anthropologist of science, but he is also a curator (his last show was at the German ZKM); and, (b) his work is widely read by artists and art students (see the recent collection edited for the French national art schools (ENBA) instruction in digital media: Connexions: Art, réseaux, media, Annick Bureaud, Nathalie Magnan (editors)
what is the stated genealogy of the work?
see especially the work of Serres (philosophy and science studies), Greimas (semiotics), Deleuze (philosophy), Callon (science studies), Garfinkel (ethnomethodology), Prigogine and Stengers (mathematics and science studies), Foucault (philosophy), Lynch (science studies), other colleagues contributing to ANT
who is the intended audience?
artists, theorists, critics
34. questions (continued): “a few clarifications” who are the “dramatis personae” of the article?
the theorist and the researcher; but, in general, this article problematizes the notion of a “personae” by introducing the idea that artifacts, machines and other non-human entities might be understood as possessing or exhbiting agency
what narrative strategies are employed in the article?
primarily expository
othering: who are “we”? who are “they”?
this is one of the main issues of the article: looking for (de)couplings between “nodes” in a network (which could be people, machines, “partial object”, and actants of all sorts
what is “thinking”/ “reading” / “writing” ?
a means of linking/articulating/coupling actants together
where was this published?
nettime
what texts are cited?
see the genealogy of the text describe above
35. conclusions (1/2): terminology general idea for today: networks are not just technologies; they can also be used as tool for understanding sociotechnical systems (i.e., as a semiotics)
the semiotic term “actant” can be used to describe humans and non-humans
36. conclusions (2/2): methodology rather than assuming a set of dichotomies, it is often more useful to understand how the assumed “polar opposites” of a dichotomy are coupled together or mediated through a third party or material
to understand a sociotechnical system (e.g., an online discussion) it is useful to find and enumerate the actants of the system (which parts have or are acribed agency) and find and delineate the forces, ideas, actions, materials, etc. that couple these actants together into an actor-network
your assigned “map of an online space” can be understood as an actor-network and can be visualized like the examples shown today
see www.cybergeography.org for more examples
37. next time: artificial intelligence the “imitation game” of alan turing
