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F20 Black Atlantic: Resources, Pedagogy, and Scholarship on the 18th Century Black Atlantic

Is Information Ever Free?

In my reading through the sources provided for this week, I have been doing a lot of thinking about how information comes into being online. As Kymberli mentioned in her weekly response, questions surrounding the creation of information online inevitably include economic structures, institutional access, and author/creator labor. That being said, it is my main assertion that no information is as free and democratizing as the myth of the internet has us believe. It is deeply important to the integrity of the information to account where materials were gathered, collected and mined, who is performing the synthesizing research and for what aims, and who is paying for this information to exist in online resources. As a general rule of thumb, I approach all information online as a skeptic. This is partially why Moya Bailey's article about transforming digital humanities caught me by surprise. I had never even thought about using aggregated hashtag data from Twitter as a source in a wider research project because I had always encountered tweets the same way I read comment sections on Facebook or Reddit. While there is lots of credible, reliable information available on Twitter, locating and then verifying the information encountered requires substantial work. There are almost no prohibitions about what one can publish on Twitter, which means misinformation, outright propaganda, and obfuscation is abound.

Anyways, to turn to the main point of this weekly response, in terms of brainstorming an Open Access resource or lesson plan for some of the material covered this week, I think that researchers would benefit from a tool that allows them to trace/find/locate and verify the sources used in another author's article/blog/tweet/etc. I am not exactly sure how this would operate, but I imagine a sort of elaborate mapping of sources that can trace intellectual arguments back to their original poster or theorist. Oftentimes, I see scholars and critics misattribute or mischaracterize another scholar's theory because they have inadvertently been influenced by a related or similar concept. I see this happen often on Twitter wherein a scholar will formulate their own notion of Marxist analysis that is then taken at face value and quoted or cited as expert analysis on Marxist theory. In this way, many theories end up conforming or coalescing around/under a single school of thought or theorist that has effectively derided contributions made my scholars of today. In my proposed tracing tool, there could hyperlinks connected to one's sources that are also hyperlinked to their sources, so that theoretically one could trace how an intellectual idea/philosophy has evolved over time and specifically WHO has made contributions to those changes.

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I like that you linked to a colleague's post.
Contents of this reply:
1. Is Information Ever Free? In my reading through the sources provided for this week, I have been doing a lot of thinking about how information comes into being online. As Kymberli mentioned in her weekly response, questions surrounding the creation of information online inevitably include economic structures, institutional access, and author/creator labor. That being said, it is my main assertion that no information is as free and democratizing as the myth of the internet has us believe. It is deeply important to the integrity of the information to account where materials were gathered, collected and mined, who is performing the synthesizing research and for what aims, and who is paying for this information to exist in online resources. As a general rule of thumb, I approach all information online as a skeptic. This is partially why Moya Bailey's article about transforming digital humanities caught me by surprise. I had never even thought about using aggregated hashtag data from Twitter as a source in a wider research project because I had always encountered tweets the same way I read comment sections on Facebook or Reddit. While there is lots of credible, reliable information available on Twitter, locating and then verifying the information encountered requires substantial work. There are almost no prohibitions about what one can publish on Twitter, which means misinformation, outright propaganda, and obfuscation is abound.
  
  Anyways, to turn to the main point of this weekly response, in terms of brainstorming an Open Access resource or lesson plan for some of the material covered this week, I think that researchers would benefit from a tool that allows them to trace/find/locate and verify the sources used in another author's article/blog/tweet/etc. I am not exactly sure how this would operate, but I imagine a sort of elaborate mapping of sources that can trace intellectual arguments back to their original poster or theorist. Oftentimes, I see scholars and critics misattribute or mischaracterize another scholar's theory because they have inadvertently been influenced by a related or similar concept. I see this happen often on Twitter wherein a scholar will formulate their own notion of Marxist analysis that is then taken at face value and quoted or cited as expert analysis on Marxist theory. In this way, many theories end up conforming or coalescing around/under a single school of thought or theorist that has effectively derided contributions made my scholars of today. In my proposed tracing tool, there could hyperlinks connected to one's sources that are also hyperlinked to their sources, so that theoretically one could trace how an intellectual idea/philosophy has evolved over time and specifically WHO has made contributions to those changes.