About to go pick kid up from first day of preschool. (1/2 day today, full day Thurs). Achieved:
📚 Just finished the introduction of Data Feminism & am jotting down some thoughts. I hope to expand on these later.
To what extent and how do the 7 principles of data feminism intersect/interact with Jennifer Armbrust’s 12 principles for prototyping a feminist business?
Women were the first computers. Is there a relationship between this history and the default woman-coded voices of digital virtual assistants that goes beyond generic sexism?
📚 Data Feminism has the best (and perhaps only) definition of positionality I’ve ever seen: “Positionality is a term that describes how individuals come to knowledge-making processes from multiple positions, including race, gender, geography, class, ability, and more. Each of these positions is shaped by culture and context, and they intersect and interact.”
Colleagues are all “I forgot how exhausting teaching in person is!” & I’m all “I forgot how exhausting getting your kid ready to go to preschool in person is!”
Want to read: Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life by Heather Cass White 📚
Me, prepping for my kid’s very masked return to preschool:
IMAGE: Liz Lemon (from the TV show 30 Rock), a white woman with brown hair wearing glasses, says, “I’m going to become wonderful.”
Want to read: Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly 📚
📺 It’s been interesting seeing other (current or former) academians’ responses to THE CHAIR. I made it 8 minutes but once the notion of just getting through the tenure process and THEN shaking things up was mentioned, I had to stop. My heart was hurting.
Setting aside my TIME 100 list plan to play in the land of YA rom-coms. Just started NICK AND NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST. 📚
Read
Meet the Southern librarians fighting for racial justice and truth-telling â Scalawag scalawagmagazine.org.Read: scalawagmagazine.org
Read this because it’s on Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Human-Information Interaction syllabus for this semester. (I like to look at updated syllabi for classes I’ve already taken to see what I might have missed recently.) Going to pull out a couple of quotes that stuck with me. I hope in time I’ll write a more robust response to this article.
The public rarely sees the many processes that happen behind the scenes at librariesâwhich cultural priorities inform decisions of what to include in a collection, or to digitize; which books to display; which films or speakers wind up on the calendarâall of these choices are determined by the priorities designated by the library leadership. And, of course, their biases play a part.
The ALA isn’t a worker’s union. It’s an association that includes everyone from paraprofessionals to directors of large systems. Several people told me that as library workers, they didn’t feel represented by the organizationâfar from it.
