The Politics of Metadata
Technicalities 41(1) Jan/Feb 2021: 11-14
As I write this, we are in the run-up to the US presidential election, and the loathing, fear and cynicism that goes with that, though as you read this the election will be over and we will be back to our normal lives of dread that the federal government is going to take away the most cherished aspects of our lives, or the other party is imminently going to come to power and take away the most cherished aspect of our lives.
The ugliness of partisan politics is pertinent because it frames my first column in Technicalities. The press release about my joining said Newsletter-Slash-Tastemaker is that I am “a known expert on the politics of metadata and classification.” OK, maybe I just made up the “known expert” part of that sentence. But what really surprised me about that statement was the word politics. I mean, it was said as if it might be interesting to people, and with the election looming, I thought “will people really be interested in politics?” like Joey Chestnut must think “do I really want to eat that hot dog?” somewhere around his 50th sausage in the day’s Major League Eating (MLE) contest. And if this column is good for nothing else, you might have learned that there is such an organization as the MLE and, no, I am not a member of it.
So, on the dubious assumption that politics is interesting to people, what do we mean by that term? Ambrose Bierce defined politics as “A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.” We might agree, except recently it seems much of our country has lost interest in the masquerade, as the strife of politics as been on full display in statements like “good people on both sides” and “stand back and stand-by”. Fortunately, libraries remain a place of general social trust, and much of the strife has bypassed us polite book-lovers. Public libraries volunteered to serve as official ballot drop-offs in this COVID-affected election where many voters received their ballots in advance of election day by mail. In fact that more states didn’t avail themselves of the service was probably less about a lack of trust and more of differences in partisan politics where one party appeared to have less of an appetite for expanded access to voting. Imagine that, in a democracy.
Librarians and partisan politics
Libraries have largely dodged the discordant politicization of our public institutions, particularly the press, the courts, universities and public schools, the post office, and the public health service… OMG, that’s a long list. Yet there is within the corps of librarians some dissatisfaction with the status quo of our work. That our established framings—such as library neutrality, intellectual freedom and notions of the underserved—are insufficient for guiding services. In their place an increasingly active and vocal group of librarians are agitating for social justice and the role of information services as an element of that justice. This is a call for fairer, more equitable distribution of goods amongst the groups that have been historically deprived of access to those goods: women, racialized people, and those marginalized for their gender or sexual practices, amongst others. And the goods to be distributed are not purely economic—they are cultural and social in nature, including who gets heard, and whose values and knowledge counts. Such marginalized communities have been deprived of not only of social goods generally, but informational goods specifically. And we need to recognize the value of information services and how social, educational, cultural and informational goods overlap and reinforce each other.
Justice League librarians (Barbara Gordon is a founding member) are committed to serve as advocates and provide information services on behalf of communities that are not just “underserved” but are made vulnerable by a combination of a lack of access to goods and having unique needs that often go unrecognized. This advocacy work is not just aimed at understanding the needs and developing services to meet those needs, but also at transforming our profession to include more members of those communities that are excluded. Such work is now not only considered to be political, but one with specifically leftist commitments. I don’t know how or why such advocacy would be seen as partisan, or even political, but it has become so, even though it seems like a commitment that is commensurate with teaching in a poor public school district, or working as a doctor on women’s health issues. The concern seems to be not that schools, hospitals or libraries in certain neighborhoods might not be as good as those located in wealthier or whiter neighborhoods, but rather the notion that the people in those neighborhoods might have distinct needs separate from those in majoritarian communities. The bottom line is that to take on a position of advocacy for the “social justice” categories, one that is consistent with a professional ethic of free and equal access to information, is probably to take on a position of liberalism.
Politics and pluralism
By “politics of metadata” I don’t mean merely to take up a position on a liberal-conservative spectrum, even one that is consistent with our shared professional values of advocacy. By political I mean that there are different communities of users, and that information services are tailored and apportioned differently amongst them. Elizabeth Anderson—a philosopher whom I recommend most heartily—puts it best in discussing higher education (1995, p. 188):
The claim that higher education is subject to “political” demands suffers from a fundamental ambiguity. Conservatives and some liberals use it to express the complaint that higher education is being held hostage to a narrow partisan agenda, imposed either by state coercion or the intimidation of radical students and faculty who tolerate no dissent…. But left-wing liberals (among whom I count myself) and radicals use the claim that education is “political” to express the view that to each epistemology there corresponds a sociology, an account of the sort of social organization that best realizes the goals of inquiry and education. In this usage, the “political” refers to the ways power relations structure social practices. It need not refer specifically to state power, to narrow partisanship, or to the use of raw coercion when reason gives out. It refers to a dimension of analysis, which may be contrasted with viewing a social practice through the ways geographical, ecological, or neurological factors figure in it. Thus, in claiming that education is and must be “political,” leftists are not urging what conservatives understand by this claim—-that the state, narrow partisan interests, or sheer force should determine what universities do. They are calling attention to the political content of epistemology, to the ways relations of cognitive authority do and should determine who gets to speak, who listens to whom, and how people respond to what others say.
It is in this sense of “political” that I wish to engage the readers of this column most regularly: knowledge itself is political and also sociological. A different way of stating that is that different communities of people create, share and use knowledge in different ways, and have different needs. As librarians we apportion people into groups all the time, and some of those apportionments are quite fair. We create categories of users, define the information services they should receive and assign resources. This is certainly a political act, consistent with Lasswell’s classic formulation of politics as “who gets what, and how.” In public librarianship we often apportion people by geographic region with different catchment areas associated with municipal library systems or branches, and we frequently segment children, teens, etc. from the larger service population. In academic librarianship we sort by scholarly discipline in many different ways. At the point we divide the general population and distribute services based on that sorting, we may first be responding to a community’s needs but we are also engaged in a political act. In fact, we are engaged in a political act when we fail to apportion groups and divide services. We are political when we do; we are political when we don’t. Anyone who claims in our professional setting to be apolitical is wrong. We all are, no matter what your commitment.
And this is what I mean by the title of this column “Inordinate Maps of Knowledge from the Bibliographers Guild.” We catalogers, we bibliographers, as a particular species of librarian, have worked too long under the concept of the “universal.” For example, we have built classifications and controlled vocabularies of larger and larger scope, to create a single map of all knowledge. We have inherited from Paul Otlet and the Documentalists an ambition for the universal, imagined and built the Répertoire bibliographique universel, arranged by the Universal Decimal Classification. Borges’ 1946 short story “Del Rigor en la Ciencia”–a single paragraph long—tells of the Cartographers Guild that made inordinate or unconscionable maps (“Mapas Desmesurados”). One map of a province was of such exactitude that it was the size of a city, another of the Empire was the size of entire province. And yet the cartographer sought greater perfection and thus produced a map of 1:1 scale that lay over the entire domain.
The Big Question before us is whether to recognize a single universalist theory of knowledge with a single universal model of it, or whether we commit to a theory of small knowledges. A universalist theory of people erases the important cultural differences that distinguish people and give them identity, and one that isn’t truly universal but rather normative by imposing one culture over another. The work of Fanon, Anzaldúa, Lorde and Mills are all indicative here. And if the epistemic and the sociological have a correspondence, as Anderson claims, then the occlusion of non-normative cultures is also an occlusion of non-normative knowledge where the powerful erase or simply overwrite the knowledge of those with less power. A politics of knowledge—a politics of information—commits us not to a single model of knowledge but to a model of multiple knowledges corresponding to multiple communities. And it is implicit in our models of tailored library services, as befits a pragmatic profession stocked with pragmatic people. Instead of universalist theory of people and knowledge, what if we had a theory of multiple small knowledges? Instead of universality, a theory of plurality?
A commitment to pluralism at the interface
What would such a pluralistic political commitment look like? For us in the bibliographers guild not only do we have to contend with the issue of multiple knowledges, but also potentially the issue of multiple representations of those knowledges. Instead of a single inordinate map of knowledge, are we looking perhaps at an inordinate number of small maps, one for each body of knowledge? Or consider an even more psychedelic alternative… Our products exist in the space between users and knowledge—umm, I mean multiple communities of users and multiple bodies of knowledge. We catalogers build representations, simulations, maps, models of knowledge, or alternatively, interfaces between users and bodies of knowledge in material form. That is what a community-based model of librarianship looks like: for this community, what knowledge do they need? How do they access it? As knowledge pluralizes, so do our representations of it, and perhaps even more so. Perhaps we need multiple representations of chemical knowledge: one for expert chemists, and an introductory one for students. One representation of fauna emphasizes their morphological similarities; another their evolutionary relations.
Ahh, postmodern knowledge, and postmodern theories of representation. Taken together, they pose quite a problem for us. Embracing such theories at least frees us from the obligation of having to develop a single truthful representation of knowledge for all of humanity, one that erases differences in knowledge and people. Once we have unmasked universalism as a particular model of knowledge and humanity, we can embrace a theory of knowledge and of people that is pluralistic, one that creates solidarity amongst people without erasing meaningful differences between them. A politics of difference but also a commitment to justice, to make sure every community gets fair and equitable access to their own knowledge.
Works Cited
Anderson, Elizabeth. 1995. The Democratic University: The Role of Justice in the Production of Knowledge. Social Philosophy and Policy 12(2), 186-219.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2012. Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza, 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1975. On Exactitude in Science in: A Universal History of Infamy(translated by Norman Thomas de Giovanni). London: Penguin Books, London.
Fanon, Franz. 1963. The wretched of the earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lasswell, Harold. 1936. Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. New York: Whittlesey House.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister outsider: essays and speeches. San Francisco: The Crossing Press.
Mills, Charles W. 1997. The racial contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.