Abstract Wikipedia/Updates/2022-09-30
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As you might recall, the Abstract Wikipedia team's Cory Massaro recently finished an arts residency in İstanbul, which he attended as part of the creative duo Tecnologías Silvestres. He will share here in his voice some highlights of the trip as well as some conclusions about knowledge democratization and the technological challenges facing specific language communities.
Photo Tour
Istanbul is mostly cats, like 90%. Sometimes they stand under the streetlights and meow at you like catnip dealers. Sometimes they just judge you from the rocks.
We took a field trip to Cappadocia for a few days to see what that was about. The thing to do there, because it is warm as the devil's dust jacuzzi, has historically been to live in a lava dome or cave. There are some underground cities in Cappadocia where people used to hang out when it was hot or a war outside. One such city contains an ancient Rock Cathedral (i.e., a cathedral made of a rock, not the site of the greatest Van Halen concert).
The underground cities have lights hooked up for us pampered moderns. The caves are full of cables and electric boxes, creating a climate apocalypse vibe which is delicious.
There were sculptures like this all over the city. I was embarrassed that I couldn't identify this twice-crowned snake-butt centilady, so I put the mythological expertise of the Abstract Wikipedia team to the test. Quiddity finally identified her as the Shahmaran.
There's a whole Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam. The museum begins with three galleries containing photos of European Christian men. After that, it gets really fascinating. One highlight was this gorgeous water clock!
Art
I spent a lot of time staring pensively into the middle distance in a scribal reverie. I made important literary sketches on cats fighting with seagulls, the behavior of people in coffee shops, and other snippets of daily life. Poems were written, short stories edited, and multiple visual art installations created with other residents at the space. I also gave two writing workshops using natural language processing and Surrealist techniques to generate ideas, which we then used to create poetry and songs (I made a word2vec oracle!).
Language and Technology and Hegemony and Abstract Wikipedia
What kind of knowledge do people want to share? Many of us (or at least I) intuitively believe that certain knowledge is more-or-less "objective" and "neutral," but those categories are inadequate. Let us consider, for example, standard objective facts about geography and biology. A city has a certain population and square mileage, a founding date, a governing body (usually), landmarks. A city also has history, and in many places, that history cannot be discussed without reference to geopolitics. As I shared information about personal history with people at the residency, I learned facts about where they came from. Some of them came from cities about which an interesting, useful, and very sad fact concerned recent violence. Other facts had to do with the global superpowers which encouraged, condoned, supplied arms for, or directly perpetrated that violence. There are plants, like particular varieties of fig tree, which are now threatened or endangered due to how war has terraformed their environment. These are real, unimpeachable facts about cities and organisms, but it is impossible to state those facts plainly without making a political statement.
While the propositional truth value of such a fact cannot be denied, subjective domains like a person's political values inform whether that fact is included in particular discourses. This is the art of creating narrative or stories. I would consider it a noble goal to make Abstract Wikipedia a platform where stories, not just facts, can be expressed and shared. Abstract Wikipedia is the right platform for this because it allows those stories to be shared outside the linguistic communities to which they are directly relevant. Just as Abstract Wikipedia is intended to convey objective information in less-resourced languages, I also hope that speakers of these languages will represent their knowledge in Wikidata so that Abstract Wikipedia can complicate the narratives of highly-resourced languages' Wikipedias.
I also talked with people about how language informs their interactions with technology. Some of the observations were unsurprising (but still important to hear and hear again): certain software is hard to use in one language or another; the Internet opens up if someone speaks a hegemonic language, etc. One thing I hadn't anticipated was how often the discussions turned to literacy. It was fascinating to speak with people who were fluent and literate in multiple hegemonic languages but didn't read, or didn't read well, the language they spoke at home. A speaker of Kurmanji (Kurdish dialect) mentioned that, when he exchanged messages with his Kurdish-speaking friends, they used voice messages–using text felt unnatural.
Abstract Wikipedia has been conceived primarily as a text-based project. This makes technical sense. However, if literacy is an impediment that affects how and in what language a person might choose to access a website, then it can be compared with other accessibility concerns. Vision-impaired persons likewise suffer when projects only consider the text interface. In both cases, it seems the same tools–screen reader-friendly User Interfaces, better Text-To-Speech technology in all languages–can help solve the problem.
In summary, I left the residency with two big questions about the work our team is doing.
- How can Abstract Wikipedia serve challenging, controversial information, and expose people to perspectives they might not otherwise have access to?
- Issues of literacy and accessibility intersect in the languages Abstract Wikipedia wants to serve. What discussions can we have about that intersection?