Dispatch from the Wisconsin Idea Road Trip 2007

Every year in the spring, a diverse and engaged group of four dozen or so UW-Madison faculty and staff sign on to a five-day bus trip across the state known as the "Wisconsin Idea Seminar." The purposes are many. The event is certainly a fun and (hopefully) positive public relations event, as evidenced by the participation of scholarship-raising alumni and local newspaper reporters. In an economic environment where direct government appropriations only account for 19% of the university's operating budget, portraying UW-Madison to citizens and legislators all across the state in a positive light is an important goal. But in the end I think we as participants learn more about the state of Wisconsin than the state of Wisconsin learns about us. We've seen a thriving global plastic packaging firm in Oshkosh, an energy-producing dairy farm in the Fox Valley, an agricultural and gaming economy on the Oneida reservation, a mechanized cherry orchard in Door County, a maximum security prison in Green Bay, and several examples of the rich natural environment (and environmental ethics) that are preserved and reproduced by both the university's College of Agriculture and the state Department of Natural Resources. And the trip isn't even over.

One evening during all of this, several of us gathered over drinks on the cool moonlit lawn of our Ephraim bed and breakfast to discuss the themes that had emerged so far. Amidst the good-natured joking and unwinding, some very serious issues quickly emerged. Wisconsin was a state rich in resources, labor, and ideas, but apprehensive about its place in a vast and interlocking set of competitive battles -- for tourist dollars, for state dollars, for corporate investment, for federal notice, for agricultural export, or for global status and prestige. The stark logic of economic competitiveness seemed to structure every conversation, affect every citizen, invade every institution. We consoled ourselves in public proclamations of our "innovativeness," our "adaptability," our "progressivism." But troubling realities of industrial and agricultural restructuring, racially disproportionate incarceration, and declining funding for public education made such claims ring hollow.

Into this contradictory mix of comfort and crisis comes the University. According to the Wisconsin Idea, "the boundaries of the University classroom are the boundaries of the state itself." In other words, the teaching, research, and service which originate in Madison should have as their focus the many peoples, communities, industries, and interests of Wisconsin at large. Citizens deserve to see a direct effect — more particularly, a direct economic effect (in terms of competitive advantage) — for their sustained investment in our University (even as that investment continues to drop below 19%).

I have a particular lens through which I view this idea. As a UW faculty member who studies information and communication processes — not just the technologies which enable those processes, but the laborers and consumers who enact them — I am beginning to think that the Wisconsin Idea is less an idealization of an economic production process (if the community subsidizes the academics, then the academics will increase the wealth of the community) as an idealization of a knowledge production process (if the community subsidizes the production of knowledge through research, then the unversity enacts the dissemination of knowledge through teaching, publication, and conferencing).

Understanding the Wisconsin Idea in this way, however, one must move beyond the overly-simplified communication dynamic between "academy" and "community." If there's one thing that this seminar road trip has illuminated for me, it's that in this state, neither the academy nor the community is homogenous in its origins, its approaches, its interests, or its power. Just as there are both affluent and struggling towns within our political geography, there are both well-resourced and struggling departments within our disciplinary geography. Just as the swaths of "red" counties and "blue" counties vie for power in our presidential elections, both political critique and corporate partnership can vie for prominence in each faculty member's research. And just as a wide variety of ethnic, language, and cultural groups have migrated (and continue to migrate) through the Wisconsin landscape over the last thousand years, so does our University draw students, staff, and faculty from all corners of the globe, suffused with all manner of personal philosophies and subject to all manner of public prejudices. It is not enough to simply brand both the state and the state university "diverse." The point is to wrestle with the ways in which diversities of all sorts, and at all scales, affect the processes of knowledge production.

For this reason I believe that reducing the state's plight (and the university's purpose) to one of "competitiveness" undermines the power of this diversity in knowledge production from the very start. Issues of environmental understanding, stewardship, and sustainability may not be reducible (or translatable) to market logic. Issues of cultural collision, conflict, and cooperation, while having profound links to economic power, nevertheless involve more than one's position in the labor market. And the same "high technology" that we might hope to deploy in order to attract and retain high-paying jobs cannot substitute for an informed, engaged, and media-literate political public. The life of our state is reducible to none of these single narratives. Neither is the life of the University.

Thus for me, the "Wisconsin Idea" stands for more than just extending the boundaries of the classroom to the boundaries of the state. It means extending the meaning of teaching to include publication and engagement at both local and global levels. It means extending the meaning of disciplinary research to incorporate multidisciplinary team research involving diverse groups, as well as interdisciplinary translation of research on the part of diverse individuals. And it means seeing service not only as a way of demonstrating an economic return on investment, but as a way of reminding ourselves and our many publics that investments in knowledge of all sorts — both science and art, both critique and creativity, both practical and theoretical — yield returns of their own.

The labor of translation

My latest book project -- being copyedited as we speak and hopefully on track for a Fall 2007 printing -- deals with issues of transcoding and translating information between the modes of text and speech, specifically in the case of television closed captioning. Along the way I learned a little bit about the information labor of print translation, a fascinating subject about which further information studies and print culture history volumes should be written. So it was with some appreciation that I read an article in the Guardian today about the labor necessary to translate Harry Potter to cultures and languages around the globe:

Of the 325 million Harry Potter books sold around the world, some 100 million copies don't contain a single line of JK Rowling's prose. They're mediated by the work of other writers who set the tone, create suspense and humour, and give the characters their distinctive voices and accents. The only thing these translators have no impact on whatsoever is the plot, which of course is Rowling's alone.

The moment Bloomsbury put out their next press release announcing that Rowling has delivered book seven and the publication date has been set, more than 60 translators across the world - from Europe to South America, Africa to Asia - will start sharpening their pencils. When that first published copy appears, their race will begin.

It's a race against publishers' deadlines, of course; in certain countries, where the quality of second-language English is very high, it's a race to get the book published in (say) Norwegian, or Danish, before your entire market decides not to bother waiting for the translation, and you find that you're trying to sell it to people who've already read the book in the original.

In some cases it's a race against unofficial translators, too; in China, where enforcement of international copyright law leaves something to be desired, IPR parasites churn out their quick and shoddy renegade versions more or less with impunity. These range from fan-produced translations published online, to brand-new books in the HP series sold on street corners, like the rather peculiar attempt at a book five that appeared while Rowling was in fact still hard at work in Edinburgh writing it (Rowling shares this distinction with Cervantes, who was understandably taken aback to find the second part of Don Quixote published unofficially before he'd had the chance to get round to writing it).

As this excerpt suggests, translation is not simply a straightforward word-substitution process, in danger of being replaced by simple software algorithms, but a very human pursuit somewhere between "art" and "science". Yet it is also a pursuit constrained by the technologies and economics of printing and distribution on a global scale. (Read the full article here.)

Information labor and cultural exchange - a former student of mine speaks out

This morning I was pleasantly surprised to find an email from a former undergraduate honors thesis student of mine, John Pederson, who is currently working in Indonesia on a Fulbright English Teaching scholarship. That in itself reveals a form of information labor and cultural exchange that, although overshadowed in the popular imagination today by stories of military occupations and the hunt for "terrorists," at least some young people in the US (not to mention around the world) still find rewarding and important. But more than simply teaching English and learning Bahasa Indonesian, John is helping construct a local information infrastructure in other ways:

Luckily, I've had the help of an entire village to help me with this and lay the foundation, literally, for the first student radio station in Sekayu, Indonesia!

The tower looks more like student science fair project than the future of free speech for a young democracy. But once up and running, the tower will broadcast the opinions, interests and ideas of a generation to an audience of about 6 kilometers—more than enough to cover the entire village.

John also impresses me with his efforts to bring his work and the work of the people in his village to the global public through a rich web site he created at www.justsayin.info -- a nice example of the way personal publishing and the public interest can coincide, and in more than one cultural environment besides.

Producing, disseminating, and critiquing information in the Iraq War

Haven't had the time or the itch to blog here for awhile, but this piece caught my attention. An article in the Washington Post cites the (bipartisan) Iraq Study Group report in noting that "U.S. military and intelligence officials have systematically underreported the violence in Iraq in order to suit the Bush administration's policy goals":

In its report on ways to improve the U.S. approach to stabilizing Iraq, the group recommended Wednesday that the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense make changes in the collection of data about violence to provide a more accurate picture.

The panel pointed to one day last July when U.S. officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence. 'Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence,' it said."

I recall that when the war started in 2003, it was official military policy not to report civilian casualties and/or "collateral damage" as well. This may still be official policy, but certainly the debate over the number of Iraqi civilians killed, injured, and displaced as refugees has intensified over the last three years -- with public health experts in the Lancet citing numbers of deaths in the hundreds of thousands, and the US administration having to contest these estimates.

The situation reminds me of the "closed world" of self-perpetuating Cold War discourse which Paul Edwards discusses in his book of the same name. Not only the terms of the debate, but the institutional and technological structures of information-gathering and validation are tied from the very start to a particular worldview, ideology, or set of assumptions about political-economic power and the inevitability of military engagement. With the limited and slanted informational tools at hand, it becomes impossible to argue against power and its policies.

When the most basic of measures -- "acts of violence," civilian casualties, scale of the refugee problem -- are not only in dispute, but possibly under active cloak and at the very least removed from official responsibility, how are policymakers, watchdog journalists, members of NGOs, and interested citizens supposed to form opinions and push for action?

The 24/7 time and space of information labor

Today a news item on Inside Higher Ed discusses the wisdom of keeping university library and computing sites open 24/7 to meet student demand for round-the-clock resource availability:

Each new year seems to be marked by a flourish of excited press releases and announcements regarding expanded hours of operation at libraries and technology centers at colleges and universities across the nation.

While many administrators boast that such developments are part of their efforts to be responsive to student desires, many health professionals, especially those focused on sleep research, say that the extra hours may actually be harming the well-being and health of students. At a recent meeting of the American College Health Association several professionals were abuzz about sleep issues in the college-age population that they feel aren’t getting enough ettention, but many see the problems only growing larger.

“We are living in a commercial world that goes 24/7,” says Michael McNeil, coordinator of the Health Empowerment Office at Temple University. “My colleagues in higher education may not like this, but we’re fostering procrastination and cramming — time management skills should be put first.”

Alison Beaver, director of health promotion at the University of Virginia’s Elson Student Health Center, says that she wouldn’t be surprised to one day learn that the prevalence of mental health issues reported by many of today’s students are correlated with a lack of sleep. Research is currently ongoing in this area.

The article does suggest that perhaps late-night noise in dorms and apartments leads students to seek out-of-home study and work sites, even if they have broadband internet connections in their bedrooms. But overall the piece neglects the question of what might be driving student patterns of 24/7 resource demand and use. Is it simply "procrastination and cramming," or might this demand be related to the difficulty of students finding open computer terminals and/or study spaces during peak hours of demand? Perhaps professors are demanding more and more online reading and research as components of classwork (I know I am). Or perhaps library and computing resources are actually being used more for leisure -- gaming, chat, web-surfing, and collegiality -- during the extended hours, thus contributing to mental and emotional health.

More research on this would be great. There's probably academic library "uses and users" research out there already on the topic. It would be nice to see this research about changes in undergraduate information labor time/space pattern correlated with research in the time/space patterns of information in the corporate, government, and non-profit worlds of post-college employment, too. Perhaps that's where the real speedup is happening ... and perhaps, like it or not, 24/7 information sites, resources and labor habits in college are preparing our students for their ultimate high-tech and high-stress careers.

RESOURCES

Rob Capriccioso, "Sleepy hollow," Inside Higher Ed (15 June 2006)