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Toward a Linked Data Approach to Shifting Identities and NULL Values in Data Sets

Authority Record MARC Example 100 1# $a Chacaby, Ma-Nee, $d 1950- 670 ## $a A two-spirit journey: the autobiography of a lesbian Ojibwa-Cree elder, 2016 375 ## $a female $s 1950 $2 lcdgt Linked Data Example Chacaby, Ma-Nee (1950-present) Instance of Two-Spirit Instance of Lesbian Instance of Woman Author of A two-spirit journey: the autobiography of a lesbian Ojibwa-Cree elder, 2016
Andrew Wiebe April 17, 2025
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The tension between binary thinking and the fluidity of identity has long been featured in discussions of definition in computational practice within galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. Nowhere is this more evident than in how data systems attempt to categorize — or fail to categorize — 2SLGBTQIA+ subjects. Metadata schemas, survey tools, and classification structures often rely on rigid dichotomies, such as male/female, known/unknown, or 1/0. (read more...)

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A large concrete building with smokes coming out of it. This building is a data center cooling tower.

Data Centers, Transnational Collaborations, and the Differing Meanings of Connection

Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes, Felipe Figueiredo April 15, 2025
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Data centers are in the news. You have probably read or heard about them. It’s as if with the snap of a finger the news cycle has changed, and the latest trend is to focus on the need to develop infrastructure to power data centers, in the US at least, where one of us is writing from. A data center is a facility where data is processed or stored, or where computer power is redistributed, where “the cloud touches the ground” (Johnson 2023: 6-7). By focusing on the history of the data centers we research, our goal in this piece is to demonstrate how they are built on top of existing infrastructures, and do not exist in thin air. (read more...)

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A fieldnote sketch from a morning at a waste bank. Clockwise: 'Most common plastic beverage bottles,' 'Clean knob,' 'Cutting the chicken,' 'Coffee left by a guest last night,' 'Waste bank savings book,' and 'Weighing the waste.'

From Bin to Bank: Recycling Household Waste in Urban Indonesia

Jiwon Kim April 10, 2025
Konten ini juga tersedia dalam Bahasa Indonesia
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Every Thursday at 9 o’ clock in the morning, housewives from a residential neighborhood on the outskirt of Jakarta gather at their usual spot at the “Love Earth” waste bank (bank sampah). It is a small lot in the corner with a humble setup with a hut, a shed, and sacks of recyclables. Whoever arrives first begins sweeping the area and wiping the table, often damp from the last night’s rain and scattered with fallen leaves. One after the other, more women trickle in, each carrying a bag of recyclable waste from their households on foot, on motorcycles, or, more rarely, in cars. At times, items left by their neighbors—bundles of empty water gallons, piles of flattened cardboard boxes, or bottles of used cooking oil—wait to be weighed and sorted. The volume and the types of recyclables gathered each week may vary; yet food, tea, and chatter are invariably shared among those present. (read more...)

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Six Andean farmers stand in front of a large portrait that depicts a white woman in regal attire and a crown and a baby in a crown in her left hand. One woman and three men wear green jackets, one man wears a black jacket, and one woman has a pink sweater and colorful skirt.

Who Will Protect Andean Potatoes in the Near Future? Uncertainties About the Next Generation of Native Potato Conservationists

Sebastian Zarate April 8, 2025
Este contenido también está disponible en Español
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This post is part of a series on the SEEKCommons project; read the Introduction to the series to learn more. Rene Gomez was one of the most renowned potato curators at the International Potato Center (CIP, Centro Internacional de la Papa in Spanish). Potato curators provide reliable advice in safeguarding the CIP collection, carrying out key activities such as the acquisition, registration, cleaning, storage, regeneration, and distribution of seeds and other planting materials. Gomez’s 35-year journey with CIP left a remarkable legacy among potato conservation experts. I met him in February 2023 during my dissertation field work in Peru. I spent many hours listening to his life story, during which I learned how his work was connected to CIP’s history and research, about his dedication to his work, and about his concern for the future of potato curation. “We are an endangered species, us taxonomists and curators,” he mentioned. Gomez was worried about the precarity of the field, particularly the lack of young people who would continue his work after his retirement. (read more...)

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This image has two parts. The left part of the image is horizontally longer than part on the right. In the left part, the author is seen biting into a piece of kaolin clay while standing with one foot forward on a rocky uneven surface, against a background of a towering heap of whitish-pink earth excavated from a kaolin clay mine. The right part of the image shows broken solid pieces and powder of edible kaolin clay, white in colour, that is spread on the surface of a table.

Bodies as Proxies, or The Stratigraphic Evidence of Our Appetites, at Metabolic Scales from the Human to the Planetary, on the Occasion of the Anthropocene’s Ongoing Debate About Itself

Allie E.S. Wist April 3, 2025
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The atmosphere of anxiety concerning the Anthropocene amplifies when considering how its eerie and unwieldy forces affect our bodies. Across posthumanist, science studies, and new materialist discourse, the concern about corporeal impacts seems to huddle around a particular set of words: porous, permeable, vulnerable, sensitive. These are invoked as scholars seek to describe the status of bodies threatened by invisible, global, and pernicious toxins. In a looping story of strata and sediment and edible rocks, this essay similarly seeks to articulate the material instabilities of bodies in an epoch that itself resists clear definition. (read more...)

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A foot of a farmer walking on an agricultural field bedded with dry gravel that is reddish-orange. A black irrigation drip pipe, that is about 12 mm in diameter, runs horizontally on the ground and the farmer's feet is placed along the drip pipe, horizontally. The farmer is wearing a simple yellowish-orange rubber slipper that seems mildly tainted with mud. His foot has slipped off his feet as he has stepped on the drip pipe. A drop of water is dripping from the hole in the drip pipe.

Witnessing the Porous World

Misria Shaik Ali April 1, 2025
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Pores compose materials around us such as gypsum, clay, lead, concrete, whose strength and durability are paradoxically analyzed in their capacity to resist porosity, or contain. Anthropogenic engagements with pores hold this ambivalence–resisting to perceive pore as a passage into the world and reducing them to their instrumental capacity to hold and contain. (read more...)

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Following Primates

Virendra Mathur, Aarjav Chauhan March 25, 2025
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Each day weaves its own tale, and no two days unfold alike in the Mandal Valley. The Mandal Valley is like any central Himalayan valley, rich and teeming with small villages, its air soaked in the mystical scent of its culture and tradition. The landscape of the valley is a gradient of human agricultural activity merging into the surrounding forest. It is the southern entry point to the adjacent Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary (Srivastava et al., 2020). Every morning, the villagers in this valley would take up their daily chores. A script was followed. Cleaning up the cowshed and tending to the cows, walking to the forest to collect wood, dry grass, and fodder, heading to the village market or Gopeshwar, the nearest town, or working the agricultural fields. In Mandal valley, there were a handful of activities likely to happen as the day unfolded. And yet, every day would unfold (read more...)

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3D-rendered human face with a web of data points that capture and map human facial features with precision, showcasing the intersection of technology and identity.

The Limits of Identity: How Race and Gender Constructs in Biometric Technology Narrow Who We Are

Brittany Fields March 18, 2025
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This article provides a brief look into the ways identity can be constrained with regard to biometric technology.  It discusses technological limitations where biometric identification systems may fail to represent a person’s full identity, including bias in recognition as well as the inability to capture complex and changing human characteristics.  It also touches on political dimensions, where legal systems and governments may place limits on how identity is recognized and documented, particularly in the case of gender recognition. (read more...)

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