ALIA Information Online 2015 Conference, 2-5 February 2015, Sydney: at the edge.
Abstract
Visions of technological utopia often portray an increasingly ‘seamless’ world, where technology integrates experience across space and time. Edges are blurred as we move easily between devices and contexts, between the digital and the physical.
But Mark Weiser, one of the pioneers of ubiquitous computing, questioned the idea of seamlessness, arguing instead for ‘beautiful seams’ — exposed edges that encouraged questions and the exploration of connections and meanings.
With discovery services and software vendors still promoting ‘seamless discovery’ as one of their major selling points, it seems the value of seams and edges requires further discussion. As we imagine the future of a service such as Trove, how do we balance the benefits of consistency, coordination and centralisation against the reality of a fragmented, unequal, and fundamentally broken world.
This paper will examine the rhetoric of ‘seamlessness’ in the world of discovery services, focusing in particular on the possibilities and problems facing Trove. By analysing both the literature around discovery, and the data about user behaviours currently available through Trove, I intend to expose the edges of meaning-making and explore the role of technology in both inhibiting and enriching experience.
How does our dream of comprehensiveness mask the biases in our collections? How do new tools for visualisation reinforce the invisibility of the missing and excluded? How do the assumptions of ‘access’ direct attention away from practical barriers to participation?
How does the very idea of systems and services, of complex and powerful ‘machines’ ready to do our bidding, discourage us from seeing the many, fragile acts of collaboration, connection, interpretation, and repair that hold these systems together?
Trove is an aggregator and a community; a collection of metadata and a platform for engagement. But as we imagine its future, how do avoid the rhetoric of technological power, and expose its seams and edges to scrutiny.
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