Acknowledging Interconnections

In addition to her teaching and research, she has participated in public exhibits on design, privacy, and public libraries, and serves as the president of the board of directors of the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO).

We caught up with Shannon in October 2021 to ask about her research into urban planning, data, design, and libraries, and to learn more about her latest book, The City is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences. (Interview posted: November 4, 2021).

PIL: Even as a professor of anthropology your research is unusually interdisciplinary, embracing media studies, geography, urban studies, design, and library and information science. Your teaching includes courses on the anthropology of networks, digital ethnography, and libraries, databases, and archives. Yet academic culture tends to separate itself into disciplinary silos and encourages specialization. Why would you say it’s important to see connections across disciplinary boundaries and be able to zoom out from common material objects to larger concepts when pursuing your teaching and research? 

Shannon: I should note, first off, that I’m not really an anthropologist; I just happen to be housed in an anthropology department! I was in media studies for about 15 years before being invited to move to anthropology to start a new graduate minor in anthropology and design — in part because my work engages with anthropology, and because I’ve used ethnographic methods in some of my projects. I actually started off in chemistry, with plans to attend medical school — until I realized that my literature courses brought me more joy than math and science. I disabused myself of the notion that being good in math and science preordains one to commit one’s life to a technical career! I eventually graduated with degrees in English and media studies; did a PhD in media studies, with lots of graduate coursework in architectural and urban history and theory; then did a postdoctoral fellowship in art history. 

I’m tremendously grateful to have been exposed to all of these ways of thinking — their different epistemologies, methodologies, political commitments, and even aesthetics. It was during my postdoctoral fellowship when I realized that among my central attractions to chemistry were the aesthetics of the laboratory, e.g., the graphic order of the periodic table, and the topology of molecular models. Likewise, my engagement with literature was driven just as much by narrative as it was by form: the architecture of the page, the white space of a poem, typography, illustration, paper weight. The things of literature and the lab.

Which brings me to the final part of your question: I can’t help but adopt a more prismatic approach in my research and teaching. It’s impossible to bracket the technical when analyzing the social — or to ignore how the urban shapes the architectural, or how the epistemological is also always aesthetic. Acknowledging these interconnections requires drawing on theories and methods that are conventionally separated into distinct fields.

Writing and teaching across fields can sometimes be risky — there’s an obligation to make sure you’re doing justice to the various knowledges you’re weaving or grafting together — and overwhelming for your interlocutor or collaborator. So, I’ve found that “starting small,” with common material objects — the file folder, the dashboard, the desk, the shelf, the inscriptions on a building façade, the (terrible) interface for a piece of enterprise software — allows me to ground or center my thinking on a recognizable, graspable thing and spiral out from there, integrating multiple modes of analysis. This grounding has been, for me, a really useful rhetorical and aesthetic strategy for writing, and an effective pedagogical device for teaching: it helps people appreciate the richness embedded in small things, and it invites them to think across scales and disciplines. It’s like using Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Way of Looking at a Blackbird” as a method.  

PIL: An overarching theme of your work concerns the ways our material infrastructures influence our intellectual infrastructures and vice-versa: The ways we shelve books in our libraries, the ways our streets are laid out, and the data we choose to collect and represent through digital dashboards all reflect certain knowledge assumptions and practices that attempt to reduce complexity by elevating some concepts and rendering others invisible. As you write in your most recent book, The City is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences, the metaphors we use matter because they “give rise to technical models, which inform design processes, which in turn shape knowledges and practices, not to mention material cities.” What are some of the “other urban intelligences” that might be overlooked when we rely on computational models of human behavior?

Shannon: Of course we can conceive of computation very capaciously, to include analog computing, non-Western genealogies of computing, and so forth. But when governments and their tech contractors are talking about computationally modeling things — not only human behavior, but also urban systems, ecologies, economies, etc. — they almost always have in mind models that are digital, binary, algorithmic, automated, and addressable. Yet not everything that matters conforms neatly to a data model or lends itself to algorithmicization. And there’s a real danger, a hubris and totalizing tendency, to assuming that everything is computation, or that everything wants to be computational.

The first half of A City Is Not a Computer focuses on the uses and limits of these computational ways of thinking about cities, and the second half provides two examples of realms that exemplify the prevalence and value of “other urban intelligences,” which both encompass but also far exceed the computational. The first realm is the library and adjacent civic knowledge institutions, and the second realm is maintenance. I’ll focus here on the former. So many community-engaged libraries — those who recognize the distinctive interests and skills and intelligences of their constituents — succeed in building collections and programs that reflect great epistemological diversity: they integrate data repositories and electronic resources with books by local authors, oral history projects, community archives, and events that celebrate the wisdom inherent in embodied practices and intergenerational exchange.

I write briefly in the book about the new Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center in Brooklyn, which draws on decades of lived, embodied experiences of the neighborhood’s toxicity — Greenpoint is home to a few Superfund sites — in supplementing its local print and electronic resource collection with local environmental data, oral histories about environmental (in)justice and activism, and indigenous knowledge.

PIL: You’ve argued in your recent book, and in other publications, that librarians and archivists have ethical standards, knowledge, and practices that could provide valuable correctives to techno-determinism and “data-driven” decision making that influences civic life. As algorithmic systems begin to take over the human work of social systems and cities become “smart,” you argue that “we must push our civic leaders to bolster their planning teams with experts in the ethical collection, organization, preservation, and dissemination of information resources.” Though libraries and archives have their own biases and faulty metaphors, what are some of the ways they can serve as knowledge and social infrastructures that provide positive alternatives to commercialized and often monopolized information systems?  

Shannon: I certainly agree that we don’t want to excessively romanticize libraries and archives; our knowledge institutions continue to grapple with their own ongoing legacies of white supremacy and colonialism and other forms of bias and injustice, as I’ve also discussed in my “fugitive libraries” article. But many of the core principles and commitments of librarians and archivists — concern with access and privacy, preservation and the public good, social responsibility and sustainability, and, increasingly, justice — are quite unlike those that drive commercialized and monopolistic tech platforms and information brokers.

Libraries and archives can build and maintain access to and preserve collections that are shaped more by epistemological concerns and social obligations than by profit. They can develop access policies that are informed more by equitable distribution than by paywalls. They can foster information discovery practices that are driven more by intellectual and ethical considerations than by algorithms that foster extremism. And we can build on some of the historical work within library networks, and the recent work in various “library labs,” to build hardware and information infrastructures that embody very different values than our commercial service providers. In all these ways they serve as lessons to, as alternatives to, commercial information systems and Big Tech.

And yes, libraries can serve — and have long served — as social infrastructures, too. They can provide critical contexts for all those information resources and collections that embody community knowledge. As trusted institutions, and as facilitators of life-long learning, they can offer — through reference services and web services and programming — critical information literacy and algorithmic literacy and infrastructural literacy. This public pedagogy function is among the many social infrastructural roles that libraries serve, and that they have served for over a century.

But in this age of increasing privatization and decreased public funding for social services, such as housing and child care and mental health support, we can’t always expect our libraries and archives to step up and fill in where commercial platforms and defunded social services fall short. The library’s program is not infinitely elastic — nor are the people who work there, as Fobazi Ettarh has powerfully acknowledged through her work on vocational awe.

PIL: You’ve made a point of making nearly all of your research and writing open access. You frequently cross borders between scholarly forms of expression and more public forms of writing, such as curating public exhibits, publishing opinion pieces, and even works of imagination, such as your essay in “How to Run a City Like Amazon and Other Fables” in which you playfully (but seriously) imagine a public meeting at in which venture capitalists announce their plans to make the city of Baltimore a “product everyone wants” while citizens who raise questions are forcibly removed from the premises. Have you experienced any friction about making your scholarship accessible and widely available? What motivates you to resist the academic incentives to align your work with traditional but often unaffordable publication routes?

Shannon: Early in my career, before tenure, I felt obligated to publish in traditional peer-reviewed journals and with major university presses. Back then, I’m not sure I thought much about alternatives! But New York City, my beloved home of 23 years, and The New School, which blends the arts, design, liberal arts, and social sciences, and which has long centered public scholarship, helped me to appreciate not only the pleasures but also the politics of more publicly engaged and ethical ways of being a scholar. I began collaborating with colleagues both inside and outside the university on exhibitions and design projects, serving on the boards of a few cultural and knowledge institutions, and writing for more public venues, ultimately realizing that such work was significantly more rewarding, had a much bigger reach and bigger potential impact, and was much better aligned with the ethics that informed my research. If I was researching and teaching about public knowledge institutions and the ethics and aesthetics of information, I should align my own practices with those principles. The form should match the content.

I’ll also note that these public venues — from open-access design journals to galleries to public architecture — also allow me to align my aesthetics with my intellectual and ethical convictions. I can impart a shape and feel to an argument, or to a pedagogical experience, that embodies and enhances the subject matter. There’s a lot more room for formal play and design experimentation in non-traditional venues!

PIL: In your most recent book, and elsewhere, you express a growing need for data literacy and algorithmic literacy. How would you like to see those who care about media and information literacy incorporate this kind of learning into their practice? Have you done this in your own teaching at The New School? And, given your experience with design, what role could design literacy play in understanding our information environment?  

Shannon: I think this goes back to our earlier conversation about the scalar dimensions of knowledge: how investigating a knowledge artifact, whether a zine or a library catalog interface, can help us understand the larger systems through which it emerged and which it serves. If we care about media and information literacy, we already recognize that media, broadly conceived, are among the chief conduits for information. We should then also recognize that algorithms, in many cases, determine how that information is filtered and presented to us, and how we discover various media. Data are the building blocks of information, and they feed the algorithms that deliver it to us. We are both the producers and consumers of those data. And all of this material is distributed via and stored within various infrastructures, which shape the architectures and flows of information. So, I’d add infrastructural literacy to your list, too!

Design has the potential to make these systems and operations, and their logics and politics, material and experiential and intelligible. Graphic design, interface design, sound design, systems design, organizational design, architecture, and even urban planning — which informs how information infrastructures are situated within a society — all shape the way we encounter information. If we recognize the presence of design in all aspects of this ecology, we also recognize the potential to design things otherwise.

---

Shannon Mattern is a Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York City where she teaches interdisciplinary courses on digital ethnography, visualization, mapping, design ethnography, and libraries. She has published four books and co-edited three collections, while contributing frequently to Places Journal and other scholarly publications as well as curating exhibits and writing essays for news outlets. Explore her presentations, publications, exhibits, and other works at wordsinspace.net.

Smart Talks are informal conversations with leading thinkers about new media, information-seeking behavior, and the use of technology for teaching and learning in the digital age. The interviews are an occasional series produced by Project Information Literacy (PIL). PIL is an ongoing and national research study about how students find, use, and create information for academic courses and solving information problems in their everyday lives and as lifelong learners. Smart Talk interviews are open access and licensed by Creative Commons.​

---

Suggested citation format: “Shannon Mattern: Acknowledging Interconnections” (email interview) by Barbara Fister, Project Information Literacy, Smart Talk Interview, no. 36 (4 November 2021). This interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 3.0 Unported License.