[Themaintainers] Introductions

[Ian Lowrie]

Hi Folks,

I'm Ian Lowrie, a PhD candidate in the anthropology department at Rice  
University. Currently, I'm living in Moscow and doing some research  
about the data sciences here for my dissertation. I'm working at the  
intersection of academy and industry, where a powerful coalition of  
elites are attempting to shape new institutions and build new types of  
education adequate to training a generation of professionals capable  
of responding to the demands placed on them by reforms in the Russian  
science system and the emerging Russian information economy alike.

As you can imagine, there is a whole lot of innovation-speak in this  
world. I find this call to study maintenance congenial for three main  
reasons. First, a huge part of this task of reform is figuring out how  
to keep Russia's historical excellence in fundamental mathematics  
research and education while also working towards breaking down the  
barrier between the academy and the world of "applied tasks" that is  
in many ways perceived to have produced this excellence in the first  
place. The question, in other words, is how to maintain the embodied  
expertise and pedagogical infrastructure that produced this  
excellence, while redirecting its output somewhat.

Second, though data science is infamous for mission-creep -- for  
always extending its central heuristics and machines to new problems,  
some might say prematurely -- a lot of what it actually does here in  
Russia is much closer to maintenance than the production of new  
services. Computer vision is used for automated inspection of quite  
literal infrastructure, for example, or for corroborating gaps in  
existing personnel databases, and natural language processing is used  
not only for analysis of but for fixing indexing errors in  
already-existing databases as they are moved to digital platforms; all  
of which is the taking-over of existing types of maintenance, despite  
the glossy cover in which it often comes packaged.

Finally, most prosaically, I'm interested in how the drive to train  
ever-more and ever-better specialists is underwritten by the  
ever-present specter of brain drain. How do we get the people we train  
to stay in academic or industrial research, and not leave to  
better-paying jobs as simple analysts in the banking industry? More  
urgently, how do we get people to not simply leave for jobs in Europe  
or America after we've invested so much capital in training them? The  
question of how to maintain human capital is central to attempts to  
build human capital, in other words.

I've blathered on a bit here, but only because I'm genuinely excited  
about this call to pay attention to both innovation and conservation,  
to how they might reinforce or even produce one another --  
particularly as I'm coming from the anthropology of science and  
technology, where The New™ is stock-in-trade both for us as  
researchers and for those who we study. I won't be able to make it out  
to SHOT because of other commitments in the coming year, but I'm  
looking forward to seeing where this conversation goes.

Best,
Ian

Quoting Amanda Menking <amenking at uw.edu>:

>>> When you first post to the list, I encourage you to introduce  
>>> yourself and your work, to say what interests you about  
>>> "maintenance" writ large and how it might connect to your current  
>>> and future projects, and also to point us to existing works that  
>>> connect to our theme.
>
> Hi Maintainers,
>
> My name is Amanda, and I'm a third year PhD student at the  
> University of Washington Information School. I'm currently working  
> on research re: Wikipedia and the "gender gap" as well as emotional  
> labor in online spaces.
>
> I'm interested in working on a piece re: online moderation and how  
> this kind of hidden (and potentially gendered) labor maintains many  
> sites. I'd love to work with collaborators on this, too.
>
> Best,
> Amanda
>
> https://ischool.uw.edu/people/phd/amenking


-- 

Ian Lowrie
PhD Candidate
Department of Anthropology
Rice University
In Russia: +7 (968) 572 42 29