This text is an excerpt from a conversation between Lucie Kolb and Eva Weinmayr with members of the Feminist Search Tools group, a collective rethinking ways of sharing and distributing knowledge within library systems, held in September 2021 as part of «Session 4: Read–ability» of the Syllabus: Teaching the Radical Catalogue.
Q: What is «Feminist Search Tools»?
Annette Krauss (AK) I think there’s always a slight misunderstanding when it comes to the term Feminist Search Tools, that it’s only about digital tools, or tools in the sense of a method that is very product-oriented. Feminist Search Tools is more like a hub or a platform that brings together conversations around knowledge production when it comes to libraries, bookshelves, and digital catalogues – including the development of certain digital prototypes. Through discussions, learning environments, workshops, meetups, collaborative writings, we try to rethink ways through which marginalized voices within libraries and archives become more easily accessible and searchable.
Q: Since you are all coming from different collectives, would you like to tell us how you came to FST?
AK I’m part of the collective Read-In, which studies the physicality and situatedness of reading. We also experiment with different ways of critically approaching libraries – private and public libraries, and their categorizations. For example, we have developed a format, which is called Bookshelf Research, for which we physically enter smaller libraries, our own libraries or bookshelves, and look at the biases of those. My personal commitment to Read-In is really about looking at and intervening in my own assumptions and complicities – as a white woman with a European passport – in upholding certain inequalities within the knowledge economies that I’m involved in. And here the collaboration with all other FST members provides a transdisciplinary perspective that I value a lot.
Anja Groten (AG) I am part of the collective Hackers & Designers, which is a group of interdisciplinary practitioners experimenting with educational formats, design, and computer programming. We organize workshops to get a grip on complex technological topics. I was also part of Read-In – perhaps more in the role of a graphic designer – and very interested in their project Unlearning the Library. How they went into libraries and archives and tried to make sense by counting and sorting, by making new statistical breakdowns and trying to understand the underlying systems of categorization. I asked how could such processes be translated to computational processes making sense of the catalogue by sorting and categorizing differently, or otherwise.
Sven Engels (SE) I’m Sven. My pronouns are they/them. I think my entry point to Read-In was for a school project in Wiesbaden, where we looked into the books that were mandatory literature for students. My interest in Feminist Search Tools was sparked by my interest in the knowledge systems that we’re embedded in and that we keep reproducing on a daily basis, be it at school or at university. How could we both challenge the knowledge systems that we are embedded in, but also see how to operate within them and see whether there is a different way of retrieving knowledge?
Aggeliki Diakrousi (AD) I was studying in Experimental Publishing at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Back then, we set up a pirate library on a Raspberry Pi and experimented
with data sets, how we make a catalogue that is more feminist, how we categorize books. We were then invited by Hackers and Designers and Read-In to help with the technical development of the latest tool of the Feminist Search Tools. We continue these, maybe, more technical questions regarding libraries and collective infrastructures as members
of the collective VARIA in Rotterdam.
Q: Would you guide us through the tool that you were prototyping in the context of the Utrecht University library?
AK The first prototype, here, tries to speak to the question: «Why are the authors of the books I read, so white, so male, so Eurocentric?» The «why» question, of course, is not something that you can address in a library catalogue! Therefore, we have been looking into different search mechanisms in a library. Here, you type in any kind of keyword, and it brings certain results. Of course, these results will be mostly information on the publications and not the authors of the books. It’s interesting that this prototype has sometimes been misread as if we wanted to replace the University Library Catalogue. We were rather looking into a supplementary tool for an inquiring person to approach the biases that might be implicit and inherent in certain search movements.
SE The question that started our conversation with the Utrecht University Library was actually «how many female non-western authors are represented in the Utrecht University Library.» We wondered what kind of information is actually stored on the author of a publication in a catalogue.
Q: How can you possibly retrieve info about the gender or the ethnicity of an author – asking for the amount of female or non-western authors represented in the library?
AK For the gender question, we turned to Wikidata, a database that stores authors’ info. It also provides more complex information than the normative binary of male-female. I think they had at least six gender differentiations. However, we weren’t sure how these assumptions about gender came about.
SE In another project, related to Annette’s PhD and its bibliographical references, we looked at authors’ bios, because we thought self-identification and self-narration of authors could be a good way. But then, can you make a referral from pronouns to what the gender of an author would be?
Q: Who is this tool actually for?
SE We wanted to create a tool that is trying to spark a conversation. We really wanted a conversation addressing whiteness, trying to address knowledge hierarchies and asking who needs to be educated on this?
AK Who’s in charge of all the decisions that influence our search? I’m not only talking about library search but about Google interfaces. When I type something in… who takes responsibility for the search process – and for which part of it? Anja always points to the diversity of possibilities here: the user, the researcher, the library, the algorithms, and so many more… But all this is not present in a search process.
AD I feel I have so much to learn. But I realized through this research that all these systems of search are very invisible. There are so many layers behind it. When I was a student, I just didn’t think about these invisible structures, and I was just taking what was given to me.
Q: Let’s also look at the visualization tool that you developed together with the Ihlia LGTBQ Heritage collection at the Public Library in Amsterdam (OBA).
SE Our latest interface, the visualization tool, started through conversations with Ihlia, an LGBTQ archive based at the Public Library in Amsterdam and ATRIA women’s archive. Both archives work with a vocabulary list that helps to search within their archive. Ihlia’s «Homosaurus» is a vocabulary list (thesaurus) but it also puts words into relation to each other. If you look, for instance, for «transgender community», you see there is a «broader term» and a «related term». And if you scroll down, you also see the hierarchy of those terms towards each other. I found it very interesting to understand the political potential of such thesauri. For IHLIA and Atria we learned that thesauri were very much an empowerment tool at the time when it was difficult to find literature on LGBTQ themes, or on women’s issues. I realized that this was a way of making information findable within
the archive. The terms you see on the x-axis are taken from the Homosaurus. The y-axis then shows the most encountered publishers within the Ihlia collection. Further up, you see the box with cluster terms that have been produced by us applying an intersectional lens to the Ihlia catalogue by introducing clusters such as «race, gender, sexuality, disability, structural oppression». And on the top right side, you see a key that – by colour coding – shows when a certain book contains a term from a particular cluster.
AK We decided on these clusters «race, gender, sexualities, disability and structural oppression» because we thought they would make it at least partially possible to relate to the question that we are asking with this visualisation tool: How could an intersectional search within a library function?
SE I think the box «key» is very interesting. It shows interventions made within the Homosaurus by Ihlia but also our interventions, for instance, under disability. We had a conversation with the researcher Lieke Hettinga who advised us on the choice of terms on the x-axes. We realized that there wasn’t a good word in Dutch for ableism. So we suggested a term here to make literature more easily searchable, a term that is more used within the disability community. Through that conversation, we understood the importance of involving different communities in the production of these kinds of tools.
AD When we were coding the tool, we also encountered this hierarchy of the factual coding part. Since we are not professional programmers, we also faced the challenge of how to go beyond the technical difficulties. And then our desire was to make this tool even more speaking to intersectionality.
Q: How important is the actual functionality of the tool?
AG Yeah, that’s a question we struggled with. We work towards a tool that can actually speak to the complexity of the questions we want to address. We see the tool as part of the conversation, and as an occasion to actually speak about these issues in very practical ways. It’s not that we are still working on or necessarily thinking that there will be at the end: THE TOOL.
AK The discussions about tools also included us looking around how we are embedded in tools. And thinking about how we could disconnect, reconnect different tools in order to question hegemonies. And to do this tooling work in a collective, was very important. We questioned each other and helped each other find different ways within what Anja was referring to as trouble, like staying with the trouble, and also accepting that there is not a future tool that will solve all of this.
SE Often there seems to be an expectation towards us building the tool from scratch. But as a feminist practice, something we’ve been considering from the very beginning is that we are always building on the work of others.
Q That leads to the question: What is a feminist search for you? Why is it necessary?
AG It’s not about labelling the search tool, the interface as «feminist». It’s really about our search process as a group. The constant reflection on how we work together, checking in on each other, situating ourselves within the project.
AK The notion of unlearning, introduced by postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak, really helps me here. She talks about feminist unlearning as constantly looking and trying to find ways to reinvestigate one’s own assumptions, prejudices, and histories.
SE For me feminist search is also about the search movement. How do we go about finding literature? How attentive are we to that process? How are we reproducing certain power dynamics? And what are we basing our knowledge on? Having engaged with different syllabi at university, and the different references… but also with our own bibliographies when writing texts – it’s so important to be conscious of who will be given a voice within that text that we’re writing. To be aware of our own implicatedness.
AK Thinking of intersectionality (which is addressing different axes of oppression without separating these) – I’d like to introduce an inverted form of intersectionality. What if I think the other way around? What does it do to me, if I’m over-represented? If I’m constantly mirrored in the existing curricula, in the cataloguing system, in the world I live? So it
does go both ways. And actually, I have not been equipped with a lot of tools to look at this social, political, psychic mirroring that I’m constantly confronted with. And here, FST attempts to bring together different axes, encounters, practices, and studies.
Links:
feministsearchtool.nl
feministsearchtools.nl
homosaurus.org
atria.nl
www.ihlia.nl