Stable material / Acceptable loss

The question of which cuisines can be “elevated,” and by whom, drives much of the authenticity debate…As white chefs face outrage for cooking cuisine that isn’t their own, nonwhite chefs are saddled with guilt or confusion for straying from tradition. Both situations are driven by the notion that European food is upscale and innovative, while basically everything else is inherently cheap, casual, and stagnant.

This discourse of “mining” people for data is reminiscent of the colonizer attitude that declares humans as raw material free for the taking. As we hand decision-making regarding social issues over to automated systems developed by profit-driven corporations, not only are we allowing our social concerns to be dictated by corporate incentives (profit), but we are also handing over complex moral questions to the corporate world.

It was a sculpture of a giant open Braille book…a huge sheet of metal propped up, its bottom edge near the ground and its top edge a foot taller than I. Each Braille dot was the size of a golf ball. This made it impossible to read the text, which was supposed to be a passage from a Walt Whitman poem…As I struggled to read what the golf balls had to say, a security guard trundled out of the building. He spoke no sign language but we got the message.

Correcting inequity, and paying down inclusion debt, requires constant effort and vigilance as well as sweeping fixes. If you’re in a leadership role, it is /imperative/ that you take steps to inspect and address inequity immediately. It’s the right thing to do.

I never liked that library administrators often fetishized digitization as improved access, collection growth as necessary and good, and digitization as an ideal way to grow collections. The labor required to actually make digitized collections discoverable doesn’t align with modern archival processing practices (MPLP), and requires re-processing, reviewing, and additional description generation. This work is often invisible, undervalued, and usually just not done, thus creating large amounts of content that are inaccessible by anyone who doesn’t already know that they exist.

It’s simple: people who engage in sexual harassment or assault are also likely to steal, plagiarize, embezzle, engage in overt racism, or otherwise harm their business...Ask around about the person who gets handsy with the receptionist, or makes sex jokes when they get drunk, and you’ll often find out that they also violated the company expense policy, or exaggerated on their résumé, or took credit for a colleague’s project.