Category:Connecting Otherwise

Part of the presentation of Vernaculars Come to Matter for Hackers & Designers Summer Talks.

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time and ties to different locations. And instead of speaking of “extracting” keywords or phrases, to think of such actions as re-formations or di-versioning.

We are curious about undoing and crossing such pervasive terminologies into methods that allow us to rethink how we work with language in code: from dictionaries to contradictionaries, from counting via accounting to ac-count-abilities, from overlapping to overlooping, from formatting to formatterings. For example, a contradictionary could provide openings to possible interpretations of a word, instead of defining its meaning. A formattering could refer to the shaping of matter

(From From contradictionaries to formatterings by Cristina Cochior, Julie Boschat-Thorez, Manetta Berends)

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dedication to a lengthy course of study. Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the human race; second, because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial. And this more noble kind of language is what I intend to discuss.

TRACK 11

Title Chorus (What eye have learned from lyrics.com) Artist Clara Balaguer Album Vernacular Language Toolkit Mix Notes Read in spoken word style

Lyrics [Full]

Vernacular rhymes with Dracula

Vernacular rhymes with spectacular

Vernacular rhymes with fuck yeah

Vernacular rhymes with slappin ya or grabbin ya or smackin ya

Vernacular rhymes with lapping up and blackin up and addin up

Vernacular rhymes with tarantula

Vernacular rhymes with Nissan Maxima

Vernacular rhymes with Honda Accura

Vernacular rhymes with scapular

Vernacular rhymes with Africa

Vernacular rhymes with particular

Vernacular rhymes with formula

Vernacular rhymes with immaculate

Vernacular rhymes with amateur

Vernacular rhymes with cracker

Vernacular rhymes with spatula

Vernacular rhymes with stamina

Vernacular rhymes with mathematical

Vernacular rhymes with parabola

Vernacular rhymes with Flux Capacitor

Verna, from the Latin that Dante eschewed, means home-born slave.

Vernacular is the language of those born into slavery.

It is the forced poetic of those who must hide their expression in the veil of scream.

It is that which is produced with the intent to elude detection.

It is that which is produced on the outskirts of the professionalized, the standardised, the rigid and embalmed bodies of knowledge that proclaim themselves the only source of it.

The vernacular is a personal intimacy with oppression and with the ability to find song in it.

The vernacular is the hidden word that bides its time, because it knows its time is nigh.

The vernacular is the sound of history being made

(From A high-low mix tape on the subject of the vernacular by Clara Balaguer)

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   So here I am
   in the hallway again. Chain motel. Nondescript corporate wallpaper
   of a beigey patterned variety. Gender is the room
   I see myself walking into, is all the rooms, any room, the number, the key
   Corresponding, and of course the whole
   world’s in there. Of course if I want to talk to almost anyone
   I have to go in. Fuck![1]

Ari Banias, “At Any Given Moment”

   This is an aching archive—the one that contains all of our growing grief, all of our dispossessed longing for the bodies that were once among us and have gone over to the side that we will go to too. When I told you that I will probably haunt you, you made it about you, but it is about me. The opposite of dispossession is not possession. It is not accumulation. It is unforgetting. It is mattering.[2]

Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective “Before Dispossession or Surviving It”

Vernacular comes to matter in the dictionary within language and architecture. In language defined as “using a language or dialect native to a region or country rather than a literary, cultured, or foreign language,” and in architecture defined as “of, relating to, or being the common building style of a period or place.”[3] These definitions surface a relation to community (i.e. what people one comes from) and place (i.e. what relations are from that context). Reinventing material-discursive worlds that come to make the vernacular and actual conditions of possibility for trans* and disabled life is the community of thought, practice, and life that this writing begins from. This means practicing “nothing about us without us” politics,[4] tying ideas of “liberation” to the liberation of all BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) trans* women,[5] analysing power differences,[6] and upholding non-compliant politics as desirable.[7] Moving from a position spelled out by Disability Justice and following articulations from crip technoscience and trans*feminism, this article seeks to centre the experiences of those most impacted. Disability Justice is a capatious paradigm that “value[s] our people as they are, for who they are, and understands that people have inherent worth outside of capitalist notions of productivity.”[8] In this way, “access[ibility is] a frictioned project requiring decolonization and racial justice."[9] Access is the project within which trans* and Disability Justice coalesce and this why I bring Disability Justice and trans* theory together when thinking about trans* vernacular practices. Meanings of place, infrastructure, and community in this article swivel into each other

(From Turnabouts and deadnames: shapeshifting trans* and disabled vernaculars by Ren Loren Britton)

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the collections by those who have knowledge of the material inputting as they go. However, the processing of the catalogue doesn’t usually mean the person categorising the item has fully read the document, and this becomes an increasingly impossible task as the archive grows and grows. So although NLP "reads" the document in a very particular, partial, and biased way, the tension between the actual results of the process and the material in the archive has often prompted us to look for different things in the archive and to read it in multiple ways. Somewhere-between-automation-and-the-handmade-3.jpg

One of the ways of sorting the result of the different NLP scripts was to create word clouds to visually look at the most frequently occurring terms (see above). For example, in the word cloud that showed people, one of the most prominent names was Ronald Reagan, but this data did not fit into any of our categories relating to people, which mainly represent comradely relations. NLP was better at pulling out these known entities like Reagan rather than minor figures in left history, as the libraries have been trained on certain data sets. This could be immensely problematic as a tool of categorisation for an archive of radical ephemera. However, by thinking these relationships

(From Somewhere between automation and the handmade by Interview with Rosemary Grennan)

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a process of objectification “expect in advance the results that they obtain.”[19]

Susan Leigh Star takes Whitehead’s “misplaced concretism” and proposes a feminist methodology specific to information technology.[20] Her essay develops the idea of “standards” as one type of “boundary object,” which she describes as:

[…] those scientific objects which both inhabit several communities of practice and satisfy the information requirements of each of them. Boundary objects are thus objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local need and common identity across sites.[21]

She cites Donna Haraway, who wonders in A Cyborg Manifesto:

How do I then act the bricoleur that we’ve all learned to be in various ways, without being a colonizer…. How do you keep foregrounded the ironic and iffy things you’re doing and still do them seriously […][22]

Star draws on a tradition of diverse feminist thinking (From Torn at the seams: vernacular approaches to teaching with computational tools by Michael Murtaugh)

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