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Short abstract:

This presentation investigates the infrastructural, political, and institutional challenges posed by the conversion of judicial decisions into AI training data utilization. It draws on a a field investigation in France, including an ethnography at the supreme court of justice.

Long abstract:

Judicial decisions, as pivotal documents within the legal system, are intricately embedded, both institutionally and materially, in their creation space: the Courts of Justice. Often stored locally in on paper, in folders and boxes stored within judicial administrative services, these decisions are traditionnally bound to circulate inside the judicial system.

In 2016, however, the French Parliament introduced a principle of open and digital dissemination of all judicial decisions. This initiative prompted legal tech start-ups, emerging from outside the judicial sector, to develop AI models trained on these open-access court decision - in order to commercialize "predictive justice" algorithms.

Nearly seven years later, judicial decisions are still not fully available to the public in a digital format. Opening access to the approximately 4 million judicial decisions produced annually in France has proven to be a complex undertaking, presenting various technical and political challenges: identification of relevant documents, digitization, standardization, centralization processes, construction of technical infrastructures for storage and dissemination, anonymization of sensitive data...

This presentation explores the algorithmic activation of judicial case law archives, drawing from a field investigation conducted within the justice sector, which includes an ethnography of the "open data" department of the French supreme court of justice (Court of Cassation). The focus will be on:

• The diversity of actors involved in the choices that shape these digital infrastructures

• The material and technical dispositives involved in these processes

• The effects of on judicial decisions, which lose their legal specificity but acquire computational properties.

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Short abstract:

This talk focuses on the sociotechnical challenges and ethical considerations associated with creating an open research database and digital archive documenting the pioneering open practices of 90’s digital knowledge infrastructures.

Long abstract:

“THEswissTHING,” established in 1994 in Basel by media artist Barbara Strebel, was a community-organized digital infrastructure to create social connections, share knowledge, and collaborate on artistic projects through open-source practices in the emerging Internet.

In the context of the research and archival project “Sharing Knowledge in the Arts” (2023-27), we create an open research database and digital archive documenting the pioneering open practices of 90’s digital knowledge infrastructures such as THEswissTHING.

Drawing on Linked Open Data (LOD) practices, and a participatory community-approach, we capture and describe complex networks of relationships to develop ontologies of care using the open-source tool Wikibase and the Records in Contexts archival standard (RiC-O 1.0).

This talk will analyze the hands-on creation of the digital archive and delve into ethical questions of collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics in creating such digital archives. We will discuss our technological and conceptual decisions and their social and political implications. Doing so, we will shed light on how data feminist LOD approaches can intervene and contribute to the collective needs of the communities being described and how they can help build towards activating archives.

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Short abstract:

Focusing the production of sound/music archives in/from the Levant, this paper considers the politics of producing archives and archival refusals through examining issues of stated intention and positionality of producers, platforms of distribution, and political-economic context.

Long abstract:

The Amman arts foundation director commented that “last year was the year of the archive,” noting the proliferation of archiving exhibitions and workshops that took place in the city and the region – sound archives, family archives, community archives, narrative archives. What seemed like an off-handed critique of a “trend” or mis/overuse of the word also pointed to a greater concern that permeated the region’s art and music worlds, namely debates about the intention and utility of their production, the positionality of those producing them, and the intervention they aim to make.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, informal and semi-structured interviews, and online media, this project considers three regional music archive projects, as well as “archival refusals” of contemporary online radios. It asks, what are the operative logics in producing these archives, and what stance do they take on what is “archive-able”? How do the discursive frames of these archives, the platforms through which they are made accessible, and funding streams (where applicable) impact how they are understood by Ammani audiences? And, in what ways are the politics of these projects wrapped up in the political-economic environment in which they are produced?

By considering these archiving projects and archival refusals, this paper seeks to position the politics of archive not only within questions of data collection and community-building, but also within the political context of place.

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Short abstract:

This paper focuses on the role of color in datafication processes to attend to the “death dealing” and “life-promoting” (Haraway 1990) capacities of data. It draws on empirical materials pertaining to natural history specimen digitization as well as the datafication of facial phenotypes.

Long abstract:

This paper takes an interest in negotiations and considerations around color in datafication processes to attend to the “death dealing” and “life-promoting” (Haraway 1990) capacities of data. It does so first of all by considering practices of digitizing natural history specimens, where making sure an image is “true to color” -representing the colors as they can be observed in live animals- is posed as a scientific concern. But color in specimen digitization is at the same time instrumental in drawing the attention of the public to the extinction of species. Ensuring the “liveliness” of a digital image, color then comes to play a crucial role in making data generative, enabling action regarding societally urgent issues. To understand and appreciate the work of color and how it informs ways of relating with and to data, the paper contrasts the digitization of specimens with the datafication of facial phenotypes. While articulating wholly different politics, considering the role of color in datafied renderings of faces demonstrates how color plays a crucial role in processes of identification, and of generating attention for unsolved cases of violent crime. The paper asks how considerations and negotiations around color, for example how to represent the “true colors” of an insect in a digital image, or whether to classify pictures of human eyes as grey or blue, point us towards questions around data and their politics of life and death.

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Short abstract:

Taking photographs as events--things that happen and things that continue to happen—is a strategy for working with archival images as sites for collective emotion and action by people living with the ongoing violence of genocide, displacement, and racialization.

Long abstract:

In this paper, I discuss the ongoing work of Archive Actions, a project of artists, community organizers, archivists, and university students that explores ways to “activate” the Elizabeth Becker Cambodia and Khmer Rouge Collection (1970–88) held at the University of Washington and the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center. The photographs in this collection are unlikely humanitarian images in that they do not depict graphic violence or suffering; they seem to depict everyday life. But they are photographs of genocide, of everyday dying. Drawing from Azoulay’s (2010) theorization of photographs as events--things that happen and things that continue to happen—the paper describes strategies of working with images as sites for collective emotion and action by people living with the ongoing effects of humanitarian crises, including Cambodian American diasporic communities. If we consider photographs as event-full, existing in multiple temporalities, there is opening to imagine an archive as a repository of the challenges that images provoke (Odumosu 2020). Thus, critical understanding and questioning of unlikely humanitarian images are practices of repair that are part of the image, not other to it.

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Short abstract:

Edgar Codd's invention of a relational method of storing data at IBM led to a humungous rise in the sale of databases. Studying the transaction of databases between the US and India's planning elite, this paper attempts to unpack the 'relations' activated by the database industry since the 1970s.

Long abstract:

This paper traces the career of Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) as they made their way into the management of India’s corporate and government data in the 1980s and 90s and sometimes blurred the distinction between the two. RDBMS 'freed' data from the structure of the computer system, allowing for unprecedented mobility and access to data that undergirded the service economy of the aughts.

What the paper takes on, as a specific object of focus, is the arrangement, storage of digitized data of public bureaucracies and the many relations it gave rise to. This is a site where both the potential and the risk of RDBMS is at its most apparent. The career of RDBMS in government shows us that the modularity in the arrangement of data and better reach and access, sits side by side with the risks this arrangement of data poses. Thus, studying the historical development of RDBMS allows for understanding some of the excesses of the present- spectacular leaks and hacks, mundane system breakdowns, errors and loss of data, a predicament I name 'slow violence'. The paper draws on archival research among India’s Planning Commission Files from the 1970s at the National Archives of India between May and July 2019 and media archive of computer journals and popular newspapers of the 1980s and 90s. It also draws on my ethnographic fieldwork of land records database management systems at multiple administrative bureaucracies and National Informatics Centers in India between Sept 2018 and Nov 2019.