One of the hallmarks of Johanna Druckers’ scholarship is an interest in how knowledge is produced. In SpecLab, her experiments at the titular laboratory centered on “reconceptualization of premises and parameters, not a reassessment of means and outcomes.” This sentiment gives a generous acknowledgment of the benefits computer-assisted quantitive methods made in humanities research, while also recognizing the “invisible” constraints orthodox methodologies inherit from the disciplines and industries of origin (Drucker, 27). Recent publications build on some of her earlier experiments to demonstrate that what is presented to us as self-explanatory artifacts actually require more thought, context and interpretation than we’re trained to deploy in our every day encounters with, say, data visualizations. Along similar lines, Drucker draws our attention to the hidden costs of the transition away from physical media to digital media for academic publication this week. One small nuance present in Pixel Dust caused me to reflect on why I’m prone to accepting Drucker’s lines of augment.

Drucker demonstrates an understanding of relevant digital technologies outside of an academic context which views the “back-end” as cruical to the frontend. The thoroughness of comprehension merges in the specificity of one example used when description some misunderstandings of the transition to digital media for academic publication. The company named in “the misperception…that everything digital is available on Google” strikes a chord with me given the origin PageRank, the key algorithm in that companies competitive advantage in the 1990s IT tech ecosystem. I would argue that Drucker knowingly references Google because of the influence of citation analysis on this algorithm, borne out of finding a quantitative method of evaluating the importance of published scientific articles. As Google put describes the logic:

PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites (citation courtesy of the Wayback Machine)

Much like her example of the codex, Drucker emphases the continuities in the backend logic between older forms of media and their descendants. In this case, leaving discovery up to Google search results likely reinvigorates the same forces that constricted traditional academic publishing, both financial and institutional, through backlinking other SEO strategies that favor

Drucker’s implication of the backend as critical subject matter to understand the transition to digital formats reflects the true costs, rather that the price. One misconception has to do with the distribution of costs over the lifetime of an academic product. Whereas physical books and journals had large upfront costs, the cost of digital publication goes beyond licensing fees, or even the “author-pays” model mentioned in Fitzpatrick’s chapter in Generous Thinking. Drucker also counts the cost of maintaining the digital medium itself, often not appended to price tags. To draw the analogy using a physical book, it’s as if there were occasions where the pigments in ink stopped rendering, and someone needed to jostle them to recompose as letters and text on a page. Or the pages would occasionally fall out of the binding, become disordered on the ground.

I think there are reasonable responses to these problems offered in the motivations behind Gil’s Ed. And in general, the reading from this week and last about infrastructure shows a gradual movement towards systems thinking. As someone who’s being propelled rapidly into a more “backend position” in a professionally, I find a lot of sympathy with Drucker’s instinct to scrutinize the complex tradeoffs in the “invisible work” required to create and maintain digital platforms.