Corinna Bath: "Every technology is socially and culturally shaped."
28.08.2009
Dr. Corinna Bath, researcher at the Humboldt-University Berlin, investigates into gender-specific issues of the Semantic Web. The central question is how to handle (and preserve) technologically implemented social, cultural and economic inequalities in the development of large scale technological infrastructures. From her perspective a feminist design of a future web is a challenge on the levels of knowledge production, technology design and use.
You are an expert on Gender and Technology Issues. Does the Semantic Web have a gender? What issues do arise when it comes to gender-specific aspects on the Semantic Web?
Results from science and technology studies indicate that every technology is socially and culturally shaped. And since gender is such a fundamental category in most societies, technology is necessarily gendered. More interesting, however, is the question in which way a certain technology is entangled with gender. In the case of the Semantic Web, to my mind it is the represented knowledge, which can mirror and perpetuate structures of inequality. We therefore have to ask: What knowledge is described (e.g. by ontologies)? Whose knowledge is that? And how is it classified, sorted and linked?
Not only the production of meaning (e.g. coded or generated statements of the form “women are…” and “men do…”) or certain structured relations of data (e.g. sorting telephone numbers in a telephone book by the husband’s name) are in danger of cementing gender stereotypes and inequality structures. It is also important to look at the kind of knowledge that cannot be represented or is not represented. From a gender research perspective it is often more productive to analyze what is missing: What about embodied knowledge, tacit knowledge, representing social processes or contradictions? Since the formalization approach is mostly based on an objective epistemology it is the question, whether the Semantic Web represents the ‘one and only’ view by the dominant culture, i.e. the hegemonic knowledge of ‘the world’, which is mainly western, white, upper-class, masculine etc.What do you expect from a future web like Web 3.0 from a gender-sensitive perspective?
From a perspective of feminist theory I wish that a future web will provide a better representation of ‘the non-privileged’, ‘diversity’ and ‘dispute’. This means that knowledge, which is so far rather marginalized, will be coded and could easily be found (e.g. by users, software agents and search engines). Also, more knowledge produced by people from non-dominant cultures will be included in a future web. Here, it is important that 1. non-privileged people from western societies as well as people from non-privileged parts of the world can speak and 2. that they can speak ‘for themselves’ instead of being ‘exhibited as others ‘, so that ‘we’ could look at ‘them’ without leaving ‘our’ hegemonic viewpoint.
Realizing these suggestions implies that search engines display not only what is ‘often looked at’. They rather present new content that is so far marginalized, but nevertheless relevant from a political and global perspective. Another idea would be that if content can be identified as sexist, racist etc., there would be comments and links to other pages providing direct counter arguments or alternative content. Generally, a good starting point for a future web could be to complement and question hegemonic discourses. It should allow for a variety of positions, particularly in those topics that implicitly assume a white, heterosexual etc. life pattern, which is based on a certain economic basis. Moreover, debates and controversies about an issue or term that challenge the dominant view should be represented.
The future web would furthermore represent knowledge as situated. This means that the knowledge represented can be recognized as a result of a political process of negotiation between contradicting positions that are located in certain relations of power (i.e. some positions are privileged over others). It should become apparent who speaks, from what societal, cultural, historic etc background, with which intentions and interests. Particularly in the case of expert knowledge or scientific knowledge it should also be revealed, which (technical, economic, epistemological etc.) apparatuses contributed to the knowledge production process.
Simultaneously there would also be attempts in the future web to undermine allegedly clear-cut categories such as the classification along the schemata men vs. women, white vs. colored, healthy vs. ill etc. by not relying on them (e.g. in queries, forms), deconstructing them explicitly or just playing with and subverting them.
Many of these suggestions require new forms of participation, access and representation techniques that have to be developed. A feminist design of a future web is a challenge on the levels of knowledge production, technology design and use.
I think it was Slavoy Zizek who framed the expression "technology is discourse". Does this also hold true for the Semantic Web?
I can only agree with the position that the Semantic Web is discourse. However, I prefer to work with feminist technoscience theorists like Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and Lucy Suchman, who speak of the material-discursive or of sociomaterial arrangements, in order to emphasize that technology has (political) implications, in which the production of meaning, the production of materiality/ technology and the production of societal/ global structures is deeply entangled and, thus, calls for accountability. At the end of her latest book ‘Human-Machine Reconfiguration’ (2007) Suchman explains:
“Agencies – and associated accountabilities – reside neither in us nor in our artefacts but in our intra-actions. The question, following Barad, is how to configure assemblages in such a way that we can intra-act responsibly and generatively with and through them. […] [The] perspective suggested here takes persons and things as contingently stabilized through particular, more or less durable, arrangements whose reiteration and/or reconfiguration is the cultural and political project of design in which we are all continuously implicated. Responsibility on this view is met neither through control nor through abdication but in ongoing practical, critical, and generative acts of engagement.” (Suchman 2007, 285f)
About Corinna Bath
Corinna Bath (Dr. ing. des.) is postdoc researcher in the graduate school ‘gender as a category of knowledge’ at Humboldt-University Berlin, where she just started her new project about the gendered order of knowledge in the Semantic Web. She got her first degree in math/logic (Free University Berlin) and defended her doctoral thesis on the gendering and de-gendering of computational artefacts in May 2009 (Bremen University). She worked at several German and Austrian universities in research and teaching and published articles and book editions on feminist technoscience theory and gender studies in computer science. She is particularly interested in ‘intelligent’ (e.g. ‘social’, ‘emotional’ and ‘semantic’) artefacts.