17.04.16 – Lecture: to see the interpreter

17.04.16 – 18:00

To see the Translator: on digitalization of academia, micromateriality and digital labour of a researcher

Lecture by Galina Orlova

Twenty years ago, Lawrence Venuti wrote a book about the invisibility of the name of the translator and his work effort on the surface generated by the culture of typography. Technology development forwarded other labourers of invisible front – teenage-girls, multiplying fan posts on the pages of their favourite writers, gamers testing new products, managers and moderators of Internet communities filtering secondary orality trash, smart throngs of crowdsourcers decoding aerospace images. However, in the list of digital labourers, whose work has to be discerned and given value, there are no researchers and those, who make the research possible.

But a new epistemological situation – multiplying data, development of open access practices and network collaboration – is significantly changing and has already changed the manner of activity of “knowledge labourers” inside academia and on its outskirts. But academy, loyal to the old hierarchies, and ideas about authorship boundaries and intellectual contributions, doesn’t notice these efforts, and to the lecturer’s hope – loses.

The report is devoted to the army of transcribers, people with a scanner and all those, who writes TDA’s, curates data and prepares it for the publication. Cheer up! Our invisible labour begets different – hopefully, non-narcissistic – knowledge.

Photo credits: Max Penson