I visited NYC from Friday 8 March – Sunday 17 March 2019.
On Saturday 9 March Fabian, Wayne, and I wanted to see the Captain Marvel movie. Somehow we were confused about who reserved tickets, and while on the subway, we realized that no one had. We were all trying to reserve tickets clicking on various sets, but before confirming the reservation someone else would get the seats leaving us to second, third, and fourth choices. It was yet another new experience with a technological miracle, seeing in our devices that other people are purchasing seats while we deliberated and considered our evening. We decided to skip the crowd and instead diverted to Union Square and got supplied at with groceries. From there we went to Forbidden Planet to check comics. There were some things we each wanted to share and read. It was crowded with people in every aisle examining everything and feeling excited. Whenever I walk into a book store I think about what I can get from the library or what I can have shipped to my home in 2 days for a lower cost and without me having to carry it home. We paused to look at who was coming out carrying things, but we and everyone else were lookie-loos. In January St. Mark’s Comics closed, and that was another place I visited a few times a year and hardly bought anything. I like the pleasure of visiting. Lots of people at Forbidden Planet were excited about the display of Captain Marvel comics. and I suppose all the hero movies increase comic sales somehow, but we saw no one go out with a purchase of any sort in 10 minutes at a busy time. We went home and watched the Umbrella Academy show instead. It surprises me that superhero movies are so easily available now and not before, and also that superhero television now is better than movies of the past, and also that suddenly there is all this delivery technology to stimulate me and anyone else typical with more media than anyone could want to consume.
On Monday I went to the Upper East Side to visit Abhishek at the Indian Embassy and Richard at the Met. Abhishek has been talking with people at the Gates Foundation about a grant to support the development of medical information for languages of India. He and I have done as much as we can in this space with our limited funding, and we have been waiting for the day when some foundation would commit to fund free and open medical content of the sort which Wikipedia could present. It still surprises me that organizations do not directly fund Wikipedia content development for humanitarian benefit when instead they fund closed content which obviously the target audience cannot access. I visited the Met Museum where Richard is Wikimedian in Residence. In the past month in partnership with Microsoft they presented their machine learning project for adding structured metadata to digital images of their art to describe what the work depicts. To complement this dataset they have a human surveying system where through a Wikidata front end users can play games to label artworks. It is a great precedent for the museums, Wikidata, crowdsourcing, and public outreach, and I hope that next year my university can partner with the Met to do more of this Wikimedia engagement.
On Tuesday I facilitated a Wikipedia editing workshop for physical therapy students at Touro College. This was the fourth annual event. Last month we published a paper presenting the case study of the three years before, so we all have a good understanding of what we have accomplished, what our limits are, and what the impact of this is. The Touro program is among the more prominent success stories in Wikimedia university outreach for editing popular articles, having students add content which passes Wikipedia’s quality standard for medical content, fulfilling the underserved need of adding the physical therapy perspective to articles which are more focused to physician treatment, for its multi-year consistency, for having buy-in from multiple college staff including professors, librarians, and administrators, and for the professors’ participation in other Wikimedia programs. We had a great workshop and presentation. Students who edited immediately left the workshop to present their outcomes to another class. I feel like a success when the students who edit Wikipedia describe their experience in terms of the information they shared rather than their manipulation of the interface, because our aim is that the interface should seem natural and invisible and their focus should be on sharing subject matter expertise.
From Touro I went to LaGuardia Community College. LaGuardia has the most diverse student population of any school. It has distinguished itself for admitting immigrants, non-native English speakers, students who have non-traditional backgrounds for college study, and anyone else who is in New York City, younger, excited for higher education, and who can identify as being a member of the collective community of minorities. The school is 15,000 students, which is large considering that it supports this kind of diversity. It also provides research experiences for undergraduates and hosts an unusually interesting archive including NYC mayoral records. LaGuardia aligns with the Wikimedia community because the school has a culture for taking risks on projects like Wikipedia. Its Wikipedia education program probably is the longest running in the world, and it has been particularly successful at multilingual engagement. Wikipedia works well here because most students know another language, and since the shared trait is knowing other languages but not actually being language compatible, the ideal educational project is one where somehow the students can connect with other native speakers in a way that enhances their education and is meaningful. By sharing what they learn in Wikipedia in their own language, that improves access to knowledge in their own language and gives the students the opportunity to reflect on what they are learning by teaching and publishing it. I met with organizers here for the next translation party, as I care about this. This translation is a legacy of the collaboration I had with them when I managed that New York State Health Foundation grant-funded education program to serve people in New York with improved access to Wikipedia’s medical content.
That night I went to the opera to see Falstaff. Before the show there were protesters in front of Lincoln Center who were angry at Shen Yun. This protest is really weird because typical Americans have no sympathy for any Chinese government crackdown on freedom of speech. The protesters themselves were oddly non-talkative. I imagine two possibilities. One is that these Chinese protesters do not participate in NYC’s multiculturalism, and instead they only know the mainstream culture of China. Consequently they might believe that Americans will come to see opposition to the Chinese government as dangerous if only they were educated to recognize it. The other possibility is that these protesters realize that the opera-goers at Lincoln Center obviously are free speech advocates, and would never censor performing arts, and think that the Chinese government has a fascist control over the media, and yet they are doing the protest anyway because the intended audience is through media to reach people in China and not to interact with anyone actually at Lincoln Center. I am not accustomed to being the target of propaganda from another culture on issues which hardly matter to me. I suppose people in other countries regularly get exposure to the propaganda of American media on all sorts of odd topics which do not matter to them.
I invited Sahaj to join Fabian and me to the show. He had never been to an opera and I like inviting him to anything which showcases Western culture in ways that are not so well known to India. He has been in NYC at E&Y since graduating last year and starting his exams for being an accountant. I like hearing about what stands out to him as different from India, and opera is as foreign of an experience as anyone might find. He enjoyed and Fabian and I like meeting him. He is greatly overworked – this is what they do to recent graduates and probably moreso if they are foreign. He is sticking with it and is getting experience with global brands like he wants.
On Wednesday I went to the New York Botanical Garden for a Wikidata editing event. Esther Jackson is their Wikimedian in Residence and active in organizing Wikimedia NYC as the local community organization. For sociological reasons, art museums have a history of Wikipedia engagement which gardens, zoos, and science museums have not yet established. From a Wikipedia development and knowledge sharing perspective this is unfortunate, because institutions like gardens which have non-unique collections of items have more group synergy than institutions like art museums which have unique collections. For example, if a garden developed information about a particular plant species, then that information benefits all gardens which have that species in their collection. Wikipedia content development at an art museum is more likely to benefit only that museum as fine art is scarce by design. Esther is organizing experiments in matching their living specimen collections to historic drawings to type specimens to naturalists’ descriptions to biographies of the people who produced all this, and Wikidata can be some hub into this. I also hope to partner with Esther and this garden in the next round of UVA graduate student data science research.
That night I went to the HIV Vaccine Trials Network meeting. I miss this from being in another city but try to be in NYC to catch these meetings. I have been on the community advisory board of this organization since 2007, first in Seattle then in New York City. Over the years I have reflected on digital communication for participants in clinical trials. I know the trials of this organization and how they work elsewhere. Continuously in all this time I have done so many experiments in this space, all unorthodox, to give participants greater access to the public information about the research which everyone agrees ought to be continually accessible to participants. These meetings are both information overload and also closed to access in so many ways. I never mind the private parts being closed but every one of these meetings is supposed to distribute information, but the media is so last generation that little makes it out to anyone. My new experiment is Scholia and Wikicite and Wikidata at the University of Virginia. Let’s see if I can ingest, publish, and disambiguate all research publications about HIV vaccination!
On Thursday I went to Consumer Reports. This was my first time visiting in about a year, after having been Wikimedian there from 2012 until I joined the University of Virginia in 2018. I talked with Geoff MacDougall about a partnership between Consumer Reports and the next generation nonprofit media organizations including Wikipedia and Internet Archive. When I visited Internet Archive last year some people there proposed that Marta Tellado, head of Consumer Reports, meet all the heads of those organizations to consider ongoing collaboration. In my mind the last generation organizations including PBS, NPR, Consumer Reports, and various smaller orgs like ProPublica should match with the present generation to fill in each others gaps with strengths. The older organizations have great difficulty converting older ways to digital media and whatever dependencies they have on traditional media are shaky. Still organizations like Wikipedia lack the credibility which Consumer Reports has, so of course I still think about all these things as I did while I was there. Whatever the case it is still hard to talk about how collaboration would work systemically and beyond pilot projects. In my view the opportunity gets easier every year as Wikipedia is able to consume new software features at a much faster rate than Consumer Reports, so avoiding haste makes sense. I also talked with CR Chief Science Officer James Dickerson about a research collaboration, and to the CR communications department, and many of my old colleagues, and of course with Chuck Bell in advocacy who has mentored me more than anyone else in this sector.
Friday was a spring break holiday and I met friends before going to see a show. Fabian, Wayne, Amanda, and I met with Raven, Jose, and Marlana. Marlana is about to enter high school, which in NYC means taking an exam for a competitive placement process. From one perspective the family is very fortunate to live in Manhattan and have lots of opportunity; from another perspective they are in a lower income bracket for their community in part because of their nonprofit engagement with the arts. Marlana has taken tutoring as is common and has her choices for high school. To me the pressure seems extraordinary for the family and someone who is a younger teenager, because intense training culminates in standardized testing which directs a person’s fate among schools that set students’ social class and career paths. Since I started at the School of Data Science I came to realize how dramatically so many students respond to college applications. For me, I hardly had any decisions to make in high school, and although I went to the University of Washington, I took it for granted that my education would be there because I chose Seattle as a city and not because I was under high pressure about a school. Something about pressuring students over brand names of schools seems inefficient to me, and I wonder if there is a better was to sort education.
We went to see a production of Sweet Charity at a Harlem theatre which casts black actors. I am continually surprised at the talent surplus in NYC and how little attention this gets. The show was in a small space and still it was more than half empty, and tickets were less than the price of movie admission. There were 10 actors and about 30 people in the audience. This is a musical so everyone has to sing, dance, act, and be awesome. Anywhere else this troupe could be featured performers on a big stage. I cannot tell the difference between top tier actors and second tier – maybe there is no difference – but somehow I guess all of these actors did not make the big stage even though they had as much talent as I could see and must have a lifetime of study and practice behind them. It is so easy here to see awesome actors doing a great show in a near empty venue, making an odd experience which seems like private actors performing a private show that only a select few get to attend. I can understand that most tourists would not want this, and instead want the security and spectacle of seeing what can happen on a big Broadway stage, but those big shows get replicated everywhere. I get more surprised seeing shows like this where the actors get close enough to touch, and especially when they put so much work into a world class performance where somehow almost no one attends. I suppose there are lots of theatre goers who would not go to Harlem.
Saturday we relaxed in Bushwick with coffee. Wayne gave me a copy the first volume of Grant Morrison’s Invisibles which Fabian and I are reading aloud together. I read this in the early 2000s and it meant a lot to me then. I like the narrative trope of a passive character having an external force pull them from an ordinary life into an extraordinary adventure, then that character routinely and unwillingly going between the worlds. In anime this is isekai, and the concept appears in Western media but for some reason in Japan the character typically stays in fantasy world whereas in Western media the character typically bounces back and forth between fantasy and their other reality. Spiderman does this, Terry Gilliam and Guillermo del Toro movies do this, and Grant Morrison does this. Morrison’s The Filth is one of my favorite comics for how the hero is a passive spectator to his own weird life, otherwise being a boring guy except that a troupe of superheros put a wig on his head and force him to accompany them through bizarre situations requiring superheroics. In the Invisibles Dane is in this situation. We played with the chinchillas this night like every night. They make me so happy and I like to socialize with chinchilla society as they interact with us and each other.
I missed Sunday Saint Patricks Day and also missed the Saint Patrick’s for All earlier in the month. If I had time I wish I could document the history of St. Pat’s for All as the LGBT+ variant on the homophobic St. Patrick’s Day parade. Also on that Sunday 17 March Reverend Billy and choir were in Bushwick. In the 90s when I first came to be a fan of Billy I never expected to be able to meet him and now I have been fortunate to see lots of performances and talk to the team a bit. My life is different now – he is part of the reason I ended up at Consumer Reports and Wikipedia and in the Consumer Movement. There is not enough time to finish anything. I wish that I could edit more Wikipedia articles about consumerism and the kind of activist causes in which Billy engages but I am unable to do everything. For some of my life goals, the only way I can accomplish them is by being ready to support other people who approach me who would advance these causes with their own time, labor, and attention.