This thesis will argue for the value of plant science field photographs. More specifically, it will consider David Turnbull’s notion of ‘knowledge as movement’ through space while discussing field collecting as a type of knowledge production in motion and the field photograph a unique record of that. Likewise, it will look at Helen Verran’s notion of imaginaries as they relate to knowledge systems while discussing field photographs as visual records.

Likewise, it will argue that the field photographs that botanists take while out in the field contribute to and are part of constructing our imaginaries. Taken together, they knit an uneven, inconsistent, and heterogeneous view of nature that collides with science. They are not objective nor absolute. They are not fixed nor refined. They are irregular records of knowledge production, which do not fit nicely into plant science research. Though ubiquitous within research, in some ways they are outliers of research. Knowledge occurs in tandem and is tangential as does movement through space, like field collecting.

The thesis discusses the career of art librarian Judith A. Hoffberg (1934-2009), focusing on her co-founding of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA), her publishing of the journal Umbrella, her artists' books collection, her participation in an international mail art community, and her relationship to feminist print culture. Hoffberg's career is situated within a history of artists' publications and information networks, the alternative press, the women's movement, and art librarianship.

Despite the enormous efforts which preceded the founding of the School of Library service at UCLA, two critics in the August 1959 issue of Southern California Chapter of the Special Libraries Association Bulletin--Robert Lewis and Frank Bennett, the latter of which was the Bulletin’s editor--created a stir in the special libraries community when they adamantly went against the general consensus of enthusiasm for the School of Library Service, and rather, vehemently opposed it. In exploring the reasons for and responses to these criticisms, this thesis will present an argument as to why these early critics were erroneous in their assessment of library education in Southern California and why the School of Library Service’s legacy and history, especially the efforts of Regent Edward Augustus Dickson, are essential in understanding the importance of UCLA’s “School of the Library.” Using information which was known in 1959 as well as that which is now known in retrospect, this thesis will assert reasons why the University of California Regents made a commendable decision in approving the School of Library Service at UCLA.

This dissertation explores the emergence of open government data in the City of Los Angeles and its implications for governance and citizen involvement. Open government data began in Los Angeles in 2013 with the launch of an open data portal publishing City financial data; later that year the City’s Mayor, Eric Garcetti, mandated that each city department publish at least one publically relevant dataset on a new city-wide site to be available the following year. The policy later expanded with the addition of sites that publish department performance metrics and geographical data. Concurrent with the growth of open data policies is a burgeoning “civic hacker” movement that seeks to put government data to civic use.

This dissertation investigates the material, practical work required to turn a city record into open data; it also shows how open data’s ideological role enables new administrative models and inspires new modes of civic involvement. This dissertation is concerned, ultimately, with the political, creative, and day-to-day work of government and civic data, and how these emerging practices and their cultural dimensions interact with the public rhetoric of open data. To both capture and confront the discourse of open data, this research seeks specificity in the implementation of open data in city offices and at public events. I use interviews and fieldwork to understand how public records migrate from internal infrastructures to the public portal, and from there to public sites where the datasets are reused by civic participants and the private sector. I situate open data within sociotechnical systems that surround its production, processing, storing, sharing, analysis and reuse. This research also asks how citizens use data to challenge or augment dominant statistical representations.

Drawing on critical data studies, science and technology studies, and political theory, I analyze the present and future impact of these information infrastructures on modes of administration, citizen involvement, and the relationship between government and governed. My work provides evidence that data consists of material and ideological systems that can modify and extend relations of power. Specifically, policies of government transparency transformed from an antagonistic dynamic pitting citizens versus governments and private industry, into one of mutual collaboration. My�dissertation�argues that open data does not transparently reveal government transactions and processes; rather this work subtly reshapes modes of administration through a data-centric lens that appeals to industry and civic participants alike. To make this case I examine open data policy in practice and also in relation to historical and contemporary examples of political activism that undertake oppositional, social justice approaches both to government transparency and data production.

This dissertation addresses the cultural politics of representation in digital archives of various histories of racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. It critiques the discourse of realism in both digital and archival representations of knowledge about minoritarian identities through case studies that explore the possibilities and the limitations of digital tools and platforms for the minoritarian critique of the archive as the all-encompassing site of knowledge. The first case study presents a digital 3D model of an East Los Angeles public housing complex famous for its numerous murals painted during the Chicana/o movement of the 1970s. Informed by the theorizations of identity formations as spatial practices, the 3D model functions as an immersive digital archive that documents the dialectics of the barrio as represented by the murals. The second case study reimagines the archive of Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian (1907-1930), an influential yet controversial ethnographical work on the Native Americans in the early twentieth century. It critiques the essentialism of this extensive work of photographic documentation by exploring the multi-modality and non-linearity of Scalar, a content management system developed by digital humanists, and through experimental network visualizations that expose the racial logic and the socio-cultural context of The North American Indian. The following chapter analyzes the discussions around race and ethnicity in the Library of Congress Flickr Commons project as an example of the current Archives 2.0 movement. It challenges the notion that user participation in social media platforms of archival institutions signifies progress towards democracy, and argues that Archives 2.0 is rather more useful as evidence of the mutually constitutive nature of the familiar binary of history/memory. The closing discussion unpacks the rhetorical dimensions of the data and the map of Digital Harlem: Everyday Life 1915-1930. It discusses the epistemological consequences of the project's reliance on mostly legal records to create an extensive database meant to portray the "everyday life" of the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout these sections, by moving away from the multiculturalist celebration of diversity, this dissertation seeks beyond the minority's inclusion into the archive, in order to imagine new modes of representing difference in the current moment of the "digital archive fever."

This dissertation examines American films, miniseries, and television shows that center on the democratic process, mobilizing it in the service of stories that both provide intense narrative and visual pleasures, and offer satisfaction in the form of apparent knowledge gained about the inner workings of electoral politics in the United States; these media texts are here theorized as “democracy porn.” Significantly, democracy porn emerges alongside neoliberalism, and its proliferation mirrors that ideology’s meteoric rise to prominence. As such, the dissertation considers texts made since the advent of neoliberalism in 1973, and up to the US presidential election of 2016, which marks a major shift in the meanings and values associated with democracy porn. Through historical, textual, and discourse analysis drawing on critical theories of affect, citizenship, and neoliberalism, the dissertation interrogates the complex ways in which democracy porn is constructed and functions within and surrounding moving image texts. The project thus tracks the ways neoliberal ideology manifests in the media texts in question, as well as how the consumption of these texts impacts viewers’ understandings of their own citizenship within a democracy increasingly steered by neoliberal principles. The project brings cultural critiques of neoliberalism—particularly of its impact on democracy and citizenship in the United States—into the disciplinary realm of cinema and media studies. This approach constitutes an intervention for the field, as analyses of neoliberalism within cinema and media studies have tended to approach the topic from an industrial standpoint. Ultimately, the dissertation seeks to begin answering the question: How is democracy porn symptomatic of the erosion of possibilities for democracy within the context of neoliberalism?

This dissertation radically reframes the library and information discourse on the African American literacy gap. It argues that special collections libraries are research environments where humanistic knowledge is produced, and that the books they house can provide important insights about the nature of literacy that have been previously overlooked. The research employs a nascent ethnobibliographic methodology in the examination of a range of artifacts from the black press, as it effectively recasts these artifacts as individual nodes in a larger system of knowledge production. By engaging in ethnobibliographic analysis, the study attempts to both identify and explore the bibliocultural link that connects bibliographical materiality with the processes of racial identity construction. The study draws upon data collected from a group of four individual case studies to further situate the research in an argument that advances the idea of a perception gap over the notion of an achievement gap in the institutional response.

Standard form consumer contracts (SFCCs) between consumers and businesses are recognized as ‘standard form’ so as to increase the efficiency of transactions and save costs, which are ostensibly passed on to consumers. Since one party is generally less powerful in terms of access to information and resources, these contracts are often acknowledged as imbalanced. SFCCs in various forms (e.g., terms of terms of service agreements, data policies, copyright policies, acceptable use policies) have been implicated in the wrongdoing of many widely-used service platforms and thus have been at the center of concern for consumer rights in recent years. While some have characterized these issues as a lack of understanding by claiming adherents have a ‘duty to read,’ or as drafters’ responsibility for egregious terms and weak disclosures, this project suggests at least part of the issues exist from a lack of consideration of the document itself—and a performance (or de-performance) of its physical characteristics to some end in a digital environment. It suggests that standardizing aspects of the document form of SFCCs, rather than relying on notions of standard practice that work against user psychology, would have beneficial effects for consumers toward evening out the power imbalance. It makes use of the disciplines that specialize in these topics, including document theory, library and information science, diplomatics, standards of records management, textual criticism and bibliography, and evidence to offer a revised perspective on SFCC issues. Ultimately, it concludes that current governance is not adequate to address the issues of these agreements and suggests three principles, or shifts in concept, that reflect its findings: 1) standardization, not standard practice 2) explanation, not notification; and 3) documentation, not integration. Additionally, it provides a proposal to develop a new set of standards that would afford SFCCs the following characteristics: a) Classifiable/Organizable; b) Preservable/Scrapable; c) Trackable/Stable; d) Authentic/Reliable; e) Processable (machine-readable). This standard could not only help extract necessary information from these documents and produce an ‘informed minority hypothesis,’ but also help stabilize the document for evidentiary reasons (e.g., dispute and discovery, burden of proof) and work against unnoticed changes (from unilateral modification).

In order to gain a better sense of the globe’s biodiversity there have been concerted efforts within the biodiversity community to aggregate dispersed databases to facilitate universal access to information. Central to these systems are nomenclatural and taxonomic mechanisms that validate, organize, and collocate data using established standards and classifications. This dissertation is about the identification, naming, control of, and access to, this cache of biodiversity knowledge, and the common information, documentation, and classification problems that materialize as part of this process. Invoking theories articulated in Information Studies, I examine how documentary control functions within the biodiversity environment, defined as it is by contingent concepts and documents, and how these disciplinary conditions negotiate this tension through classification structures. In particular, composite taxonomies are examined as authoritative access-oriented classifications designed predominantly to aggregate multiple biodiversity taxonomies under one management classification to facilitate efficient data communication. Such composite structures are situated in contradistinction to traditional, descriptive-based taxonomies, primarily designed to argue a hypothesis-driven position about how organisms are related. As constructed knowledge organization systems, biological classifications make implicit epistemological and ontological claims about biological facts, yet these attributes are often overlooked in the practice of interfacing with these systems. Given the increased prominence of these databases within scientific and professional communities, this dissertation asks what kind of knowledge these composite taxonomies instantiate and represent, and how successful they are in serving a consensus-based taxonomic purpose. Taking a critical Information Studies approach, these issues are explored by deeply analyzing the Catalogue of Life, a prominent composite taxonomic schema, invoking documentary, historical, and qualitative methodologies. This project critiques and illustrates the radiant effects of composite taxonomies in biodiversity networks and their multiple uses in professional and scientific practice. This manuscript argues all knowledge organization systems—biological and otherwise—are constructs of cultural and historical circumstances, manufactured artifacts of certain spatiotemporal positions. My goal is to show how other disciplines can inform the literature, theories, and work within Information Studies to rethink our problems anew. As I see it, the question is no longer whether our classification systems can attain true representational capacities, it is more about how we are going to acknowledge their constructedness and harness their contingencies for the most situated social benefit.