How Eva Louise Young (1861-1939) Found Me: On the Performance of Metadata in Knowledge Production

Abstract

Human knowers in academic settings today are caught up in computational procedures. Such procedures have constraining and surprising effects on the “findability” of scholars and scholarly works. This chapter argues that, and shows how, digital literacy is beneficial for epistemological and methodological reflection and creativity during the research process. Unraveling the intricacies of the chapter’s author meeting a “forgotten” philosopher—Eva Louise Young (1861–1939)—in a situated human-computer interaction meant acquiring the competence of being critical of, and creative with, Google’s functioning.1 It meant learning that, in today’s algorithmic condition, canonization and knowledge production are complicated posthuman entanglements. Literacy here means combining tool criticism and creativity from media studies with bioinformatical practices of data and information storage, labeling, and retrieval in dynamic settings.