Patrick Keilty

Tabulating Queer: Space, Perversion, and Belonging

Considering fields as diverse as the history of science, Internet studies, border studies, and coalition politics, the article gives an historical overview of how the knowledge around queer phe- nomena has been structured, tabulated, and spacialized: the hazards, coercive and productive qualities, as well as queers para- doxical relationship as both resistant to and reliant on categories, classification, and knowledge structures. In the process, the article also considers the development of Western hierarchical knowledge structures in relation to societal power dynamics, proximity, and space.

Embodiment and desire in browsing online pornography

The purpose of this essay is to explore why Spink, Ozmutlu, & Lorence (2004) found that browsing online pornography requires more time and effort than general searches online. Recent information-seeking behavior research concerning online pornography neglects to examine sexuality or desire as factors influencing this particular information activity. As such, I rely on Lacans theory of desire, Freuds theory of cathexis, and existential phenomenology, a philosophical method that emphasizes an interpretation of perception and bodily activity, in order to examine the way our embodied relations with the technological apparatus of the computer effect the time and effort of browsing online pornography. In the process, I offer an explanation of subjective analysis as a new mode of description for understanding certain aspects of information activity.

Embodied engagements with online pornography

ABSTRACT Even though sexual arousal is a central feature in browsing online pornography, embodiment has largely gone unexamined in much of the research on pornography in information studies and human–computer interaction. Through existential phenomenology, which emphasizes a synthesis of cognitive reflection and embodied experience, this article examines how our embodied engagements with the technological apparatus of the computer help reconstitute the way we feel time, objects of desire, and pleasure in the process of browsing online pornography.

What porn says to information studies: The affective value of documents, and the body in information behavior

In this paper we examine will examine how the everyday life of information seeking of pornography reveals two things. In contradiction of the general theory that says documents are sought for their cognitive value, the commonplace phenomenon of browsing pornography online demonstrates that documents are sought for their affective value. Furthermore, affective response reveals ways that the information seekers own body is an important element in the negotiation of assessing and understanding documents during the seeking process. We also assess the degree to which these specific observations are true in more general settings.

Desire by design: pornography as technology industry

Globally, pornography is a US

Exploring Cyberbullying Through Visual Narratives.

97 billion global media industry (Morris 2014). As the primary platform by which people interact with pornography today, online pornography companies wield enormous in...

Feeling documents: toward a phenomenology of information seeking

This poster reports on a study that examined the use of visual narratives to explore young people’s views on cyberbullying and for generating design interventions that would combat mean and cruel behavior online. Two focus groups – a group of five teens in high school and a group of undergraduates– used storytelling and sketching to frame their perceptions of cyberbullying around a narrative and to propose design features that might afford young people the time to pause and reflect on their actions in social media before they participate in cyberbullying.

Tedious: feminized labor in machine-readable cataloging

The purpose of this paper is to present two models of human cognition. The first narrow model concentrates on the mind as an information-processing apparatus, and interactions with information as altering thought structures and filling gaps in knowledge. A second model incorporates elements of unconsciousness, embodiment and affect. The selection of one model over the other, often done tacitly, has consequences for subsequent models of information seeking and use.,A close reading of embodied engagements with pornography guided by existential phenomenology.,The paper develops a phenomenology of information seeking, centered primarily around the work of Merleau-Ponty, to justify a more expansive concept of cognition. The authors demonstrate the roles of affect and embodiment in document assessment and use, with a prolonged example in the realm of browsing pornography.,Models of information seeking and use need to account for diverse kinds of human-document interaction, to include documents such as music, film and comics that engage the emotions or are perceived through a broader band of sensory experience to include visual and auditory components. The authors consider how those human-document engagements form virtual communities based on the similarity of their members’ affective and embodied responses, which in turn inform the arrangements, through algorithms, of the relations of documents to each other. Less instrumental forms of information seeking and use – ones that incorporate elements of embodiment and affect – are characterized as esthetic experiences, following the definition of the esthetic provided by Dewey. Ultimately the authors consider, given the ubiquity of information seeking and its rhythm in everyday life, whether we can meaningfully characterize information seeking as a distinct human process.

Resistance and possibility: Rethinking the concept of subject access from queer theoretical perspectives

Abstract This essay examines previously unexplored IBM reports and manuals that document the development of Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) in the 1960s to understand gendered assumptions manufacturers made about the labor of information retrieval and to ultimately discuss the ways in which MARC transformed the feminized labor of information, making it more diffuse and shifting expectations about productivity. In the process, this essay will show that cataloging, like other forms of women’s labor transformed by technology in the latter part of the twentieth century, has a complicated relationship to the market labor and industrialization. Finally, this essay ends by connecting MARC and feminized labor to the contemporary discussion of BIBFRAME.

Tagging and Sexual Boundaries

This session will use queer theory to raise important questions about the role of information science in relation to queer communities. Using examples taken from both literary and popular culture, the session will look at the practices of classification in information systems, and how those practices, even when they attempt to facilitate access to resources for LGBTQ communities, ignore disjunctions and distortions that, far from being a barrier to access, form a fundamental aspect of queer expression.