jill/txt

There’s a fabulous article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker about the history of breastfeeding and of breast pumps. Did you know that Linneus had first categorised humans as Quadrupedia: four-footed beasts, until his wife was breastfeeding their baby a few years later, and he thought that the term mammalia, or animal that breastfeeds their young, would be a better term? That after wetnurses being common among the wealthy and even the middle classes, breastfeeding became de rigeur in the eighteenth century, but then again became a lower class activity in the early twentieth century?

The latter part of the article stops being a history of breastfeeding and makes an interesting argument that we’re currently focusing so strongly on the technology of the breastpump that we’re privileging the right to pump at work above parental leave. in Salon Kate Harding argues that this is a judgemental mothers-should-stay-home argument, but I disagree. Parental leave in the US is appalling. Parents aren’t entitled to paid leave at all, though most are entitled to take twelve weeks unpaid leave and get their job back when they return, and of course, some employers give twelve weeks paid leave. Fathers, as far as I know, have no right to parental leave at all, unless their employer is particularly generous.

That basically means that a mother has the choice between sending her child to daycare at 12 weeks (they actually have infant daycare facilities for extremely young babies in the US) or quitting her job altogether. Pretty lousy set of options, eh?

I pump at work these days. But I was able to stay home (at 80% pay) with my baby for eight months, and we still have five months left for her daddy to stay home with her. It’s nice that our baby can drink my bottled breastmilk, but far more importantly, she gets to spend her days with someone who loves her insanely, she gets to continue building a strong relationship with her daddy (and I get home at 3pm and get lots of time with her too!).

The point of Jill Lepore’s article isn’t that it’s bad to use a pump, it’s that it’s horrific that the right to pump at work is apparently becoming more important as a fight for parents’ and babies’ rights than the right to parental leave - for mothers AND fathers. Even if you don’t agree that parental leave should be paid (I believe that’s an important investment in our children and thus for our society) the right to get your job back after a year or two years on parental leave should be fundamental - otherwise mothers have to choose between a very limiting set of options: have a career or stay at home for years. I’m all for the right to pump at work. But if US parents are putting their efforts into pushing through legislation requiring employers to provide pumping rooms at work instead of working for good parental leave, well, that’s a pretty messed up set of priorities.

(The photo is by Cafemama at Flickr, and shows her pumping in the restroom at a US Airways lounge)

I gave a talk for local librarians on Wednesday, which ended up being about the idea that the age of print was but a short blip in the history of human culture, the Gutenberg Parenthesis, as Tom Pettitt and others have called it (see this PDF for Pettitt’s paper on the topic at MIT5), and that we’re now in the post-parenthetical period. I love the Gutenberg Parenthesis concept - it seems such a great way of explaining the changes we’re going through. But the librarians did point out some problems - for instance, why did copyright appear so late in the age of print if it’s one of the defining features of the Gutenberg Parenthesis? Ibsen didn’t actually own copyright to his own works at the end of the nineteenth century - his publisher did, though. And did I realise that early printers used to travel around from village to village and set up their portable printers and publish small runs of whatever people wanted? Well, no, I hadn’t. Well, the librarian continued, the “authority” and mass-media quality of print wasn’t an issue until Richelieu decided that the state needed more information about its citizens and suddenly required all printed material to be sent to the government - and this idea that print should be controlled by the government quickly spread to other countries. Isn’t that a great example, by the way, of how technology and culture/society are interdependent?

I think these objections merely show that the transitional periods are extremely long, and that norms and expectations based on a previous technology carry over far past the extinction of that technology. That’s why copyright extends and even increases in today’s world, despite its being largely unsuitable for today’s technology and communication.

Having thought about this all Wednesday, Thursday’s lecture to my web design students ended up circling around the same issues - and all the links and so on are summarised in the class blog [Update Sept ‘09 - Oops - a teaching assistent deleted THE WHOLE BLOG for that class so that link won’t work and all my notes are lost. GRRR!]

After a well-earned vacation, danah boyd has returned to blogging and has posted her dissertation Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics online. danah is a pioneering scholar of social networking sites, a she-really-only-JUST-got-her-PhD!? kind of researcher who has already done so much important work - and who is extremely good at getting her message out there, speaking at conferences and meetings across the world and participating in commercial research as well as research aimed at establishing policies.

So I’m thrilled to be able to read her dissertation. I’m printing the whole thing as I write, because this is something I want to be able to curl up with and a piece of writing I’m sure I’ll be referring to in my own work.

I’m looking forward to Ada Lovelace Day, on March 24. Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, having written software for Babbage’s Analytical Machine in the 1840s. The machine was never built, so the software never ran, and she died young, but has still been an inspiration to women in computing ever since. The Ada Lovelace Day is an innovation this year, suggested by Suw Charman-Andersen, who pledge that “I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.” I signed her pledge, as have well over a thousand other bloggers, so the day is happening - and there’s always room for more bloggers!

The lack of visible women at technology conferences and in technology jobs has been a problem for many years, and lately there’s even been a worrying decline in the number of women studying computer science. Having positive female role-models is extremely important to young women. I know it’s been important to me - it’s simply hard to make the jump imagining myself in a role as a man in a suit, and much easier to figure out the kind of teacher, researcher or leader I want to be when I can see how different women who are far more experienced than me choose to fill these roles. I know there are many studies that support this too, and suggest it may be more important for women to have role-models of their own gender than it is for men - I should have references sorry, I only have the one right now.

So check out the pledge, the blog, and consider joining in yourself - and of course, check back here on March 24 to read my blog post about a woman in technology who’s inspired me.

I just heard about a fabulously interesting seminar at Infomedia on Computational Journalism - they’re planning on starting up a project about the use of software that gathers, computes and re-presents data in an editorial context, things like Washington Post’s Faces of the Fallen. I’m not sure something like this is necessarily best viewed as journalism actually. Yesterday I read about Boliga.no, a website that pulls in data from ads about houses that are for sale and shows you how long each house has been on the market, how much the suggested price has dropped and so on - details that are very useful to a potential house buyer, but that advertisers and real estate agents have no interest in showing us. I would call Boliga.no a useful web service, but if Boliga.no had been created as part of a newspaper site, would it be “computational journalism”?

Interestingly, since yesterday most of the journalistic articles written about Boliga.no have used it to write classically journalistic stories: Her stupte boligprisene 15 prosent i fjor (”Prices dropped 15% here last year”), Ligger 95 dager i snitt (”On average 95 days to sell”), Stavanger-bolig kuttet fra fem til tre millioner (”Stavanger home dropped from five to three million”). But that means journalists can use web services - well, mashups, I guess - like this, not that the mashup itself is journalism, right?

The main speaker is Olav Anders Øvrebø, who’s done a lot of interesting work on blogging and journalism among other things, and the respondents are central actors in the Norwegian sphere of these things too.

Sadly I’m teaching just when the seminar’s running. I’ve cheekily asked whether I can bring my students, but I’m expecting a no - 25-30 students just won’t fit into that seminar room or, probably, the seminar format. Ah well.

This morning started unlike every other morning of the last nine months. Sure, I woke up, showered and fed Jessica, but then I ate an amazing breakfast Scott cooked for us (Dutch apple pancake baked in our new cast iron skillet - so yummy!) and after seeing the twelve-year-old off to school I kissed Scott and little eight-month-old Jessica goodbye and went to work. My first day back at work after nine months of maternity leave.

It actually feels pretty good being back at the office. My desk is so tidy. My phone is rerouted to my old phone number, my computer is hooked up again and I’ve gone through my email (actually I just archived everything from 2008 without reading it) and my paper mail (mostly catalogues). I’ve been figuring out my schedule for the spring. I’m teaching into the web design course, HUIN105, with Eric Rasmussen, who’ll be substituting for Scott this semester. I’m also supervising a few students who are doing independent practical projects in HUIN305. But I’m only teaching for a couple of months, because I’m getting a bonus few months of sabbatical since I missed part of it being on maternity leave. And thanks to brilliant Norway I only have to work 5 1/2 hour days: I get two hours paid leave every day because I’m still nursing. I love Norwegian parental leave.

I’m also giving a couple of talks in the next weeks, both for librarians, who are some of my favourite people when it comes to genuine interest in using social technology and the web to connect with readers. The first talk is at Neptunseminaret on January 21 here in Bergen, which is an annual meeting organised by various regional library associations. This year the topic is “Human meets machine”, and the other speakers look really interesting. I’m looking forward to attending this. My second talk is in Oslo at Kari Skjønsberg-dagene on Feburary 9, and is organised by the Faculty of Journalism, Library and Information Science.

All this is good.

But walking to work I realised that I may never again spend all of every day with my baby. She’ll be with her daddy for the next semester, which is fabulous. But our days of me being there always are over.

I’m already looking forward to going home and holding her close again!