News from the Collective

Learning from other scholars’ work on Haitian radio was, and still is, one of the greatest pleasures in the process of writing Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC 2016). People living in or from Haiti widely acknowledged and almost took for granted radio’s outsized role in public and political life. Edwidge Danticat and Jonathan Demme also understood this and paid tribute in Claire of the Sea Light and The Agronomist respectively, but historians remained largely fixated, understandably, on pivotal moments in Haiti’s rich history. Radio is different. Not pivotal, but witnessing the pivotal. Less dramatic and more long lasting and adhering to the same format for days, years, decades. It speaks to people who wouldn’t read newspapers or books. It floods private and public space with the sounds of music, talking, ruling, dissenting, explaining, satirizing, creating, crying, testifying, lying. But it leaves few archival traces. This is why the work of the five scholars in this series is so important. They allow us to hear a little and honor the listeners who make the medium what it is.

To start the series, Ian Coss gave a finely tuned account of a “day in the life” of a radio station in Cap Haïtien that follows the programming rhythm of days and nights.  Then, Jennifer Garcon recounted one of the pivotal points in the relationship—its near breakdown and ultimate survival—also a turning point for a 19-year-old Jean Claude Duvalier, newly proclaimed President for life. Last week, Laura Wagner, who listened to each recording Radio Haïti-Inter and its archive (now at Duke University) and wrote its archival descriptors, writes of the work itself, the emotional, financial and intellectual challenges involved, and the reason this archive is essential to anyone interested in Haiti, or radio, or racial justice.

We continue the series in Brooklyn this week, where amidst gentrification and millennials seeking upscale vegan quesadillas, the ‘culture of the transistor’ is alive and well. Pirate radio stations broadcasting music and news in Haitian Creole have loyal followings, mostly of an older generation for whom radio was the primary medium during their youth. Listening brings back memories of a prosperous 1940s and 50s Haiti that recent narratives centered on catastrophe tend to bury. David Goren, who has not just written about but also mapped Brooklyn’s pirate stations, reminds us that these aural communities connect past and present, and perhaps future as well.

Guest Editor– Alejandra Bronfman

Click here for the full series!

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‘A lot of these stations, especially the Haitian stations, they have such an extensive music library that a song will come on the radio and all of a sudden my mom is like, ‘Oh my God! Your grandma used to have this record and she played it every Saturday!’ says Joan Martinez, a young Haitian-American born in the US and a former program host on some of the unlicensed Kreyol language stations. “Now she’s transported back to being on the island, with the big radio that’s a piece of furniture in the living room. People are chatting, little drinks are flowing about, my grandmother milling about in a gorgeous dress. It’s kind of like that whole nostalgia era that unfortunately was probably lost because of the political turmoil in Haiti. So it’s harkening back to a good time, to a simpler time, a better time, a more carefree era.”

Every day, the skies of New York City fill up with unseen clouds of radio signals spreading over immigrant neighborhoods. These culturally charged clouds of radio energy burst with a flow of content that continually shifts and transforms, following the lifecycle and rhythm of the streets.

From clandestine studios tucked behind store fronts, DJs transform time and physical space with Konpa, Reggae and Soca music, mixing the sounds of ancestral homes with the thump and challenge of adapting to a new life in the United States. Jolted by electrified fingers of Signal, the old radio poetry of hiss and hum leaps from a scattered forest of antennas connected to transmitters hidden away inside rooftop sheds. In Brooklyn, the signals alight on Flatbush Avenue, blasting from radios in dollar vans, bakeries, churches and on street corners and kitchen tables. By accessing an analog technology that (outside of the radio itself) is essentially free for the listener, economically marginalized communities avoid the subscription and data fees built in to the conveniences of the digital life. Listeners, often the elders of the community, extend metal antennas and position the radios just so, trying to catch the elusive vibrations of crucial music, news and information that are seldom felt in New York City’s legal and mostly corporate owned media soundscape. 

“These underground, unlicensed or pirate stations have been around for as long as there has been radio,” Martinez says. The legality of radio stations stems from The Communications Act of 1934, legislation that created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the agency tasked with penalizing unlicensed stations and shutting them down. “The focus really was on the listeners.” says Rosemary Harold, chief of FCC Enforcement ‘because what had happened before licensing became what we know as today, was that listeners weren’t able to consistently hear radio broadcasts. And now we’re kind of in a modern iteration of that.” 

Others, like pirate radio historian John Anderson, see the Act as unfairly slanted towards commercial interests, awarding “the highest powers and clearest channels” to stations that sold advertising, tilting the medium away from serving specific communities. “By privileging commercial speech over non-commercial speech and by basically saying if you are a special interest, we will not award you a license.” Anderson says. “You create the conditions for there to be dissension over the media policy, which will lead people into radical actions, like putting stations on the air without permission.” In Flatbush, stations broadcast primarily to Haitians, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Grenadians and Orthodox Jews. The Haitian stations are particularly active in East Flatbush with just under a dozen broadcasting daily in Kreyol to the large Haitian community. 

“I came across it at a very young age. There was this really popular station back in the late 80s, Radio Guinee, and it was based in Brooklyn.” Joan Martinez says. “Nobody knows where it was, there are suspicions. But all I know is from Friday night all the way to Sunday night, you would just hear a series of these stations every weekend and it would be the place where you could listen to the latest in Haitian pop music, rap music. It was also the news, my parents and their friends would all sit around the radio and they would just be politicking in the living room getting really loud, you know, dancing, singing along that sort of thing. It was just like a meeting ground and the radio was guiding it.” 

This phase of New York City pirate radio rose from the ashes of a previous scene dating to the late sixties: a dozen or so stations sporadically run mostly by white teenagers: a mix of hippies, radicals and electronically inclined misfits. By 1987, this loose collective of friends and rivals devolved into infighting after a short-lived attempt to broadcast from international waters off Jones Beach. This created room for new pirate radio voices from diverse communities that were increasingly being pushed off the legal airwaves by high costs, format consolidation, and  “the low power desert”, an FCC-led phaseout of small community broadcasters. The local pirates joined a growing national wave of progressive pirate radio activity taking  advantage of a new generation of cheap FM transmitters imported from China or homebrewed in makeshift workshops by free radio activists.

By the early 90’s, immigrant community-focused broadcasters In New York City flipped the unspoken rules of the earlier pirates who broadcast mainly late at night on a few pre-determined “safe” frequencies, instead filling the FM dial from bottom to top, day and night. In 2000, under pressure from a nationwide increase in pirate radio activity, the FCC introduced a new license class: Low Power FM (LPFM) but opposition from National Public Radio and the National Association of Broadcasters shut down the issuing of new licenses. That severely limited LPFM’s availability in major urban markets due to rules requiring LPFM’s to be “three click aways” from existing stations. Local pirates felt they had no alternative but to continue broadcasting and some stations in Flatbush have been on the air for decades. Despite the passage of the Local Community Radio Act in 2011, opening a new licensing window with relaxed spacing requirements, few new frequencies were available in NYC due to an already crowded dial. The continued pirate presence is enabled by a sort of safety in numbers, an FCC enforcement team hampered by a low budget and a bureaucratic process of enforcement. 

Though the stations exist to serve their communities with news and culture and maybe make a little money for their owners and dj’s, they can and do cause interference for listeners of licensed stations, particularly low-powered non-commercial broadcasters like WFMU, a beloved freeform music station. Interference near their frequency has inspired the Brooklyn Pirate Watch Twitter group to keep a wary eye on pirate operations.

Interference aside, FCC commissioners and staff publicly fume at the pirates for a range of potential public safety violations, some more theoretical than others and claim they are somehow harming their own communities, and wonder finally, why don’t they just stream on the internet. By viewing radio piracy purely from a legal perspective, critics miss the cultural and historic forces driving the Haitian pirates. During the Duvalier dictatorship (1957-1986) Haitians had access to only two stations broadcasting in Kreyol, rather than French, the language of the elite. One was Radio Lumiere, a religious station and the other Radio Haiti-Inter, a fiercely independent voice whose director Jean Dominque was assassinated in 1999.

“The peasant in Haiti, while he’s working on his farm you know he had a transistor.” Says Dr. Jean Eddy St. Paul, Director of the Haitian Studies Institute at the City University of New York. ‘And many peasants, they don’t have money to buy tobacco to smoke, but they will have money to buy the battery to put in the transistor. The first generation of migration, in the US, was during the 1960s and for many of those people the culture of transistor was part of their everyday life, so they’re still maintaining the culture of transistor. For them, having a radio station is very important.’ 

In July 2019, on a side street in East Flatbush, I met a man calling himself “Joseph” aka “Haitian” (“because I’m a pure Haitian!”), part of a group that keeps Radio Comedy FM on the air. “There’s no owners and committee. It’s a bunch of young guys”. Joseph says, “We have to do something positive for our community. Right now the Marines are in Haiti and we don’t know what’s next! CNN don’t show you this! BBC don’t show you this! So what we do, we have people in Haiti that call us and tell us what’s going on and will send us pictures. This is how we get our information. And bring it to the people…. I have family over there, my mother’s still there. So I have to know what’s going on. 

At this point in the digital age, it’s an open question how long these analog pirate stations will remain relevant, as their audiences age, neighborhoods gentrify and younger listeners gravitate to social media platforms. The answer seems to lie with their elderly and impoverished listeners. “They don’t have enough money to buy the newspapers understand?.” Joseph says.” For him that makes it worth it to keep Radio Comedy on the air despite a crackdown from the FCC backed by the PIRATE Act signed into law in 2020 that increases fines to $100,000 a day up to $2 million. But the legislation lacks funding to enforce the new regulations. With a federal statute still in place reducing fines down to the ability to pay, it’s unclear whether the PIRATE Act will be anything more than another in an escalating series of scare tactics. 

“If they don’t want us to do it just make it easy for us. Let’s make a meeting with those guys [the FCC],” Joseph says. ‘We’re going to provide the air for you. A frequency. You’re going to pay for example, $500 a month even $1,000 a month.’ We will be more than happy to do it. “

Though the FCC has recently suggested the possibility of a new round of LPFM licenses in the future, the already crowded nature of NYC’s FM band makes it unlikely that new frequencies will be made available to the current pirate stations. In addition the FCC doesn’t want to be seen as rewarding illegal activity by granting a license to former pirate broadcasters, which was a prohibition in LPFM’s earlier licensing periods. And for the moment, Joseph, who’s been running unlicensed stations since 1991 (‘it’s an addiction’) is equally unlikely to cede the airwaves. He sees Radio Comedy as not just a radio station, but a community lifeline. 

 “You know many children we save? There was a bunch of guys…Jamaican, Trinidadian, Haitian trying to form a gang. We talked to them, bring them to the station. Most of them have a diploma now. Without the radio, most of them probably get locked up or dead.” 

Even with the PIRATE act on the books, the number of stations on the air in Brooklyn has remained steady with an average of about 25 per day and the advent of the Coronavirus pandemic has only sharpened their mission. In March 2020 as the spread of Covid-19 lead to NYC’s lockdown, the unlicensed Haitian broadcasters and the other West Indian stations in Brooklyn took a step closer to their listeners, increasing their air time and enhancing their formats to deliver information about the virus both in New York and in their countries of origin amid the heavy toll it took on the community.

Click here to hear Station IDs for Radio Lumiere, Radio Independans, and La Voix du Peuple!

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Featured Image: Antenna in Flatbush, courtesy of David Goren

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An award-winning radio producer, David Goren has created programming for the BBC, Jazz at Lincoln Center Radio, the Wall Street Journal Magazine, and NPR’s “Lost and Found Sound” series, as well as audio-based installations for Proteus Gowanus Radio Cona and the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective. In 2016, he was an artist-in residence at Wave Farm, a center for the transmission arts.

Since 2014, David has been recording New York City’s prodigious pirate radio activity and researching the evolution of this grassroots community radio movement resulting in the release of  “Outlaws of the Airwaves: The Rise of Pirate Radio Station WBAD” (2018) for KCRW’s “Lost Notes” podcast, New York City’s Pirates of the Air for the BBC World Service (2019) and the “Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map 2.0” (2020)  which was featured in The New Yorker. He presented “Tracing Neighborhoods in the Sky,” as part of the Fall 2019 Franke Lectures at Yale University. In January 2021, the Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map became a partner of the Library of Congress’ Radio Preservation Task Force.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Archivism and Activism: Radio Haiti and the Accountability of Educational Institutions–Laura Wagner

Listen to yourself!: Spotify, Ancestry DNA, and the Fortunes of Race Science in the Twenty-First Century–Alexander Cowen

SO! Amplifies: Marginalized Sound—Radio for All–J Diaz

“We need to focus on what remains unrendered, or unseen – what we are blind to.” – Rosa Menkman

On Friday evening, NCAD (National College of Art and Design, Dublin) and The Digital Hub hosted a webinar with Rosa Menkman and Joanna Zylinska. It was the fifth event in the Digital Cultures series, and my first time tuning in. I expected a straightforward panel discussion, but after the host, Rachel O’Dwyer introduced the two artists, we were shown two presentations first by Rosa and Joanna. Seeing them back-to-back provided a nice opportunity to notice similarities between their areas of expertise and differences in how they approach machine vision and algorithmic blindspots.

Rosa’s presentation “Destitute Vision” demonstrated her keenness to experiment with alternative forms of lecturing. In a mesmerising 15-minute work, she explores how artistic interventions can help us understand technologies of perception. In a calm voice-over, she proposes that data has the potential to be fluid, but it is the architecture through which it moves that distorts it and molds it into a singular form. Instead of asking what algorithms see, Rosa inquires what they render invisible.

I enjoyed learning about her “BLOB of Im/Possible Images” project, a playfully named 3D gallery that shows images chosen by a group of particle physicists, who visualised important concepts or phenomena that cannot (yet) be rendered. I can see how this type of speculative thinking opens up new possibilities for understanding each other across disciplines and types of expertise.

Still from Rosa Menkman’s “BLOD of Im/Possible Images,” found on newart.city (click on image to visit).

Joanna’s presentation explored her experience of using an Artbreeder GAN algorithm to render images of eyes and brains, which turned into an artwork titled “Neuromatic.” Her choice to focus on these body parts points to an interest in pinning down what exactly constitutes seeing. She explained that even though we know a lot about the human body and its complex processes, the phenomenon of seeing remains somewhat of a mystery.

In her research, Joanna considers what it means for humans to endow machines with the capacity of seeing, and inquires whether machines can see at all. Her approach proves the value of artists borrowing from other fields – in this case, from philosophy – to tackle a concept they deem interesting. Indeed, later in the discussion, Joanna talked about how her practice requires re-learning biology and philosophy and using their knowledges in a way that breaks rules and poses unconventional questions. These methods are usually inaccessible by scientists, who are more limited by funding requirements and goal-oriented methodologies.

What followed the presentations was a productive discussion about collaboration, modes of seeing, and the role visual arts play in rendering visible different technological and biological phenomena. I left the event feeling like I got to look at artistic research from a new angle, one that reveals their playfulness and lack of rigid expectations as assets and activators of interdisciplinary understanding.

Found on Wellcome Collection: Dissection of the skull, showing the eyes with attached nerves and muscles. Lithograph by G.H. Ford, 1864.

In the discussion, Rosa pointed out that scientists want to open up their knowledges to other experts and communities, and that artists are often a bridge between scientific fields and people who are unfamiliar with them. Similarly, Joanna noted that artists often deal with the same themes as engineers or scientists, but the endpoint of their projects tends to differ, and their scope can be broader.

On the topic of interdisciplinarity, Joanna pointed out that jumping between fields reveals similarities between them, but also shows their respective blindspots. She stressed that the aim shouldn’t be to create some sort of (unattainable) universal knowledge, but rather to notice each other’s limitations and find common ground, without flattening the differences that remain.

Still from Joanna Zylinska’s “Neuromatic.”

What started as a conversation about specific themes – machine vision, algorithmic limitations, collaboration – shifted to a meditation on why people desire to model and represent the world. Joanna asked if there is a single world out there to be represented, hinting at the intrinsic subjectivity of perception and sensations.

“Vision is just one of the senses, it is never just vision because it’s always already expanded, it’s environmental, it’s always been haptic. But the human has been constructed as a visual being. There is a history to vision and the human as a visual, visualising subject. We have to address that history.” – Joanna Zylinska

The discussion also carried climate urgency undertones, as the guests noted the importance of recognising non-human actants in the world in our explorations of modes of perception. Instead of seeking a “total vision” that encompasses different kinds of experiences, Joanna suggested that treating this concept as a speculative, artistic question allows for exploring the human desire to understand our limitations.

Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square” painting: the experience of looking at “nothing”?

Joanna noted she could see a corporation exploiting an idea of “hyper vision.” Yes, I can imagine a neoliberal Tesla-esque project using computer vision to obtain the “perfect” way to see and analyse the world. Elon Musk would announce it at a self-serving event, claiming he is changing the world, only to grant access to this new “product” to a select few, dodging critique and refusing to consider why a “total vision” would be a good idea in the first place. In this ecocentric and capitalist mode of thinking, to see the world from every angle would mean to own it from every angle.

Trees have eyes in Rachel MacLean’s “Eyes to Me”

In the end, it boils down to agency. Knowing that current infrastructures of digital cultures are shaped by profit- and data-oriented corporations, we have to be vigilant when thinking about who acts as a user and who is being used. Both Joanna and Rosa discussed these power structures. They highlighted that algorithms – sometimes perceived as abstract and incorporeal – have very real socio-political consequences, often harming already marginalised groups when used in the hands of immigration enforcement or banks.

For me, the all-encompassing influence algorithms already have was the most important takeaway from this event. Artistic interventions can shed light on the shadowy inner workings of certain algorithms without vilifying them. But we have to acknowledge the limitations of our perception – literal and conceptual – before we engage with other modes of seeing.

Links for further research:

Watch the full event back on YouTube.

See other events in the Digital Cultures series here.

Read Rosa’s recent publication, Beyond Resolution.

Read Joanna’s recent publication, AI Art.

Welcome to our Spring Newsletter!

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Combinatorial Books - Gathering Flowers - Part III by Janneke Adema, Gary Hall, and Gabriela Méndez Cota.

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Tracy T. Dooley, co-editor of Simplified Signs: A Manual Sign-Communications System for Special Populations, has made available a transcript of the Online Book Launch of Simplified Signs: A Manual Sign-Communication System for Special Populations here.

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Translating Les Philosophes: A Collaborative Challenge by Felicity Gush and Rosie Rigby

Earth Day and the Beauty We Love by Sam Mickey

In praise of conflict by Geoffrey Baker

Out now: "Rethinking Social Action Through Music” by Geoffrey Baker.

An Interview with Giulia Raboni, co-editor of What is Authorial Philology?  

Promotional Video for Arab Media Systems by Carola Richter and Claudia Kozman (eds)

An Interview with Jessica Goodman, editor of 'The Philosophes' by Charles Palissot

An Interview with the contributors of Introducing Vigilant Audiences by Daniel Trottier, Rashid Gabdulhakov and Qian Huang

Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing by Sam Mickey, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim (eds).

This book makes essential connections for understanding how humans may interact with all of life on Earth, especially in the face of rapid global climate change.
​
—  J. B. Richardson III, emeritus, University of Pittsburgh, CHOICE connect, April 2021 Vol. 58 No. 8

History of International Relations: A Non-European Perspective by Erik Ringmar.

The book is a rich mine of historical narratives that give an interesting, objective and enlightening account of crucial stages of the world history. Without its comprehensive study, one cannot better understand the complexity of today’s world. It is a must read for graduate students, faculty and researchers. The book is highly recommended for all those who are keen enough to have an access to the world history through objective lenses.

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B C, Before Computers: On Information Technology from Writing to the Age of Digital Data by Stephen Robertson.

This reviewer found the book an absorbing read… should … appeal to general readers interested in the modern information environment.

— R. Bharath, emeritus, Northern Michigan University, CHOICE connect, May 2021 Vol. 58 No. 9.

The Waning Sword: Conversion Imagery and Celestial Myth in 'Beowulf' by Edward Pettit.


This book’s strength is its wealth of [...] comparanda—interesting, worthy, often compelling analogues to the central monster-fight of Beowulf. They reveal the likelihood of an archaic mythic substrate embedded in the narrative tradition the poet inherited [...]. Pettit’s study is well worth the effort he has put into it, gathering in one place a compendium of the solar imagery that once appealed so strongly to the Beowulf poet [...].

— Craig R. Davis, Speculum 96/2 (April 2021), 545-47.

Annunciations: Sacred Music for the Twenty-First Century by George Corbett (ed.)

‘In this book we have a highly creative response [to (post-?) secular society], one which is not just a book, but a multimedia work […] It is the fruit of a remarkable, indeed unique collaboration between theologians and composers […] the resultant “alchemy” has produced some rather wonderful music as well as developing theological understanding, and raising sometimes awkward new questions. […] Annunciations makes a decisive shift from the now-common Historically Informed Performance model (i.e. how would Palestrina’s music have sounded in its historical context?) to Theologically Informed Programming and Performance: “to show how an appreciation of the theological engagement or profound spirituality of composers can influence their music’s performance and reception”’. — Dominic White, OP, New Blackfriars, (May 2021)

Sailing from Polis to Empire: Ships in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic Period by Emmanuel Nantet (ed.)

This work is a worthy and innovative contribution to its field. The visual component is a valuable asset towards the understanding of the subject, and the inclusion of different themes, explored through varied approaches, allows for a greater understanding of the most recent work in nautical studies of the ancient Mediterranean, bringing important input into a subject that has been growing in visibility during the past few years, due to new technologies and the irreplaceable role of underwater archaeological surveys. The bibliographies of the different chapters provide a valuable collection of both early ship studies, updated and very recent publications, and ancient sources, in which researchers can find passages for further consideration. The illustration list, which includes ancient iconography, also contributes to this purpose. Even though the nature of the various chapters seems, at first, rather different, readers will soon realise that they are connected by the same approach and purpose, marking the work’s methodological position and serving as a practical guide to researchers who may wish to further their knowledge and future investigation into these matters. Its proposed timeframe, albeit focusing on the Hellenistic era, often ends up transposing towards the more remote period of the Homeric tales and occasionally extends into the Roman imperial period, especially as regards iconographic surveys, due to the scarcity of material. This allows the work to go beyond its initial scope and to consider matters such as technological capacities, shipbuilding techniques, harbour characteristics and mental and socio-economical influence of ship trade with a long-term view, another mark of its multidisciplinary approach.

— Daniela Dantas, Centre for History of the University of Lisbon, The Classical Review 71.1 190–193, 2021.

Making up Numbers: A History of Invention in Mathematics by Ekkehard Kopp.

This book examines the theoretical growth of mathematics from a historical perspective. Kopp (Univ. of Hull) offers a fascinating and enlightening presentation in which basic notions are evolved into advanced mathematical concepts. As shown here, abstraction becomes a natural result of mathematical development.

—  D. P. Turner, Faulkner University, CHOICE Connects, June 2021 Vol. 58 No. 10

Information and Empire: Mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600-1850 by Simon Franklin and Katherine Bowers (eds)

Wegen dieser guten Verfügbarkeit des Bandes, seiner klaren Struktur und der Bedeutung des Themas kann das Buch sowohl dem Spezialisten als auch für die universitäre Lehre empfohlen werden. Die kontroversen, aber auch komplementären Thesen im Buch werden zu fruchtbaren Diskussionen in Kursen und Seminaren anregen.

—Arkadi Miller, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas in our review supplement jgo.e-reviews 9 (2019), no. 2

Earth 2020: An Insider’s Guide to a Rapidly Changing Planet by Philippe Tortell (ed.).

Conceived before Covid-19, 'Earth 2020: An Insider’s Guide to a Rapidly Changing Planet' is an attempt to review various environmental topics from climate change to biodiversity and pollution crises in a series of testimonies by "insiders,” specialists in their respective disciplines. It begins with a solid introduction by Philippe Tortell explaining his journey into the preparation of these essays. As he explains in the introduction the idea for this book came to him as a way "to focus public attention (if only for a short while) on topics of significant importance.”[5] Tortell explains the book as a way of assessing the human footprint on the "Earth system” since the first celebration of Earth Day in 1970.

— Loys Maingon, The Ormsby Review, April 17, 2021.

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Ross Higman is a software engineer working on the Open Dissemination System for the COPIM project. He has previously developed software for telecommunications networking and air pollution modelling, and worked as an editorial assistant. He holds an MPhil in Linguistics from the University of Cambridge.

Could you give us a glimpse of how you first became involved with open access?

I've been aware of open access for a while, as many of my friends are in academia or librarianship. Like many people, I became much more conscious of the issues that can arise from closed access publishing early in the coronavirus pandemic! Working at OBP has been my first direct involvement with open access, and it's exciting to work on at this time of growing interest and engagement from the scholarly community.

What drew you to work at OBP?

I've always sought out roles where I can use my skills to the benefit of society, and as a software developer with an earlier background in publishing admin, I found the opportunity to create open source software supporting smaller OA publishers very appealing.

Could you briefly describe what your role involves?

I work full-time on the COPIM project developing the web-based metadata management system Thoth. There are two of us on the development team, and between us we work on extending and improving all aspects of the software, from the publicly-visible web interface to the database that holds all the metadata under the covers. We're adding new functionality all the time, as well as learning what works best for the editorial staff who use it and adapting the system to their needs, and it's great to have that sense that we're constantly making progress.

What do you think is the most challenging aspect of your work? And the most exciting?

There's lots to learn, and it's constantly changing - which is both challenging and exciting. Thoth is written entirely in the programming language Rust, which I hadn't worked with before, and has some unusual features compared to languages I've used previously. Like Thoth itself, it's quite new, and still developing, but that allows it to learn from and improve on what's gone before! It's also the first time I've been involved in developing every level of a web application, which is a lot to master, but really satisfying when you see it all working together.