Friday bonus: Thinking in public, making visible

In this post, I'm braiding three different threads that have been on my mind in recent weeks. It's a fairly loose braid, but I hope the relationship between the topics is clear enough.

One my my highlights during the month of October was the BarCamp (a kind of un-conference) that took place before the Dutch national Open Science Festival. I haven't been to a BarCamp in years, and it felt so good to be in a context of other researchers and research supporters, but without the structure of the usual academic conference or franticness of the high-hype conferences organized by funders and government (take your pick: these appear to be the two poles at the moment). The OSF BarCamp was a relief, more like what I experience in venues like Libre Graphics Meeting, where I generally go in my own time, not for work. Long story short, these are venues where sharing and open discussion happen. People bring ideas and look for connections. It's a relief to be in venues where people are present for the purpose of being open and interested.

I say all of this in the context of a conversation I had this week with a colleague. We were discussing the merits of publishing emergent ideas in places like personal blogs, both as a way of fleshing things out in their early stages, and to get those ideas into the world sooner than they might get there in a more scholarly publishing flow.

As academia experiences a combined crisis and change of mindset in the concept of "impact" and is forcibly moved away from treating citations to publications as the most or only important measure of success, other ways of contributing to various discourses are increasingly important. I've been thinking about this lately while considering what of my work has had impact recently. While I've written some scholarly work I'm pretty proud of in the last year or so, it's undeniable that the most impactful thing I've done in that period is write my reader's guide to "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" This has arguably been my biggest contribution to public discourse because Cory Doctorow found it useful, and linked to it a couple times (thanks, Cory!). More importantly, he wrote a couple essays that were inspired by it (for example, "The technopolitics of ad-tech"). This fits into a newer way of thinking about impact: rather than looking at how many other scholarly texts cite your work, look at changes that take place out in the world (this is, of course, a lot harder to measure).

I wrote my text about "Artifacts" because I think it's a seminal text in science and technology studies, but it can be a little intimidating. I mostly wrote it for people like students I've taught that article to, who have struggled with it. That was the kind of impact I imagined. But because it turned out to be useful to someone who has a far bigger platform than I do (and who's very good at linking to things he uses), it now gets to be useful to more people. That's a massive positive: yet more people, in expanding rings of interpretation, get a taste of the arguments set out in "So Artifacts Have Politics?"

This comes full circle, and I'll tie off the braid, by hooking together those two different kinds of impact, and the still-vexed issue of thinking in public while working in scholarly conventions. I finally got around to making a version of "Reading 'Do Artifacts Have Politics?'" that's more properly-citeable. I consider it a good punchline to this month, and if you want that version, it's got a handy DOI.

coons, ginger (2026). Reading "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" Not so obvious. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23725979