For our wikistorming project, we decided to collaborate on multiple levels for this assignment: in username and in process. We created the Wikipedia account name "femsociality" to signify the collaborative nature of our work. Our first task was to expand on the alternative texts already established in the existing Wikipedia entry on prosthesis. In doing so, we discovered exclusionary discourses that were deeply entrenched within the reasoning and logic built into Wikipedia's infrastructure; the very act of making something "accessible" to the Wikipedia viewer (such as making sure there are "logical" caption descriptions that coincide with the images they describe) sets the parameters of what would be deemed to be made accessible. For example, according to one section of the "Wikipedia: Alternative text for images" Wikipedia entry, the claim is made that an "image that is purely decorative (provides no information and serves only an aesthetic purpose) requires no alternative text." This illustrates a troubling assumption and defines the limits of how visual material should be interpreted on Wikipedia entries.
Our second moment of "failure" occurred when we tried to insert alternative captions on the back-end of Wikipedia but had no means to test whether our codes were functional or written correctly. We had no means to test whether our alternative texts were readable via screen reader technology. This automatically curtails who may feel inclined to edit, as one cannot see or test their final product.
During the process of writing alternative text for a particular image of a prosthetic knee device on the "Wikipedia: Prosthesis" entry, we found ourselves using a specific style of language to describe the object represented in the photograph. We automatically seemed to engage in mechanical, abstracted forms of thick description rather than playing or experimenting with alternative modes of visual description.
As an unexpected offshoot of our initial inquiry into alternative texts, we noticed an overwhelming presence of images on the Prosthesis entry depicting men's relationships with prosthetic devices that were heavily invested in militarized frameworks. In response to this abundance of male bodies, we grit our teeth as we committed the same violence perpetuated in both neoliberal conquests and scholarly explications of otherness as we quickly mined the informational fields of Flickr Creative Commons for entries of "woman with prosthesis" and found an overabundance of World Bank photography of women in the Global South wearing prosthetic devices. We wrestled with inner conflict as we attempted to "objectively" and "thickly" describe the photo of a woman from Cambodia (a woman whose name we may never come to know; one who is positioned as nameless, voiceless, and disposable) using a prosthetic leg, as per the alternative text model of visual description. After hours and hours of arguing, of feeling deeply conflicted, of both critically analyzing and pitilessly bitching, we decided to make our experience of this Wikistorming project partially visible on this blog and partially imprinted on the Wikipedia: Prosthesis page. #dropsmic #neoliberalism #postcolonialviolence #academicprivilege #ivorytowerstatus #PhDturmoil
Louise >:(
Christina >:(
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