Evolving Perspectives
The Political Economy of Digital Environmental Impact Assessment in South Korea View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eun Sung Kim
The Korean Digital Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) System, which is currently under development, aims to develop a system that conducts environmental impact assessment on a platform that digitizes the entire process of environmental impact assessment. This paper analyzes the politics of major interest groups such as EIA agencies, EIA review agencies, public officials, and residents in three stages of EIA: big data platforms, environmental predictive modeling, and data presentation. The results of this study are as follows: Big data platforms are beneficial to the interests of review agencies, but ambivalent to the interests of EIA business. Big data platforms increase the accessibility of data to review agencies, making it easier for them to review assessment data, which helps to prevent false and poor investigations. On the other hand, the platform cannot replace field surveys, but it can reduce the scope and scale of field surveys, which may partially infringe on the interests of field survey agencies, while big data platforms can be utilized as a data market if environmental impact survey data can be sold on the data platform. Second, if domestic predictive modeling programs are installed on the platform, it may weaken the market dominance of large companies that use expensive foreign modeling software. Third, even in the pursuit of digital democracy, a politics of the senses may be at work, diminishing the tactile and auditory and enhancing the visual in the presentation of data.
Divine Forces: Saints, Soldiers, and Energy in Eastern Europe
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elaine Wilson, Daniel Esparza
This paper seeks to address the urgent issue of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the resultant energy crisis through an examination of Russian conceptions of power—spiritual, military, and nuclear—and their political and literary expression from the medieval period to the present day. This paper examines the entanglement of church and state and the weaponization of spiritual figures and forces. This historical framework, in turn, informs the analysis of the energy sector in both the Soviet Union and former SSRs, with special focus on nuclear power, to demonstrate how various conceptions of energy have long been a tool of Russian chauvinism and colonialism.
Digital Preservation in the Small: Lessons for Preservation from Minimal Computing View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Moles
Digital preservation is hard. Getting started in digital preservation is harder. Getting started at a small institution, or in the developing world, is harder yet; despite the digital preservation community’s open ethos and sizable body of tools and resources, case studies and guidance largely address the concerns of established programs, and take for granted developed-world infrastructure and resources. To small teams and less well-resourced institutions, preservation can simply seem inaccessible. Meanwhile, initiatives like the Digital Stewardship End-to-End Workflow Model call for preservation to become embedded throughout the digital content lifecycle—a distant goal as long as preservation continues to be seen as arcane, technical, and complex. Can we do better? I propose that we can, and that minimal computing, a philosophy and body of practice emerging in digital humanities over the past decade, offers useful lessons. Minimal computing suggests an approach that does not (implicitly or explicitly) assume that every preservation practice should strive to achieve the maturity of an ideal NDSA Level 4 program—one closer to Owens’ call to “start small and implement simple and discrete tools and practices… using nothing more than the file system you happen to be working in.” At the same time, by making use of those “discrete tools and practices” already developed by the community, this approach can leverage lessons learned and make it possible to scale up to more sophisticated systems and workflows.
