slavery Archives | Alex Taylor

Reading “Accounting for Slavery”

Alex Taylor — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 11:23:26 +0000

Rosenthal, C. Caitlin. (2018). Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.

I’ve read a number of Caitlin Rosenthal’s academic papers and have been anticipating this book for a while. The book doesn’t disappoint. It cements and builds on her past work, and draws her insightful ideas together. Rosenthal convincingly shows how the systems of accounting used in the (largely) antebellum Southern States of the US served to manage (and master) slaves, methodically sustaining the violence we know too well.

I particularly enjoyed Rosenthal’s careful examination of the paper-based records, showing in detail how forms, tables and calculations objectified people’s bodies as machinery in a capital project, in effect authorising the brutality. What I’d really like to see in any future work is how this line of inquiry ties into contemporary slave studies, with its strong and vital narrative forms. This will no doubt present a challenge, but one worth pursuing.

Accounting for Slavery:
Masters and Management
Caitlin Rosenthal.

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HCID Seminar talk

Alex Taylor — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 10:36:31 +0000

I had the pleasure of presenting as part of our very own HCID Seminar Series in November. I took the opportunity of trying out some early ideas about tables, a little clumsily testing out ideas of how tables have been used in the recording of bodies, from the slave trade to the algorithmic modes of bodily accounting so pervasive today.

See the abstract for the talk below.

“A return of slaves in the Parish of Jamaica, St Ann”, 28 June 1820. The National Archive.

Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification. Yoo Kim, arXiv.org, 2014.

The act of reading across and down, through the coordinate grid, to find information is a generative act. […]

This is not trivial, but essential, to the performative capabilities of tables.

Joanna Drucker

ABSTRACT: Through a number of routes, I’ve found myself thinking about tables, the kinds of tables with columns and rows. These tables lie behind so much of the proliferation of data and computation we are witnessing in contemporary life. They are also core to much of the work we do as researchers and designers. Yet too often we neglect the lively nature of these ordering technologies (Drucker 2014). In offering a practical solution for sorting and organising pretty much anything (e.g., numbers, times, dates, names, events, journeys, bodies, etc,), we overlook how they afford and authorise very particular ways of making matter matter (e.g. Rosenthal 2018; Wernimont 2018). Take Excel. The tool’s powerful capacities for ordering items in a seemingly infinite number of rows and columns—setting various systems of organisation against one another—is in no way inert. The explicit or implied hierarchies, the categories and comparisons, the roundings up or down, the spatial and calculative transformations, etc.—altogether, they are, already, telling a story. They are, if you will, technoscientific “worldings” (Haraway 2016).

I want to use this talk as a forcing function to explore this line of thought and the relevance it might have to the design of interactive systems. For now, my view is that much is to be understood from the close examination of ‘tables-in-action’. I believe we might discover many of the assumptions and biases we have in interpreting data and conducting research by attending to what we do with our tabulating practices—practices that, at first glance, appear so neutral. With this as a starting point, my hope will be to imagine worlds otherwise. To imagine intervening in the ways we work with tables so that we might extend and multiply the worlds we make possible.

Drucker, Johanna. Graphesis: Visual forms of knowledge production. Harvard University Press, 2014.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Rosenthal, Caitlin. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Harvard University Press, 2018.
Wernimont, Jacqueline. Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media. MIT Press, 2018.

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Cycling on up

Alex Taylor — Fri, 03 Aug 2018 12:09:28 +0000

I’ve been continuing with my experimentations and thoughts on cycling, and in particular extending my reflections on my first ‘Boris Bike’ journey recorded in 2014 (see this chapter). There’ll hopefully be more to come in the coming months that tie together the space-times I traversed with other records and different accounts.

/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Autograph-video.mp4

A video captured using the now defunct Autographer. It captures me purposely cycling beyond the usual routes mapped by the rental bikes. from the Aberfeldy Street docking station out through Newham to Green Street, along The Greenway/Northern Outfall Sewer, and then back to Bow.

Table of bike journeys on 3 Oct 2014. My journey from Aberfeldy Street to Bow is highlighted.

Graph of bike hires per day in 2014. Oct 3, the day of my journey is highlighted in green.

Graph of number of rides against duration on 3 Oct. My journey was 45, highlighted in green.

My heart rate variability (HRV) over the course of the bike ride.

1851 Census record of Plaistow households, including household of Elizabeth Frances Ireland.

Highlight of Elizabeth Frances Ireland in 1851 Census record of Plaistow households.

Estimated location of Prospect Fram, where Elizabeth Frances Ireland’s home is recorded in the 1851 Census — intersecting with my cycle route.

One Elizabeth Frances Ireland, beneficiary claimant to the Woodstock Plantation, St Ann, Jamaica, awarded compensation for enslaved people (see Legacies of British Slave-ownership archive).

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Newcastle APL Talk

Alex Taylor — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 10:07:24 +0000

Talking to the good people at Newcastle’s School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape (APL), I got the chance yesterday to develop and share my slowly evolving thoughts on bike journeys, bodies and fabulations.

Living Fruitfully in/with the conditions of (im-) possibilty

ABSTRACT

In this talk, I want to revisit a piece I wrote in 2016. The piece, a chapter in Dawn Nafus’ book Quantified (2016), was intended as a story of promise, a fabulation about London’s bike rental scheme and how it might be used to re-imagine new figurings of human-machine relations. Thinking across, askew, or “athwart” (Hustak & Myers 2013), my experimenting with the relational capacities of bicycles, a city, (bio)sensing and the proliferation of data-everywhere, aimed to resist the “agencies of homogenization” (Scott 1998) to explore the conditions of possibility for other worldings (Haraway 2016).

Reflecting on this work, I’ve felt a dissatisfaction with my efforts to throw together mixtures of data at all scales, with the attempts at thickening and enlivening the relations. It all felt too flat, too lacking in vitality. So, at the risk of appearing self indulgent, this talk will present some early ideas for a different story woven in and through the thicket of relations. Struggling to weave myself into London’s legacy with slavery and the violent erasures of bodies and agency (Hartman 2008), I’ll be trying to place myself at a much more fragile and tenuous juncture of space-time, but at the same time still seeking to work fruitfully in/with the conditions of (im-)possibility.

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FoI Request: Amount paid per year to repay Slavery Abolition Act loan

Alex Taylor — Tue, 08 May 2018 21:17:29 +0000

In response to a story reported via a number of news sites and exploring a thread in my own research, I submitted a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to Her Majesty’s Treasury on the 7th April. In brief, I requested further details on the amount paid per year to repay the Slavery Abolition Act loan, a loan taken by the UK government in 1834 to ‘compensate’ slave owners for their loss of ‘property’. Shockingly, this loan was being repaid up until 2015 by UK taxpayers.

I made my request using the amazing WhatDoTheyKnow site. I’ve included the text from my request below for context.

To Her Majesty’s Treasury,
As widely reported, in 1833–35 [1] the UK government borrowed £20m, 40% of its national budget, to “recompense” slave owners for losing their “property” [2] — under the Slavery Abolition Act. On 9 February 2018, HM Treasury announced (via Twitter) that this loan had been paid in full. A related FOI request that HM Treasury responded to on 9 February 2018 sets the date of the loans ‘consolidation’ to be the 1 February 2015: “The 4% Consolidated Loan was redeemed on 1 February 2015” [3].
Under the Freedom of Information act, I request further details of this loan. Specifically, I request the annual amount paid per year since 1833–35.
I also request to total sum paid to repay the loan, including interest.
Yours faithfully,
Alex Taylor
London
1. From the documentation available, it’s unclear whether the loan began in 1833 or 1835.
2. This was covered by a number of news organisations. Two examples from the Guardian follow:
— https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre…
— https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre…
3. https://www.gov.uk/government/publicatio…

Having left their written response to the last day of the 20 working days usually allotted, HM Treasury replied with a somewhat muddled message offering some details, but not fully answering my request. Some equivalent to “HM Treasury does not hold information/records” was used four times in a one-page response:

“HM Treasury does not hold information within the scope of your request.”
“HM Treasury does not hold records dating from this period.”
“HM Treasury does not hold any detailed information on the structure or amounts of repayments…”
“HM Treasury does not hold information on the total interest paid…”

The letter from HM Treasury is available via WhatDoTheyKnow here.
I will be continuing this research and share any further information I’m able to obtain.

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