Jentery Sayers | Unlearning the Internet | Week 3 DHum 150 | UVic English | 21 January 2019 Slides Online: jentery.github.io/150/slides/week3m
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Defining "Standard"
sets of agreed-upon rules for production that span communities and are deployed to render things interoperable
enforced by committees or legal bodies
compete with other standards
vehicles for ostensible neutrality of tech: once tech is standardized, people can point to it as a “disinterested” instrument for observation or decision-making
so . . . how are values baked into the standardization process?
Some Standards
QWERTY (keyboard design from 1870s typewriters)
DOS (operating system from 1980s)
VCR (video format competing with Betamax in 1970s and '80s)
MP3 (audio format from 1990s)
Shirley Cards
Lorna Roth: "'skin-colour balance' in still photography printing refers historically to a process in which a nrom reference card showing a 'Caucasian' woman wearing a colourful, high-contrast dress is used as a basis for measuring and calibrating the skin tones on the photograph being printed. The light skin tones of these women—named 'Shirley' by male industry users after the name of the first colour test-strip card model —have been the recognized skin ideal standard for most North American analogue photo labs since the early part of the twentieth century and they continue to function as the dominant norm."