Meanland Blog - Slut Walks, Filter Bubbles and Citation Analysis

Catherine Moffat August 03

You’re probably thinking there can’t be much more to say about slut walks. The topic has been comprehensively covered, not least by Jacinda Woodhead and Stephanie Convery in their piece for the Drum, ‘Modern feminism: politics and rights, not spectacle’.

You might also be wondering where slut walks fit into a blog post ostensibly about the future of reading and the book. But as the walks make their way around the globe like some colourful Mexican wave (this month in Delhi), they serve as useful reminders, as Convery and Woodhead assert, that ‘it is the role of progressive feminists to focus on the daily issues negatively impacting on the lives of women here and abroad’.

Recently there has been a spate of information highlighting the absence of women in literary awards, literary award nominations, and ‘best-of lists’. This is despite women being major consumers of literature. Not only are women absent from awards, as VIDA’s ‘count’ reveals, women are also not being reviewed or asked to review books in anything like the number that men are.

The (in)visibility of women in the literary world and the right to write about what is important to women is linked to the issue of the visibility of women on the streets and the right to dress as one pleases. What is not valued is easily destroyed.

(If you want a quick tour of the field see VIDA’s ‘The Count’ for the statistics, Sophie Cunningham on the Stellas and Lionel Shriver’s ‘I write a nasty book and they want to put a girly cover on it…')

Just as revealing as the above blog posts are the responses from some men along the lines of ‘why would we want to read stuff written by women?’ This is an attitude I find bewildering. Reading has to be one of the safest, cheapest ways to get some insight into someone else’s head – to experience the other.

The absence of women in literary awards is mirrored in some areas of cyberspace. A recent Wikimedia survey of Wikipedia editors puts the number of women editors at 9%.

I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that the majority of Wikipedia editors are male, white and under 40 – a group with historically high levels of leisure time and an interest in technology. Wikimedia, to their credit, are trying to put strategies in place to encourage a more diverse culture amongst editors.

Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Sue Gardner, asked women why they stopped editing and then in her post ‘Nine reasons why women don’t edit Wikipedia (in their own words)’ blogged about their responses. These include, ‘disliking the fighty culture,’ examples of overt misogyny, and women who gave up because their material was consistently deemed ‘insufficiently significant’ and edited out. ‘Hard to imagine,’ as Barbara Fister notes, ‘considering the massive amounts of detail provided on gaming, television shows, and arcane bits of military history’.

Just as worrying was the person who complained pages were removed because pre-1990s academic journal sources ‘couldn’t be validated’ because they hadn’t been digitised and couldn’t be found online.

I’m going to keep that 9% figure in my head when the google algorithm so conveniently turns up a Wikipedia page at the top of every search. Wikipedia is not necessarily representative of the online world in general, but it does serve as an interesting case study and a reminder that sometimes brave new worlds are not as brave and open as they seem.

Of course, women don’t represent the only gap in the literary award record. Minorities of all shapes and sizes don’t get much of a look in. Overland is doing its bit via the Cal Connections project to provide opportunities at grassroots level for new writers from minority groups. But while special editions are a start, it would be good to find they are unnecessary.

The other big absence in literary awards is ‘genre’ novels.

When Peter Temple’s Truth won the Miles Franklin, it was widely touted as the ‘first genre crime novel’ to win. It’s bizarre that we even notice – surely writing is good or bad, enjoyable or not, regardless of gender, race or genre. Even Temple himself suggested the judges would ‘cop some flak’ for their choice.

Jason Steger’s piece in the Age reflects much of the commentary at the time, suggesting ‘some may call it a brave choice’ and comparing Temple to ‘more conventionally literary writers such as Tim Winton, Thea Astley and Patrick White’.

He cites Peter Craven’s comment, ‘Temple is one of those exceptional writers who break down the distinction between art and trash; between quality literary writing and popular yarn spinning’. Ouch!

China Miéville writes across a number of genres and is often quoted saying he doesn’t want to transcend genre. ‘People say, “Oh, you’ve transcended the genre” … but I don’t think genre is a muck to be kicked off, I think it’s a set of protocols you can do wonderful things with’.

In a recent TED talk Eli Pariser spoke about online filter bubbles – the phenomenon where search engines and other online media don’t just tailor the ads they show you, but also personalise the results of your searches in response to your previous choices. This means that if you and I search simultaneously on the same topic, our results will reflect what the search engine decides will interest us. If we both searched, as in Pariser’s example, on ‘Egypt’, you might get a list of political news sites while I get travel sites.

Online or off, we’re all in our own little filter bubbles composed of the sites we look at, the journals we read, the reviewers we follow and the friends whose recommendations we trust.

In the academic world, a whole science of filtering and awarding value has arisen based around citation analysis. Governments, anxious to demonstrate return on investment, are requiring universities to count and codify their research activity. As in any value system, there are always winners and losers. Andrew Gunstone, in an article on the Australian government’s Excellence in Research Australia (ERA) framework, highlights the way such systems are often geared to reward work in international science subjects rather than regional research such as Australian Indigenous Studies.

Another tussle for value is going on around ebooks versus print. I’m betting it will be three or four years before a ‘born digital’ book wins a major prize. What I’m not betting on is that award going to a woman. My only money will be on whether some up-and-coming young bloke gets the gong, or one of the safe old literary lions.

Does it really matter if we all exist in our own little bubbles? Maybe not, so long as we’re happy with the status quo. But why miss the opportunity to learn something new, to understand someone else’s point of view? If we can recognise the limitations of our own bubble and are prepared to step outside the filter every now and then, we just might gain some insight into someone else’s world.

In the same way that slut walks gave us the opportunity to re-open the dialogue about attitudes to violence against women, I’m advocating reading as a way of re-examining our attitudes in a range of areas.

So this month, step outside your own personal filter bubble and read something you wouldn’t normally read. Try the genre book, or the book with the frilly pink cover, the serious academic tome, the fiction, the non-fiction, the blog, the ebook…

Just read.

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