Defining Public Knowledge with Program Officer Patricia Hswe

Knowledge production and knowledge access are among the most critical of social goods. How, then, should society steward them? Mellon program officer Patricia Hswe reflects on this and other questions that the Public Knowledge grantmaking area addresses at a time when media proliferates, digital divides persist, and unsung heroes in libraries, archives, and communities are building the knowledge solutions of tomorrow.

At one point, Mellon had a grantmaking area that was called “Scholarly Communications.” Since then, the grantmaking has evolved, and the program is now called “Public Knowledge.” Can you talk about what the term public knowledge means to you?

Public knowledge, like a prism, is a multifaceted construct, largely because of how “public” and “knowledge” may be understood broadly—at the same time, they also evoke complexities, nuances, and even tensions, depending on one’s identity, community, and background.

For me, public knowledge means ensuring that knowledge access and production are treated as public and social goods: that is, goods in the public interest for purposes that matter to them, such as learning, justice, self-determination, and memory-keeping. This construct does not apply to one type of people, or—in the parlance of our program, because of its emphasis on libraries, archives, and presses—one type of “user.” As a result, through grantmaking in this area, Mellon embraces a variety of organizations, peoples, histories, and ways of knowing, which may include practices and customs that are inviolable, and must remain so, because of their cultural heritage context.

When the Public Knowledge team discusses its work, you often reference the “cultural record.” What is the cultural record? How do people engage with it? Does reading a newspaper count? How about going to the local library?

For me, the cultural record stands for what is known or documented about representations of culture, such as the visual arts, letters and diaries, social media, film, music, news media, literature, archaeological artifacts, and the creators and keepers of these things. Obviously, this list is not exhaustive! People engage with the cultural record in many ways. Reading a newspaper and going to the local library count, as does visiting an archive, listening to a spoken-word recording, or downloading data about property records to track and map racial covenants, which excluded people of color from buying homes in certain neighborhoods. How one interacts with the cultural record and who has access to it are key concerns in the Public Knowledge grantmaking area.

How is public knowledge a social justice issue? Does everyone have access to it?

Public knowledge is a social justice issue, especially if we consider the institutions that house it, such as public libraries and the challenges they currently face in order to thrive; the people who are affected by the availability of knowledge or the lack of it; and the misinformation, disinformation, and other fabrications that can distort events, harm communities, and threaten the stability and accuracy of the cultural record.

Another reason why public knowledge is a social justice issue concerns the people “behind the scenes” who make discovery of and access to resources possible and whose expertise allows for interactions with this content. Librarians, archivists, and technologists are among the unsung heroes of public knowledge infrastructure—effectively the hidden maintainers of systems of knowledge access—and their demanding work should be centered, recognized, and celebrated more. The hidden and increasingly precarious labor that makes memory institutions “run” is an area that Mellon has been exploring to better understand where we have a role as a funder in addressing these problems.

Everyone should have access to public knowledge resources, but certain divides continue to prevent equitable access—such as the so-called digital divide, which speaks to the lack of a level playing field in many countries, including this one, for internet access. Affordability is another factor, and so are shortcomings in infrastructure (high-speed internet access is not a given for everyone) and institutional interference, which prevents communities from having broadband that they can control. Another type of digital divide stems from the need for people to proficiently use digital tools for accessing information on the internet and in digital environments in general. This gap is particularly acute for populations that don’t enjoy regular access to library services, such as people who are incarcerated. Still another gap has to do with language justice issues, such as the lack of a truly multilingual internet. We have been addressing the last two challenges through grantmaking in recent years.

Access to public knowledge is inherently valuable. But what about the ability and opportunity to produce it?

We in the program like to say that we are about the “stuff”—in fact, this is a key throughline from Scholarly Communications to Public Knowledge: much of humanities scholarship still depends on the “stuff” of collections, records, and publications that we continue to bolster.

But we are doing so in fundamentally different ways because of the questions we ask at the outset, such as: Who gets to be published? What is being published, and who decides? Who gets access to the publications, and how? Outlets for scholarship remain critical for Mellon to support. Recent examples of publishing grants include (1) RavenSpace (The University of British Columbia in partnership with University of Washington Press), a publishing platform for Indigenous Studies scholarship that enables community collaboration and incorporates protocols for controlled access to Indigenous cultural heritage content; (2) Reviews in Digital Humanities (Dartmouth College), an open-access journal that is transforming peer review for digital scholarship; and (3) Cita Press (Educopia), which is revitalizing works of feminist authorship that are in the public domain.

At a time when digital media feels ubiquitous and proliferating, how should we think about what gets preserved?

What a question, if not a grand challenge, for these times! When it comes to how we should think about what gets preserved, I would take us back to where we began, which was with the question of what public knowledge means to me. What does public knowledge mean to society as a whole? And particularly in the context of digital media preservation, what content is in the public and social interest to preserve? What memory institutions are excelling in this work and thus serving as examples to follow? Who is using digital media content, and how are they using it? Responses to these questions could help guide decision-makers in this space to feel confident that they are preserving what should be safeguarded for posterity. 

The Foundation has a rich history of preserving a range of media, including social media and web-based content. Our grantmaking area’s commitment to digital preservation and web archiving means that, in saving what is contemporary and “in the now,” we are helping weave a more complete narrative of these times—for future knowledge, meaning, and memory—else only certain people and stories will be documented and known, which makes for an inequitable and irresponsible approach to building a knowledge society that is culturally diverse and makes knowledge accessible. For this reason, we are making grants like the one to the College of Wooster, called the Black Web Archives Collective, that is centering the Black experience online and highlighting Black contributions to the development of the web.

In addition to having an improved understanding of what gets preserved, I’d argue that we also need to be more intentional about how we communicate the need to preserve digital media. Instead of “preserve,” let’s use “rescue” or “save.” Because this media is ephemeral, let’s say that it is “endangered,” “threatened,” or “at risk.” Rhetoric won’t change everything, but there are ways to rebrand the criticality of digital media preservation as a disaster prevention issue—the disaster of irretrievable civic and cultural loss, if the rescue and long-term stewardship of this content are not made a priority. Ultimately, the care and curation of digital media that’s relevant to public knowledge stakeholders make for a responsible, ethical stewardship practice.