In a recent post on the Nieman Journalism Lab entitled “Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of 'rare' is changing in the age of information abundance," Maria Popova, editor of Brain Pickings, presents an insightful analysis of shifting concerns regarding individuals' position relative information in our digital era. Given recent initiatives in the Digital Humanities aimed at moving rare, difficultly encountered items onto a 'democratically' available digital domain, we must now rethink the barriers standing between the individual and an abundance of formerly obscure artifacts and the structural shifts this necessitates.  "These efforts, both government-subsidized and privately initiated, may have made a wealth of information accessible," Popova notes, but "it’s an entirely different story to ask how many people these materials have reached — how many people have actually gained access to them — and it’s one that harks back to the shifting relationship between scarcity and value." 

Certainly one agrees accessibility is not tantamount to access. Indeed, Popova finds three barriers, two classic and one contemporary, that structure our relations to information.

Popova's classic barriers are awareness and access. Awareness is described as one's knowledge of information's presence or existence; access is described as one's ability to encounter known information. The digital convergence, Popova intuits, has reduced access barriers by bringing more materials into the public domain, but, in doing so, it has increased awareness barriers by tipping the balance of that which is available further towards obscurity. There is more to encounter in the digital realm, but a greater portion of it is unknown. This argument, that individuals lack moorings in digital geographies, might sound familiar. Frederic Jameson, who will be coming to the Townsend Center in the Spring of 2012, makes a similar claim when discussing the cultural logic of late capital.

In his “Cognitive Mapping” essay, Jameson refers to the work of Kevin Lynch, whose 1960 The Image of the City revealed how individuals perceive and navigate urban landscapes. Lynch utilized three disparate cities, Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles, to show how, as markers capable of broadly delimiting spatial organization disappear, urban alienation increases. Jameson compares these cities to three eras of capital: "classical or market capitalism," "monopoly capitalism," and our contemporary era of "late capital." Boston, with the Charles River, obvious boundaries, and legible spatial formations is akin to the grid-like logic of classical capitalism. ersey City, bounded by water on one side but lacking obvious internal markers, creates the self-other split of monopoly capitalism. Finally, Los Angeles, with its disparate neighborhoods and lack of coherent bounds, is mapped in a manner akin to late capital. 

 Information, as described by Popova, appears to have similar moorings. As information shifts into its late-capital-like stage, so must the barriers one has to mapping it. Popova's contemporary barrier is motivation, or one's desire to encounter information. She writes, "The relationship between ease of access and motivation seems to be inversely proportional because, as the sheer volume of information that becomes available and accessible to us increases, we become increasingly paralyzed to actually access all but the most prominent of it — prominent by way of media coverage, prominent by way of peer recommendation, prominent by way of alignment with our existing interests."

This motivational conundrum proves to be the fulcrum of Popova's end claim that, in this new informational realm, great curators are needed to frame the obscure so as to motivate others to fully access it. In fact, looking over her work on the web, she goes so far as to claim content curation can be a form of authorship.

This, of course, is a claim that places emergent strands of practice in the popular realm of Digital Humanities at odds with sedimented legal practice. How can the law move from a focus on property (even "intellectual property") to a focus on the work of discovering, framing, and reframing? How can we accommodate content curation and information discovery under our indistrial-based conception of labor? 

Popova justifiably calls for the new: "new language, new laws, new normative models."