In this episode, Jane Ruffino talks to Patrick about how she bridges digital archaeology with the world of content design.
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Patrick:
So this episode, I’m speaking with Jane Ruffino. I’ve spoken to Jane for quite a while, but we have never been able to get on a podcast together until now. And I’m super glad we did, because Jane has probably, I think, one of the or the most interesting background and occupations in UX writing. So she is a UX writer. She’s a content strategist, and she’s worked for a number of different companies before doing that, including agencies. And she’s also worked as a journalist. And she is a course director of UX writing at the Berg School of Communication in Sweden. So she’s quite accomplished. And she’s obviously a content designer through her character agency. But she is also an archeologist. She’s studying a Ph.D. in archeology and it’s actually digital archeology. Her project is called Things of the Internet, and it’s contemporary archeology of the physical infrastructure of the Internet. Now, I think that’s just ultimately fascinating. And we discuss not only how that relates to UX writing and content design, but also the big question we discuss in this episode is how can the content design industry be better? How can it improve? And I don’t want to leave you waiting. So here’s my discussion with Jane Ruffino.
Patrick:
Well, actually, that’s a really good place to start talking about what you do, because you actually you do a few different things and your Ph.D. is so interesting to me. It’s in, I don’t know what you would call it, but you refer to digital archeology?
Jane:
It’s actually the archeology of the physical infrastructure of the Internet. The title of the Ph.D. is Things of the Internet. So it’s about the big thing. So when I started the research, when I pitched the project, it started years ago. It actually was my first attempt at doing a Ph.D., which was a disaster, but it was on the data fixation of landscapes and it was like 20 years ago and nobody was talking about this stuff and everyone thought I was weird. Now, I don’t care if people think I’m weird, so it’s much easier. But a few years ago, I started to try to bring back this concept that a few of us had been working on for a long time about archeology and privacy. And this is really before a lot of the big privacy questions started to be at the surface in the tech industry. I mean, they were still happening all the time in activist circles, but we started talking like these things are really related, the way archeologists collect data, the way we collect data in the tech industry. Now we’re starting to talk about it in the tech industry and we’re not really talking about it in archeology. And a friend and I had this proudness question that we’ve been playing with for a long time, which was, does deposition, as in the deposition of an object, something left behind, imply consent to be studied? And this was like years before GDPR. And we came to the conclusion that no. And that felt very scary because in a field that’s entirely dependent on digging things up that people left behind and couldn’t tell you whether it’s OK to have them, it felt quite scary that we were challenging the very foundations of our discipline, but it felt really necessary. And then what it brought me to was this idea of algorithmic decision making and technical products with, let’s say, decisions like automated decision making, having layers of time. So like an object, like something that has what in archeology, we call stratigraphy. So it’s like the layers that are laid down. These objects have time, they have materiality, they have space. It’s just very hard to register as an object. So I started thinking, like, how do I study these things? How do I study data as a material thing? It’s the most abundant form of material culture. And yet we have no way of studying the thing. Now with people doing digital humanities, people doing incredible work, archiving the web. But how do we understand data as a thing? So when I pitched this project, it had moved on quite a lot from then to how do we understand what data is as a thing is kind of quite theoretical question. And as soon as I started the research, I realized that in order to study the tiniest things, I really needed to turn to the biggest things. And that right now is the undersea cables. So I’m studying right now the undersea cables connecting Sweden and Estonia, that’s the first part. I haven’t gotten much further than that. And so it’s looking at two extremely advanced digital cultures, Sweden and Estonia, which has a really advanced kind of digital culture, but a very different recent history. And they’ve always been really tied together. So this cable became one of the first physical connections for the Internet between these two countries after the end of the Cold War. So it’s going to end up being some probably some pretty interesting Cold War and early post-Cold War stuff. And obviously, because of COVID, I haven’t been able to do very much field work, thankfully, because this is all outside. Now obviously, I can’t see a lot of the cables, and that’s part of the research is like doing the archeology of things that we can’t physically see. So it’s really interesting. One of the things that I did recently was go down to this beach, this place where the cable comes ashore and just stand there and go like, what am I looking at? And I think this is where archeology and design come together as having a common method that’s really valuable. The first thing that you should do is go to the place, wherever that place is. I mean, it could be a digital place and go, OK, what am I looking at rather than looking for? Because if you start looking for, you’re going to miss a lot. So it’s reall
