All the Names for Rain
I'm teaching a class at the School for Poetic Computation called Drawing Data By Hand. This week we talked about data organization and categorization. This class is 5 weeks instead of the 10 week version I've taught before, so I'm making it less theoretical and discussion based and including more in–person activities.
For this class I designed three different exercises to get us thinking about organization.
In the first exercise, students arrange and group 20 random screenshots from their downloads folder. (They can also choose to re-arrange their junk drawer). Students come up with categories like "things that bring me joy", they arrange by content "pictures of flowers", they arrange by media "screenshots vs pictures" or by purpose "work" vs "personal".
I use this as a lead–in to the LATCH principles developed by the information designer Richard Saul Wurman who claimed that all information must be organized by one of these elemnts: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, Hierarchy (Scale). I've introduced this framework twice and at least at first, students are unimpressed "categories" being exceedingly broad––but my hope is that the acronym will stick in their heads enough that they start to recognize different organizing schemes.
In the second exercise, I asked students to come up with a list of categories which they willingly label themselves and then a list of categories to which they are labeled by some external entity (government, company, family, etc). We discussed which categories we embraced vs. tried to distance ourselves from. We arranged the categories on a spectrum from Fluid to Rigid using as a reference our previous discussion about Formal Categories vs. Fuzzy Categories. We talked about which categories were externally visible (recognizable by others with little effort) and which were internal. This exercise brought up complicated feelings in all of us, as we recognize there are categories to which we are assigned which we do not in fact belong to. Or categories in which we seek membership but perhaps do not feel earned. I tried to be honest that the external categories we are sorted into do matter they have very real and material impacts on our lives whether the state views us as "legal residents", whether they recognize our gender identity. We talked about the Trump administration and effects of the transphobic and homophobic executive order released in January and the impacts that is having on people receiving care and on the deletion of LGBTQ+ and race-related data in government data-sets. We talked about the double edged sword of that visibility. That being recognized by the State can be important for the protection of rights (ex:measuring health access) and for meaningful care (ex: understanding differences in health outcomes), but can also be weaponized (it is dangerous to be counted). To be honest, I haven't been sure how to engage in a meaningful way with my students about the current political moment, I'm still not sure if I went about it the right way, but it felt necessary to talk about.
...
When you think about external categories and when you specify what is the criteria by which this category is applied, you can sort of...well...see how little they describe reality, how silly at times those categories can be. I'm not sure that makes them less impactful but perhaps it challenges their power. I'm not really sure it does. But maybe.
I brought up an adaptation of George Box's famous quote "All models are wrong, but some are useful" to "All categories are inaccurate, but some are useful". Models and categories are attempts by us to impose order and find patterns on a richness and complexity of experience (physical, social, and cognitive) that is simply too vast for us to make sense.
While doing research for this class I came across a Borges short story (there are a number of Borges short stories that turn out to be quite relevant to these topics, what a guy). The short story is about a man with an idetic memory who is simultaneously very "learned" but who in the word of Borges cannot truly think because "thinking is to forget differences, to abstract, to generalize. In the crowded world of Funes there was but details, almost immediate"
The third exercise we did was inspired by a reading from Orion Magazine which is a celebration of Collette Leimomi Akana’s Hānau ka Ua, a collection of Hawaiian rain names. The names contain within them careful observations and relations, the place in which the rain falls, its interactions with landscape and object, its sound, and its scent. I find them beautiful in their specificity.
A few of my favorites:
‘Awa: a fine rain; falls in fine, icy drops that makes oneʻs head appear white like a gray-haired man
Po‘onui: a troublesome or top-heavy rain; literally meaning “big head,” this descriptive term refers to an uncomfortable rain so cold it numbs the head and sends shivers down one’s spine
Pōʻaihale when the rain falls in a shape that circles the home
I've asked students as homework to categorize the weather in their own homes in this manner, thinking about how it engages with the landscape and their lives.
A few that came to my own mind:
The rain which floods the bottom of the subway steps
The rain which drums on the leaves, but keeps it dry under the canopy
The rain which melts the snow and reveals the garbage bags underneath
The rain when the suffocating humidity finally breaks and you can breathe again