Steve Jankowski

@textaural

Assistant Professor in New Media Histories at UvA. Curator of Keywords for Studying Media, Culture & Information I study Wikipedia, utopian computation, design and consensus politics, often all at once.

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Steve Jankowski@textaural· 26d

Steve Jankowski@textaural· 29d

I'm proud to announce "Digital ecologies of hope: A natural history of emerging media futures" as the last Utopian Media Studies article. It includes a creative supplement (which is the entire article, but illustrated: journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10... journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Jul 6

Likely Bunsen Honeydew. AND just realized, in this moment, that his lastname is likely because his head looks like a honeydew melon.

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Jul 4

My riff on the Cyberpunks prayer from www-jstor-org.proxy.uba.uva.nl/stable/1465622 (p. 792).

A revised version of the Cyberpunks prayer.
Our User,
Who art in data,
Hallow be thy network.
Thy update come,
Thy code will be run
Offline as it is online,
Give us this day our daily thread,
And block our toxic posts
As we block those who troll against us.
And lead us not into disconnection,
But deliver us from disconnection.
For thine is the System and the Software
and the glory forever, and ever
Amen.

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Jun 30

🚨 INTERNET HISTORY ALERT 🚨 Super excited to announce my two entries of "Projects" and "Hype Histories" as part of the _Imagining the Internet(s)_ Collaborative glossary by the Institute of Network Cultures. networkcultures.org/wp-content/u...

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Jun 29

As part of the special issue on Utopian Media Studies that I am co-editing with Convergence, I am pleased to see this article by the very talented @anya-shchetvina.bsky.social and @nathaliefridz.bsky.social come out. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #utopia #mediastudies #webhistory

Screenshot of the journal title page for the article: "The Vernacular web: A notion at the intersection of media theory and a utopian web imaginary". with the abstract: "This article critically examines the vernacular web as a notion that exists in conceptual ambiguity
between Media and Internet Studies, Web History, and artistic and activist practice. Drawing on Ruth Levitas’s argument that utopian implications are often embedded within the Social Sciences and can be critically excavated (2013), it argues that the vernacular web operates across two registers: an analytical concept describing amateur, non-institutional, and ostensibly autonomous forms of online practice, and a temporally grounded imaginary that invests the early web with utopian value. By analysing the reciprocity between these two registers, the article traces how utopian assumptions about autonomy, participation, and digital well-being circulate across scholarship, historical narratives, and activist practice. Through the cases of Olia Lialina’s essays and The Yesterweb, it identifies three constituent values of functional autonomy, while arguing that this imaginary remains half-baked: oriented towards aesthetics and affect rather than a reflection on the feasibility, limitations and potential risks."

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Jun 17

Motivated actor reporting for duty. Just adding a Wikipedia citation to influence AI output.

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Jun 8

Wikipedia is often held as a leader in how a community comes together to make difficult epistemological decisions. This article examines the difficulty they faced when deciding to create a timely policy about AI. Some great work looking at Wikipedia policy here. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Screenshot of the article "Failed comprehensiveness, successful minimalism: Wikipedia’s 3-year struggle to govern AI-generated content (2022–2025)"

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Jun 7

Apparently, the article gained so much traffic it crashed Britannica's site. www.identitytheory.com/navel-gazing/

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Jun 4

Last month I had the pleasure of being part of a workshop on speculative fiction where I talked about some media fiction from the 1800s I found. One of those stories (The Automaton Ear) caught @r-emrys.bsky.social attention (she was there too) and she wrote about it reactormag.com/i-heard-it-t...

Steve Jankowski@textaural· May 25

And buried amongst the 200+ citations from Francis, St Paul, and Benedict is our gal Hannah

Steve Jankowski@textaural· May 22

Literally just finished this paragraph (it might get cut for the paper I'm working) when I opened bsky and saw your post. Needless to say, I think you are right.

Steve Jankowski@textaural· May 18

museum.eecs.yorku.ca/york-univers...

Steve Jankowski@textaural· May 11

IT'S HAPPENING! Over the past month the first three articles that are part of the special issue on Utopian Media Studies have been published (links in thread).

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Apr 21

Corpoetics has a different flavour these days. In 2009, a book was released of found poetry assembled from corporation mission websites. In comparison to the literature of Palantir & Andreessen's venture capitalism, the past two years shift from mission statements to manifestos needs attention.

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Apr 14

Every shot of Mick Jagger in Dancing in the Street is youtube-thumbnail-face. www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5lA...

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Apr 5

Hot off the presses is my colleagues' new paper on keywords😍 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Mar 26

Contextualizing Wikipedia

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Mar 26

Encountering Wikipedia

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Mar 26

Revealing Wikipedia

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Mar 26

Optimizing Wikipedia was an early research action that peaked in 2013.

An area graph of the accumulated citations for the top ten cited documents.

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Mar 26

Each "action" of research has its own popularly cited texts. And Modeling is the most frequently cited.

A line graph of Modeling Wikipedia – Yearly Citations (2005–2025). The diagram shows a largely linear increase up to 2022 and then a sharp drop off.

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Mar 26

While I'm often thinking about the State of Wikipedia Research, here is what I see as the history of "Popular" Wikipedia research. This history directly maps to a history of the development of Wikipedia/Wikidata as a AI training source. wikiworkshop.org/2026/paper/w...

A line chart from 2005 to 2025 showing yearly citations – from Google Scholar – for five major research actions (top ten cited documents per action). It shows how 2009–2013 began the bifurcation of research in viewing Wikipedia as two separate research objects: a peer production object and a semantic extraction object.

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Mar 26

Shout out to Sabrina Mac Gregor et al. who presented yesterday at Wiki Workshop 2026 on their paper _Cultural POV? Negotiating Situated Knowledge on the French Wikipedia_. Some great examples of the frictions between language and culture. wikiworkshop.org/2026/paper/w...

Introduction
Wikipedia operates as a critical knowledge infrastructure,
yet conflicts regularly emerge over the legitimacy of
including content related to minority cultures. In the
Canadian context, this problem particularly affects
Indigenous, Franco-Canadian, and diasporic communities,
which remain underrepresented despite the encyclopedia's
mission to collectively produce and freely share universal
knowledge. As the Wikimedia Foundation has identified
knowledge equity as a strategic priority, understanding the
mechanisms through which diverse cultural perspectives are
negotiated within Wikipedia has become necessary.
This paper presents a work-in-progress methodological
approach and preliminary insights, examining the protocols
that regulate the cultural pluralization of knowledge in
Canadian content on French Wikipedia. Drawing on dispute
situations in which contributors debate these protocols
during editing conflicts, it explores how conditions for
cultural pluralization are negotiated in practice.

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Mar 26

Yesterday I had the pleasure of chairing a session for Wiki Workshop 2026 which included this much-needed research: _OpenSpeaks Archives: Citing Low-Resourced Language Oral History Multimedia_ Subhashish Panigrahi, Opino Gomango, Kimmi Pal wikiworkshop.org/2026/paper/w...

Wikipedia's stated mission to provide "free
access to the sum of all human knowledge" fails
practically by not recognising low-resourced
language oral history as citations. By design,
Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects systematically
exclude the majority of the world’s population
that preserves and disseminates knowledge
through oral history rather than written forms.
Based on our experience running the OpenSpeaks
Archives, a Wikimedia movement-linked
language documentation initiative, we argue in
this paper that this critical gap should be
addressed by developing a scientific system to
integrate oral histories as citable sources within
Wikimedia projects

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Mar 18

archive.org/details/stop...

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Mar 17

As someone who studies this, being utopian about the internet _means_ seeing it for what it truly is. Indeed, I think this is a perfect description of your writing 😁

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Feb 27

Ray-tracing 1685

Illustration from Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus Sive Telescopium (The Long-Distance Artificial Eye, or Telescope).

Steve Jankowski@textaural· Feb 24

Currently I am just starting to supervise a new group of MA students and I'm working on a paper that is grounded in science and technology studies. And so while thinking about helping students sort through writing and my own ideas, I came up with this Latourian-styled research outline.