283 research outputs found
Book Review: âRaw Dataâ is an Oxymoron
Book review of â"Raw Data" is an Oxymoronâ, by Lisa Gitelman (ed.), MIT Press
Theses on Discerning the Reading Series
A series of theses about the status of literary reading series as cultural events and artifacts
Big data, ethics and religion:New questions from a new science
Hopes, fears, and ethical concerns relating to technology are as old as technology itself. When considering the increase in the power of computers, and their ever-more widespread use over recent decades, concerns have been raised about the social impact of computers and about practical issues arising from their use: the manner in which data is harvested, the preservation of confidentiality where peopleâs personal information is concerned, the security of systems in which such data is stored, and so on. With the arrival of âbig dataâ new ethical concerns surrounding computer-based technology ariseâconcerns connected not only with social issues, and with the generation of data and its security, but also with its interpretation by data scientists, and with the burgeoning trade in personal data. The first aim of this paper is to introduce some of these ethical issues, and the second is to suggest some possible ways in which they might be addressed. The latter includes some explorations of the ways in which insights from religious and theological perspectives might be valuable. It is urged that theology and data science might engage in mutually-beneficial dialogue
"Spying for the People": surveillance, democracy and the impasse of cynical reason
This essay examines the Snowden affair as a sort of Rorschach test that traces the contours of what I am calling the impasse of cynical reason. In particular, I contend that the emerging form of algorithmic dataveillance both elicits and actively thwarts theoretical and critical approaches predicated on an a normative, symbolic model of epistemology that this form aspires to supplant. As a result, what such approaches tend to discern in the emerging culture of surveillance are its own epistemological commitmentsâthe very ones comprising the impasse of cynical reason. Breaking out of this impasse will thus require disrupting the deep, hidden complicity of such critique with its ostensible object. I contend that this will require taking seriously the often disingenuous or fallacious arguments on behalf of dataveillance in order to overcome the critical resistance to the quite genuine eventuality they connoteâthat of the decline of cynical reason as the prevailing form of social coordination
Printing the Network: AIDS Activism and Online Access in the 1980s
HIV/AIDS activists in the 1980s made up a significant cohort of early computer network users, who used Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) to create and circulate health information amongst PWA (People living with AIDS) communities. This article explores how these early adopters extended access to new computer networks by printing online information in newsletters. Their work bridged the sharing of text files over BBSâa novel networked practiceâwith more traditional activist media tools familiar to readers trained in civil rights, homophile, and feminist organizing. The article focuses on the Philadelphia-based organization Critical Path, led by Kiyoshi Kuromiya, who applied systems theories drawn from Buckminster Fullerâs work to the problem of HIV/AIDS. Critical Pathâs print newsletter drew on BBS to put information in the hands of a wide constituency of PWAs and their allies. They targeted, in particular, PWA communities excluded from access to medical research trials based on race, gender, drug use, or carceral status, and did so through a multimedia practice that recognized how access to emerging computer networks was similarly stratified. Through analyzing Critical Pathâs digital-to-print practice, I argue that HIV/AIDS activists approached new online networks as a fundamental equity issue shaped by their broader understandings of the structural violence performed by exclusion from good, up-to-date information
Order, archive, share
âResearch data managementâ is booming. Urgently demanded and driven
by such diverse actors as research funding institutions, who are interested in quality
control and the efficient use of data, or the âOpenâ movements, who advocate free
access to knowledge, ethnologists and cultural anthropologists meet this topic with
reluctance and often with skepticism. Rightly so, on the one hand, since the archiving
of data and, above all, the intended reuse of data by third parties raise a number of
practical, legal and ethical questions. On the other hand, the question of how digital
data can be organized and especially permanently preserved and used is virulent also
in the ethnological disciplines. In any case, the debate on the subject is urgent because
overarching regulatory processes have long since been set in motion.
This contribution discusses different aspects of the debate on data management
and sketches problem areas, open questions and opportunities which can arise for the
ethnological disciplines. Not least, the changing conditions of knowledge production
and circulation which occur alongside the establishment of digital techniques and
technologies require historical contextualization. Therefore, this contribution also attempts
a discipline-specific historical categorization
Culture, Theory, Data: An Introduction
The introduction to a special issue of New Literary History titled "Culture, Theory, Data," which explores the consequences of computation for cultural theoryâand vice-versa.
The introduction begins by explaining how we came to a historical juncture where "culture" and "data" seem to be opposed terms. Then it offers some reasons for believing that opposition is beginning to fade, including the emergence of "a new theoretical lingua franca" that draws meaning simultaneously from quantitative and from qualitative disciplines. The authors end by observing that reflection on the intersection of culture and data is particularly urgent in an era of generative language models
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Where We Go One, We Go All : QAnon and the Mediology of Witnessing
âWhere We Go One, We Go Allâ: QAnon and the Mediology of Witnessing
When critics admonish their opponents for circulating mere conspiracy theories, they are disparaging them for subscribing to facile accounts of socio-historical phenomena that are more sophisticated and aleatory than such heavy-handed narratives apprehend. Unfortunately, this kind of disavowal has the side-effect of precluding conspiracy theories from more serious philosophical consideration.
Arguably the most notorious information age conspiracy theory of the moment is QAnon, a byzantine, messianic truther echo-system that has recently irrupted into mainstream public consciousness. QAnon derives its name from âQ,â a lurid, anonymous, putatively omniscient insider who has been dropping missives on message boards about Donald Trumpâs clandestine war with a satanic, sex-trafficking, election-fixing cabal that lurks beneath the liberal establishment.
In order to engage with QAnon as a cultural phenomenon, my article probes the rhetorical coordinates of the popular concept of conspiracy theory through optics provided by Kenneth Burke and Jodi Dean. Drawing on the recent media scholarship of Carrie Rentschler, Kate Starbird, and John Durham Peters, I then examine QAnon culture as a misguided activist modality of witnessing (what Alain Badiou might call a âpseudo-Eventâ) precipitated, in no small part, by rhetorical and algorithmic architecture that subtends an ever-increasing proportion of human subjectivity.
I conclude with some reflections on the viability of what media theorist Jonathan Sterne terms an intervention
What Difference Does Quantity Make? On the Epistemology of Big Data Biology
publication-status: Acceptedtypes: ArticleIs Big Data science a whole new way of doing research? And what difference does data quantity make to knowledge
production strategies and their outputs? I argue that the novelty of Big Data science does not lie in the sheer quantity of
data involved, but rather in (1) the prominence and status acquired by data as commodity and recognised output, both
within and outside of the scientific community and (2) the methods, infrastructures, technologies, skills and knowledge
developed to handle data. These developments generate the impression that data-intensive research is a new mode of
doing science, with its own epistemology and norms. To assess this claim, one needs to consider the ways in which data
are actually disseminated and used to generate knowledge. Accordingly, this article reviews the development of sophisticated
ways to disseminate, integrate and re-use data acquired on model organisms over the last three decades of work
in experimental biology. I focus on online databases as prominent infrastructures set up to organise and interpret such
data and examine the wealth and diversity of expertise, resources and conceptual scaffolding that such databases draw
upon. This illuminates some of the conditions under which Big Data needs to be curated to support processes of
discovery across biological subfields, which in turn highlights the difficulties caused by the lack of adequate curation for
the vast majority of data in the life sciences. In closing, I reflect on the difference that data quantity is making to
contemporary biology, the methodological and epistemic challenges of identifying and analysing data given these developments,
and the opportunities and worries associated with Big Data discourse and methods.Economic and Social
Research CouncilES/F028180/1Leverhulme TrustRPG-2013-153European Unionâs Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013ERC grant
agreement number 335925
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