FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be

A Continuous-Time Microsimulation and First Steps Towards a Multi-Level Approach in Demography

Microsimulation is a methodology that closely mimics life-course dynamics. In this thesis, we describe the development of the demographic microsimulation with a continuous time scale that we have realized in the context of the project MicMac - Bridging the micro-macro gap in population forecasting. Furthermore, we detail extensions that we have added to the initial version of the MicMac microsimulation.Mikrosimulation ist eine Prognosetechnik, die sich hervorragend eignet, um Bevölkerungsdynamik realitätsnah abzubilden. In dieser Dissertation beschreiben wir die Entwicklung einer demografischen Mikrosimulation, die wir im Rahmen des Projektes MicMac - Bridging the micro-macro gap in population forecasting erstellt haben. Zudem erläutern wir Erweiterungen, die wir an der ursprünglichen MicMac- Mikrosimulation vorgenommen haben

Taking time seriously:How do we deal with change in historical networks?

The end of the monopoly of sociologists on social scientific network analysis has raised new questions about time and space in networks. This paper, mostly intended to be read by historians, archaeologists and political scientists, reviews existing works and circumscribes open questions as regards time, and especially historical time. It presents two currents of research that have produced cumulative results: on the one hand, the production of interpretable animated visualizations of changing networks, and on the other hand, the so-called "actor-oriented" statistical modeling of network dynamics. It also presents comparatively under-discussed questions: those that have to do with the definition, gathering and coding of data, and the drawing up of hypotheses.Cet article discute des manières de prendre en compte le temps en analyse de réseaux. Il présente la littérature sur le sujet en essayant de distinguer les questions déjà assez bien connues (la présentation visuelle sous forme d'animations, la modélisation de type Siena) et celles, beaucoup moins discutées, qui ont trait à la construction des données, et en particulier à la datation des liens, ainsi qu'à l'élaboration d'hypothèses prenant les temporalités en compte

Data-driven & Theory-driven Science : Artificial Realities and Applications to Savings Groups

Paper I and Paper II is not published yet. They are excluded from the dissertation until they will be published.The scientific process is neither unique nor nomic. Two processes of scientific inquiry are theory-driven and data-driven science. This dissertation analyzes savings groups using theory-driven and data-driven methods. Simulated realities-based on data-driven theory-are used to understand the emerging dynamics of savings groups. Savings groups are grassroots, community-based organizations composed of 15 to 30 members. These organizations-usually supported by international development agencies-have weekly meetings during a cycle of operations that typically lasts a year. In the groups, savings are kept in two funds: a fund for loans and a social welfare fund that covers life-cycle events. The findings of Papers A to D in this dissertation provide new large-sample evidence about savings groups, their dynamics, and the factors affecting their financial performance. In practice, the results of Paper A to D shed light on the best policies to promote sustainable development with informal finance in a cost-effective way. A theory-driven approach indicates that the social fund in savings groups stimulates loan allocation among risk-sharing members, while implicitly covering idiosyncratic risks (Paper A). A data-driven approach based on Bayesian data-mining reveals that the macroeconomic environment and the facilitation model of development agencies have a strong influence on the profit-generating capacity of savings groups (Paper B). Machine-learning methods further show that business training is not the most frequent program implemented by development agencies, but it is in fact the most powerful intervention to encourage profits, particularly when a development agency stops working with a group and leaves a community (Paper C). Finally, the simulation of a village with artificial agents indicates that the businesses of savings groups can have higher profits due to the consolidation of social capital and the competitive advantage created through a process of homophily (Paper D). Metatheoretically, the theory-driven and data-driven approaches of this dissertation-and the complementarity between these approaches-contribute to the epistemology of data-intensive science. The dissertation concludes that the gelstaltic and quasi-teleological explanations of the data-driven approach help to the formulation of theories through inductive and abductive reasoning.publishedVersio

ENGENDERING BYT: RUSSIAN WOMEN'S WRITING AND EVERYDAY LIFE FROM I. GREKOVA TO LIUDMILA ULITSKAIA

Gender and byt (everyday life) in post-Stalinist culture stem from tacit conceptions linking the quotidian to women. During the Thaw and Stagnation the posited egalitarianism of Soviet rhetoric and pre-exiting conceptions of the quotidian caused critics to use byt as shorthand for female experience and its literary expression. Addressing the prose of Natal'ia Baranskaia and I. Grekova, they connected the everyday to banality, reduced scope, ateleological time, private life, and anomaly. The authors, for their part, relied on selective representation of the quotidian and a chronotope of crisis to hesitantly address taboo subjects. During perestroika women's prose reemerged in the context of social turmoil and changing gender roles. The appearance of six literary anthologies gave women authors and Liudmila Petrushevskaia in particular a new visibility. Female writers employed discourse and a broadened chronotope of crisis, along with the era's emphasis on exposure, negation, and systematic critique, to challenge gender roles. Both supporters and opponents of women's literature now directly addressed its relation to gender instead of using byt as a euphemism. From 1991 to 2001 women's prose solidified its status as a recognized part of Russian high literature. Liudmila Ulitskaia and Svetlana Vasilenko employed a transhistorical temporality that was based on the family and offered an indirect critique of history through representation of women's byt. Critics debated the relationship between women's writing, feminism, and the new divide between elite and popular literature. Depictions of byt in the work of Ulitskaia imply that the everyday is an artistic resource in its own right as well as a conduit to higher meaning

Actants, Agents, and Assemblages: Delivery and Writing in an Age of New Media

This dissertation redefines the rhetorical canon of delivery by drawing on interdisciplinary theories of technology and materiality, including hardware and software studies, assemblage theory, and actor-network theory. Rhetorical theorists and composition scholars have correctly equated the technological medium with delivery, but also have focused exclusively on the circulation of symbolic forces rather than the persuasive agency of technology itself, thus eliding the affordances and constraints posed by technological actors at the non-symbolic levels of hardware, software, protocol, and algorithms. I establish a historical precedent in classical theorists such as Demosthenes, Cicero, and Quintilian that acknowledges their understanding of the role of nonhuman actors in rhetoric. In contrast to contemporary views of an active human subject using a passive technological object to achieve a communicative aim, I extend these classical understandings of materiality by articulating a vision of technological agency where rhetorical agency and delivery are equally distributed across human and nonhuman actors and assemblages. This account of delivery enables rhetorical scholars to study how material artifacts and writing technologies circulate, transform, and affect rhetorical consequences as they enter into various associations and shape emergent political publics. Through new media case studies from activist newsgame designers and algorithmic art, I establish a form of multimodal public writing that reconceives of political community building in networked spaces as a process that necessarily involves the consideration of procedural, protocological, and algorithmic rhetorics and literacies. By examining how delivery occurs through a complex ecological and material milieu, I define a more nuanced theoretical framework that allows rhetoricians and composition theorists to more productively address the various non-symbolic aspects of digital rhetoric and nonhuman agency that increasingly serve as a condition of possibility for the ways we learn to write and communicate toda

Character Constellations

Fiction has a major social impact, not least because it co-shapes the image that society has of various social groups. Drawing on a collection of 170 contemporary Dutch-language novels, Character Constellations presents a range of data-driven, statistical models to study depictions of characters in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, and other identity categories. Incorporating the tools of network analysis, each chapter highlights an aspect of fictional social networks that affects the representation of social groups: their centrality, their communities, and their conflicts. While reading individual novels in light of emerging statistical patterns, combining the formal methods of social network analysis with the interpretive tools of narratology, this study shows how central societal themes such as (in)equality and emancipation, integration and segregation, and social mobility and class struggle are foregrounded, replicated, or distorted in the Dutch novel. Showcasing what character-based critiques of literary representation gain by integrating data-driven methods into the practice of critical close reading, Character Constellations contributes to societal debates on cultural representation and identity and the role fiction and art have in those debates