The downs and ups of the consumer price index in Argentina: From National Statistics to Big Data

On the 5th of February 2007, the Institute of National Statistics and Census in Argentina (INDEC) released a press statement, giving a percentage figure for that month’s Consumer Price Index (CPI-GBA). Since the announcement, this number and its subsequent variations have been at the centre of a national and international political, legal and technical controversy. The legitimacy of the numerical value of the percentage has been called into question by a range of actors and has been challenged by the emergence of multiple alternative indicators of inflation. We explore this methodological controversy through the lens of statactivism. We do not describe the controversy in its entirety, but, rather, enter the controversy to develop a comparison of the procedures informing the production of the CPI as a national statistic with those informing its production as a big data number. In both cases, we explore the way in which price is produced as an indicator. In doing so we draw attention to the significance of calculative infrastructures as ubiquitous, multi-layered processes of connectivity, that have the capacity to make surfaces, to draw lines and boundaries, and to enable particular economic and political activities to unfold in multiple and specific ways. We argue that the capacity to connect, to attach and detach, that is immanent to such infrastructures configures price as an indicator in particular ways, and in doing so help make what we call state space, a term which we use to draw attention to how specific configurations of connectivity in the calculative infrastructure enacts a space of possibility for statactivis

Creative Temporal Costings: A Proto-Publics Research Project with Leeds Creative Timebank

A key defining characteristic of timebanking is that all activities are valued equally and in terms of time, with an hour contributed by a legal expert rendered equivalent to an hour of dog-walking. Leeds Creative Timebank (LCT), shares this principle, but is currently the only UK bank dedicated to the collaborative exchange of time among creative practitioners. The team is working on an experimental social design intervention that explores the practices of collaborative exchange as experienced by, and through a co-commissioned study undertaken with LCT, to investigate the value(s) of creative collaborative exchange in this emerging parallel economy. The authors employed methods that allow them to work within the ethos and economy of the LCT, with each investigator having an equal number of hour-long denominations deposited for them in the bank, to enable participation in the bank on the same basis as other members. The assembled ‘hours’ were invested in individuals’ participation in two workshops and the co-production of two outputs: a research report and a creative publication. This experimental method assemblage allowed to explore how collaboration supports the creation of multiple values from within LCT, while also affording members a position from which to develop critical approaches to collaborative exchange from without

Figure: Concept and Method

This open access book shows how figures, figuring, and configuration are used to understand complex, contemporary problems. Figures are images, numbers, diagrams, data and datasets, turns-of-phrase, and representations. Contributors reflect on the history of figures as they have transformed disciplines and fields of study, and how methods of figuring and configuring have been integral to practices of description, computation, creation, criticism and political action. They do this by following figures across fields of social science, medicine, art, literature, media, politics, philosophy, history, anthropology, and science and technology studies. Readers will encounter figures as various as Je Suis Charlie, #MeToo, social media personae, gardeners, asthmatic children, systems configuration management and cloud computing – all demonstrate the methodological utility and contemporary relevance of thinking with figures. This book serves as a critical guide to a world of figures and a creative invitation to “go figure!

Figure: Concept and Method

This open access book shows how figures, figuring, and configuration are used to understand complex, contemporary problems. Figures are images, numbers, diagrams, data and datasets, turns-of-phrase, and representations. Contributors reflect on the history of figures as they have transformed disciplines and fields of study, and how methods of figuring and configuring have been integral to practices of description, computation, creation, criticism and political action. They do this by following figures across fields of social science, medicine, art, literature, media, politics, philosophy, history, anthropology, and science and technology studies. Readers will encounter figures as various as Je Suis Charlie, #MeToo, social media personae, gardeners, asthmatic children, systems configuration management and cloud computing – all demonstrate the methodological utility and contemporary relevance of thinking with figures. This book serves as a critical guide to a world of figures and a creative invitation to “go figure!

Personalization : a new political arithmetic?

Scholarship on the history of political arithmetic highlights its significance for classical liberalism, a political philosophy in which subjects perceive themselves as autonomous individuals in an abstract system called society. This society and its component individuals became intelligible and governable in a deluge of printed numbers, assisted by the development of statistics, the emergence of a common space of measurement, and the calculation of probabilities. Our proposal is that the categories, numbers, and norms of this political arithmetic have changed in a ubiquitous culture of personalization. Today’s political arithmetic, we suggest, produces a different kind of society, what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls the ‘default social’. We address this new social as a ‘vague whole’ and propose that it is characterized by a continuous present, the contemporary form of simultaneity or way of being together that Benedict Anderson argued is fundamental to any kind of imagined community. Like the society imagined in the earlier arithmetic, this vague whole is an abstraction that obscures forms of stratification and discrimination

Doing Real Time Research: Opportunities and Challenges

This paper emerges out of a programme of workshops on Real Time Research, funded by NCRM during 2011-12, which brought together a network of interdisciplinary scholars to discuss the possibilities and challenges of doing research in real time. As well as these discussions, we also engaged in various exercises designed to give us practical experience of doing research in real time. The past, present and future are always brought together in social science methods, contributing to temporally significant modalities of enquiry, such as the ethnographic present, prediction or genealogy. But the workshops were designed to address the implications of the ‘timeliness’ of research in the context of an increasingly digitised and informational culture that allows access to, and creates dependences on, quantities of data gathered from diverse sources, often as soon as they are produced. The main questions we sought to address were: How are the dynamics of an informational society and digital culture transforming the temporality of methods? What opportunities are offered for research by the ongoing expansion of the present? And how can social science make use of the availability of real-time (immediately and continuously accessible) information? This paper explores the opportunities and threats of doing research in real time

Introduction: Figure, Figuring and Configuration

This introduction will outline the concept and practice of “figure” and “figuration.” The word “figure” can refer to numbers, characters in text or representations of persons or other entities in images or to a movement or series of movements, a diagram or a short succession of notes. In uses such as prefiguring, configuring, and disfiguring, it can refer to a process, opening questions of ordering, causality, premonition, (retrospective) fulfilment, prophecy, anticipation, redemption and pre-emption. As a noun, configuration can refer to an assemblage or the ways in which technologies materialise cultural imaginaries. Figures sit between the representational and the abstract; they can be inhabited and, in being inhabited, can be turned. We conclude by inviting readers to “go figure!

Number ecologies: numbers and numbering practices

Introduction to special issue: Number ecologies: numbers and numbering practices

Digital Valuation: Lessons in relevance from the prototyping of a recommendation app

This article describes the use of a prototype recommendation app to explore how users are included and/or excluded in categories of various kinds of ‘People Like You’. In the study, interviews with users of the prototype app indicate that the experience of receiving personalized recommendations isroutinely evaluated in terms of relevance, that is, as either of interest to them or as beside the point, as accurate or inaccurate, with accuracy often understood as recognition of their context(s). We build on the interviews to develop an analysis which suggests that the capacity of recommendation systems to make relevant recommendations is a function of the parallel projections – from the app on one side and users on the other – that are made as part of an interaction order. In developing this analysis, we reflect on the implications of the interaction order for the inclusion and exclusion of users in categories or kinds of people. We highlight the importance of the temporal formatting of interaction as a continuous present for the relation between belonging and belongings, and thus for the creation of a datasset (Beauvisage and Mellett 2020)

Ambient Images

The digitization of the image has intensified the transformation of the relationship between humans and images. The proliferation of tools for the production of images and acceleration in their distribution has meant that a blasé attitude toward visual saturation, already prominent in the 20th century, has become more widespread. Writing in 1927, Siegfried Kracauer presciently spoke of a “blizzard of photographs.” In the first decades of the 21st century this grew into an environmental flood and the multiple streams along which people circulated images, challenged many of the traditional assumptions about the status and function of the image. Then came the pandemic. Suddenly, the relationship between the personal image and the public image was reconfigured. People hung out on platforms such as Instagram and Tik Tok with increased intensity and hunger. The platforms for virtual communication absorbed and at times aimed to compensate for the loss of events, meetings, face-to-face encounters and relationships. Confinement to the domestic sphere produced ever more mundane practices of co-present intimacy across platforms. For instance, while cross-generational practices of food photo sharing have long been a significant genre, photographs of home baking became an Instagram cliché, with “sourdough” becoming Google’s top food-related search phrase in 2020. The zoom boom soon became a new malaise—zoom fatigue. This adoption of virtual platforms was a profound incursion. It altered our sense of time and space as sense-making and social performance were increasingly aimed at and organised via camera and screen. Linear biographical narratives were cross-cut and spliced in novel ways. The image was less and less a document of an external reality, but more and more part of the new forms of mediated sociality. The diminution of physical engagements had an impact on how impressions were formed, what constituted the sensory triggers for memory, as well as shifting the markers for processes of understanding and decision-making. In this environment, images do not just multiply. Their increasing number also accentuates how they are stitched together to form new atmospheres, assemblages, iterations—or what we call the production of ambient images