Open data, closed government: Unpacking data.gov.sg

In 2011, Singapore created data.gov.sg as an open, online repository for government data. This essay examines this Web portal, the data it contains, and some of the applications that have been built using it and aims to understand the role that data.gov.sg plays within the context of Singapore’s continued political and economic development. Although such portals and the data they contain are often presented as offering transformative modes of governance and democratic participation, analysis of data.gov.sg shows how the data portal can act to reinforce and entrench existing modes of governance

Teleview and the aspirations of the infrastructural state in Singapore

[Extract] In 1988, Singapore rolled out a pi lot for a homegrown digital computer network. Teleview, as it was called, was a videotex system that used the public telephone network to connect paid subscribers to a central computer via a modem. Users could gain access to information about a variety of topics, including weather, stock market prices, and travel. They could also use online banking, business communication, ticket reservation, and educational services, as well as electronic directories, games, and magazines (Keong 1990). Despite significant government promotion of the project, the rate of uptake was slow. Although the cost was low—equivalent to about USD 5.50 per month, plus three cents per message and thirty-five cents per hour of connection time (Sandfort 1993)—only 5 percent of Singaporean house holds ever subscribed to Teleview (Wong 1997). The system was eventually modified to become a portal through which users could connect to the global internet. Given this brief account, it is tempting to understand Teleview as a kind of failure—something that was not widely adopted and was quickly displaced once the real thing (namely, the World Wide Web) came along. As a corollary, it is also tempting to read Teleview as some sort of desperate (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempt by an authoritarian government to curtail the democratizing forces that the internet promised to bring with it. Indeed, Cherian George (2012, 216), one of Singapore’s foremost media critics, quickly dismissed Singapore’s native network: “The Internet’s big bang in the mid-1990s turned the likes of Teleview into white elephants and relegated what were grand national projects to mere footnotes in the history of the online revolution.

Hadooping the genome: The impact of big data tools on biology

This essay examines the consequences of the so-called ‘big data’ technologies in biomedicine. Analyzing algorithms and data structures used by biologists can provide insight into how biologists perceive and understand their objects of study. As such, I examine some of the most widely used algorithms in genomics: those used for sequence comparison or sequence mapping. These algorithms are derived from the powerful tools for text searching and indexing that have been developed since the 1950s and now play an important role in online search. In biology, sequence comparison algorithms have been used to assemble genomes, process next-generation sequence data, and, most recently, for ‘precision medicine.’ I argue that the predominance of a specific set of text-matching and pattern-finding tools has influenced problem choice in genomics. It allowed genomics to continue to think of genomes as textual objects and to increasingly lock genomics into ‘big data’-driven text-searching methods. Many ‘big data’ methods are designed for finding patterns in human-written texts. However, genomes and other’ omic data are not human-written and are unlikely to be meaningful in the same way

Starting up biology in China: performances of life at BGI

BGI (hua da ji ying; 华大基因; “China Great Gene”) counts among the world’s largest and wealthiest institutions for biomedical research. Located in Shenzhen, the new megacity in southern China, BGI is now a critical site for understanding the relationship between biomedicine and the economic development of China. This essay uses performance studies and the notion of shanzhai (“copycatting”) to understanding how this laboratory poses a challenge to traditional modes of understanding technoscience. This marks an attempt to understand BGI, its work, and its workers on their own terms, or at least on local terms. Just as shanzhai challenges our notions of originality, BGI’s hybridity challenges our notions of where and how scientific knowledge is produced. Performing not merely as a “laboratory,” but also, and at the same time, as a “factory,” and a “company,” BGI is an unfamiliar kind of hybrid scientific-industrial-commercial-governmental-philanthropic space that draws its repertoire from its very particular regional, national, and local-urban circumstances

The Quotidian Labour of High Tech: Innovation and Ordinary Work in Shenzhen

The literature on the production of high-tech electronics in China—following a Silicon Valley model—focuses on either large-scale manufacturing or the role of start-ups and ‘makers’. The aim of this article is to turn to other kinds of spaces and work in the production of high-tech electronics. I focus here on three kinds of spaces in Shenzhen: the Huaqiangbei electronics market, small-scale factories and industrial design workshops. The electronics economy depends critically not just on ‘makers’ but on all kinds of other labour. In particular, it depends on lower middle-class and low-class work—devices made by small factories and shops, sold by small enterprises and designed for the less wealthy, especially in developing countries. The human networks that connect these individuals are critical to the size, speed and density of the markets, allowing devices to be built and shipped rapidly, for parts and customers to be available

Hans Peter Luhn and the birth of the hashing algorithm

November 1958, at a six-day international conference devoted to scientific information, the inventor Hans Peter Luhn demonstrated a series of his electromechanical machines. They looked rather ordinary. Much like other computing devices of the day, they were boxy and utilitarian, designed to scoop and sort tall stacks of punch cards into slots and bins

The business machine in biology: the commercialization of AI in the life science

This paper traces one important trajectory in the history of expert systems. Through a collaboration between Edward Feigenbaum and the geneticist Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Laureate in Medicine, AI became deeply connected to the life sciences. Biology was a crucial test-bed for some of Feigenbaums systems and, in the long term, these systems had a transformative effect on biology. In particular, the work of Feigenbaum and his collaborators and students, brought biology and computing together in especially powerful ways. We now take for granted that biology can be computerized we have whole sub-disciplines such as bioinformatics, biocomputing, and computational biology devoted to the task of studying life as information. The computer systems and software that Feigenbaums lab helped to develop played an important role in establishing the possibility of these kinds of work

Crowdfunding Conservation Science: Tracing the Participatory Dynamics of Native Parrot Genome Sequencing

Who gets to practice and participate in science? Research teams in Puerto Rico and New Zealand have each sequenced the genomes of parrot populations native to these locales: the iguaca and kākāpō, respectively. In both cases, crowdfunding and social media were instrumental in garnering public interest and funding. These forms of Internet-mediated participation impacted how conservation science was practiced in these cases and shaped emergent social roles and relations. As citizens “follow,” fund, and “like” the labor of conservation, they create new relational possibilities for and with science. For example, the researchers became newly engaged and engaging by narrating and displaying the parrots via an Internet-inflected aesthetic. The visibility of online modalities shifted accountabilities as researchers considered whom this crowdfunded work answered to and how to communicate their progress and results. The affordances of the Internet allowed researchers from the peripheries of the scientific establishment to produce genomic knowledge for globally dispersed audiences. The convergence of genomic and Internet technology here shaped scientific practice by facilitating new modes of participation—for laypeople in science but also for scientists in society

Trace together: Pandemic response, democracy, and technology

On 20 March 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Singapore government released a new app called TraceTogether. Developed by the Ministry of Health, SG United, and GovTech Singapore, the app uses the Bluetooth capability of smartphones to store information about other smartphones that have come into close proximity with your own. These data facilitate the government’s process of “contact tracing” through which they track those who have potentially come into contact with the virus and place them in quarantine. This essay attempts to understand what kinds of citizens and civic behavior might be brought into being by this technology. By exam-ining the workings and affordances of the TraceTogether app in detail, the authors argue that its peer-to-peer and open-source technology features mobilize the rhetorics and ideals of citizens science and democratic participation. However, by deploying these within a context that centralizes data, the app turns ideals born of dissent and protest on their head, using them to build trust not within a community but rather in government power and control. Rather than building social trust, TraceTogether becomes a technological substitute for it. The significant public support for Trace-Together shows both the possibilities and limitations of citizen science in less liberal political contexts and circumstances