Landmarks: Navigating Spacetime and Digital Mobility

In this essay we will examine how we can conceptualize digital mobility as spatial navigation. Digital mobility occurs in media where the user navigates through space and actually becomes, simultaneously, creator, performer, and navigator of a spatial story. In this sense, the on-screen navigator simultaneously makes and reads space. We argue that in digital mobilities the user/player becomes simultaneously I-narrator, actor and agent of narrative. The user navigates through space and becomes, in fact, a digital pedestrian. Different from the (virtual) mobility of analogue moving-image media in that the interaction between user and space is much more fluid and the user becomes both actor and navigator, digital mobility is clearly central to the use of mobile screens, such as mobile phones, navigation devices, or portable game consoles in which case one carries the screen and interacts with it, while being on the move. Moreover, we also believe that digital mobility can be a central quality of certain digital practices during which users are not literally on the move but still have to navigate through, and control digital environments through spatial interaction. This can for example be the case when playing certain games or consulting Google Earth on a desktop computer

Creative Urban Methods for the Datafied City

Dataf ied and smart cities produce some challenges for inclusive, resilient, and sustainable urban futures. How can creative methods contribute to thinking and designing ways to imagine and co-create dataf ied cit-ies with and for participatory citizenship and values for inclusion and sustainability? This question is central to the agenda of the research group [urban interfaces] and their collaboration in interdicisplinary and transdisciplinary partnerships. Working with and around the concepts of participation, criticality and imagination, the group brings cultural inquiry into dataf ied cities together with a methodological inquiry into creative urban methods. In the following, we sketch this agenda and approach and some recent examples of what such creative methods may yield

Situating Data: Inquiries in Algorithmic Culture

Taking up the challenges of the datafication of culture, as well as of the scholarship of cultural inquiry itself, this collection contributes to the critical debate about data and algorithms. How can we understand the quality and significance of current socio-technical transformations that result from datafication and algorithmization? How can we explore the changing conditions and contours for living within such new and changing frameworks? How can, or should we, think and act within, but also in response to these conditions? This collection brings together various perspectives on the datafication and algorithmization of culture from debates and disciplines within the field of cultural inquiry, specifically (new) media studies, game studies, urban studies, screen studies, and gender and postcolonial studies. It proposes conceptual and methodological directions for exploring where, when, and how data and algorithms (re)shape cultural practices, create (in)justice, and (co)produce knowledge

Schooled by Dashboards?: Learning Platforms’ Performance-Centered Pedagogy and Its Impact on Teaching

Personalized learning is rapidly becoming a reality in classrooms worldwide through platformization. At the classroom level, digital platforms shape learning toward personal needs through pedagogies encoded into their design—their algorithms, but also into dashboard interfaces teachers increasingly employ as part of their educational toolkit. This study investigates how dashboards can impact teaching in primary school classrooms by examining how their data visualizations configure particular views on learning, which educators increasingly depend on to make pedagogical decisions. It will address two research questions: What are the pedagogical underpinnings of learning dashboards integrated in personalized learning technologies? How may pedagogies encoded into these dashboards affect teaching? To answer these questions, the chapter will start by setting out a theoretical perspective on platform pedagogy. Subsequently, it will describe teaching and learning relationships encoded in the teaching dashboard of the Dutch adaptive learning platform Snappet and argue that its pedagogy of performativity may disempower teachers’ control over learning. The concluding section will discuss actions needed to strengthen schools’ and teachers’ control over the pedagogical dimensions of learning platforms

The Agricultural Data Imaginary: Precision farming’s reinforcement of the productivist approach to agriculture

Big Data come with the promise of a better future. In the agricultural discourse on smart technologies and data-based applications in farming, so-called “precision farming” is envisioned as a “revolution” of traditional agricultural mass production of crops and livestock. Big Data are imagined as making the agrifood industry more efficient, more profitable, and more sustainable. Drawing on David Beer’s concept of the “data imaginary” (2019), this chapter examines discourses on precision farming in corporate advertisements, lobbyist agricultural journals, and review articles in academic journals in the field of agriculture and computing. It argues that data-based agrifood production is seen as the next technological fix of the broken system of traditional industrial farming, while it in fact reinforces the devastating environmental and social damages that traditional industrial farming has caused. Keywords: big data, smart farming, data imaginary, productivist agriculture, technological solutionis

Interstitial Data: Tracing Metadata in Archival Search Systems

Metadata do not merely give explicit information about records in the archive but can also be considered a source of information about the (historical) context in which they are created. This chapter combines the insights of critical data studies and archival studies to formulate a hands-on approach to tracing metadata in archival search systems. The approach, which builds further on Loukissas’s local reading strategies, consists of two distinct phases: an exploration phase to trace and select and an analysis phase to trace and compare. The author concludes that a lot of data necessary to understanding metadata in search systems is hidden—dif ferent forms of what can be considered “interstitial data.

The Datafication of Racialization and the Pursuit of Equality: The Case of the “Barometer Culturele Diversiteit”

In this chapter, I show how the investigation of racialization in datafied applications can be done through an instrumental, epistemological, and ontological approach to datafication and that the results of each approach do not necessarily match. By analyzing the attempted implementation of a tool aimed at measuring the composition of personnel in terms of migration background called Barometer Culturele Diversiteit (BCD) at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, I show how the tool is using ideas about race (instrumental), shaping knowledge through colonial politics (epistemological), and producing race (ontological) simultaneously. Aided by this analysis, I will advocate for an understanding of the use of raceethnic data for affirmative purposes in terms of strategic essentialism, making epistemic imperfection regarding race warranted only in antiracist data systems working toward their own obsolescence

Situating the Marketization of Data

Data are neither inherently valuable, nor do all data have the same value. This contribution argues how data are made useful and valuable to specific actors and for specific purposes. It draws attention to the material politics of data flows and valuation, and to the many different actors and stakeholders who build the technological conduits and pipelines that facilitate the circulation and use of data. Therefore, it highlights the need to study the infrastructural layer of the global data market, as well as the central role of intermediaries who build and uphold these infrastructures for the exchange and use of data for different purposes. Both are important to situate the processes of datafication and data marketization in specific empirical settings