data | Platypus

Searching for Microbes with No Name: The Labour of Sampling and the Making of Scientific Value

 Victor Secco  July 7, 2026

It was an early crisp morning in late April 2023, I climbed into the back seat of the Hilux with the other field scientists, heading to the day’s sampling site on the north coast of Belgium. We sat in silence in the car, part of the early-morning mood and a sign of how tired and overworked we felt most days for the last month. Outside the car’s window urban and green fields landscapes alternate on our way. As we reached closer to our destination the song “A horse with no name” by George Martin started playing on the radio. Slowly the lead-scientist in the field started humming the song and then singing along quietly, as we all followed her humming, the mood inside the car completely changed. We were ready for another long day out in the elements—thorny bushes, light rain, cold wind—collecting soil, sand, water and air in search of microbes with no name. (read more...)

The Human Cost of Precision

 Samiksha Bhan  March 24, 2026

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In 2022, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s son died at the age of twenty-six from a lifelong battle with cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder caused by birth-related brain damage. When in 2017, Nadella delivered a talk about the use of assistive artificial intelligence for people suffering from disabilities like CP, he was contacted by one his colleagues in Spain. Julián Isla, a software engineer at Microsoft, emailed Nadella out of a sense of resonance, because his own son suffered from a rare genetic epilepsy making him a parent of a child living with disability as well. Like Nadella, Isla was also motivated to think of the role of artificial intelligence in the assistance of other parents who, as he described, were on the “odyssey of diagnosis”. (read more...)

Toward a Linked Data Approach to Shifting Identities and NULL Values in Data Sets

 Andrew Wiebe  April 17, 2025

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The tension between binary thinking and the fluidity of identity has long been featured in discussions of definition in computational practice within galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. Nowhere is this more evident than in how data systems attempt to categorize — or fail to categorize — 2SLGBTQIA+ subjects. Metadata schemas, survey tools, and classification structures often rely on rigid dichotomies, such as male/female, known/unknown, or 1/0. (read more...)

Two Insomniacs Discuss Routine and Restlessness Through Google Tracking

 Alexandra Dantzer  April 4, 2024

Ovaj sadržaj dostupan je i na srpskom.

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In this piece I meditate on a conversation I had with my key interlocutor, Aleksandar Kecman, about Google tracking and our reflections upon first encountering my digital footprint. I met Aleksandar in Belgrade, where I did research among insomniacs exploring how the experience of time (and tangentially, space) figures in their lives. Being an insomniac myself I felt chronically out of synch with the rest of society—people close to me and their work and sleep schedules, the rhythms of socializing, and the idea of productive life well spent in time—and this feeling tracked with my interlocutors. Many of the problems the sleepless face are quandaries of time. How are the everyday practices of insomniacs shaped by local and broader understandings of what it means, temporally, to lead a “good life,” or a productive life, within a society that values grind and hustle? (read more...)

A Vocabulary for Junk in Four Movements

 Rebecca Carlson, Emil Rieger, Sarah Thanner  July 6, 2023

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It was really a miracle that he was able to function. He had accumulated so much shit, it was starting to get concerning, or would have, if there had been anyone to be concerned. As it was, all he was, was being practical. Weirdos hoard shit for god knows what reasons but he was keeping a collection of spares. Admittedly, there was a tight line one approaches when one, for example, collects spares for other spares or if you’re missing the very thing to donate parts for in the first place. But he was aware of that. Each time a new thing came into the house, he would reflect on that line. It was a dotted line, like those where you’d put your signature or tear along. Which one it was, that’s an open discourse, to be negotiated anew. As of right now, there was a more practical concern. The (read more...)

Making the Invisible Seen: The Infrastructure of Modern Groundwater Governmentality in Taiwan

 Ho Chun-Yi  September 7, 2021

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In 2009, the Taiwan High Speed Railway Company (THSR) claimed that severe land subsidence in Changhua and Yunlin counties was compromising and damaging the structural integrity of the railway. The THSR urged the government to regulate the over-pumping of groundwater in the region, which was seen as culpable for the land subsidence, in order to guarantee the safety of the rail users. Since the agricultural wells constitute a significant proportion of the total wells in these two counties, the safety issue became an issue of “water-justice” – local farmers have accused the Sixth Naphtha Cracking Plant owned by the Formosa Plastic Corporation of exploiting Yunlin’s surface water thereby forcing them to pump groundwater. To tamper farmers’ sentiments, the central government announced that according to a relevant survey, land subsidence was caused by deep wells, rather than farmers’ shallow wells. Therefore, the government would not forbid the pumping of groundwater by farmers in Changhua and Yunlin county. (read more...)

Data Activism and Petro-Public Knowledge “Across Borders”: The Formosa Plastics Global Archive

 Tim Schütz, Shan-Ya Su  April 27, 2021

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When our research group entered the Formosa Plastics museum in Taiwan, the first thing we noticed was a massive piece of kauri wood, sitting protected under a dome of glass. Wang Yung Ching, chairman of the company and formerly Taiwan’s richest person, had acquired the burl in 2002, after seeing it in an art gallery in the southern port city of Kaohsiung. As our tour guide explained with excitement, Wang was captivated by the wood’s radiant strength, representing the “immeasurable capabilities and longevity of the Formosa Plastics Group”, making it an ideal “centerpiece” for the company’s six-floor museum . Exhibits celebrate the founder and spirit of the Formosa Plastics Group (complete with dioramas and wax figures) and a miniature replica of Formosa’s 6th Sixth Naphtha Cracking Plant in Central Taiwan. The fourth floor has an Earth Conservation Theatre. The sixth floor conveys how Formosa has given back to society through investment in education, hospitals, and cultural heritage projects . (read more...)

Girls, Gadgets, and Gatekeepers: What is Ethical Feminist Fieldwork When Working with Children?

 Isha Bhallamudi  April 15, 2021

There is no Institutional Review Board (IRB) or equivalent body in India. The ethics of research are left to the purview of researchers, their supervisors, and departments. Therefore, as an international PhD student, I first encountered the IRB when planning my MA project at UC Irvine, where I investigated the intersectional effects of gender and class within the family, and how they shape differential access to mobile phones for adolescents in urban India. (read more...)