This latest installment of our intermittently-weekly round-up brings you posts on machines that do conspiracies, transhumanism and capitalism, algorithms (beginning to be a staple), and biomedical vampirism. What more could you ask for? If you see anything around the web that you think we ought to include, please drop us a line. (read more...)
A few years ago, Paul Edwards and colleagues (2011) introduced a notion of “science friction”—the idea that scientific datasets do not magically fuse together into a readily accessible “open” stockpile, and instead must be communicated and reshaped in order for scientists to collaborate across them. While it is all too easy to imagine endlessly wired interoperable devices, and bodies thoroughly mediated by fluid streams of measurement, the reality is not that simple. The Data Friction panel at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings this past year attempted to take the idea of science friction further, and ask what else can we see when we turn our attention to frictionful encounters with data. This panel considered what alternative forms of knowing become possible by paying attention occasions where data fails to be mobile, or to the ways data and bodies resist being bound by models, devices, and infrastructures. What we see when we pay attention to frictions are significant questions of ownership, the slipperiness social relations, and examples of how people inhabit more fundamental social, material and conceptual incommensurabilities that data often surfaces. These social formations open up broader questions of the work that underlying notions of what constitutes “data” are doing. (read more...)
How does data look? The answer to this question is often seen as a matter of Data Visualization, a new field increasingly tasked with the role of imaging and imagining data. As a sign of the times, Strata + Hadoop World, the central conference of data professionals, just hosted its first Data Visualization conference in California. With growing urgency the central issue in this field mirror those that had afflicted design before it: where to draw the line between art and science, fact and fiction, form and function. Seeing data, however, is not simply about the skillful manipulation of statistics into visual form. The way data is represented is necessarily tied up with the way and by whom it is presented. Therefore, to ask how data appears is to think about the broader politics of representation, that is the socio-cultural framework that guides how we are invited to view data, how we expect data to look like, function, and act. (read more...)
On a recent trip to California I took the train down to San Jose to visit the Tech Museum of Innovation where a new exhibit focused on wearable technology and data—Body Metrics—had just been unveiled. I study the proliferation of digital self-tracking, a phenomenon made increasingly widespread by the popularity of sensor technology and wearable devices (think Apple Watch, Fitbit wristbands, or OMsignal shirts) that generate data about one’s self. In my research I pay particular attention to the way these new technologies of knowledge are shifting the way we think about and view our bodies so I was keen to see the way the museum expressed the relationship between data and bodies. My visit would become haunted, however, by another display of the body—the Body Worlds exhibit—that I had seen months earlier in New York City. Considered alongside one another, the two exhibits say a lot about the way we commonly conceptualize personal data. (read more...)
