Database State – a comprehensive map of UK government databases (2009)
Filed under report | Tags: · civil society, database, human rights, surveillance, united kingdom
In recent years, the UK Government has built or extended many central databases that hold information on every aspect of our lives, from health and education to welfare, law–enforcement and tax. This ‘Transformational Government’ programme was supposed to make public services better or cheaper, but it has been repeatedly challenged by controversies over effectiveness, privacy, legality and cost.
Many question the consequences of giving increasing numbers of civil servants daily access to our personal information. Objections range from cost through efficiency to privacy. The emphasis on data capture, form-filling, mechanical assessment and profiling damages professional responsibility and alienates the citizen from the state. Over two-thirds of the population no longer trust the government with their personal data.
This report charts these databases, creating the most comprehensive map so far of what has become Britain’s Database State.
All of these systems had a rationale and purpose. But this report shows how, in too many cases, the public are neither served nor protected by the increasingly complex and intrusive holdings of personal information invading every aspect of our lives.
By Ross Anderson, Ian Brown, Terri Dowty, Philip Inglesant, William Heath, Angela Sasse (March 2009)
Published by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd., York, UK
More info (Guardian)
Direct download:
Database State – full report (PDF, 879KB)
Database State – Executive Summary (PDF, 260KB)
Victoria Vesna (ed.): Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, computer games, data, database, film, narrative
Discovering the role of data in creating a new way of experiencing—and making—art.
Database Aesthetics examines the database as cultural and aesthetic form, explaining how artists have participated in network culture by creating data art. The essays in this collection look at how an aesthetic emerges when artists use the vast amounts of available information as their medium. Here, the ways information is ordered and organized become artistic choices, and artists have an essential role in influencing and critiquing the digitization of daily life.
“Victoria Vesna’s edited anthology Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow provides a compelling collection of 16 essays that engage the shifting aesthetics of computational and interactive art forms. Database Aesthetics supplies the reader with an absorbing and diverse cross-section of stylistic, analytical and theoretical examinations of the meaning of the database to interactive (and, in some cases, traditional) media. Furthermore, it showcases several practical instances of artworks configured using databases and provides the reader with valuable insights from the artists into the design, implementation and execution of these projects. It offers a number of intellectually robust, rewarding and thought-provoking approaches for those already immersed in digital culture and its critical discourses. This book serves as a timely and valuable resource for both the classroom and beyond.” —Discourse
Contributors: Sharon Daniel, Steve Deitz, Lynn Hershman Leeson, George Legrady, Eduardo Kac, Norman Klein, John Klima, Lev Manovich, Robert F. Nideffer, Nancy Paterson, Christiane Paul, Marko Peljhan, Warren Sack, Bill Seaman, Grahame Weinbren.
Published by University Of Minnesota Press, 2007
ISBN 0816641196, 9780816641192
336 pages
PDF (updated on 2011-8-6)
Comment (0)Lev Manovich: The Language of New Media (2001–) [EN, IT, ES, PL, SR]
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, cinema, computer games, computer graphics, data, database, film, film history, interface, media theory, montage, new media, programming, telepresence
“In this book Lev Manovich offers the first systematic and rigorous theory of new media. He places new media within the histories of visual and media cultures of the last few centuries. He discusses new media’s reliance on conventions of old media, such as the rectangular frame and mobile camera, and shows how new media works create the illusion of reality, address the viewer, and represent space. He also analyzes categories and forms unique to new media, such as interface and database.
Manovich uses concepts from film theory, art history, literary theory, and computer science and also develops new theoretical constructs, such as cultural interface, spatial montage, and cinegratography. The theory and history of cinema play a particularly important role in the book. Among other topics, Manovich discusses parallels between the histories of cinema and of new media, digital cinema, screen and montage in cinema and in new media, and historical ties between avant-garde film and new media.”
Keywords and phrases
3-D computer graphics, telepresence, computer animation, digital compositing, computer games, VRML, digital cinema, Myst, computer space, human-computer interface, photorealism, Jurassic Park, virtual worlds, Aspen Movie Map, computer media, SIGGRAPH, CD-ROM, hypermedia, avant-garde, Movie Camera
Foreword by Mark Tribe
Publisher MIT Press, 2001
Leonardo Books series
ISBN 0262133741, 9780262133746
xiii+354 pages
Author (archived)
Author
Publisher
The Language of New Media (English, 2001, 20 MB, updated on 2019-8-23)
Il linguaggio dei nuovi media (Italian, trans. Roberto Merlini, 2002, 39 MB, added on 2019-8-23, via)
El lenguaje de los nuevos medios de comunicación (Spanish, trans. Óscar Fontrodona, 2006, 31 MB, added on 2019-8-23, via)
Język nowych mediów (Polish, trans. Piotr Cypryański, 2006, 52 MB, added on 2019-8-23, via)
Jezik novih medija (Serbian, trans. Aleksandar Luj Todorović, 2015, 10 MB, added on 2019-8-23, via)