Lisa Gitelman (ed.): “Raw Data” is an Oxymoron (2013)

We live in the era of Big Data, with storage and transmission capacity measured not just in terabytes but in petabytes (where peta- denotes a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion). Data collection is constant and even insidious, with every click and every “like” stored somewhere for something. This book reminds us that data is anything but “raw,” that we shouldn’t think of data as a natural resource but as a cultural one that needs to be generated, protected, and interpreted. The book’s essays describe eight episodes in the history of data from the predigital to the digital. Together they address such issues as the ways that different kinds of data and different domains of inquiry are mutually defining; how data are variously “cooked” in the processes of their collection and use; and conflicts over what can—or can’t—be “reduced” to data. Contributors discuss the intellectual history of data as a concept; describe early financial modeling and some unusual sources for astronomical data; discover the prehistory of the database in newspaper clippings and index cards; and consider contemporary “dataveillance” of our online habits as well as the complexity of scientific data curation.

Essay authors:
Geoffrey C. Bowker, Kevin R. Brine, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Lisa Gitelman, Steven J. Jackson, Virginia Jackson, Markus Krajewski, Mary Poovey, Rita Raley, David Ribes, Daniel Rosenberg, Matthew Stanley, Travis D. Williams

Publisher MIT Press, 2013
Infrastructures Series
ISBN 0262518287, 9780262518284
182 pages

review (Niccolò Tempini, LSE blog)

publisher
google books

Download (removed on 2013-11-12 upon request of the publisher)

Evgeny Morozov: To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (2013)

“Our society is at a crossroads. Smart technology is transforming our world, making many aspects of our lives more convenient, efficient and – in some cases – fun. Better and cheaper sensors can now be embedded in almost everything, and technologies can log the products we buy and the way we use them. But, argues Evgeny Morozov, technology is having a more profound effect on us: it is changing the way we understand human society.

In the very near future, technological systems will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions into many more areas of public life. These are the discourses by which we have always defined our civilization: politics, culture, public debate, morality, humanism. But how will these disciplines be affected when we delegate much of the responsibility for them to technology? The temptation of the digital age is to fix everything – from crime to corruption to pollution to obesity – by digitally quantifying, tracking, or gamifiying behavior. But when we change the motivations for our moral, ethical and civic behavior, do we also change the very nature of that behavior? Technology, Morozov proposes, can be a force for improvement – but only if we abandon the idea that it is necessarily revolutionary and instead genuinely interrogate why and how we are using it.

From urging us to drop outdated ideas of the Internet to showing how to design more humane and democratic technological solutions, To Save Everything, Click Here is about why we will always need to consider the consequences of the way we use technology. ”

Publisher PublicAffairs, 2013
ISBN 161039139X, 9781610391399
433 pages

review (Kevin Driscoll, LA Review of Books)
review (Siva Vaidhyanathan, Bookforum)
review (Steven Poole, The Guardian)
review (Pat Kane, The Independent)
review (Adam Thierer, Reason.com)
Interview (with Terry Winograd, Boston Review)

Publisher

PDF (added on 2019-4-3)
EPUB (updated on 2019-4-3)

Viktor Šik: Kulturní analytika – metoda vizualizace velkých kulturních dat (2012) [Czech]

Předmětem této magisterské diplomové práce je kulturní analytika jako metoda pro výzkum kulturní produkce se zaměřením na vizuální produkci za použití nejnovějších technologií výpočetní techniky. Práce si klade za cíl představit základní principy kulturní analytiky, teoretický a historický kontext a související metodologii jakou je například vizualizace informací. Debata o kulturní analytice je zasazena do diskurzu softwarových studií jakožto nové humanistické a uměnovědné disciplíně, která se kriticky vymezuje proti mediálním studiím a obrací se k základním principům informačních technologií. Závěrečná případová studie pak ve smyslu kulturní analytiky demonstruje možnosti zpracování velkých dat, techniky automatizované analýzy a způsoby vizualizace médií na analýze vytvořené výhradně pro účely této práce.

Magisterská diplomová práce
Masarykova univerzita, Filozofická fakulta, Obecná teorie a dějiny umění a kultury/Teorie interaktivních médií
Vedoucí práce: Jana Horáková
Brno: FF MU, 2012

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