Author: sam

Sam is owner of this blog and works as a senior lecturer in digital geographies.
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Six myths about ‘big data’, Kate Crawford

[via Rob Kitchin’s Programmable City feed]

In a recent workshop at the UC Berkeley iSchool, Kate Crawford of Microsoft Research (and several other institutions) offered a keynote critically reflecting upon the discursive regimes that have been built in the understandings of ‘big data’. Riffing on Claude Levi-Strauss’ ‘mythologies’ project, Crawford’s talk, ‘The Raw & the Cooked’, outlines six myths about ‘big data’ and unpicks the assumptions upon which these myths rely. In brief, Crawford’s six myths are: ‘Big data are new’, ‘Big data is objective’, ‘Big data don’t discriminate’, ‘Big data makes cities smart’, ‘Big data is anonymous’, ‘You can opt out of big data’.

Crawford does a good job at setting the scene for a range of work that touches on the uses of large data sets that come from a range of sources, that may be repurposed for rather different ends than those intended, about which academics, politicians, civil servants and business people have told, and reinforced, particular kinds of stories such that those data have become very significant. What Crawford helpfully does is step back from particular data-oriented agendas, such as ‘smart cities’ or ‘social network analysis’, to highlight some particular, perhaps pressing, methodological and ethical concerns. This is of particular interest for me in relation to a project I am beginning to undertake with Steve Hinchliffe concerning ideas around ‘contagion’, looking in particular at social media data.

Crawford gives a good namecheck in the section on the fourth myth for Matt Zook too!

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Close up at a distance, Laura Kurgan

There are a number of people engaging in really thoughtful and thought-provoking artistic, activist and political engagements/interventions with geographical (topographical) technologies, which are very much worth paying attention to. Work by Jordan Crandall, Laura Kurgan, Lisa Price and Trevor Paglen, amongst others, I think offers some really interesting ways of critically thinking about, and engaging with, the various kinds of mappings we (as socieities) are variously undertaking for sometimes not-so-benevolent causes.

Laura Kurgan’s recent Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics has attracted some deserved attention by geographers and, in a similar vein to Patrick Crogan’s excellent Gameplay Mode, offers an interesting critical engagement with the military origins of satellite mapping and imaging technologies. Kurgan argues that we cannot stand at a ‘critical distance’ to evaluate these technologies but rather –  we are “addressed by and embedded within them”. Thus – “Only through a certain intimacy with these technologies–an encounter with their opacities, their assumptions, their intended aims–can we begin to assess their full ethical and political stakes” (page 14).

Columba Peoples, from the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, has written a good review of Kurgan’s Close Up at a Distance for the open access book reviews section of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, which is online here and well worth a read.

Also, Laura Kurgan and Trevor Paglen engaged in a fascinating conversation about their practice at Columbia University earlier this year, which was recorded and is available on YouTube:

Note: Trevor’s mic doesn’t work very well and he’s muffled for a bit at the beginning but it gets fixed so stick with it!

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Stiegler on Malabou, plasticity and the brain, via @DJRoss70

Dan Ross, Author of Violent Democracy and Director of the phenomenal film The Ister and translator of several of Bernard Stiegler’s books, has been tweeting some snippets from Stiegler’s recent book États de choc and from his 2013 lectures at Goldsmiths. I have concatenated the split quote and reproduced it here, as an aide de memoire as much as anything…

First, from États de choc:

“Catherine Malabou makes plasticity Hegel’s major concept. But plasticity is possible only by passing through its solidifying and fixing exteriorization. Plasticity is possible only by passing through the fixing that is writing, without which there can be no reading. By passing through writing, which is a specific moment of technics-become-grammatization process. Hegelian, or post-Hegelian, plasticity is CONSTITUTED (and destituted) by its ‘inorganic moment’, as Hegel says.” Bernard Stiegler, États de choc, pp. 189–90, note 2.

This was split across six tweets, here: 1 2 3 4 5 6.

Second, Dan’s précis of a key point from Stiegler’s Goldsmiths lectures:

Bernard Stiegler at Goldsmiths 2013, disagreeing with Catherine Malabou’s “no justification for separating mind and brain”. Malabou’s discourse completely ignores the fact that knowledge is not simply cognitive. Knowledge presupposes social circuits of transindividuation through which a form of knowledge is constituted. Malabou’s discourse is regressive in relation to what Freud taught us, that libido is irreducible to the drives. What Catherine Malabou ignores is that the brain harbors drive-based automatisms or compulsions. These automatisms or compulsions can become object investments of desires and idealizations. But they can do so only because the non-organic recoding of the cerebral organ meant that the instincts were replaced with the drives, thereby becoming (thanks to this recoding) educable.

Split across eight tweets, here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.

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Stiegler on ‘immateriality’ and ‘virtual spaces’

Following on from my recent post about two new articles, I thought it apposite to highlight a couple of extended quotes from Bernard Stiegler’s work that I think offer a good critical response to the persistent use of the metaphor of ‘virtual space’ and its apparent immateriality. I am posting this as much as a reminder for myself as because I hope it is of interest to others too. I will leave commentary on these passages for another time… Continue reading “Stiegler on ‘immateriality’ and ‘virtual spaces’”

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Digital geographies – two new articles

I have two new articles broadly concerning ‘digital geographies’ at different stages in the publication process. This represents a long-held interest I have held in the various ways we can think about and study ‘the digital’. In particular, these are the first articles to come out of a strand of my research which aims to advance understandings of the materialities that underpin digital geographies. In particular, this research focuses on the emergence of what have been called ‘spatial media’, the devices and systems we increasingly use to mediate our activities and way-finding in everyday life. Conceptually, this work significantly draws on my ongoing engagement with the work of the philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler.

The first article is in Geography Compass: ‘Beyond the screen’ addresses the different ways in which we can study ‘life online’, drawing together a range of methodological strands to demonstrate how geographical thinking can inform and enhance social scientific research concerning the internet, particularly in relation to the articulation of spatial experience and knowledge. I am grateful to my colleague Gail Davies for suggesting that I write this piece for Geography Compass, which is an excellent resource for scholars at all stages of their careers. Thus paper was published in the August 2013 issue of Geography Compass and so can be found on the journal website. I also have a pre-press version available here.

The second article will be coming out in Progress in Human Geography: ‘The Matter of Virtual Geographies’ revisits the articulation of ‘virtual’ geographies and reviews recent discussion within geography of digitally mediated activity. The aim of the article is to argue for a greater attention to the material conditions of ‘the digital’. This is achieved by articulating a theory of ‘technics’–the co-constitutive relation between the human and the technical,–and ‘transduction’–the iterative modulating and translation of a sociotechnical milieu from one state to another–through the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler. This article expands on existing work in geography, such as Kitchin & Dodge’s excellent ‘Code/space’, that is pushing for more sophisticated understandings of software, code, and the plethora of increasingly sophisticated systems and devices with which we mediate ourselves and our (spatial) experience of everyday life. I am happy to share pre-print copies of this paper, please contact me if you’re interested.

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The New Circulations of Culture – David Beer

Over on his blog Thinking Culture, David Beer has highlighted his recently published essay on Berfois concerning what he has called ‘the new circulations of culture’:

My short article ‘The New Circulations of Culture’ has just been published in Berfrois. It’s a piece about the way that data circulations and new media infrastrcutures are reconfiguring culture (based upon my recent book).

In the essay David offers some key points on which to focus when considering the increasing mediation of everyday life through contemporary social and spatial media. These points echo many of the issues that have arisen in broader debates being convened as ‘software studies‘ (not least in Kitchin and Dodge’s Code/space) and critical engagements with digital mediation in the guise of ‘the attention economy‘. This paragraph is particularly valuable:

First, we need to generate a greater understanding of how algorithms filter data, and shape cultural encounters. Predictive recommendation systems are a common feature of cultural consumption, but we have little understanding of the algorithms that shape the recommendations these systems make. Nor do we have much of a sense of how these recommendations shape cultural encounters and the formation of tastes and preferences. Second, there is a need to get a greater understanding of the way that people are now playing with data. Playing with data is an increasingly common part of cultural participation. APIs are frequently made available to enable these data playgrounds to operate. Indeed, there is even an emergent culture of visualization with individuals using available data resources to create visualizations. Alongside this, data aggregators allow for real-time insights into cultural trends – allowing us to see what is ‘trending’, ‘buzzing’ or ‘hot’ at that moment. Finally, we also need to think of the way that the body might be implicated by circulations of data. It would be too easy to get carried away with the power of new devices and new software, but we need to give more attention to the ways in which these devices and data circulations are incorporated into bodily routines.

This makes a compelling case for Stiegler’s argument that we should be engaging in what he calls ‘digital studies‘ as a matter of urgency.

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Bots book up top restaurant tables

The BBC carried a story in their technology section today about coders writing custom bot scripts that search for restaurant reservations and book tables before those looking for themselves can respond.

The story comes from a blog post by a chap called Diogo Monica, in Silicon Valley (where else), who noticed that tables at a good restaurant he likes were getting booked up by bots and so he decided to write one for himself. The BBC story narrates how:

The code emailed Mr Monica when other diners cancelled reservations or SBP released more tables. While the code helped him get a table now and then it quickly became ineffective. Close scrutiny of the [restaurant’s] website revealed why.

“I found myself looking at it and noticed that as soon as reservations became available on the website (at 04:00), all the good times were immediately taken and were gone by 04:01,” he wrote.

As with many other time sensitive transactions, in this fairly rudimentary software domain of online reservations a veritable arms race has ensued in the creation of more sophisticated and more rapid software programmes. The fairly arbitrary rules of booking, with automated update timings etc., become the terrain for battle. Where once the ‘who you know’ at the restaurant or in the right social circles would secure you a good table at the most desirable location and time it seems to have transformed, in some cases, into the ‘what you know’ of online booking systems code. As Mr Monica suggests:

“As for tactics, think of this war like high-frequency trading,” he said. “The people with the best algorithms/optimisations will have an edge over everyone else.”

Bonkers.

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Facial tracking to be built into screen-based advertising in the UK

For those with an interest in such things, this has been a long time coming. The company Quividi, who have been hawking their facial tracking system for a little while now, have teamed up with Amscreen, the owner of a network of advertising screens in convenience stores, petrol stations etc, to measure, in real-time, the attention paid to adverts screened in particular places. The problematic of the ‘attention economy‘, or the commodification of our capacity for attention within particular settings–mostly online, is being brought into more everyday settings as so-called ‘smart’ technologies become smaller and cheaper.

Here’s the thinly veiled sales pitch the BBC ‘Click’ programme were only too happy to share:

Which contains a lot of the footage Amscreen have filmed themselves for their own corporate video celebrating this new venture. Here’s Quividi’s own video explaining (and selling) how their technology works:

In the UK, already a highly surveilled country, there may be little reaction other than a shrug of the shoulders. However, should one wish to counter this kind of technology there have already been some nice experiments with forms of camouflage. Probably the best known example is the CV Dazzle project by Adam Harvey (for a Masters project in the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Programme). It would be entertaining if this became a sort of avant-garde fashion for make up…

CV Dazzle, facial recognition camouflage

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Living books about life, Open Humanities Press

A year on from the publication of the ‘Paying Attention‘ theme issue of Culture Machine, the excellent Open Humanities Press published journal, I’ve been poking around the various linked websites and stumbled on the Living books about life site, which is really interesting.

The JISC-funded, OHP published website offers 24 open access ‘living books’, curated by a range of innovative scholars to ‘bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences’:

All the books in the series are themselves ‘living’, in the sense that they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research — along with interactive maps, visualisations, podcasts and audio-visual material — into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus engaged in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data and e-book readers such as Kindle and the iPad.

In the series there’s a Bioethicsâ„¢ book, curated by Joanna Zylinska, with a range of open access readings thematically organised, ‘biomanufacturing and biopatenting’ for example, as well as some artistic reflections in video and text form. There are also living books curated by David Berry on ‘Life in code and software‘, Steven Shaviro on ‘Cognition and decision‘ and Claire Colebrook on ‘Extinction‘. There’s lots to explore and I would encourage people to take a look… perhaps there should be one on ‘attention’?!

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Guardian Continues Radical Thinker Series with Videos on Critchley, Horkheimer and More

Reblogged from Critical Theory:

Earlier this week The Guardian and Verso launched their “Radical Thinkers” video series, which aims to explain radical philosophy in short 3-4 minute videos. Since its inception earlier this week, a video has been released every day.

Today’s video tackles Simon Critchley’s “Infinitely Demanding“ and his thoughts on politics and anarchism.

Stella Sandford focuses on Willhelm Reich’s thoughts, especially on Marxism, psychoanalysis and patriarchy.

Esther Leslie discusses Marx Horkheimer’s “Critique of Instrumental Reason“ and the emergence of psuedo individuality.

Really interesting videos that provide some welcome critical engagement with philosophy (that is not Daniel Dennett) in a prominent British forum, albeit the left-leaning preserve of the self-identified middle classes that is the Grauniad (of which, of course, I am a reader ;-).