Category: software studies

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Reblog > Nigel Thrift and Steven Koonin discuss urban science and big data

Stuart Elden points to an interesting video of a conversation with Nigel Thrift, discussing urban informatics, ‘big data’ and so on. Slight hint of Thrift buying into the rhetoric around ‘big data’ but still an interesting discussion…

Nigel Thrift, Vice Chancellor of University of Warwick, and Steven Koonin, Director of New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, partners in this endeavour, discussed the emerging field of applied urban science and informatics, the opportunities it presents, and how it is challenging the way we think about information. The discussion was moderated by Sallie Keller, Director, Social Decision and Analytics Laboratory, Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech.

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Reblog > Hybrid assemblages, environments and happenings – Eric Paulos

Eric Paulos reflects on a wealth of experience of interdisciplinary and participatory research, particularly in relation to the maker movement. Eric offers some great reflections on Mark Weiser’s interdisciplinarity and the importance of creative practice.

Hybrid Assemblages, Environments & Happenings -Eric Paulos

Abstract: This talk will present and critique a body of work evolving across several years of research at the intersection of computer science and design research. It will present an augment for hybrid materials, methods, and artifacts as strategic tools for insight and innovation within computing culture. It will explore and demonstrate the value of urban computing, citizen science, and maker culture as opportunistic landscapes for intervention, micro-volunteerism, and a new expert amateur. Finally, it will present and question emerging materials and strategies from the perspective of engineering, design, and new media.

https://twitter.com/epaulos

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Rob Kitchin’s new book submitted and into production: The Data Revolution

Professor Rob Kitchin is currently engaged in a large five year EU-funded project: The Programmable City, concerned with the role of software on the ongoing production, performance and imagination of cities. Over on the blog for the project they have announced that Prof. Kitchin’s most recent book ‘The Data Revolution’ is now with the publishers, Sage, with a view to publication later this year. I’m looking forward to it”¦

Here’s the book outline blogpost from the Programmable City website:

Rob Kitchin has just submitted the final draft of a new book – The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences – to Sage and it’s moved into production.  The chapter titles are below and the book will be published later in the year.

Preface
1.  Conceptualising data
2.  Small data, data infrastructures and data brokers
3.  Open and linked data
4.  Big data
5.  Enablers and sources of big data
6.  Data analytics
7.  The governmental and business rationale for big data
8.  The reframing of science, social science and humanities research
9.  Technical and organisational issues
10. Ethical, political, social and legal concerns
11. Making sense of the data revolution
References

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Reblog > Drones, sport and ‘eventization’

Last month Patrick Crogan wrote a great, pithy blogpost about the conduct and conceptualisation of war in relation to the relentless gaze of drones arrayed with computer vision technologies that originate from professional sports video analysis. Folding together Derek Gregory’s recent detailed reading of Gregoire Chemayou’s ‘Theorie du Drone’, the work of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control and Bernard Stiegler’s theorisation of the industrialisation of memory, Patrick highlights how software systems embedded within the complex surveillance and attacking capabilities of drones that are becoming quasi-autonomous are operating in the very constitution of the events of war, not merely reacting or functioning as equipment, but proactively producing events. Reproduced below…

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This post is to start some ideas circulating from work I am increasingly becoming preoccupied with concerning military robotics and AI, as a particular (and also particularly important, in many ways) case of automatizing technologies emerging today. This is a big topic attracting an increasing amount of critical attention, notably from people like Derek Gregory (whose Geographical Imaginations blog is a treasure trove of insights, lines of inquiry and links on much of the work going on round this topic), and Lucy Suchman who is part of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control and brings a critical STS perspective to drones and robotics on her Robot Futures blog.

NFL

I’m reading French CNRS researcher Gregoire Chamayou’s Théorie du drone, a book which has made a powerful start on the task of philosophically (as he has it) interrogating the introduction of these new weapons systems which are transforming the conduct, conceptualisation and horizon of war, politics and the technocultural global future today. Many riches in there, but I just read (p. 61) that the U.S. Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency, looking for ways to deal with the oceans of video data collected by drones constantly overflying territory with unblinking eyes, obtained a version of software developed by ESPN and used in their coverage of American football. The software provides for the selection and indexing of clips from the multiple camera coverage of football games to enable their rapid recall and use in the analysis of plays which (as anyone who watches NFL or College football coverage knows takes up much more time than the play itself in any given broadcast). The software is able to archive footage (from the current or previous games) in a manner that makes it immediately available to the program director in compiling material for comparative analysis, illustration of player performance or tactical/strategic traits of a team, etc. The player and the key play can be systematically broken down, tracked in time, identified as exceptional or part of a broader play style, and so forth.

These capacities are precisely what makes the software desirable to the US Air Force inasmuch as the strategic development of drone operations deals with effectively the same analytical problem: the player and the key play, the insurgent/terrorist and the key act (IED, ambush, etc).  The masses of video surveillance of the vast ‘gridded’ space of battlespace, a vast ‘arena’ similarly zoned in precisely measurable slices (but in 3D) must be selectable, taggable and recoverable in such a way to be usable in the review of drone operations. And the logic (or logistic as Virilio would immediately gloss it) of this treatment of ‘battlespace’ is realised in what has recently emerged unofficially from the Obama administration-Pentagon interface as the emerging strategic deployment of drones by the CIA (which runs a significant and un-reported proportion of drone operations globally). This targeting strategy is based precisely on pattern analysis both in tracking known suspected enemies of the state and in identifying what are called ‘signature targets’ (the signature referring to a ‘data signature’ of otherwise unidentified individuals, one that matches the movements and associations of a known insurgent/terrorist – see Gregory’s post on this in Geographic Imaginations ).

The ethical and juridical-political dimensions of this strategy are coming under increasing and much-needed scrutiny (more to come on this). As a media/games theorist, the striking thing about this felicitous mutuality of affordances between pro sport mediatisation technics and those in development for the conduct of drone operations is the reorientation to space it not only metaphorically suggests (war, become game now steering the metaphoric vehicle back in the other direction) but enacts through an ‘eventization’ (Stiegler) operating in the very constitution of the ‘event’ of war or counter-insurgency (or what James Der Derian called ‘post war warring’) . While there are many complicit actors benefiting from the profitable mediatized evolution of American football into a protracted, advertising friendly broadcast, no such ‘partnership’ exists between key players ‘on the ground’ and those re-processing their data trails.

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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.