Category: Reading

Reading The “sentient” city and what it may portend

Posted on by Alex Taylor

A ram­bling piece in Big Data & Soci­ety by Nigel Thrift: The ‘sen­tient’ city and what it may por­tend.
sentient_city
Was­n’t expect­ing the digres­sion into spir­its and per­for­mance art, but I do like Thrift’s con­tin­u­al efforts to write about expan­sive human/agent capac­i­ties and extend­ing the .

…the claim is being made that, as com­pu­ta­tion­al objects have devel­oped, cities are able to take on new forms of vital­i­ty (Stern, 2010), forms of vital­i­ty which can devel­op over time. Per­haps one way in which we might con­sid­er this ques- tion is pre­cise­ly through look­ing at how vital­i­ty dev­el- ops when com­pu­ta­tion­al things are explic­it­ly includ­ed in the con­tours of expe­ri­ence. Then it becomes clear that it has only grad­u­al­ly arisen, line by line, algo­rithm by algo­rithm, pro­gram by program.

Wikipedia or see Goonewar­de­na, K. (2005). The urban sen­so­ri­um: space, ide­ol­o­gy and the aes­theti­ciza­tion of pol­i­tics. Antipode, 37(1), 46–71.
Thirft, N. (2014). The “sen­tient” city and what it may por­tend. Big Data & Soci­ety, 1(1).

Reading Data matter(s)

Posted on by Alex Taylor

Wil­son, M. W. (2011). Data matter(s): legit­i­ma­cy, cod­ing, and qual­i­fi­ca­tions-of-life. Envi­ron­ment and Plan­ning D: Soci­ety and Space, 29(5), 857–872.
data-matters
Real­ly help­ful paper from Matthew Wil­son on the inter­min­glings of data and geog­ra­phy. Although more con­cen­trat­ed on a par­tic­u­lar aspect of com­mu­ni­ty life (name­ly report­ing prob­lems or dam­age to local facil­i­ties etc.), the paper has some strong rel­e­vances for the Teni­son Road project. Espe­cial­ly use­ful are Wilson’s thoughts on mat­ter­ing in rela­tion to fem­i­nist techno­science and of course 

Wil­son cites:
Har­away D J, 1991 Simi­ans, Cyborgs, and Women: The Rein­ven­tion of Nature (Rout­ledge, New York)

Har­away D J, 1997 [email protected]_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Fem­i­nism and Techno­science (Rout­ledge, New York)

Har­away D J, 1999, “Knowl­edges and the ques­tion of alliances”, in Knowl­edges and the Ques­tion of Alliances: A Con­ver­sa­tion with Nan­cy Hart­sock, Don­na Har­away, and David Har­vey (Kane Hall, Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton, Seat­tle, WA)

On Simone’s ‘people as infrastructure’

Posted on by Alex Taylor

People as Infrastructure
 
A few of us work­ing at the inter­sec­tion of data, civic­me­dia and cit­i­zen­ship are tak­ing a look at this arti­cle by AbdouMaliq Simone. Some ram­bling com­ments follow:
First, just a short point about style: I’m delight­ed to see Simone’s unapolo­getic use of rich descrip­tions of Jo’berg’s streets. They are in strik­ing con­trast to what I see to be the stan­dard ethno­graph­ic account in HCI papers. What I find tedious is the usu­al pre­am­ble in HCI works—explaining method—and then the use of par­tic­i­pants’ quotes as a kind of ‘proof’ of par­tic­u­lar points. Also, both point to a curi­ous idea of what it means to demon­strate evi­dence or proof. Simone both­ers with none of this. He gets straight to the sto­ries, to the rich descrip­tions of inner city Jo’berg and its under­bel­ly. (more…)

Short note on ‘Objects, Infrastructure and Vocation’

Posted on by Alex Taylor

infrastructure+vocation
Infra­struc­ture and Voca­tion: Field, Call­ing and Com­pu­ta­tion in Ecology
A bril­liant CHI paper by Steven Jack­son and Sarah Bar­brow. How many papers pre­sent­ed at CHI cite St. Augus­tine of Hip­po and, to boot, suc­ceed in draw­ing out rel­e­vant reflec­tions on sci­en­tif­ic mod­el­ling tools in ecol­o­gy. See­ing ecol­o­gy through the lens of both infra­struc­ture and the ‘voca­tion­al call­ing’ pro­vides a pro­duc­tive view onto what ecol­o­gists do and how their prac­tices are chang­ing. Jack­son and Bar­brow illus­trate this nice­ly by writ­ing of the chang­ing notion of ‘the field’ for ecol­o­gists. I see a strong par­al­lel here between ecol­o­gy and biol­o­gy. Biol­o­gy is a field very much in tran­si­tion and the changes have much to do with the mate­r­i­al encoun­ters in bio­log­i­cal work — with for exam­ple the chang­ing nature of biol­o­gists’ work at ‘the bench’ and with exper­i­men­tal appa­ra­tus. The turn to machines, com­pu­ta­tion and algo­rithms is not only reshap­ing the prac­tices but also refig­ur­ing what biol­o­gists know and how they see their phe­nom­e­na (some­thing we also tried to get across in At the inter­face of biol­o­gy and com­pu­ta­tion at CHI). A sim­i­lar con­clu­sion is being drawn out in this papers as it cap­tures the entan­gled rela­tions between the tools, prac­tices and ways of know­ing in ecology.