Author: Cosimo Accoto

“[…]Digital technologies that render the world legible in new ways — by creating new representational forms that account for action in the world (such as activity-recognition systems) or making the invisible visible (such as many location-based systems, social-networking systems, or data-mining applications) — help to shape this encounter and are themselves shaped by it. The social origin of legibility is a critical issue for collaboration in mobile and ubiquitous environments. The examples that we have presented argue for a different view of information and information use than pervades conventional engineering discourse. They argue that the elements of the everyday world around which ubicomp applications seek to organize themselves — individuals, roles, groups, places, activities, times, contexts, and so forth — are not elements of the physical world to be uncovered and recognized but are instead elements of the social world. Their informativeness derives from the nature of social participation, and their nature and meaning are negotiated in, expressed through, and solely available to social practice. When we think of sensing technologies as devices that order the world, rather than devices that describe it, then alternative relationships between the social and technical are strikingly brought to light” (Dourish and Bell, “Divining a Digital Future. Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing”, The MIT Press, p.195)

“Today almost every aspect of life for which data exists can be rendered as a network. Financial data, social networks, biological ecologies: all are visualized in links and nodes, lines connecting dots. A network visualization of a corporate infrastructure could look remarkably similar to that of a terrorist organization. In An Aesthesia of Networks, Anna Munster argues that this uniformity has flattened our experience of networks as active and relational processes and assemblages. She counters the “network anaesthesia” that results from this pervasive mimesis by reinserting the question of experience, or aesthesia, into networked culture and aesthetics. Rather than asking how humans experience computers and networks, Munster asks how networks experience—what operations they perform and undergo to change and produce new forms of experience” (from the abstract: Anna Munster, “An Aesthesia of Networks. Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology”, The MIT Press, 2013)

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/aesthesia-networks

“What exactly is Big Data? At first glance, the term seems rather vague referring to something that is large and full of information. That description does indeed fit the bill, yet it provides no information on what Big Data really is. Big Data is often described as extremely large data sets that have grown beyond the ability to manage and analyze them with traditional data processing tools. Searching the Web for clues reveals an almost universal definition, shared by the majority of those promoting the ideology of Big Data, that can be condensed into something like this: Big Data defines a situation in which data sets have grown to such enormous sizes that conventional information technologies can no longer effectively handle either the size of the data set or the scale and growth of the data set. In other words, the data set has grown so large that it is difficult to manage and even harder to garner value out of it. The primary difficulties are the acquisition, storage, searching, sharing, analytics, and visualization of data.There is much more to be said about what Big Data actually is. The concept has evolved to include not only the size of the data set but also the processes involved in leveraging the data. Big Data has even become synonymous with other business concepts, such as business intelligence, analytics, and data mining. Paradoxically, Big Data is not that new. Although massive data sets have been created in just the last two years, Big Data has its roots in the scientific and medical communities, where the complex analysis of massive amounts of data has been done for drug development, physics modeling, and other forms of research, all of which involve large data sets. Yet it is these very roots of the concept that have changed what Big Data has come to be” (from: Frank J. Ohlhorst, Big data analytics : turning big data into big money, 2013)

“Language and the future: this is the subject of this book. Not the rhetorical future of history, politics, and so on, but the pragmatic future of the next second, of the next minute, of the next action and interaction. Future and interaction: this is the task (or the destiny) of code. So code is “ speaking ” us. Geoff Cox is trying to show the other side of the moon: if we can say that code is speaking us (pervading and formatting our action), the other way round is also true. We are speaking code in many ways. In the beginning someone is writing the code, and others are supposed to submit themselves to the effects of the code written by someone. Power is more and more inscribed in code. Writing to Thomas Sebeok, Bill Gates once remarked that “ power is making things easy ” (quoted by Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein in Data Trash , 1994). Code and interfaces: interfaces are supposed to make the complexity of the code easy, but code in itself is more often about simplifying technical procedures of social life, particularly of economic production and exchange. So code is speaking us, but we are not always working through the effects of written code. More and more we are escaping (or trying to escape) the automatisms implied in the written code (from the preface, Geoff Cox,”Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression”, The MIT Press, 2013)

“When a movement is motion-captured, Manning argues, digital technology breaks its virtual wholeness, dissecting its potential relational web and mapping it into bits of numerical data. In order for the mapping to work and for the capturing system to be able to read the motion, a specific (and very limited or simplified) kind of gesture is required, a linear, clearly traceable displacement replicating a sort of gestural conformity to the software, diminishing what a body can really do. For Manning, the unmappable virtuality of a movement’s preacceleration, or the virtual tendency of the body toward movement, toward relation, is what allows a displacement to take place and form. At the same time, relation is also what allows memory to be generated, for example, in rehearsal, during which it appears not as “a recurrence of the same,” but as “difference embodied through movement”: remembering the relation and its potential changes as recollecting the future. On the other hand, a visible, already actualized movement is all that is necessary for software detection, usually a displacement of a limb or of the whole body across space; the virtual double or twin of the gesture is left out of the picture” (Stamatia Portanova, Moving without a body : digital philosophy and choreographic thoughts: The MIT Press, 2013)

Abstract: “In this paper we argue that the new availability of digital data sets allows one to revisit Gabriel Tarde’s (1843-1904) social theory that entirely dispensed with using notions such as individual or society. Our argument is that when it was impossible, cumbersome or simply slow to assemble and to navigate through the masses of information on particular items, it made sense to treat data about social connections by defining two levels: one for the element, the other for the aggregates. But once we have the experience of following individuals through their connections (which is often the case with profiles) it might be more rewarding to begin navigating datasets without making the distinction between the level of individual component and that of aggregated structure. It becomes possible to give some credibility to Tarde’s strange notion of ‘monads’. We claim that it is just this sort of navigational practice that is now made possible by digitally available databases and that such a practice could modify social theory if we could visualize this new type of exploration in a coherent way”

Click to access Latour_et_al-The_Whole_is_Less.pdf

[Abstract] “In this paper we consider the significance of metadata in relation to image economy of the  web. Social practices such as keywording, tagging, rating and viewing increasingly influence  the modes of navigation and hence the utility of images in online environments. To a user  faced with an avalanche of images, metadata promises to make photographs machine readable in order to mobilize new knowledge, in a continuation of the archival paradigm. At  the same time, metadata enables new topologies of the image, new temporalities and multiplicities which present a challenge to historical models of representation. As photography becomes an encoded discourse, we suggest that the turning away from the  visual towards the mathematical and the algorithmic establishes undecidability as a key property of the networked image” (Notes on the Margins of Metadata: concerning the undecidability of the digital image, Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis, 2013)

Click to access DR_KS_Notes-on-the-Margins-of-Metadata.pdf

[from the abstract] “The domains of Business Intelligence (BI) and social media have meanwhile become significant research fields. While BI aims at supporting an organization’s decisions by providing relevant analytical data, social media is an emerging source of personal and individual knowledge, opinion, and attitudes of stakeholders. For a while, a convergence of the two domains can be observed in real-world implementations and research, resulting in concepts like social BI. Many research questions still remain open – or even worse – are not yet formulated. Therefore, the paper aims at articulating a research agenda for social BI. By means of a literature review we systematically explored previous work and developed a framework. It contrasts social media characteristics with BI design areas and is used to derive the social BI research agenda. Our results show that the integration of social media (data) into a BI system has impact on almost all BI design objects” (Barbara Dinter, Anja Lorenz, 2013)

http://www.qucosa.de/fileadmin/data/qucosa/documents/10587/Dinter_Lorenz_Social_Business.pdf

“Computers have conflated memory with storage, the ephemeral with the enduring. Rather than storing memories, we now put things “ into memory, ” both consciously and unconsciously. “ Memory ” — computer memory — has become surprisingly permanent. As Matthew Kirschenbaum has argued, our digital traces remain far longer than we suppose. Hard drives fail, but can still be “ read ” by forensic experts (optically, if not mechanically); our ephemeral documents and other “ ambient data ” are written elsewhere — that is “ saved ” — constantly. Again, to read information is to write it elsewhere. At the same time, however, the enduring is also the ephemeral. Not only because even if data storage devices can be read forensically after they fail they still eventually fail, but also because — and more crucially — what is not constantly upgraded or “ migrated ” or both becomes unreadable. As well, our interactions with computers cannot be reduced to the traces we leave behind. The experiences of using — the exact paths of execution — are ephemeral. Information is “ undead ” : neither alive nor dead, neither quite present nor absent” (“Programmed Visions. Software and Memory”, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, The MIT Press, 2011, 133)