We don’t just consume animals for nutrition, but consume them culturally. They are “painted, written, construed, arranged, stuffed, chained, trained, dissected, imagined,” according to cultural theorist Randy Malamud, and this happens “with an iron-fisted sense of entitlement and control on the part of the cultural hegemons, that is, us” (2). Malamud outlines evidence of the “digital approximation of taxidermy”…More
Wonders exposed
Google Treks extends Street View to places you can only access on foot. It reveals some remarkable scenery, and takes you to places you’ve always wanted to go, such as the Himalayas or the Canadian Arctic. It also reminds me of some important facts about travel. Behind the camera We seasoned tourists tend to blind ourselves…More
Like this
I have a daily quota of clicks to dispose of. I’m frugal with these minimally interactive units. George in The Jetsons (1962) must have left an impression on me. I recall this office worker of the future complaining to his boss on one particular day of having to press too many buttons. George was only contracted to press one a day. Pressing a button was all…More
AI and imagination
Does society need machines that show intelligence, empathy or act like human beings in other ways? I think that we are best served by well designed computers and good interaction design that makes clear the distinction between the person and the machine. Much of the enthusiasm for AI-based human-computer interaction assumes that people desire a seamless blending…More
Big corpus
UK publishers produce over 180,000 books each year. (About one third are in digital formats.) So that’s a lot of words, even before the outputs of other countries are taken into account, and all the other words generated online — self published, or unpublished — and journal, magazine and newspaper articles. These large text corpuses are more than…More
Post-digital humanities
This week I’ll participate in a round table discussion about the digital humanities at an event called Methodological Intersections at the Trier Digital Humanities Autumn School in Trier, Germany. We’ve been presented with 5 questions, which I’ve reformulated here in my own words — with some tentative responses. Q1: The digital humanities (DH) presents itself as cross disciplinary. Does the idea of the digital humanities weaken the…More
Refugees have smartphones too
Pictures of refugees with smartphones proliferate in the press and online — sometimes with captions suggesting that smartphone owners display an affluence that excludes them from sympathy or support. There are nearly as many smartphones on the planet as there are people, and refugees have them too. But smartphones have become essential tools for survival. Like affluent, free-roaming tourists, refugees draw on GPS…More
Big Data: a non-theory about everything
“Instead of looking through telescopes and microscopes, researchers are increasingly interrogating the world through large-scale, complex instruments and systems that relay observations to large databases to be processed and stored as information and knowledge in computers” (449). This is how geographers Harvey Miller and Michael Goodchild describe Big Data in their critical article “Data-driven geography.” They add that this data flow amounts to more data than…More
Big data metaphysics
Anyone with a personal computer knows about the problem with data, not least its tendency to grow at an unnerving rate, take up space, demand upgrades, and clog bandwidth as it gets moved around. Emails and tweets are data, so are picture files, music tracks, and movies. Sometimes we store it, or it flows through our world as…More
What’s wrong with post-digital cultures
It’s salutary to see familiar common sense placed under a new heading (e.g. post-digital). Headings turn the familiar into something strange, and jar matters into consciousness again. Technorationalist, technoromantic, post-human, and post-apocalyptic fill a similar role. Here’s a Google Ngram showing the frequency of the term “post-digital” in Google’s book repository over time, till 2008. But we move into a different discussion when headings over-reach,…More