SOCIO-TECHNICAL INFRASTRUCTURES
Eric, Miri, Livia, Ayo, Alice, and Yingru
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Feel free to add resources and recommendations (for the group, for individual classmates, etc.) on our Shared Resource Repository!
Now, here’s how you can prepare for today:
- Please complete this short (five-minute?) survey about how you’d like to use our final two classes.
- Consider: some of you might want to submit your final projects to UCL’s Collecting COVID-19 | Anthropological Responses project.
Livia has asked you to read…
- Hamish Robertson and Joanne Travaglia, “Big data problems we face today can be traced to the social ordering practices of the 19th century.,” LSE Impact Blog (October 13, 2015).
- Shambhavi Kadam, “AI in Pursuit of the Perfect Image,” Adobe Blog (February 6, 2019).
- Irene Malatesta, “Smart Keywording Without Bias,” Adobe Blog (April 10, 2020).
- Try out Morphlab’s facial emotion detection tool on yourself
- Optional: Tom Slevin, “Prosthetic Memory,” Philosophy of Photography 4:1 (2013): 109-112.
Miri has asked you to watch…
- The Dalles Google Data Center 360° Tour {8:28}.
- Portland District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Historic: The Dalles Lock and Dam {0:32}.
- Optional Reading:
- Mél Hogan, “Data Flow and Water Woes: The Utah Data Center,” Big Data and Society (2015) 1-12.
- Mél Hogan, “Big Data Ecologies,” ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization Vol. 18, no. 3 (2018) 631-57.
- Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, “‘Where the Internet Lives’: Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure” in Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, eds. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015) 71-93.
- Supplemental Resources:
- Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).
- Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water (New York: Penguin, 1986).
- Katrine Barber, Death of Celilo Falls (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005).
Yingru has asked you to read…
- Zhang Wanqing, “The Invisible Victims of China’s Coronavirus Crisis,” Sixth Tone (February 24, 2020).
- Tricia Wang, “You Can Learn Something From the People of Wuhan,” BuzzFeed (March 24, 2020).
Alice has asked you to read…
- Zach Weinersmith, Maggie Koerth, Laura Bronner, and Jasmine Mithani, “A Comic Strip Tour of the Wild World of Pandemic Modeling,” FiveThirtyEight (April 13, 2020).
- Skim Johanna Drucker, “Dynamic Systems” in Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press / metaLab, 2014): 125-37.
Ayo has asked you to…
- Watch The Otolith Group, Sovereign Sisters (2014) {3:47}.
- Review The Otolith Group, Statecraft: An Incomplete Timeline of Independence (2014).
- Read Patricia Saunders, “Defending the Dead, Confronting the Archive: A Conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip,” small axe 26 (June 2008): 63-79.
- Supplemental: M. NourbeSe Philip, ZONG! (Toronto: Mercury Press, 2008).
Eric has asked you to…