I cannot recommend highly enough the work of Diana Forsythe; people are now discovering in their own fieldwork what she had already said a decade ago: Forsythe, D. (2002). Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence. David Hess, ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press. The other important source would be Lucy Suchman's work: Suchman, L. (1994). Do categories have politics? : the language/action perspective reconsidered. In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work. 2, 3, p. 177-190. I've also compiled a small collection of resources and people interested in digital ethnography. Literature is available here: https://www.zotero.org/groups/digitalethnography --- Alexander Leavitt PhD Candidate USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism http://alexleavitt.com Twitter: @alexleavitt <http://twitter.com/alexleavitt> On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Daniel Kunzelmann < kunzelmann.daniel@yahoo.de> wrote:
Dear all,
Again, eager to start yet another list of literature :)
...the issue at stake this time: ethnographic and/or anthropological work on the power of numbers (with a specific focus on big data)!
Anyone wants to share their must-read with me? I'm teaching another undergraduate course this upcoming semester in the field of digital anthropology. The seminars title: "On the power of numbers: How databases and quantification now do (their) work in everyday life (and how they have always done so?). The title is a bit cryptic, but the idea is that I do want to explore today's phenomenon of big data by contrasting it with other forms/ways of quantification(s) (e.g. statistics, etc.) that have already had an influence on our lifes for much longer time than today's databases, social network sites or algorithms.
Or to put it differently: to understand big data I want to look on how numbers have been unfolding their power in different times of history.
Using theoretical texts, I want my students to acquire knowledge on the key concepts of "big data" "databases", "numbers" and "quantifications". How can we think these phenomena today? How can we relate them to power? How to they rule and govern our lifes, but also how are they challenged and reworked? And, lasts but not least, how can we apply such concepts in order to better understand todays digital developments in many spheres of (everday) life (from health to sharing economy to body conceptions, etc.)?
My idea would be to teach two types of concepts:
a.) "new" Cultural and Social Anthropological concepts and theories that explicitly talk about and refer to digital phenomena as in "big data", "databases", "algorithms", etc.
b.) "classical" ones that do NOT explicitly talk about these issues, but that you would consider highly applicable to understand such phenomena (e.g. work on statistics, quantifications, numbers, etc.).
I'd be very happy if you, once again, shared your knowledge and insights with me and my students. You may either do this by answering to this post or directly typing in your suggestions here:
https://danielderkunzelmann.piratenpad.de/airl-power-of-numbers-big-data
Either way, I will again share the list with the community afterwards :)
kind regards, Daniel
P.S.: Since this is a reading list for students, It would be awesome if you could maybe also name a chapter or pages if you suggest a classic work (e.g. what of Foucault would you suggest if you think the concept of "governmentality" would help...)
Daniel Kunzelmann, Ph.D.c / Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich / Institute of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology twitter @der_kunzelmann blog http://transformations-blog.com/daniel-kunzelmann/ web http://unibas.academia.edu/DanielKunzelmann linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/pub/daniel-kunzelmann/7b/426/9a5
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