ABSTRACT

This book critically explores forms and techniques of calculation that emerge with digital computation, and their implications. The contributors demonstrate that digital calculative devices matter beyond their specific functions as they progressively shape, transform and govern all areas of our life. In particular, it addresses such questions as:

  • How does the drive to make sense of, and productively use, large amounts of diverse data, inform the development of new calculative devices, logics and techniques?
  • How do these devices, logics and techniques affect our capacity to decide and to act?
  • How do mundane elements of our physical and virtual existence become data to be analysed and rearranged in complex ensembles of people and things?
  • In what ways are conventional notions of public and private, individual and population, certainty and probability, rule and exception transformed and what are the consequences?
  • How does the search for ‘hidden’ connections and patterns change our understanding of social relations and associative life?
  • Do contemporary modes of calculation produce new thresholds of calculability and computability, allowing for the improbable or the merely possible to be embraced and acted upon?
  • As contemporary approaches to governing uncertain futures seek to anticipate future events, how are calculation and decision engaged anew?

Drawing together different strands of cutting-edge research that is both theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, this book makes an important contribution to several areas of scholarship, including the emerging social science field of software studies, and will be a vital resource for students and scholars alike.

part |36 pages

Algorithmic life

chapter |14 pages

The Public and its Algorithms

Comparing and experimenting with calculated publics

chapter |20 pages

The Libraryness of Calculative Devices

Artificially intelligent librarians and their impact on information consumption

part |52 pages

Calculation in the age of big data

chapter |15 pages

Experiencing a Personalised Augmented Reality

Users of Foursquare in urban space

chapter |15 pages

A Politics of Redeployment

Malleable technologies and the localisation of anticipatory calculation

chapter |20 pages

Seeing the Invisible Algorithm

The practical politics of tracking the credit trackers

part |52 pages

Signal, visualise, calculate

chapter |18 pages

Bodies of Information

Data, distance and decision-making at the limits of the war prison

chapter |16 pages

Data Anxieties

Objectivity and difference in early Vietnam War computing

chapter |16 pages

‘Seeing Futures'

Politics of visuality and affect

part |32 pages

Affective devices

chapter |15 pages

Love's Algorithm

The perfect parts for my machine