ABSTRACT

Humans at Work in the Digital Age explores the roots of twenty-first-century cultures of digital textual labor, mapping the diverse physical and cognitive acts involved, and recovering the invisible workers and work that support digital technologies.

Drawing on 14 case studies organized around four sites of work, this book shows how definitions of labor have been influenced by the digital technologies that employees use to produce, interpret, or process text. Incorporating methodology and theory from a range of disciplines and highlighting labor issues related to topics as diverse as census tabulation, market research, electronic games, digital archives, and 3D modeling, contributors uncover the roles played by race, class, gender, sexuality, and national politics in determining how narratives of digital labor are constructed and erased. Because each chapter is centered on the human cost of digital technologies, however, it is individual people immersed in cultures of technology who are the focus of the volume, rather than the technologies themselves.

Humans at Work in the Digital Age shows how humanistic inquiry can be a valuable tool in the emerging conversation surrounding digital textual labor. As such, this book will be essential reading for academics and postgraduate students engaged in the study of digital humanities; human-computer interaction; digital culture and social justice; race, class, gender, and sexuality in digital realms; the economics of the internet; and technology in higher education.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

Toward a humanist account of digital labor

part I|60 pages

Government

chapter 1|15 pages

Racialized surveillance and the US census

Tabulating labor 1

chapter 2|23 pages

Digital labor and trans histories

Resisting assigned gender in the early mainframe era 1

chapter 3|20 pages

Big data and universal design in The Home Market

Are there market researchers in Utopia?

part II|79 pages

Industry

chapter 5|20 pages

Work, play, and the banality of the digital

Boredom as form

chapter 7|21 pages

Digitizing labor in the Google Books Project

Gloved fingertips and severed hands

part III|30 pages

Out of the office

part IV|82 pages

University

chapter 10|18 pages

The digital labor of blended learning

The Reading Cities project 1

chapter 13|11 pages

The stakes of digital labor in the twenty-first-century academy

The revolution will not be Turkified

chapter 14|17 pages

Scaling black feminisms

A critical discussion about the digital labor of representation