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Going Live: Towards an Amphibious Sociology
Abstract
In this paper, I outline one strand in a genealogy of ‘liveness’, exploring the role of media in its emergence as a privileged spatio-temporal organization of experience. In order to consider the opportunities afforded by current developments in ‘live methods’ I then explore some of the implications for sociology of not simply studying practices of mediation but of inhabiting media, of being in medias res. Here I propose an amphibious sociology, for the potential it offers sociology to deploy methods reflexively in more than one medium, contrasting the methods of making distributive middles to the methods of establishing measures of representativeness, and exploring the opportunities and pitfalls of participation, or being in the middle.
... As a methodological approach, TG thus deviates from a more historical (archetypically Foucauldian) understanding of 'genealogy' as an excavation of the conditions of possibility -a history of the present -that seeks to understand those elements of which we feel they are 'without history' (Foucault 1980, 139). Instead, and as argued, TG is interested in 'the middle', and in how this relational middle is shaped by -and, at the same time, shapes -past, present and future spatiotemporal ideas, rationales and configurations (Barad 2007;Lury 2012). We will now do exactly this by presenting (parts of) an (as-yetunfinished) topological genealogy of the EC's eTwinning platform. ...
... While it is expressly not concerned with educational forms (this will be the substantive focus of the next section, governance through change), what we are seeking, in effect, are the ecological conditions that will subsequently give rise to different educational forms. To employ a metaphor adapted from Lury's (2012) notion of amphibious sociology, our interest at this stage is the broader ecological relations that will help to shape -or give dedicated form to -the sorts and types of educational actors that will inhabit these spaces. Importantly, this is not to suggest a deterministic or straight-forward causal relationship, in which certain 'ecological' conditions (i.e., spatio-temporal and bordering processes) need to give rise to particular educational forms. ...
... This entailed attending to the effects of the preceding figuring of European space, including the educational forms that are embedded in these emergent spaces and, in turn, how these educational forms themselves are constantly undergoing topological processes of deformation in response to their context. Returning to the previously introduced ecological imagery of Lury (2012), these educational forms are considered here as the 'organisms' that emerge from the prevailing 'ecological ' (or contextual) conditions. In a methodological sense, the focus of researching governance through change is then not so much directed at how governing spaces are themselves constantly (re-)forming and taking place, but is instead concerned with analyzing the productive effects of these practices in and on the field of education. ...
This article presents topological genealogy (TG) as a methodology to research transnational digital governance, and particularly how digital infrastructures are implicated in enacting such forms of governance. Inspired by the field of social topology, TG is centrally interested in investigating the conjoined production of digital infra- structures and present-day education policymaking as governance; as well as how both produce, and are produced by, processes of flows and change. Notably, the TG methodology helps to disen- tangle digital governance in, through and as change. Through a worked example of the European Commission’s eTwinning plat- form, the article shows TG in action, and complements the topolo- gical analysis with methodological foregroundings. These show how the methodology impacts as much the fabrication of research data and its subsequent analysis as it impacts the doings of the researcher.
... Even though this insight is increasingly gaining traction on a theoretical level, there still remains a lack of methodological unclarity and opacity as to how to precisely trace how such 'bringing into being' concretely happens (Decuypere, Grimaldi, & Landri, 2021;Piattoeva & Saari, 2020;Williamson et al., 2019). It is in that sense that I advocate in the next section for a relationaltopological approach towards data practices that is interested in their liveness (Lury, 2012); that is, in how they emerge, develop and unfold. This relational approach permits, in the following section, the operationalization of the insights outlined in this introduction into a methodological toolbox that enables the empirical scrutiny of such data practices. ...
... In doing so, and as stated, I will sketch the outlines and contours of a methodology that allows the disentanglement of the liveness of data practices, i.e. how such practices are happening as they are in the making (cf. Lury, 2012). This paper is thus not concerned with researching data practices in experiential terms (see Selwyn & Pangrazio, 2018, for explorations along these lines). ...
... I consider data infrastructures, thus, as without unity, but rather as distributed and dis-tributing; as 'never static but always changing and always in motion' (Lury & Day, 2019-equally Lury, 2012. This implies that, among others, that methods that seek to capture the liveness of data practices need to 'continually make available the possibility of changing relations' (Lury, 2012;Ratner & Gad, 2019). ...
This paper offers a methodological framework to research data practices in education critically. Data practices are understood in the generic sense of the word here, i.e., as the actions, performances, and the resulting consequences, of introducing data-producing technologies in everyday educational situations. The paper first distinguishes between data infrastructures, datafication and data points as three distinct, yet interrelated, phenomena. In order to investigate their concrete doings and specificities, the paper proposes a topological methodology that allows disentangling the relational nature and interwovenness of data practices. Based on this methodology, the paper proceeds with outlining a methodical toolbox that can be employed in studying data practices. Starting from nascent work on digital education platforms as a worked example, the toolbox allows researchers to investigate data practices as consisting of four unique topological dimensions: the Interface of a data practice, its actual Usage, its concrete Design, and its Ecological embeddedness - IUDE.
... 8 High expectations set on personal data produced by self-tracking technologies do not necessarily materialise. Even though people use self-tracking devices for different purposes, they mainly seek and long for personal data that is first and foremost lively, 9 meaning that data can be reflected on and somehow become meaningful in their daily lives. One of the key prerequisites for the development of lively data is people's connectivity to their everyday experiences through their own data. ...
... Many struggled to make their self-tracking data lively, meaning that the data could be reflected on or have some meaning for their everyday lives. 9 There seemed to exist connectivity gaps in which the data was invisible or inaccurate and the users would have wanted to have these gaps eliminated in order to gain meaningful data. The results suggest that in cases when connectivity gaps exist persistently and cannot be removed there is a danger that the data becomes dead (see Nafus), 20 thus solidifying the seeds of disconnectivity. ...
... The interviewees sought personal data that was lively, 9 i.e. somehow meaningful for their personal lives. In cases when the data had repeatedly failed the self-trackers, some participants seemed to begin abandoning their attempts to interpret their data. ...
Objective:
Self-tracking technologies have created high hopes, even hype, for aiding people to govern their own health risks and promote optimal wellness. High expectations do not, however, necessarily materialize due to connective gaps between personal experiences and self-tracking data. This study examines situations when self-trackers face difficulties in engaging with, and reflecting on, their data with the aim of identifying the specificities and consequences of such connective gaps in self-tracking contexts.
Methods:
The study is based on empirical analyses of interviews of inexperienced, experienced and extreme self-trackers (in total 27), who participated in a pilot study aiming at promoting health and wellness.
Results:
The study shows that people using self-tracking devices actively search for constant connectivity to their everyday experiences and particularly health and wellness through personal data but often become disappointed. The results suggest that in connective gaps the personal data remains invisible or inaccurate, generating feelings of confusion and doubt in the users of the self-tracking devices. These are alarming symptoms that may lead to indifference when disconnectivity becomes solidified and data ends up becoming dead, providing nothing useful for the users of self-tracking technologies.
Conclusions:
High expectations which are put on wearables to advance health and wellness may remain unmaterialised due to connective gaps. This is problematic if individuals are increasingly expected to be active in personal data collection and interpretation regarding their own health and wellness.
... 4 When considering a research technique like scraping, we soon find ourselves describing the particular settings in which digital social research is done. Scraping also allows us to approach digital social research as an on-going process, rather than as a finished product (Lury 2012): it opens up a perspective on social research in-the-making, as opposed to the declarations of intent and hopes for what digital social research might deliver as its final product (Latour 1987). But perhaps most interesting of all, we find, is that these sociological ideas may not only be applied to scraping, they may also be deployed in scraping-enabled social research. ...
... In what follows, we will argue that digital social research offers ways of renewing the commitment to research-as-process, as scraping may inform the development of 'live' forms of social research, a term we take from Lury (2012) and Back and Puwar (2012). Crucial in this respect is that scraping disturbs the distinction between the 'inside' and the 'outside' of social research. ...
... Liveness is the term proposed by Lury (2012) and Back and Puwar (2012) to investigate the transformation of the spaces and times of social research in the context of digital culture. For them, the term captures the need for sociology to become responsive to contemporary changes in the spatial and temporal ordering of social phenomena: the increasing valorisation of instantaneity and liveness, the drive towards the condensation of the past, present and future in digital networked media, and the conjuring up of an 'eternal now' in this context. ...
This paper investigates the device of scraping, a technique for the automated capture of online data, and its application in social research. We ask how this ‘medium-specific’ technique for data collection may be rendered analytically productive for social research. We argue that, as a technique that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to re-structure research in at least two ways. Firstly, as a technique that is not native to social research, scraping risks introducing ‘alien’ analytic assumptions such as a pre-occupation with freshness. Secondly, to scrape is to risk importing into our inquiry categories that are prevalent in the social practices and devices enabled by online media: scraping makes available already formatted data for social research. Scraped data, and online social data more generally, tend to come with analytics already built in. The pre-ordered nature of captured online data is often approached as a ‘problem’, but we propose it may be turned into a virtue, insofar as data formats that have currency in the practices under scrutiny may serve as a source of social data themselves. Scraping, we propose, makes it possible to render traffic between the object and process of social research analytically productive. It enables a form of ‘live’ social research, in which the formats and life cycles of online data may lend structure to the analytic objects and findings of social research. We demonstrate this point in an exercise of online issue profiling, and more particularly, by relying on Twitter and Google to track the issues of ‘austerity’ and ‘crisis’ over time. Here we distinguish between two forms of real-time research, those dedicated to monitoring live content (which terms are current?) and those concerned with analysing the liveliness of issues (which topics are happening?).
... Live watching, therefore, expands the original temporal definition based on the correspondence between happening and its transmission, and focuses on the creation of a sense of shared viewership (Bourdon 2000;Ellis 2000; van Es 2016) which supports the emergence of experience communities (Atkinson and Kennedy 2017) or, in other words, co-experience (Lim et al. 2012). Under these terms, liveness refers, not to simultaneity between the event and its mediated diffusion, but rather to the creation of a sense of collective, communal presence (Lury 2012;Marriott 2007). ...
... ). After careful consideration of methodological options focusing on 'live methods'(Lury 2012)including participant observation through ethnographic approaches, either through 'being there' in situ(Hammelburg 2020(Hammelburg , 2021aRichardson and Hjorth 2017) or through the recreation of lived experiences with the assistance of platform walkthrough methods(Light et al. 2018) -I have decided that my research questions would be better addressed through the diary-interview method, as I will detail in the following section.In this regard, it is worth recalling that one of the starting points of this project is the acceptance that experiences are contextually contingentthat is, how anyone feels in a given situation depends on a number of factors, including the individual's mood. If the research is interested in habit and taken-for-granted practices, then it would be unfeasible to observe those through 'being there' (as my presence would disrupt this habitualness) nor through platform walkthroughs (which do not reflect the everyday use of these same technologies). ...
This project examines the new dimensions and attributes of the historical construct of liveness in the current social media environment. In this scope, liveness comprises both the orchestration of the experiential and the continuous pursuit of immediacy, presence, shared experience, and authenticity in contexts marked precisely by mediation. Liveness emerges as the productively contradictory experience of immediate connection through media. This thesis deploys liveness both as its central object of enquiry and as a conceptual device to examine mediation as an experiential process in and of itself. Through a diary-interviewing study conducted with London-based social media users, it explores how ordinary experiences of and with habitual social media challenge, reaffirm, or expand our available conceptions of liveness, and assesses the extent to which liveness can be useful to illuminate our understanding of lived experiences with and of social media more broadly. In so doing, the thesis advances a critical phenomenology of mediation, focusing on perceptual processes to examine and interrogate the structures of lived experience without disregarding the social, technical, economic, and political forces that underpin the social media manifold. In examining liveness through some of the organising principles of phenomenology – temporality, spatiality, intersubjectivity, and embodiment – this thesis explores four existential quests as enacted through technical mediation. They are: the ‘real-time’ experience, the experience of ‘being there’, ‘getting involved in a shared experience’, and the ‘authentic’ experience. I conclude that the conceptual value of liveness and its relevance and endurance as a key topic of interest for media studies rest in its intrinsically contested, disputed nature of as-if-ness – of a mediation that claims also to be immediate – and in how those tensions are renewed, refashioned, and updated with the development and habituation of new technologies of communication.
... Sociologists have drawn attention to the instability and under-determinacy of digital research methods themselves, proposing notions such as plastic methods (Lury, 2012) and live methods (Back & Puwar, 2012). Multifarious purposes, furthermore, can equally be ascribed to social media platforms themselves, as the settings of these platforms change frequently, and they cater to a changing set of actors, having to interface and negotiate the multiple interests of divergent user groups, advertisers, third parties and developers (Langlois & Elmer, 2013). ...
... With their application of co-occurrence analysis, online data tools equip practices for the detection of what is becoming current, and as such, they participate in the valorization of 'liveness' (Lury, 2012;Lury & Wakeford, 2012): which word are currently popular on Twitter? ...
This paper introduces a distinctive approach to methods development in digital social research called ‘interface methods’. We begin by discussing various methodological confluences between digital media, social studies of science and technology (STS) and sociology. Some authors have posited significant overlap between, on the one hand, sociological and STS concepts, and on the other hand, the ontologies of digital media. Others have emphasized the significant differences between prominent methods built into digital media and those of STS and sociology. This paper advocates a third approach, one that (a) highlights the dynamism and relative under-determinacy of digital methods, and (b) affirms that multiple methodological traditions intersect in digital devices and research. We argue that these two circumstances enable a distinctive approach to methodology in digital social research – thinking methods as ‘interface methods’ – and the paper contextualizes this approach in two different ways. First, we show how the proliferation of online data tools or ‘digital analytics’ opens up distinctive opportunities for critical and creative engagement with methods development at the intersection of sociology, STS and digital research. Second, we discuss a digital research project in which we investigated a specific ‘interface method’, namely co-occurrence analysis. In this digital pilot study we implemented this method in a critical and creative way to analyse and visualize ‘issue dynamics’ in the area of climate change on Twitter. We evaluate this project in the light of our principal objective, which was to test the possibilities for the modification of methods through experimental implementation and interfacing of various methodological traditions. To conclude, we discuss a major obstacle to the development of ‘interface methods’: digital media are marked by particular quantitative dynamics that seem adverse to some of the methodological commitments of sociology and STS. To address this, we argue in favour of a methodological approach in digital social research that affirms its maladjustment to the research methods that are prevalent in the medium.
... Rather, we have used the EWS case to demonstrate the utility of rhythmanalysis for better understanding the rhythmic complexities of digital governance. This reflects what has been described by Lury (2012) as 'live methods', in which research reflexively and intentionally engages with 'relations and with parts, with differentiation, and be involved in making middles, in dividing without end(s), in mingling, bundling and coming together ' (ibid.: 191). Or, as Piattoeva and Saari (2022), as well as Decuypere and Lewis (2023) showed, novel research problems, such as digital governance, can only be approached by starting 'in the middle', and by acknowledging that methodologies are co-constitutive of the settings of which they enquire (Lury, 2020). ...
This paper discusses and develops rhythmanalysis as a methodological approach to disentangle the temporalities of digital and predictive governance; that is, how governance evolves through temporal ordering effects produced with, and through, digital technologies. Whilst rhythmanalysis, as it has become broadly used in the social sciences over the past decades, primarily focuses on ‘lived’ (rhythmic) practices of people, we argue that rhythmanalysis can also be developed as a framework to investigate the temporalities of digital governance environments. Using the field of education and, more specifically, the case of Early Warning Systems in US schooling as a worked example, we show how such a framework allows one to approach temporalities through, first, identifying chronorhythms (defined by chronological time), kairorhythms (defined by identifying and intervening in ‘right’ moments in time) and algorhythms (defined by the design of a technology). The second dimension is to analyze relations between those rhythms; more notably, synchronization (i.e., the coordination of rhythms in time), sychorization (i.e., the coordination of rhythms in space) and disruption (i.e., the altering or coming to a stop of particular rhythms). Finally, the framework includes visualization as a third dimension of rhythmic analysis, specifically through practices of selecting, drawing and world-making. Overall, this framework can inspire scholars interested in empirically disentangling temporal and predictive governance, within and beyond the field of education.
... This is the benefit of approaching policy assemblages and policy research 'in the middle': it is as much a methodological framework as it is a research(er) disposition to ongoing reflexive criticality, acknowledging both productive new lines of flight and unproductive blockages. We readily see PMAT engaging with Lury's (2012) call for live methods in qualitative research, which 'must be satisfied with an engagement with relations and with parts, with differentiation, and be involved in making middles, in dividing without end(s), in mingling, bundling and coming together' (p 191; emphasis added). Situatedness, and the acknowledgement of one's enfolding in the research problem, becomes instead the prime methodological consideration. ...
... This is the benefit of approaching policy assemblages and policy research 'in the middle': it is as much a methodological framework as it is a research(er) disposition to ongoing reflexive criticality, acknowledging both productive new lines of flight and unproductive blockages. We readily see PMAT engaging with Lury's (2012) call for live methods in qualitative research, which 'must be satisfied with an engagement with relations and with parts, with differentiation, and be involved in making middles, in dividing without end(s), in mingling, bundling and coming together' (p 191; emphasis added). Situatedness, and the acknowledgement of one's enfolding in the research problem, becomes instead the prime methodological consideration. ...
... By this, I mean that policy mobilities and network ethnography should be considered both as methodological frameworks and as research(er) dispositions to ongoing reflexive criticality, acknowledging both new productive lines of flight and unproductive blockages. I see policy mobilities as engaging with Lury's (2012) call for live methods in social science research, which "must be satisfied with an engagement with relations and with parts, with differentiation, and be involved in making middles, in dividing without end(s), in mingling, bundling and coming together" (p. 191; emphasis added). ...
We are all scholars of policy to some extent. Such a definitive statement is not without merit—after all, we all experience and interact with policy across education, from the “eddies and flows” of its movements to the “fixities and moorings” of its frictions. Regardless of whether we explicitly refer to ourselves as “policy researchers, ”the various dimensions of education and schooling upon which we choose to putatively focus—including pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, and student wellbeing—are continuously being(re)shaped and (re)constituted by the various material and discursive elements of policy, in both predictable and unpredictable ways. Unsurprisingly, policy remains a central preoccupation of education research, leading to a continued focus on developing, adopting, and adapting different theoretical, methodological, and analytical approaches to better understand the changing empirical contexts we face. These changes include not only the changing policies themselves but also the changing processes, actors, spaces, and relations by which such policies are developed, disseminated, contested, and enacted.
... As Celia Lury writes, the term 'amphibious' is used 'to refer to animals that live both on the land and in the water, that is, live in two media ' (2012, p. 194). Working in more than one medium, we hoped to create an 'amphibious sociology' (Lury, 2012) that could exist on land and in water just like the swimmers, and share a 'frog's eye view' (Deakin, 2000) that would inhabit a swimming perspective and take our research back to the water it had risen from. ...
This article outlines the collaborative process of making a watercolour animation drawn from research with women who swim wild in rivers, lakes and seas. Discussing graphic storytelling in sociology, anthropology and related disciplines, we share our experiences of creative collaboration, describing in detail the practical process of making a research-led animation to share with the wider swimming community and situating the project within a larger discussion of graphic and public ethnography, live methods and the possibilities of representation. The article contributes to the ways we can make methods lively and shows how we can both literally and metaphorically animate sociology.
... For those involved in governing for diversity and equality specifically, rather than governance in general (which implies governance through diversity and equality, but not necessarily actively for this), there is a sort of reflexive 'intentionality', what I think about in terms of retroflexivity, to this subjectification process though which workers come to see and know themselves as positioned relationally via multiple affective relations with students, colleagues, friends and family. Rather than something to be negotiated around, these affective relations are constitutive, they serve to animate and enliven (Fraser, Kember & Lury, 2005;Lury, 2012), to enact as I claimed in Chapter 2. As Bruno Latour recognises 'attachments are first, actors are second', 'the more attachments one has the more one exists' (Latour, 2005, pp. 216-217). ...
How can we rethink ideas of policy failure to consider its paradoxes and contradictions as a starting point for more hopeful democratic encounters?
Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational
politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotions is that there are
sets of affective dynamics which complicate the already materially and symbolically contested terrain of policy-making. This relational politics is Shona Hunter’s
starting point for a more hopeful, but realistic understanding of the limits and
possibilities enacted through contemporary governing processes. Through this
idea Hunter prioritises the everyday lived enactments of policy as a means to
understand the state as a more differentiated and changeable entity than is often
allowed for in current critiques of neoliberalism. But Hunter reminds us that
focusing on lived realities demands a melancholic confrontation with pain, and
the risks of social and physical death and violence lived through the contemporary neoliberal state. This is a state characterised by the ascendency of neoliberal
whiteness; a state where no one is innocent and we are all responsible for the
multiple intersecting exclusionary practices creating its unequal social orderings. The only way to struggle through the central paradox of governance to
produce something different is to accept this troubling interdependence between
resistance and reproduction and between hope and loss.
Analysing the everyday processes of this relational politics through original
empirical studies in health, social care and education the book develops an
innovative interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis which engages with and extends
work in political science, cultural theory, critical race and feminist analysis, critical
psychoanalysis and post-material sociology.
... In taking up matter and movement, I attend to Borsato's art as moving forms of fieldwork that produce space-time-matter configurations. Celia Lury (2012) names this approach to fieldwork live methods. The affective, expressive, transcorporeal, and precognitive underpinnings of what she calls live methods intersect with new materialist methodologies that insist on the way agency flows through relational networks and is mobilized through human and nonhuman intra-actions. ...
... In taking up matter and movement, I attend to Borsato's art as moving forms of fieldwork that produce space-time-matter configurations. Celia Lury (2012) names this approach to fieldwork live methods. The affective, expressive, transcorporeal, and precognitive underpinnings of what she calls live methods intersect with new materialist methodologies that insist on the way agency flows through relational networks and is mobilized through human and nonhuman intra-actions. ...
This edited collection takes up the wild and sudden surge of new materialisms in the field of curriculum studies. New materialisms shift away from the strong focus on discourse associated with the linguistic or cultural turn in theory and toward recent work in the physical and biological sciences; in doing so, they posit ontologies of becoming that re-configure our sense of what a human person is and how that person relates to the more-than-human ecologies in which it is nested. Ignited by an urgency to disrupt the dangers of anthropocentrism and systems of domination in the work of curriculum and pedagogy, this book builds upon the axiom that agency is not a uniquely human capacity but something inherent in all matter. This collection blurs the boundaries of human and non-human, animate and inanimate, to focus on webs of interrelations. Each chapter explores these questions while attending to the ethical, aesthetic, and political tasks of education—both in and out of school contexts. It is essential reading for anyone interested in feminist, queer, anti-racist, ecological, and posthumanist theories and practices of education
... Dawn Nafus (2014), writing about the numerical data generated by sensors, uses the term 'liveness' (adopted from Lury, 2012) to articulate something similar. 'Live' here captures a sense of "numbersin-production" or "in the making" (Nafus, 2014: 211), of becoming that carries possibility and the capacity for surprise. ...
This paper explores an episode of numbers appearing on a screen and being read/spoken, looked at and received as numbers, by people who work together to achieve a particular goal. The events happened in Singapore, in 2012-2013, as part of periodic reporting on diabetic retinopathy screening in the context of efforts to innovate such screening. I tell of two parties at odds over how to engage numbers accountably. This question of 'engagement', of what can and should be done with numbers to secure their participation in organizational affairs, is worked out in how numerical forms are performed and sustained as working numbers. Using three STS analytics to analyse the episode - Helen Verran's (2001) work on number as a relation of unity/plurality, John Law's (1994) work on modes of ordering, and Steve Woolgar and Daniel Neyland's (2013) work on mundaneity and accountability - I argue that numbers are brought to life in very different ways, each mobilizing a certain recognition of what numbers are and what it takes to respect this. In the conclusion, I comment on the article's use and juxtaposition of these STS analytics, using the metaphor of a kaleidoscope.
... Dawn Nafus (2014), writing about the numerical data generated by sensors, uses the term 'liveness' (adopted from Lury, 2012) to articulate something similar. 'Live' here captures a sense of "numbersin-production" or "in the making" (Nafus, 2014: 211), of becoming that carries possibility and the capacity for surprise. ...
This paper explores the question of how numbers and subjects co-constitute one another, drawing on an organizational ethnography of healthcare innovation in Singapore. In particular, it seeks to get traction on a persistent ‘disconnect’ involving numbers in the organization with the help of three STS analytics: Helen Verran’s work on number as a relation of unity/plurality, John Law’s work on modes of ordering and spaces of qualculation (the latter with Michel Callon), and Steve Woolgar and Daniel Neyland’s work on mundaneity and accountability. All three analytics sensitize us to the interrelations of numbers and subjects, yet they highlight different facets and take different theoretical positions on the ontology of numbers. While this makes them, on some view, theoretically incompatible, it also opens imaginative possibilities for attending to the multiplicity of numbers and numbering in analyses of organizational relations and innovation. Keywords: numbers in organizing, nature and properties of numbers, co-constitution
... 159 These are challenges neglected by previous uses of IC and similar digital methods, and they are in tension 5 with the present emphasis on contemporaneity and 'liveness' in digital social research. 160 Our analysis of the five genres identifies two critically important, and related, dimensions of temporality. First, how the identities of the genres can only be grasped by tracing their temporal interrelationsças the nostalgia genres react against the modernist sounds and technological imaginaries of microsound and similar 10 genres, and as the transient, permeable identity of hypnagogic pop bifurcates into the mainstream chillwave and the underground vaporwave. ...
How is the internet transforming musical practices? In this article, through a study of five prominent popular and cross-over music genres spanning the period from the late 1990s to the present, we examine how the internet has augmented the creative, aesthetic, communicative, and social dimensions of contemporary music. The five genres are microsound, hauntology, hypnagogic pop, chillwave, and vaporwave. Analysing the internet-based practices associated with these genres poses methodological and theoretical challenges. It requires new research tools attentive to the online practices involved in their creation and reception. To this end we adapt the Issue Crawler software, an established digital research method that analyses networks of hyperlinking on the worldwide web. In addition, it requires a theoretical framework that can respond to music's profuse mediations in the digital environment.We propose that reconceptualizing genre in music by reference to a theory of mediation offers such a framework. The essay concludes by reflecting on the implications of our analysis for theorizing music and place, and for problematizing existing historical periodizations, notably that of modernism and postmodernism. © The Author (2018). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
... When dealing with web content, it has therefore been argued that researchers need to take into account the socio-technical logic of the platform as part of the analysis of its content [4]. In fact, with the explosive rise of (big) data, attention to these socio-technical logics of platforms must be further prioritized, as social research increasingly makes use of what is called 'live research' [5] [3], where masses of content (with specific forms and technicities) are aggregated in real-time, copied onto other networks, and archived across the (social) web. Furthermore, data analysis and the tools that enable this are built on dynamic web services. ...
This paper presents digital methods for city analytics, applied to the mapping and activation of an urban area in the city of Amsterdam called the Knowledge Mile. Firstly, we map companies registered in the area and analyse their connections through on-line hyperlinking. Secondly, we use Instagram, Panoramio and Google Search data to map most-shared photos and high-ranked images of the area. Lastly, we use Foursquare data to map most-shared locations. The produced maps visualize the online presence and resonance of an urban area that is an axis cutting through the city center and crossing many district and neighborhood 'borders'. The maps have been used as navigational tools and conversation pieces during workshops and participatory design sessions with local stakeholders.
... The speculative middle shifts methods from a reporting on the world to a way of being in the world that is open to experimentation and is (in)tension. Celia Lury (2012) names this approach "live methods" which she contends must be satisfied with an engagement with relations and with parts, with differentiation and be involved in making middles, in dividing without end(s), in mingling, bundling, and coming together. The objects of such methods-being live-are without unity, un-whole-some; put another way, they are partial and undivisible, distributed, and distributing. ...
This article responds to agitations occurring in qualitative research related to the incompatability between methodologies and methods, the preponderance of methodocentrism, the pre-supposition of methods, a reliance on data modeled on knowability and visibility, the ongoing emplacement of settler futurity, and the dilemma of representation. Enmeshments between ontological thought and qualitative research methodologies have rigorously interrogated the logic of anthropocentrism in conventional humanist research methods and have provoked some scholars to suggest that we can do away with method. Rather than a refusal of methods, we propose that particular (in)tensions need to be immanent to whatever method is used. If the intent of inquiry is to create a different world, to ask what kinds of futures are imaginable, then (in)tensions need attend to the immersion, friction, strain, and quivering unease of doing research differently.
... As such, the surface twists and turns, shapeshifting its way in and out of realities which it secretly impels, unaware of its own capacities and contradictions. It need not be what it is; there is always something else it could be in order to do what it in the end does anyway (Lury, 2012). So, for example, American cities on the surface are fully black and white, but there still persists a seeming determination to get rid of collective black life from the surface of cities, to remove anything distinctive of all that blacks as a collective people attempted to make in and from the city. ...
Long a site for incessant worry, revision or redemption, it is unclear what the ‘city' is today. Yet, in face of the near‐apocalyptic readjustments potentiated by human‐engineered global warming, there is an exigency about getting cities to function right. It is no wonder, then, that contemporary theories of cities and urbanization attempt to restore some common sense, to get to the heart of critical matters in a world where urbanization disrupts once‐normative assumptions about the nature of territory, scale and politics. But what is the nature of that ‘common sense'? How does one engage the very concrete efforts that constructed the city, with all the layers of physical and cultural memory that new regimes usually attempt to cover up, and all that the city does not show, either because its inhabitants are prohibited from paying attention or because whatever is considered normative or spectacular in city life has to get rid of the messy labor and politics that brought it about? Invoking blackness as an analytical method, these questions are addressed through thinking about how long histories of urban practices deployed by black residents of cities across the world might challenge and reinvent the sense of an urban commons. ‘Living just enough, just enough for the city…'
Stevie Wonder (1973)
... For those involved in governing for diversity and equality specifically, rather than governance in general (which implies governance through diversity and equality, but not necessarily actively for this), there is a sort of reflexive 'intentionality', what I think about in terms of retroflexivity, to this subjectification process though which workers come to see and know themselves as positioned relationally via multiple affective relations with students, colleagues, friends and family. Rather than something to be negotiated around, these affective relations are constitutive, they serve to animate and enliven (Fraser, Kember and Lury, 2005;Lury, 2012), to enact as I claimed in Chapter 2. As Bruno Latour recognises 'attachments are first, actors are second', 'the more attachments one has the more one exists' (Latour, 2005, pp. 216-217). ...
How can we rethink ideas of policy failure to consider its paradoxes and contradictions as a starting point for more hopeful democratic encounters? Offering a provocative and innovative theorisation of governance as relational politics, the central argument of Power, Politics and the Emotions is that there are sets of affective dynamics which complicate the already materially and symbolically contested terrain of policy-making. This relational politics is Shona Hunter's starting point for a more hopeful, but realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities enacted through contemporary governing processes. Through this idea Hunter prioritises the everyday lived enactments of policy as a means to understand the state as a more differentiated and changeable entity than is often allowed for in current critiques of neoliberalism. But Hunter reminds us that focusing on lived realities demands a melancholic confrontation with pain, and the risks of social and physical death and violence lived through the contemporary neoliberal state. This is a state characterised by the ascendency of neoliberal whiteness; a state where no one is innocent and we are all responsible for the multiple intersecting exclusionary practices creating its unequal social orderings. The only way to struggle through the central paradox of governance to produce something different is to accept this troubling interdependence between resistance and reproduction and between hope and loss. Analysing the everyday processes of this relational politics through original empirical studies in health, social care and education the book develops an innovative interdisciplinary theoretical synthesis which engages with and extends work in political science, cultural theory, critical race and feminist analysis, critical psychoanalysis and post-material sociology.
... 4 When considering a research technique like scraping, we soon find ourselves describing the particular settings in which digital social research is done. Scraping also allows us to approach digital social research as an on-going process, rather than as a finished product (Lury 2012): it opens up a perspective on social research in-the-making, as opposed to the declarations of intent and hopes for what digital social research might deliver as its final product (Latour 1987). But perhaps most interesting of all, we find, is that these sociological ideas may not only be applied to scraping, they may also be deployed in scraping-enabled social research. ...
This paper investigates the device of scraping, a technique for the automated capture of online
data, and its application in social research. We ask how this ‘medium-specific’ technique for data
collection may be rendered analytically productive for social research. We argue that, as a
technique that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to restructure
research in at least two ways. Firstly, as a technique that is not native to social research,
scraping risks introducing ‘alien’ analytic assumptions such as a pre-occupation with freshness.
Secondly, to scrape is to risk importing into our inquiry categories that are prevalent in the social
practices and devices enabled by online media: scraping makes available already formatted data
for social research. Scraped data, and online social data more generally, tend to come with
analytics already built in. The pre-ordered nature of captured online data is often approached as a
‘problem’, but we propose it may be turned into a virtue, insofar as data formats that have
currency in the practices under scrutiny may serve as a source of social data themselves. Scraping,
we propose, makes it possible to render traffic between the object and process of social research
analytically productive. It enables a form of ‘live’ social research, in which the formats and life
cycles of online data may lend structure to the analytic objects and findings of social research. We
demonstrate this point in an exercise of online issue profiling, and more particularly, by relying on
Twitter and Google to track the issues of ‘austerity’ and ‘crisis’ over time. Here we distinguish
between two forms of real-time research, those dedicated to monitoring live content (which terms
are current?) and those concerned with analysing the liveliness of issues (which topics are
happening?).
This paper is concerned with the process of generating informed consent from potential participants who have limited experience of formal education (LESLLA learners) and therefore limited background knowledge of an abstract, culturally-situated concept such as research. We argue that initial efforts to inform these marginalized and vulnerable populations need sharper focus as both these prospective participants and the researchers working with them may not fully appreciate the complex dynamics of researching with each other. Hence, we propose a performative approach to generate awareness and relationships among the researcher and prospective participants. Here, we describe the new materialist performative approach to introduce LESLLA learners to research dynamics through a board game designed to familiarize potential participants with interview situations, while also creating space for considering the agencies of other entities within the research process.
In this study, we build on a recent social data scientific mapping of Danish environmentalist organizations and activists during the COVID-19 lockdown in order to sketch a distinct genre of digital social research that we dub a quali-quantitative micro-history of ideas in real-time. We define and exemplify this genre by tracing and tracking the single political idea and activist slogan of grøn genstart (‘green restart’) across Twitter and other public–political domains. Specifically, we achieve our micro-history through an iterative and mutual attuning between computational and netnographic registers and techniques, in ways that contribute to the nascent field of computational anthropology. By documenting the serial ways in and different steps through which our inquiry was continually fed and enhanced by crossing over from (n)ethnographic observation to computational exploration, and vice versa, we offer up our grøn genstart case account as exemplary of wider possibilities in this line of inquiry. In particular, we position the genre of micro-history of ideas in real-time within the increasingly wide and heterogeneous space of digital social research writ large, including its established concerns with ‘big and broad’ social data, the repurposing of computational ‘interface’ techniques for socio-cultural research, as well as diverse aspirations for deploying digital data within novel combinations of qualitative and quantitative methods.
This paper explores the often unremarkable and unremarked upon activity of the refreshing of digital media streams and feeds, paying particular attention to its temporalities. It draws on original empirical research with UK based digital media professionals, mindfulness practitioners and school students to highlight the ways in which the temporalities of refreshing are embodied and experienced. To do this, it considers what theorisations of the prefix ‘re’ might offer, arguing that the ‘re’ indicates a non-linear temporality that is, at once, creating anew, going back, being behind or after, as well as repeating, again and again. Building on these explanations of ‘the re’, the paper argues that the refresh be understood in terms of a present temporality, which is both now and ongoing, and that can be constantly moving, stuck or stilled, and skipped or reset. The paper seeks to understand these specific embodied experiences of the refresh in terms of what Raymond Williams calls a structure of feeling: a ‘temporal present’ that ‘gives the sense of a generation or period’. Taking up Williams’ explication of a structure of feeling in the 1970s through the relatively new experience of the medium of broadcast television, the paper posits that the present temporality of refreshing might be key to the composition of a contemporary structure of feeling.
As a research methodology, walking has a diverse and extensive history in the social sciences and humanities, underscoring its value for conducting research that is situated, relational, and material. Building on the importance of place, sensory inquiry, embodiment, and rhythm within walking research, this book offers four new concepts for walking methodologies that are accountable to an ethics and politics of the more-than-human: Land and geos, affect, transmaterial and movement. The book carefully considers the more-than-human dimensions of walking methodologies by engaging with feminist new materialisms, posthumanisms, affect theory, trans and queer theory, Indigenous theories, and critical race and disability scholarship. These more-than-human theories rub frictionally against the history of walking scholarship and offer crucial insights into the potential of walking as a qualitative research methodology in a more-than-human world. Theoretically innovative, the book is grounded in examples of walking research by WalkingLab, an international research network on walking (www.walkinglab.org).
The book is rich in scope, engaging with a wide range of walking methods and forms including: long walks on hiking trails, geological walks, sensory walks, sonic art walks, processions, orienteering races, protest and activist walks, walking tours, dérives, peripatetic mapping, school-based walking projects, and propositional walks. The chapters draw on WalkingLab’s research-creation events to examine walking in relation to settler colonialism, affective labour, transspecies, participation, racial geographies and counter-cartographies, youth literacy, environmental education, and collaborative writing. The book outlines how more-than-human theories can influence and shape walking methodologies and provokes a critical mode of walking-with that engenders solidarity, accountability, and response-ability.
This volume will appeal to graduate students, artists, and academics and researchers who are interested in Education, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Affect Studies, Geography, Anthropology, and (Post)Qualitative Research Methods.
Theorisation of culture is often absent from research on production in the creative and cultural sector. Further, cultural production has been largely untouched by the insights of the cultural economy approach. Culturalisation is a means of addressing the question of what constitutes culture and thus a cultural (economy) approach. It is the process by which culture and cultural production combine in the ‘operationalisation of the real.’ Culturalisation underpins much scholarship in this journal by posing the (economic) real as a problem of definition in order to illustrate the operations involved in its temporary resolution. The implications of this position need further addressing. There is a feedback between culture as a problem of definition and a cultural approach. Devices can interrogate the relationship between processes of cultural definition and the conceptual parameters of a cultural economy approach. Workshopping, projects and events are put forward as cultural devices emerging from a 10-month ethnography of literary performance in Bristol, England. This illustration shows firstly, how culturalisation occurs in a designated cultural sector to contingently realise culture; and secondly, the implicit logic of cultural economy as culturalisation, typified by the device as method, so as to open a debate concerning its implications.
The EPIC community has been wrestling with ways to integrate quantitative and qualitative methods in light of the increasing role that digital data plays in business practices. Some focus on methodological issues (digital data as method), while others point to the consumer value in data products (data as thing in the world). This paper argues that “digital data as method” and “digital data as thing in the world” are becoming increasingly intertwined. We are not merely witnessing ethnographers’ haulting embrace of digital data, but a wider process of the domestication of data, in which we, alongside the people we study, are participants. The domestication of data involves everyday situations in which ordinary people develop their own sense-making methods—methods remarkably similar to ethnographic knowledge production. In this way, the domestication process tightens the connection between data as thing in the world and data as method. I argue that seeing the interconnection gives us the conceptual resources necessary to open up new areas where ethnographers can gain both intellectual and practical footholds in data-rich environments.
In the face of increasing calls for sociology to demonstrate its public relevance, it is necessary to question cherished understandings of what so-called Public Sociology should look like. This paper advances an understanding of sociology that is ontologically oriented toward a world of rapidly emerging and often unfamiliar social realities, with an eye to producing new ways of understanding the discipline's authority vis a vis ‘the public.’ In experimenting with alternate conceptualisations of sociology, its public and their relation, I turn to a social, and specifically artistic, event for inspiration; namely, Marina Abramović’s performance of The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art. While the artist and the social scientist clearly work with differing possibilities and constraints, the performance indicates a novel way in which authority might be mobilised. Wheras the debate around public sociology normally centres on the figure of the expert, Abramović’s performance give rise to a new authority, intimately bound up with the age old sociological concepts of charisma and the gift. This highly experimental performance points the way toward a more affectively open and productive relationship between author and public.
Der Beziehungsstatus der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften zu den mittlerweile über 30 Jahre alten neuen Medien ist noch immer, um es mit dem Wortlaut eines großen Social Networks zu sagen, › kompliziert ‹. Ein gutes Beispiel dafür ist die Essayserie in der FAZ im Frühjahr diesen Jahres, die Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht unter anderem mit der Forderung nach einer epistemischen Reform der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften eröffnete.
This transdisciplinary experiment in speculative fiction, painting, and geohumanities arose through ongoing conversations between a social theorist and an artist, in which we took inspiration from each other’s work and developed a hybrid collaborative practice engaging painting and fiction. Thematically the work concerns the place of the analog, the body, painting, and materiality in the dispersed network spatialities of corporate digital futures. Drawing on nonrepresentational theory, mobilities theory, and new media and software studies, the story is an animated suspension of the near future dealing with concepts of time, space, scale, region, body, network, artificial intelligence, code, and art. The paintings are presented as a source, a mediation, and an interface for this collaboration.此一推想小说、绘图与地理人文的跨领域实验，是透过一位社会理论家和一位艺术家之间的持续对话而产生，于此过程中，我们相互从对方的作品中汲取灵感，并发展出涉入绘画与小说的混合式合作实践。该作品在主题上考量总体数码未来的分散网络空间性中的类比、身体、绘画及物质性。运用非再现理论、能动性理论，以及新媒体和软件研究，这个故事是对于迫近的未来所激发的暂停，处理时间、空间、尺度、区域、身体、网络、人工智能、编码与艺术之概念。绘画作品将呈现为此般合作的来源、中介与界面。Este experimento transdisciplinario en ficción especulativa, pintura y las geohumanidades surgió de conversaciones todavía en desarrollo entre un teórico social y un artista, cuando tomamos inspiración del trabajo de cada uno de nosotros y desarrollamos una práctica híbrida de colaboración que involucra pintura y ficción. Desde el punto de vista temático, el trabajo concierne al lugar de lo análogo, el cuerpo, la pintura y la materialidad en las dispersas cadenas de espacialidades de los futuros de corporativos digitales. A partir de teoría no representacional, teoría de las movilidades, nuevos medios y estudios de software, la historia es una suspensión animada del futuro cercano que toca con los conceptos de tiempo, espacio, escala, región, cuerpo, red, inteligencia artificial, código y arte. Las pinturas se presentan como una fuente, una mediación y una interfaz para esta colaboración.
Indicators with long social histories, such as the Consumer Price Index, often serve as nodes of calculative infrastructures. They create a field of social action, making some relations between people, institutions, and materials possible, and other relations less possible. By reflecting on two experiments in do-it-yourself sensor data, this article explores the tensions that occur when indicators have not yet become stable entities. When the conditions of possibility for the indicator's continued existence are less assured, the labor it takes to build numbers into something socially meaningful becomes surprisingly visible. This labor proceeds in stops and starts, as the various material and epistemological and social resistances reveal themselves. Sensors shape these starts and stops. Sensors give their users an indication of a possible whole entity whose contents they cannot fully imagine, and either must create or abandon. Far from producing certainty, sensor data often provokes a sense of vagueness that is worked on until it becomes either clarity or action, failure or indifference. Through this view of numbers in the making, we can see just how remarkable it is that indicators become part of calculative infrastructures at all.
In social and cultural theory, topology has been used to articulate changes in structures and spaces of power. In this introduction, we argue that culture itself is becoming topological. In particular, this ‘becoming topological’ can be identified in the significance of a new order of spatio-temporal continuity for forms of economic, political and cultural life today. This ordering emerges, sometimes without explicit coordination, in practices of sorting, naming, numbering, comparing, listing, and calculating. We show that the effect of these practices is both to introduce new continuities into a discontinuous world by establishing equivalences or similitudes, and to make and mark discontinuities through repeated contrasts. In this multiplication of relations, topological change is established as being constant, normal and immanent, rather than being an exceptional form, which is externally produced; that is, forms of economic, political and cultural life are identified and made legible in terms of their capacities for continuous change. Outlining the contributions to this Special Issue, the introduction discusses the meaning of topological culture and provides an analytic framework through which to understand its implications.
This paper is an attempt to describe the nature of a new calculative background that is currently coming into existence, a background that will both guide and constitute what counts as ‘thinking’. It begins by providing a capsule history of how this background has become a more and more pervasive quality of Euro-American cultures as a result of the rise of ‘qualculation’. It then moves on to consider how this qualculative background is producing new apprehensions of space and time before ending by considering how new kinds of sensorium may now be becoming possible. In this final section, I illustrate my argument by considering the changing presence of the hand, co-ordinate systems and language, thereby attempting to conjure up the lineaments of a new kind of movement-space.
The main argument of this paper is that the Web is well suited for the role of a streetwise informant for protest events. Using special software, we plot the network of Web sites of organisations related to the meat and anti-globalization protests in Milau, France, in June of 2000, and compare our findings about the nature of the actors with the reports in the mass media. Not only do the findings deepen mass media accounts but they also point to a new web-sociological means to re-open the question of the real. Putting on display the institutional dimension of the protest, the Web network simultaneously undermines and enriches the mass media accounts of the protests. The Web may provide a reality check on existing accounts of the protest and document encounters between opposing definitions of reality. Our analysis also suggests the Web can be harnessed to complicate the definition of real social action.
Scholarly attention to new forms of participation on the Internet has proliferated classifications and theories without providing any criteria for distinctions and diversity. Labels such as ‘peer production’, ‘prosumption’, ‘user-led innovation’ and ‘organized networks’ are intended to explain new forms of cultural and economic interaction mediated by the Internet, but lack any systematic way of distinguishing different cases. This article provides elements for the composition of a ‘birder's handbook’ to forms of participation on the Internet that have been observed and analyzed over the last 10 years. It is intended to help scholars across the disciplines distinguish fleeting forms of participation: first, the authors highlight the fact that participation on the Internet nearly always employs both a ‘formal social enterprise’ and an ‘organized public’ that stand in some structural and temporal relationship to one another; second, the authors map the different forms of action and exchange that take place amongst these two entities, showing how forms of participation are divided up into tasks and goals, and how they relate to the resource that is created through participation; and third, we describe forms of governance, or variation in how tasks and goals are made available to, and modifiable by, different participants of either a formal enterprise or an organized public.
In recent years, social media has become ubiquitous and important for social
networking and content sharing. And yet, the content that is generated from
these websites remains largely untapped. In this paper, we demonstrate how
social media content can be used to predict real-world outcomes. In particular,
we use the chatter from Twitter.com to forecast box-office revenues for movies.
We show that a simple model built from the rate at which tweets are created
about particular topics can outperform market-based predictors. We further
demonstrate how sentiments extracted from Twitter can be further utilized to
improve the forecasting power of social media.
Responding to the growing gap between the sociological ethos and the world we study, the challenge of public sociology is to engage multiple publics in multiple ways. These public sociologies should not be left out in the cold, but brought into the framework of our discipline. In this way we make public sociology a visible and legitimate enterprise, and, thereby, invigorate the discipline as a whole. Accordingly, if we map out the division of sociological labor, we discover antagonistic interdependence among four types of knowledge: professional, critical, policy, and public. In the best of all worlds the flourishing of each type of sociology is a condition for the flourishing of all, but they can just as easily assume pathological forms or become victims of exclusion and subordination. This field of power beckons us to explore the relations among the four types of sociology as they vary historically and nationally, and as they provide the template for divergent individual careers. Finally, comparing disciplines points to the umbilical chord that connects sociology to the world of publics, underlining sociology's particular interest in the defense of civil society, itself beleaguered by the encroachment of markets and states.
Most of the people around us belong to our world not directly, as kin or comrades, but as strangers. How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to them as transient participants in common publics. Indeed, most of us would find it nearly impossible to imagine a social world without publics. In the eight essays in this book, Michael Warner addresses the question: What is a public?
According to Warner, the idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life. Publics have powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations. The idea of a public contains ambiguities, even contradictions. As it is extended to new contexts, politics, and media, its meaning changes in ways that can be difficult to uncover.
Combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extensive case studies, Warner shows how the idea of a public can reframe our understanding of contemporary literary works and politics and of our social world in general. In particular, he applies the idea of a public to the junction of two intellectual traditions: public-sphere theory and queer theory.
Responding to the growing gap between the sociological ethos and the world we study, the challenge of public sociology is to engage multiple publics in multiple ways. These public sociologies should not be left out in the cold, but brought into the framework of our discipline. In this way we make public sociology a visible and legitimate enterprise, and, thereby, invigorate the discipline as a whole. Accordingly, if we map out the division of sociological labor, we discover antagonistic interdependence among four types of knowledge: professional, critical, policy, and public. In the best of all worlds the flourishing of each type of sociology is a condition for the flourishing of all, but they can just as easily assume pathological forms or become victims of exclusion and subordination. This field of power beckons us to explore the relations among the four types of sociology as they vary historically and nationally, and as they provide the template for divergent individual careers. Finally, comparing disciplines points to the umbilical chord that connects sociology to the world of publics, underlining sociology's particular investment in the defense of civil society, itself beleaguered by the encroachment of markets and states.
This astonishing book presents a distinctive approach to the politics of everyday life. Ranging across a variety of spaces in which politics and the political unfold, it questions what is meant by perception, representation and practice, with the aim of valuing the fugitive practices that exist on the margins of the known. It revolves around three key functions. It: Introduces the rather dispersed discussion of non-representational theory to a wider audience. Provides the basis for an experimental rather than a representational approach to the social sciences and humanities. Begins the task of constructing a different kind of political genre. A groundbreaking and comprehensive introduction to this key topic, Thrift's outstanding work brings together further writings from a body of work that has come to be known as non-representational theory. This noteworthy book makes a significant contribution to the literature in this area and is essential reading for researchers and postgraduates in the fields of social theory, sociology, geography, anthropology and cultural studies.
In spring 2009, revelations over the expense claims of British MPs led to one of the most damaging scandals affecting the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy in recent history. This article explores how this incident reveals the capacity of Web 2.0 devices and transactional data to transform politics. It reflects, graphically, the political power of identifying and knowing people on the basis of their transactions, on what they do rather than what they say. It also shows in practice how Web 2.0 devices such as Crowdsourcing, Google Docs, mash-ups and visualization software can be used to mobilize data for collective and popular projects. Basic analytic tools freely available on the Web enable people to access, digitize and analyse data and do their own analyses and representations of phenomena. We examine media and popular mobilizations of transactional data using the specific example of the MPs' expenses scandal and relate this to larger currents in online government data and devices for public scrutiny which give rise to a new politics of measurement. We argue that this politics of measurement involves the introduction of new visual devices based on the manipulation of huge databases into simplified visual arrays; the re-orientation of accounts of the social from elicited attitudes and views to transactions and practices; and, the inspection of individuals arrayed in relation to other individuals within whole (sub) populations. It is also a politics that mobilizes new informational gatekeepers and organizers in the making and analysis of transactional data and challenges dominant or expert forms of analysis and representation.
Typically in longitudinal quantitative research, classifications are tracked over time. However, most classifications change in absolute terms in that some die whilst others are created, and in their meaning. There is a need, therefore, to re-think how longitudinal quantitative research might explore both the qualitative changes to classification systems as well as the quantitative changes within each classification. By drawing on the changing classifications of local food retail outlets in the city of York (UK) since the 1950s as an illustrative example, an alternative way of graphing longitudinal quantitative data is presented which ultimately provides a description of both types of change over time. In so doing, this article argues for the increased use of ‘dirty data’ in longitudinal quantitative analysis, a step which allows for the exploration of both qualitative and quantitative changes to, and within, classification systems. This ultimately challenges existing assumptions relating to the quality and type of data used in quantitative research and how change in the social world is measured in general.
In social and cultural theory, topology has been used to articulate changes in structures and spaces of power. In this introduction, we argue that culture itself is becoming topological. In particular, this ‘becoming topological’ can be identified in the significance of a new order of spatio-temporal continuity for forms of economic, political and cultural life today. This ordering emerges, sometimes without explicit coordination, in practices of sorting, naming, numbering, comparing, listing, and calculating. We show that the effect of these practices is both to introduce new continuities into a discontinuous world by establishing equivalences or similitudes, and to make and mark discontinuities through repeated contrasts. In this multiplication of relations, topological change is established as being constant, normal and immanent, rather than being an exceptional form, which is externally produced; that is, forms of economic, political and cultural life are identified and made legible in terms of their capacities for continuous change. Outlining the contributions to this Special Issue, the introduction discusses the meaning of topological culture and provides an analytic framework through which to understand its implications.
Public Culture 14.1 (2002) 49-90
This essay has a public. If you are reading (or hearing) this, you are part of its public. So first let me say: Welcome. Of course, you might stop reading (or leave the room), and someone else might start (or enter). Would the public of this essay therefore be different? Would it ever be possible to know anything about the public to which, I hope, you still belong?
What is a public? It is a curiously obscure question, considering that few things have been more important in the development of modernity. Publics have become an essential fact of the social landscape, and yet it would tax our understanding to say exactly what they are. Several senses of the noun public tend to be intermixed in usage. People do not always distinguish between the public and a public, although in some contexts this difference can matter a great deal.
The public is a kind of social totality. Its most common sense is that of the people in general. It might be the people organized as the nation, the commonwealth, the city, the state, or some other community. It might be very general, as in Christendom or humanity. But in each case the public, as a people, is thought to include everyone within the field in question. This sense of totality is brought out in speaking of the public, even though to speak of a national public implies that others exist; there must be as many publics as polities, but whenever one is addressed as the public, the others are assumed not to matter.
A public can also be a second thing: a concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space, as with a theatrical public. Such a public also has a sense of totality, bounded by the event or by the shared physical space. A performer on stage knows where her public is, how big it is, where its boundaries are, and what the time of its common existence is. A crowd at a sports event, a concert, or a riot might be a bit blurrier around the edges, but still knows itself by knowing where and when it is assembled in common visibility and common action.
I will return to both of these senses, but what I mainly want to clarify in this essay is a third sense of public: the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation -- like the public of this essay. (Nice to have you with us, still.) The distinctions among these three senses are not always sharp and are not simply the difference between oral and written contexts. When an essay is read aloud as a lecture at a university, for example, the concrete audience of hearers understands itself as standing in for a more indefinite audience of readers. And often, when a form of discourse is not addressing an institutional or subcultural audience, such as members of a profession, its audience can understand itself not just as a public but as the public. In such cases, different senses of audience and circulation are in play at once. Examples like this suggest that it is worth understanding the distinctions better, if only because the transpositions among them can have important social effects.
The idea of a public, as distinct from both the public and any bounded audience, has become part of the common repertoire of modern culture. Everyone intuitively understands how it works. On reflection, however, its rules can seem rather odd. I would like to bring some of our intuitive understanding into the open in order to speculate about the history of the form and the role it plays in constructing our social world.
1. A public is self-organized.
A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself. It is autotelic; it exists only as the end for which books are published, shows broadcast, Web sites posted, speeches delivered, opinions produced. It exists by virtue of being addressed.
A kind of chicken-and-egg circularity confronts us in the idea of a public. Could anyone speak publicly without addressing a public? But how...
Television: Technology and Cultural Form was first published in 1974, long before the dawn of multi-channel TV, or the reality and celebrity shows that now pack the schedules. Yet Williams' analysis of television's history, its institutions, programmes and practices, and its future prospects, remains remarkably prescient. Williams stresses the importance of technology in shaping the cultural form of television, while always resisting the determinism of McLuhan's dictum that 'the medium is the message'. If the medium really is the message, Williams asks, what is left for us to do or say? Williams argues that, on the contrary, we as viewers have the power to disturb, disrupt and to distract the otherwise cold logic of history and technology - not just because television is part of the fabric of our daily lives, but because new technologies continue to offer opportunities, momentarily outside the sway of transnational corporations or the grasp of media moguls, for new forms of self and political expression.
In this groundbreaking editorial and curatorial project, more than 100 writers, artists, and philosophers rethink what politics is about. In a time of political turmoil and anticlimax, this book redefines politics as operating in the realm of "things." Politics is not just an arena, a profession, or a system, but a concern for things brought to the attention of the fluid and expansive constituency of the public. But how are things made public? What, we might ask, is a republic, a "res publica," a public thing, if we do not know how to make things public? There are many other kinds of assemblies, which are not political in the usual sense, that gather a public around things--scientific laboratories, supermarkets, churches, and disputes involving natural resources like rivers, landscapes, and air. The authors of "Making Things Public"--and the ZKM show that the book accompanies--ask what would happen if politics revolved around disputed things. Instead of looking for democracy only in the official sphere of professional politics, they examine the new atmospheric conditions--technologies, interfaces, platforms, networks, and mediations that allow things to be made public. They show us that the old definition of politics is too narrow; there are many techniques of representation--in politics, science, and art--of which Parliaments and Congresses are only a part. The authors include such prominent thinkers as Richard Rorty, Simon Schaffer, Peter Galison, Richard Powers, Lorraine Daston, Richard Aczel, and Donna Haraway; their writings are accompanied by excerpts from John Dewey, Shakespeare, Swift, La Fontaine, and Melville. More than 500 color images document the new idea of what Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel call an "object-oriented democracy."
Can Google queries help predict economic activity?The answer depends on what you mean by "predict." Google Trends and Google Insights for Search provide a real time report on query volume, while economic data is typically released several days after the close of the month. Given this time lag, it is not implausible that Google queries in a category like "Automotive/Vehicle Shopping" during the first few weeks of March may help predict what actual March automotive sales will be like when the official data is released halfway through April.That famous economist Yogi Berra once said "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." This inspired our approach: let us lower the bar and just try to predict the present. Our work to date is summarized in a paper called Predicting the Present with Google Trends. We find that Google Trends data can help improve forecasts of the current level of activity for a number of different economic time series, including automobile sales, home sales, retail sales, and travel behavior. Even predicting the present is useful, since it may help identify "turning points" in economic time series. If people start doing significantly more searches for "Real Estate Agents" in a certain location, it is tempting to think that house sales might increase in that area in the near future.Our paper outlines one approach to short-term economic prediction, but we expect that there are several other interesting ideas out there. So we suggest that forecasting wannabes download some Google Trends data and try to relate it to other economic time series. If you find an interesting pattern, post your findings on a website and send a link to econ-forecast@google.com. We'll report on the most interesting results in a later blog post.It has been said that if you put a million monkeys in front of a million computers, you would eventually produce an accurate economic forecast. Let's see how well that theory works.
In America, almost all the money in circulation passes through financial institutions every day. But in Nigeria's "cash and carry" system, 90 percent of the currency never comes back to a bank after it's issued. What happens when two such radically different economies meet and mingle, as they have for centuries in Atlantic Africa? The answer is a rich diversity of economic practices responsive to both local and global circumstances. In Marginal Gains, Jane I. Guyer explores and explains these often bewildering practices, including trade with coastal capitalism and across indigenous currency zones, and within the modern popular economy. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Guyer demonstrates that the region shares a coherent, if loosely knit, commercial culture. She shows how that culture actually works in daily practice, addressing both its differing scales of value and the many settings in which it operates, from crisis conditions to ordinary household budgets. The result is a landmark study that reveals not just how popular economic systems work in Africa, but possibly elsewhere in the Third World.
This important new work by Roy Wagner is about the autonomy of symbols and their role in creating culture. Its argument, anticipated in the author's previous book, The Invention of Culture, is at once symbolic, philosophical, and evolutionary: meaning is a form of perception to which human beings are physically and mentally adapted. Using examples from his many years of research among the Daribi people of New Guinea as well as from Western culture, Wagner approaches the question of the creation of meaning by examining the nonreferential qualities of symbolsâsuch as their aesthetic and formal propertiesâthat enable symbols to stand for themselves.
In this paper, we analyze the activity of single fibers in the optic nerve of a frog. Our method is to find what sort of stimulus causes the largest activity in one nerve fiber and then what is the exciting aspect of that stimulus such that variations in everything else cause little change in the response. It has been known for the past 20 years that each fiber is connected not to a few rods and cones in the retina but to very many over a fair area. Our results show that for the most part within that area, it is not the light intensity itself but rather the pattern of local variation of intensity that is the exciting factor. There are four types of fibers, each type concerned with a different sort of pattern. Each type is uniformly distributed over the whole retina of the frog. Thus, there are four distinct parallel distributed channels whereby the frog's eye informs his brain about the visual image in terms of local pattern independent of average illumination. We describe the patterns and show the functional and anatomical separation of the channels. This work has been done on the frog, and our interpretation applies only to the frog.