The Critical Life of Information

010000100110 The Critical Life of Friday, April 11, Information 2014 An interdisciplinary workshop that will consider questions of scale posed by the rise of Big Data as a cultural and political force. The workshop will address how new notions of information as property, and its harvesting from people in contexts ranging from shopping to health care to social media, condition humanistic inquiry and its concepts of the individual and the collective. William L. Harkness Hall, Room 309 | 100 Wall Sreet wgss.yale.edu/bigdata The Critical Life of Information: 10:00 am – 12:00 pm Program of Events Panel I: Big Data and the Law Margot Kaminski, Yale Law School Framing Big Data in the United States: A Legal Overview With an eye towards interdisciplinary conversation, this presentation will dis- Panel I: Big Data and the Law cuss the ways in which the legal community in the United States struggles 10:00 am – 12:00 pm with defining both the harms and the benefits of Big Data. This presentation will try to give the audience a taste of how the law, particularly US law, approaches big data issues. It will summarize some basic regulatory Panel II and Lunch: Visual and Quantitative Analytics principles, will outline current legal regulation of big data in the United 12:00 – 2:00 pm States, and will outline recent–and pending–proposals for reform. It will pro- vide an overview of the FTC’s 2012 report, and explain how the Snowden leaks have revived the conversation in the United States. And it will use a Panel III: Big Data and the Arts few concrete recent examples to show why other features of the U.S. legal system–such as the First Amendmen–may make attempts at big data regula- 2:00 – 4:00 pm tion in the U.S. different from abroad. Malavika Jayaram, Harvard Berkman Center Coffee Break Performing Welfare Through Identity Theatre: A Tale of Big Data, Biometrics 4:00 – 4:15 pm and Bias Big Data doesn’t get much bigger than India’s identity project. The world’s Panel IV: Big Data and Governance largest bio-metric database–currently consisting of almost 600 million enrolled– exemplifies several strands of the discourse about data and scale. A narra- 4:15 – 6:15 pm tive of granularity, accuracy and efficiency is extended through a techno-uto- pian vision of targeted delivery of welfare. In a frictionless world without Reception corruption, subversion, contestation or negotiation, the dark side of data and development is subsumed by the promise of inclusion, identity and legitima- 6:15 – 7:00 pm cy. Ignoring the fact that the most marginalized sections of a population are disproportionately impacted due to a gaping digital divide and the embedded biases within technologies of surveillance, the project functions as identity theatre, privileging the voices of certain actors and particular practices, while diminishing others. Doing so in a legal vacuum, without parliamentary ap- proval or statutory sanctity, in country that lacks a horizontal data protection framework, complicates the power imbalances further. In this session, Malavika will outline the schema of this ambitious project, and locate it in a global frame. Far from being a hyperlocal project without cross-border implications, the scheme portends the growth of India as a biometrics hub, assisting other countries with their national ID programs, and exporting technologies of control once they have been tested on a mas- sive population that has little agency and limited ability to withhold consent. By offering a perspective that is somewhat different from the predominantly western focus of privacy, she hopes to generate a more inclusive discourse about the social impact of Big Data projects. Respondents: • Laura Wexler, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and American Studies, Yale University • Caleb Smith, English, Yale University • Fred Ritchin, NYU Tisch School of the Arts 12:00 – 2:00 pm experienced is an inversion of consumption, one in which we’ve come to engage in a more profound way with the acts of acquisition over that Panel II and Lunch: Visual and Quantitative Analytics which we are acquiring; we’ve come to prefer the bottles to the wine. Peter Leonard, Yale University, Digital Humanities Sumanth Gopinath, University of Minnesota and Jason Stanyek, University Macroscopic Perspective: Data Visualization in Humanities Research Projects of Oxford Elena Grewal, Senior Data Scientist, Airbnb The BPMs of Capital: Nike+, Big Sonic Data, and the Sensorization of the ‘Human Race’ Experimentation in the World of Big Data: Common Pitfalls and Best Practice This talk stems from a collaborative book project tentatively titled Nike + Group Discussion Music: The Specters of Corporate Sonic Futures. The project treats the Nike Corporation as a wealthy and ambitious agent for musical curation 2:00 – 4:00 pm and sponsorship and examines its recent projects (both advertisements and Panel III: Big Data and the Arts commodities) that undertake various mappings of musical data and develop- ments of new musical technologies. Following a brief overview of some of Kenneth Goldsmith, University of Pennsylvania the more familiar entanglements of music with (big) data (including recom- The Cultural Artifact in the Digital Age mendation engines, audio fingerprinting, the Music Genome Project, music information retrieval, and more), the talk will discuss examples from Nike, In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of including considerations of its Original Run series of commissioned albums, objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” I’ve its project with the Japanese breakbeat duo Hifana, and, most importantly, come to embrace Huebler’s idea, though it might be retooled as: “The its sonico-musical work with the Nike+ Sport Kit, developed in tandem with world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any Apple. We argue that Nike’s projects are especially novel and extreme in more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing: With their work with cross-domain data mapping and manipulation and that they an unprecedented amount of available text, our problem is not needing betray a preoccupation with sensorization, involving transformations of sen- to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity sory information in ways that both amplify and transmogrify the scope and that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how power of the ever-growing process of datafication. I manage it, parse it, organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours. This attitude belies a new relationship toward the cultural Respondents: object, both as producers and consumers (though the lines between who is • David Joselit, The Graduate Center, CUNY a producer and who is a consumer are becoming increasingly blurred). At • Francesco Casetti, Film Studies, Yale University a time when everything is available, the best information manager, the best • Natalia Cecire, English, Yale University filterer, the best sorter becomes the most powerful arbiter of culture. In a time of abundance, where the more of something there is the more power- 4:00 – 4:15 pm ful it is, the art world’s model of scarcity is become increasingly irrelevant. Sometimes I feel that the average office worker in a cubicle understands Coffee Break contemporary art better than people in the art world do. Democratic and distributive cultural models (social networking, file-sharing) create the most 4:15 – 6:15 pm powerful cultural modes. In the age of big data, content — that which we Panel IV: Big Data and Governance once thought to be the primary focus of the cultural artifact — has taken a back seat to a host of mechanisms surrounding the artifact. In a sense, Nishant Shah, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore the apparatuses — vis–à–vis Flusser — that propel the digital artifact into Writing the Subject: Intellectual Property, Big Data and the New Subject of existence have become its primary content. This explosion of cultural arti- Governance facts have shifted the focus from production to management, turning many of us into unwitting archivists, hence the rise of archiving studies and more If we take the shift from being information societies to becoming data soci- broadly, digital humanities. Archiving and collecting has become a new eties seriously, we need to understand that the subject of governance that kind of folk art, something that is widely practiced and has unconsciously we have taken for granted, will have to be revisited and rewritten. Looking become integrated into a great many people’s lives. I think it’s fair to say at three case-studies historical and contemporary, around the writing of this that many of us today spend as much time organizing our vast collections subject of governance, and locating the crisis on the debates around intel- of media as we do actually interacting with them. We have more music on lectual property and big data, this talk looks at the normative construction our hard drives than we’ll ever be able to listen to — and yet we keep of a data subject and the need to identify new data subjectivities which are getting more. We spend as much time acquiring, cataloging and archiving often in a condition of illegibility or illegality. our artifacts these days as we do actually engaging with them, suggesting to me that the ways in which culture is distributed and archived has become profoundly more intriguing than the cultural artifact itself. What we’ve Kath Weston, Anthropology, University of Virginia imental. Examining the places where notions of experiment are most under stress, she reads works by Stephen Crane, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and William Old MacDonald Had a Database: Lessons from America’s National Animal Carlos Williams in relation to epistemological limina like popular science (e.g.

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