News Archive

Dr Mark Carrigan - (University of Warwick)

Nate Tkacz's ESRC funded project: Interrogating the Dashboard Conference...

As part of a broader project – Performances of Value: Competition and Competitions Inside and Outside Markets – we call for papers for a workshop on Competition(s) that will take place on June 10-11, 2016 at the Copenhagen Business School...

Dr Nathaniel Tkacz will be speaking at Warwick Paytech 2016. Find out more...

Noortje Marres will be a fellow in the Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University and participate in its symposium on non-knowledge this January http://tinyurl.com/zuk9c39

For more information and about the post (and to apply) please see the web link: Associate Professor Post CIM/QStep

SHEEN S. LEVINE and DAVID STARK Dec 2015

CIM is pleased to announce that Dr Ana Gross successfully defended her doctoral thesis on the 11th of November, 2015. Dr Gross' thesis, titled 'Data Types and Functions: A Study of Framing Devices and Techniques', was passed without amendments and received very favourable reviews from the examiners. CIM would like to congratulate Dr Gross on this fine achievement! Her thesis abstract follows.

Data Types and Functions: A Study of Framing Devices and Techniques

This thesis contributes to the sociology and anthropology of data by examining the techniques and devices that are deployed to frame data as part of methodological, ethical, economic, digital, journalistic and artistic practices. The thesis starts by tracing the lineage of the concept of frame as part of the traditions of cybernetic anthropology, artificial intelligence, social interactionism and science and technology studies to delineate a conceptual framework that can account for the contextualisation of data. Empirically, the project focuses on two data leaks and repurposes the materials that emerged from these as case studies that render visible how different techniques and devices make possible the formation of two distinctive data types: personal data and prices. The first case study examines the making and unmaking of search keywords as personal and it is based on the materials that arose from the leak of a search engine database in 2006. This case study looks at how techniques like reidentification demonstrations and data sequencing have contributed to define search keywords as being about and capable of signalling persons while also investigating how ethical devices like informed consent and anonymisation work to depersonalise data instead. The second case study compares compositional against disaggregated framings of prices and it is based on the materials that became available as a consequence of the attempted disclosure of the databases used to estimate a national inflation indicator in Argentina since 2006. This case study explores how product identification and data aggregation techniques contribute to frame the fluctuation of prices as part of the measurement and communication of national statistics while also studying digital scraping and imaging as devices that frame the observation and interpretation of retail price variation for financial use.