We are excited to announce the publication of “Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India” with the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. It is available for download in ePub and PDF formats, and for print-on-demand orders: https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/lives-of-data-essays-on-computational-cultures-from-india/
Lives of Data maps the historical and emergent dynamics of big data, computing, and society in India. Data infrastructures are now more global than ever before. In much of the world, new sociotechnical possibilities of big data and artificial intelligence are unfolding under the long shadows cast by infra/structural inequalities, colonialism, modernization, and national sovereignty. This book offers critical vantage points for looking at big data and its shadows, as they play out in uneven encounters of machinic and cultural relationalities of data in India’s socio-politically disparate and diverse contexts.
“This remarkable collection is the first major portrait and assessment of the social and technical relationalities that constitute the ecology of big data in India today. Equally remarkably, the authors represent the first generation of scholars of digital media who speak through an Indian lens while being totally conversant with the cutting edge of global scholarship on big data.’ — Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
“Wide-ranging and incisive, Lives of Data is essential reading for those who wish to understand the seductions and contingencies of being or becoming data-driven.” — Lisa Gitelman, author, Paper Knowledge and editor, ‘Raw Data’ Is an Oxymoron