“I demand, I insist, that everything around me shall henceforth be measured, tested, certified, mathematical, and rational. One of my tasks must be to make a full survey of the island, its distances and its contours, and incorporate all these details in an accurate surveyor’s map. I should like every plant to be labeled, every bird to be ringed, every animal to be branded. I shall not be content until this opaque and impenetrable place, filled with secret ferments and malignant stirrings, has been transformed into a calculated design, visible and intelligible to its very depths!”

–Michel Tournier, Friday; or, The Other Island (Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique), 1967

The quote above captures an attempt to stave off madness, and it’s the first thing that comes to mind whenever someone brings up data-driven science or the quantified self movement. Now I don’t mean to suggest that either of these activities is mad, but the quest to measure everything makes me nervous, even while it fascinates me.

Robert P. Crease, author of World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement, wrote an interesting piece for the NYTimes this weekend on measurement and its discontents. In it he describes two different ways of measuring things:

“In one kind of measuring, we find how big or small a thing is using a scale, beginning point and unit. Something is x feet long, weighs y pounds or takes z seconds. We can call this ‘ontic’ measuring, after the word philosophers apply to existing objects or properties. But there’s another way of measuring that does not involve placing something alongside a stick or on a scale. This is the kind of measurement that Plato described as ‘fitting.’ This involves less an act than an experience: we sense that things don’t ‘measure up’ to what they could be. This is the kind of measuring that good examples invite. Aristotle, for instance, called the truly moral person a ‘measure,’ because our encounters with such a person show us our shortcomings. We might call this ‘ontological’ measuring, after the word philosophers use to describe how something exists.

It’s obvious which kind of measurement is preferred or privileged in the examples I provided above, and Crease explains:

“As the modern world has perfected its ontic measures, our ability to measure ourselves ontologically seems to have diminished. We look away from what we are measuring, and why we are measuring, and fixate on the measuring itself … [But] in our increasingly quantified world, we have to determine precisely where and how our measurements fail to deliver. Now that we have succeeded in defining the kilogram by an absolute universal standard, we still have to remind ourselves of the human purposes that led us to create the kilogram in the first place, and always to make sure that the kilogram is serving us, and not the other way around.”

So why do we measure ourselves? The Quantified Self website tagline is “self knowledge through numbers” but the purpose or benefit of this knowledge is less clear. Ethan Zuckerman, who attended the recent Quantified Self Conference, notes that people self-track in order to “test the effectiveness of an intervention” or “monitor and understand the dynamics of a particular indicator,” and that one of the benefits might be that a “personal science could help a much broader range of people.” However, he also points out that “most self-trackers aren’t sharing their data very widely, both due to privacy concerns (will my health insurance provider cut me off if they discover I’m a restless sleeper? That I only walk 3000 steps a day?) and in part because sharing and aggregating data may not have easily apparent benefits.” This seems to suggest that if the data collected are mostly useful to the person collecting them, then the primary benefit is self-improvement or self-management. Zuckerman distinguishes this from surveillance data that are useful to others, but in my mind, self-surveillance is still surveillance. And, honestly, I’m really not a fan of self-improvement if it seeks to make people as efficient and productive as industrial machinery, or if it is considered to be a direct path to moral righteousness.

The quantified self, especially as a form of citizen science, is most often presented in terms of increased or improved agency. But I wonder what this agency actually allows people to do or be? How does it differ from what Foucault described as disciplinary power, and a relation of docility and utility with our bodies? (In the scenarios he described, internalised discipline removes the need for externalised force and violence because monitoring and regulation are self-imposed.) Put more bluntly, if our bodies are still just cogs in a machine then being the machine operator is surely only a limited improvement, or lateral shift in power, rather than a revolutionary change in the order of things.

For that kind of wholesale change to occur, I think we need to recapture our “ontological” measuring capacities and capabilities. Of course it’s ludicrous to claim that ontic measurements and quantifiable data are useless, but as I’ve argued before, “by implicitly supporting the notion that scientific data are the [most] appropriate types of evidence a citizen can collect, political action relies on conformity to existing structures of knowledge and power.” And the potential for action is also further complicated by “the capacity (or incapacity) of people to make sense of the data collected, not to mention their willingness (or unwillingness) to act as data collectors in the first place.” What I want to suggest is that we also need other ways of measuring that are equally valued. Ways that are more experiential, more qualitative and more ambiguous–and therefore more inviting of critical interpretation and debate.

What do others think?

Update: Ken Anderson left a comment that points to an interesting paper that includes a quote that nicely sums up some of my concerns:

“Where are the visualization tools that allow the contradictory and controversial nature of matters of concern to be represented? … What is needed … are tools that capture what have always been the hidden practices of modernist innovations: objects have always been projects; matters of fact have always been matters of concern. … What I am pressing for is a means for drawing things together – gods, non-humans, and mortals included.”

- Bruno Latour – keynote lecture for the Network of Design meeting of the Design History Society, Falmouth, Cornwall, 3 September 2008.

Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Antennae 9: Mechanical Animals (pdf)

“The main theme gathers together the work of a number of artists, scientists, and academics who over the past decade have relentlessly contributed to the creating, researching, and theorising of the cross-fields between nature and robotics. The issue resembles a journey of discovery into a fascinating alternative reality where the boundaries nature and technology are deceptively and at times disturbingly blurred.”

Antennae 13: Interspecies (pdf)

“Through the propelling enthusiasm and deep anxieties characteristic of recent post-humanism approaches, interspecies communication has become something of a chimerical entity. We all, in one way or another, communicate to animals, especially with our closest pets. The cat and the dog have co-habited with us long enough to allow the development of a shared syntax made of body language, sounds, habits and rituals which enable a bi-lateral communication. Anthropomorphism plays, of course, a part in our communicational exchanges with animals. When do we really see the real animal, or when do we just see ourselves reflected in it?”

Also:

Antennae 6: Rogue Taxidermy (pdf)
Antennae 7: Botched Taxidermy (pdf)
Antennae 12: Pig (pdf)

My Best Fiend. On the Productivity of Intellectual Enmities.
Lecture series, Autumn 2011

The Center for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP) / the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London
Organised by Michael Guggenheim

“My best fiend” is a lecture series, which invites scholars to reflect on their academic enemies (from movements: Marxism, to persons: Talcott Parsons, to disciplines: anthropology, to concepts: “the other”). The goal of the series is to investigate the productivity of intellectual enmities.

Science and Technology Studies has highlighted the productive role of controversies to produce epistemic objects and sort the world. Controversies align scholars with methods, theories and schools of thought, they produce orientation in otherwise confusing seas of research. But controversies also pigeonhole people into camps. They undeservedly identify complex research identities with schools and theories and create guilt-by-association. The lecture series is calling for an analysis of such constellations by the protagonists themselves.

Enemies are productive. They spark interest, they draw energy, people care about them and they care about us. Why else would people spend time denouncing this badly formulated concept of an esteemed colleague, decrying the neighbouring discipline that keeps misunderstanding the world, or keep on writing bad tempered footnotes about this mistaken theory – and thereby become complicit in this very unproductivity? Why do scholars choose this enemy and not another?

Enemies also often involuntarily direct ones thinking, researching and theorising. If an enemy posits a, people feel compelled to posit b. If she writes approvingly of c, we need to denounce it. An enemy can have more power over people’s thinking than they would probably like to have it. It is as if people are guided in their thinking not only from their research object, but by an unknown field of do’s and don’t’s, accumulated since the time of their studies, of where to go and look and where not to look.

The lecture series calls for analyzing the productivity of intellectual enemies. The speakers choose an enemy of their choice, and analyse his, her or its productivity for their own thinking, their research and their career. Doing so, they contribute to a new sociology of sociology. They revisit controversies and analyze them from within and beyond to engage in a sociological celebration of what they usually denounce.

All Lectures Tuesdays, 4.30-6pm, RHB 137

1st Nov.: Liz Moor (Goldsmiths)
Reflections on the Genesis of Intellectual Fiends

8th Nov.: Harry Collins (Cardiff)
Good and Bad Arguments With Friends, Idiots and People Without Integrity

6th Dec.: David Oswell (Goldsmiths)
Dances with Wolves: Latour, Machiavelli and Us

13th Dec.: Steve Fuller (Warwick)
Bruno Latour and Some Notes on Some Also Rans.

Taking Animals Apart: Exploring Interspecies Enmeshment in a Biotechnological Era
Sponsored by the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison
May 31-June 2, 2012
Madison, WI

Deadline for proposals: December 15, 2011

In our globalized, highly-industrialized society, human and nonhuman animals are enmeshed in surprising and often troubling ways. “Pharm” goats are living factories for the production of pharmaceuticals; honeybees are explosive-detectors in the “War on Terror;” and household pets – clothed and escorted in strollers – have become humanized companions. What do these sorts of enmeshments mean for us and our “human condition” as well as for our non-human animal counterparts? What do they mean for relationships among species?

The Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center and Program in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison is sponsoring a three-day conference to bring together advanced graduate students in animal studies, science and technology studies, and allied disciplines (English, History, Anthropology, and Fine Arts among others) to discuss the relationships between animal studies and STS. We welcome papers or projects that explore the overlap of humans and other organisms as well as their mutual interaction with technology. Each participant will present a pre-circulated paper, article, creative composition, or dissertation chapter for constructive feedback in a roundtable discussion with peers and with scholars from the University of Wisconsin.

Our keynote speaker will be Susan Squier — Brill Professor of Women’s Studies and English at The Pennsylvania State University; acting director of its Science, Medicine, Technology in Culture program; and author of Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet.

Mornings will include facilitated discussions on animal studies and STS as well as sessions on participants’ written work. In the afternoons, participants will attend field trips to sites of human-animal enmeshment in and around Madison. As part of the conference, artwork on the conference theme will be on display in a juried exhibition and honored at the keynote reception. A free public film screening of a movie on the theme of human-animal relations will conclude the conference weekend.

Modest travel stipends may be available from the Holtz Center at the University of Wisconsin to offset the costs of lodging, meals, and travel. The option to stay with local students will be available, should participants wish to do so.

Please send a paper proposal of 250 words and a curriculum vitae to Peter Boger at boger@wisc.edu or Jen Martin at jamartin4@wisc.edu by December 15, 2011. Accepted papers will be due April 30, 2012. Visual artists and creative writers of fiction, nonfiction or poetry should contact Heather Swan for more information at hsrosenthal@wisc.edu.

Proboscis’ Urban Tapestries: Public Authoring in the Wireless City project (2004-2007) changed what I thought digital storytelling could be and do, and its desire to explore what might constitute a 21st century Mass Observation still resonates deeply with me. I found myself thinking about this after the Powerhouse Museum‘s Seb Chan and Luke Dearnley presented on culture + heritage + digital at last week’s Web Directions South conference.

A few things from their preso have stuck with me, not least because they talked about some approaches to knowledge creation and dissemination that I think academics could put into practice more often. For example, over the past ten years museums have had to learn to give up some of their authority and control, or at least to understand authority and control a bit differently. Describing the current situation, they say:

“Now it is all about being a data provider, getting our knowledge and collections out into the community where they can be debated and gather feedback and attract interest. The social web and now the mobile web has made this possible at the kind of scale that wasn’t possible in 2001. At the same [time] we now have ‘contextual authority’ rather than what we previously imagined was ‘overall authority’.”

And when discussing collections, they raise some interesting points about location and scale:

“The other big change is that of scale. A collection like that of the Powerhouse used to feel ‘large’ but in actual fact it is tiny. Its value in the digital space now is no longer as an island but only in what it can contribute to national and international collections – a collection of collections. That’s a tough challenge for a State-funded museum whose majority of ‘visitors’ walking in the door live in Sydney. But at scale new possibilities emerge.

What this boils down to, at least in terms of traditional social and cultural research, is the necessity of being comfortable with the fact that we create only one of many types of knowledge, but also being comfortable with the fact that we already create the kind of contextual knowledge that can be used by others in ways we can only imagine. (I think that empirical researchers with a background in participant observation or action research are already well on board.)

But I’m reminded that I never learned about Mass Observation in my anthropology classes and, in retrospect, I think it was because in an era of privileged anthropologists exclusively studying the exotic Other, MO sought to create “an anthropology of ourselves” by recording the everyday lives of ordinary British people. In other words, “their” knowledge (both subject and object) wasn’t as good as “our” knowledge–and it didn’t belong in a formal education. But what if all ethnographic data were put together into a “collection of collections” with which people could do all sorts of things? Yale University’s Human Relations Area Files project has done a brilliant job of compiling a wide diversity of cultural materials, but when I used it to create the re/touch interaction design encyclopaedia, well, let’s just say that its digital format did precious little to help me. My point here is that we also need to work with digital media folks more often.

When I think of data visualisation and cultural heritage, I see extraordinary, but still largely untapped, potential–especially in terms of working with qualitative data that do not easily lend themselves to snappy charts and infographics. Locative media have, I think, fared much better in being able to represent less clear-cut or ephemeral information distributed across space and time, allowing us to see over and under things with extraordinary detail. (As an aside, I’m really looking forward to seeing the upcoming Convergence Special Issue on Locative Media.)

But I also remain convinced that data visualisation, either quantitative or qualitative, could be productively complemented by more critical explorations in data materialisation. I’ve written before about how materialisation can be more affective than visualisation, and while Timo Arnall and BERG get a lot of much deserved attention for gorgeous wireless visualisations like Immaterials and Wireless World, my favourite video of theirs has always been Nearness:

.

That single video did more to help me understand how RFID works than dozens of other papers and visualisations put together, and all because it didn’t just make the invisible visible, it made it physical or materialised it. As Jack Schulze explained:

“RFID is a complex and fairly abstract technology to grasp. We have to be careful in how we communicate with it. There are many leaps of imagination and understanding required to grasp it and hold a useful model of how it works and what is happening, let alone see how it maps usefully and elegantly into the world around us. The familiarity of the chain reaction form, means the audience quickly grasps that the normal kinetic transfer of force in the sequence is replaced by invisible forces that work very closely together. Like invisible digital breaths between objects. Because the form was familiar, our hope was the concept of nearness without touching would be clearly understood.”

But back to Seb and Luke’s presentation. They showed a bunch of interesting work, and I was completely taken by the New York Public Library’s historical menus project. Oh, how I wish that radishes would become popular again! But mostly I would love to see these data materialised as cookbooks and servingware.

The UK’s National Maritime Museum and Citizen Science Alliance‘s Old Weather project is also pretty impressive. As Fiona Romeo and Lucinda Blaser explain:

“A programme of citizen science allows our museum to link cutting-edge science and issues with our historic purpose and subjects. The Old Weather project also delivers a reusable interface for the distributed transcription of archive materials … The logbooks, which date from 1914 to 1923, contain previously untapped information about the weather, ships’ movements and daily events onboard. This data is not available anywhere else, and has the potential to advance scientific understanding of climate variability and change. By taking part in Old Weather, members participate in and gain an understanding of how climate science research is undertaken, data are processed and results used, allowing them to contribute towards important climate research activities.”

Of particular interest to me is how the project treats participants as collaborators in knowledge creation rather than as mere informants or labourers:

“The Citizen Science Alliance is guided by a philosophy that all projects must answer a real scientific research question. The projects must never waste the ‘clicks’, or time, of volunteers, who should be respected as collaborators, including, where appropriate, recognition as co-authors of academic papers.”

The transcription tool also allows for the recording of additional data that keeps volunteer participants interested and engaged:

“While there may be an initial pleasure in encountering the poetic language of the weather scale, there was a risk that the task of extracting observations would be considered ‘dry’ or repetitive after a short time. But our volunteers have been inspired by the real human stories that they discover in the logs and they capture weather data in order to follow the stories of vessels and people through to the end. In doing so, they gain an insight into life at sea during this time period. For example, they come to understand that enemy combat was not as common as they might have imagined, and there is much more in the logs to do with the practicalities of living life at sea.”

Again, the richness of this information and the experience of working with it really makes me want to see people making some ship dioramas!

But the final lesson from their project, I think, is relevant to all public cultural heritage data visualisation and materialisation projects:

1) Provide a platform for volunteers to share their data, findings and challenges;
2) Ensure that professional researchers enter into discussion with the volunteers, both to set specific challenges and provide feedback, but also to respond to the questions and interests that emerge from the community itself;
3) Release all of the analysed data back to the community, as soon as is practicable for the project.

And now, writing all this down just makes me realise how much I want the Counting Sheep project to be a solid exploration of what socially and culturally focussed design research can contribute to the visualisation and materialisation of cultural heritage…

The Yahoo Farm Diorama

“If you’re a both nature lover and a geek, you would certainly love the Yahoo Farm. The Yahoo Farm is a 60 cm wide diorama, sitting in your bedroom and bringing you online data from the Yahoo ecosystem.

For example, the wind mill rotation below is directly controlled by the wind speed outside (being connected to the Yahoo Weather API), the hand-painted backgrounds are switched according to the weather state, a new sheep is coming out of the barn each time one of your friends gets online on Yahoo Messenger, and each new email lights up a fruit in the Email Tree.”

The RoboFun Team developed and presented this at the 2011 Yahoo Open Hack in Bucharest, winning the Hacker’s Choice Award.

First of all, dioramas are totally awesome. And this tech is interesting and cute as.

UPDATE: Here are my presentation slides, notes and links.

See also: Ben Buchanan’s “big stonking post” and AJ Fisher’s discussion of the conference as “an atomic age World Fair” that made Web folks “think bigger.”

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I’m really looking forward to giving the opening keynote address at Web Directions South in Sydney next week.

In addition to all the fine web designers and developers that will be presenting, people interested in pervasive computing will want to catch Mike Kuniavsky on design [in|for|and] the age of ubiquitous computing and James Bridle on the robot-readable world.

Here’s the short abstract for my talk, A 21st Century Bestiary:

“When we think about what the Web is, and what it can be, we tend to focus on interactions between people and computers, or between people and other computationally-enabled things. But what happens when these ‘things’ are animals?

In this talk, Anne will discuss the role that animals have played in shaping the Web so far, how the Web is enabling new ways of interacting with animals, and what we might expect from a future of human-animal-computer interaction.

Covering everything from online farms and product traceability to animals that tweet and epizoic media, this talk will demonstrate that the Internet isn’t just made of cats, but also cows and birds and sheep and cockroaches and…”

If you’re there, please come say hello!