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Lives of data

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.Lives of Data emerged from research projects and workshops at the Sarai programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. It brings together fifteen interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners to set up a collaborative research agenda on computational cultures. The essays offer wide-ranging analyses of media and techno-scientific trajectories of data analytics, disruptive formations of digital economy, and the grounded practices of data-driven governance in India. Encompassing history, anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), media studies, civic technology, data science, digital humanities, and journalism, the essays open up possibilities for a truly situated global and sociotechnically specific understanding of the many lives of data.

Digital desolation

The post-digital condition

'The Post-digital Condition' is the opening essay from the essay collection by INC's Miriam Rasch, Swimming in the Ocean: Texts from a Post-digital World, to be published in Dutch by De Bezige Bij in June 2017. The translation was done by Nadia Palliser, the (analogue) photos come from project Wendepunkt by Maarten van Riel.

Snow Fall in de polder

Interactive multimedia productions are a recent journalistic format. The format has been studied in the Anglo-Saxon context as digital longform and interactive documentary. Research has consequently focused on English language productions. This article presents an overview of these types of productions created in the Netherlands and also proposes an analytical apparatus and conceptualization that does justice to the main properties of this new genre; multimediality and interactivity. The results show that this journalistic form is mainly produced by established national newsrooms. Furthermore, the potential of digital media is used sparsely. Despite the use of complex narrative structures like multi-linear and non-linear stories, familiar media forms are used. Interactive features are mostly utilized to provide additional information to users.

Fictiocracy

Fic-ctio-cra-cy /ˈfɪkʃ(ə)krəsi/ n. pl. – cies. 1. Political regime that, implicitly or explicitly, considers the distinction between fact and fiction irrelevant. 2. A political or social unit that has such regime. 3. The principles of word-building and transmedia storytelling applied to politics and journalism. 4. The title of this longform. [French fictiocracie, from Late Latin fictiocratia]

Navigating Interactive Story Spaces

Over the past decade, journalists have created in-depth interactive narratives to provide an alternative to the relentless 24-hour news cycle. Combining different media forms, such as text, audio, video, and data visualisation with the interactive possibilities of digital media, these narratives involve users in the narrative in new ways. In journalism studies, the convergence of different media forms in this manner has gained significant attention. However, interactivity as part of this form has been left underappreciated. In this study, we scrutinise how navigational structure, expressed as navigational cues, shapes user agency in their individual explorations of the narrative. By approaching interactive narratives as story spaces with unique interactive architectures, in this article, we reconstruct the architecture of five Dutch interactive narratives using the walkthrough method. We find that the extensiveness of the interactive architectures can be described on a continuum between closed and open navigational structures that predetermine and thus shape users’ trajectories in diverse ways.