Jess Bier
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 132852 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Jess Bier |
| NOMBRES | Jess |
| APELLIDO | Bier |
| FIRMA | BIER J |
| AFILIACIONES | Erasmus University Rotterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1928-6331 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 14 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 38 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 14 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2008 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2022 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Depth beyond 3D
In this study, I argue that attending to decolonial dimensions can add depth to studies of volume and capitalism more broadly. Bringing Black and Indigenous studies into conversation with the volume literature, I analyze several forms of dimension at work in the production of volume as a relational space that can incorporate, and exceed, 3D Cartesian grids. These are illustrated through an examination of the handling of shipping containers, an in…
Displacement without Redistribution
This article analyzes how capitalism is being reproduced through the digitalization of logistics. I examine two cases where efforts are made to digitalize container shipping workflows: a set of global standards for shipping data and a new “sustainable” platform for streamlining the movement of ships through port. In both cases, conceptions and practices of practicality shape digital infrastructures in ways that help maintain the uneven distributi…
It’s a small, small, small world
Drawing on Roy and Ong’s work on worlding, this article introduces the concept of orders of difference to analyze the selective incorporation of the nation-state into supranational political and economic systems. I argue that attending to orders of difference is necessary to better understand the ways that imagined equality is mobilized to reproduce global injustice. I do so through a combined examination of the liberal globalism of the iconic “I…
Algorithms as folding
This article proposes an analytical approach to algorithms that stresses operations of folding. The aim of this approach is to broaden the common analytical focus on algorithms as biased and opaque black boxes, and to instead highlight the many relations that algorithms are interwoven with. Our proposed approach thus highlights how algorithms fold heterogeneous things: data, methods and objects with multiple ethical and political effects. We exem…
Bodily circulation and the measure of a life
This article analyzes the process of body recovery that took place after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Focusing on how identification was intertwined with valuation, I show how notions of economic class informed decisions about which human bodies were fit for preservation as human bodies. The RMS Titanic steamship was a microcosm of social circulation in the early 20 th -century Atlantic, and life on board was systematically stratified acco…
Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine
The Colonizer in the Computer
Chapter 4, “The Colonizer in the Computer”, is an examination of how the colonial past and present can affect maps. The Palestinian Authority (PA), the provisional Palestinian government, was founded in the mid-1990s, and they were immediately charged with making their own maps. Their efforts roughly coincided with the second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation. As such it was part of the broader political practice of…
Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine
Maps are widely believed to be objective, and data-rich computer-made maps are iconic examples of digital knowledge. It is often claimed that digital maps, and rational boundaries, can solve political conflict. But Jess Bier challenges the view that digital maps are universal and value-free. She examines the ways that maps are made in Palestine and Israel to show how social and political landscapes shape the practice of science and technology. Ho…
Palestinian State Maps and Imperial Technologies of Staying Put
Maps are considered to be an ultimate expression of modernity. Empirical cartography plays a central role in daily governance, and it also has a long history of furthering displacement and erasure. In this article I argue that the landscapes of historic British colonialism and the ongoing Israeli occupation influence the digital maps made by the Palestinian Authority. Through an investigation into the borders, roads, and urban areas of one such m…
Building Better Ecological Machines
Computer models of the economy are regularly used to predict economic phenomena and set financial policy. However, the conventional macroeconomic models are currently being reimagined after they failed to foresee the current economic crisis, the outlines of which began to be understood only in 2007-2008. In this article we analyze the most prominent of this reimagining: Agent-Based models (ABMs). ABMs are an influential alternative to standard ec…
Participatory Knowledge Production 2.0
In recent years, the role of social media (also referred to as Web 2.0, user-generated content, participation, and crowd sourcing) in nearly all aspects of daily life has hardly been out of the new
Mapping census data for difference
Dimensions of Locality
As a world religion Islam is based on a highly abstract and absolute notion of the transcendent, which its followers establish and celebrate - in a seemingly contradictory fashion - at very specific sites: Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and the vast and complex landscapes of mosques and Muslim saints' shrines around the world. Sacred locality has thus become a paradigm for the relationship between the human and the transcendent, a model for urban plan…
How Niqula Nasrallah Became John Jacob Astor
In this article, I explore the physical afterlife of one victim of the 1912 Titanic disaster, the Syrian American businessman Niqula Nasrallah, whose remains would widely be identified as those of the famous multimillionaire John Jacob Astor. Syrian emigrants constituted 10-20 percent of the Titanic's third-class passengers, and their names were overwhelmingly altered as casualty lists were transmitted via an early form of radio. Such transformat…
Algorithms as folding
This article proposes an analytical approach to algorithms that stresses operations of folding. The aim of this approach is to broaden the common analytical focus on algorithms as biased and opaque black boxes, and to instead highlight the many relations that algorithms are interwoven with. Our proposed approach thus highlights how algorithms fold heterogeneous things: data, methods and objects with multiple ethical and political effects. We exem…
Mapping census data for difference
Depth beyond 3D
In this study, I argue that attending to decolonial dimensions can add depth to studies of volume and capitalism more broadly. Bringing Black and Indigenous studies into conversation with the volume literature, I analyze several forms of dimension at work in the production of volume as a relational space that can incorporate, and exceed, 3D Cartesian grids. These are illustrated through an examination of the handling of shipping containers, an in…
Palestinian State Maps and Imperial Technologies of Staying Put
Maps are considered to be an ultimate expression of modernity. Empirical cartography plays a central role in daily governance, and it also has a long history of furthering displacement and erasure. In this article I argue that the landscapes of historic British colonialism and the ongoing Israeli occupation influence the digital maps made by the Palestinian Authority. Through an investigation into the borders, roads, and urban areas of one such m…
How Niqula Nasrallah Became John Jacob Astor
In this article, I explore the physical afterlife of one victim of the 1912 Titanic disaster, the Syrian American businessman Niqula Nasrallah, whose remains would widely be identified as those of the famous multimillionaire John Jacob Astor. Syrian emigrants constituted 10-20 percent of the Titanic's third-class passengers, and their names were overwhelmingly altered as casualty lists were transmitted via an early form of radio. Such transformat…
Displacement without Redistribution
This article analyzes how capitalism is being reproduced through the digitalization of logistics. I examine two cases where efforts are made to digitalize container shipping workflows: a set of global standards for shipping data and a new “sustainable” platform for streamlining the movement of ships through port. In both cases, conceptions and practices of practicality shape digital infrastructures in ways that help maintain the uneven distributi…
Dimensions of Locality
As a world religion Islam is based on a highly abstract and absolute notion of the transcendent, which its followers establish and celebrate - in a seemingly contradictory fashion - at very specific sites: Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and the vast and complex landscapes of mosques and Muslim saints' shrines around the world. Sacred locality has thus become a paradigm for the relationship between the human and the transcendent, a model for urban plan…
Bodily circulation and the measure of a life
This article analyzes the process of body recovery that took place after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Focusing on how identification was intertwined with valuation, I show how notions of economic class informed decisions about which human bodies were fit for preservation as human bodies. The RMS Titanic steamship was a microcosm of social circulation in the early 20 th -century Atlantic, and life on board was systematically stratified acco…
Dimensions of Locality
As a world religion Islam is based on a highly abstract and absolute notion of the transcendent, which its followers establish and celebrate - in a seemingly contradictory fashion - at very specific sites: Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and the vast and complex landscapes of mosques and Muslim saints' shrines around the world. Sacred locality has thus become a paradigm for the relationship between the human and the transcendent, a model for urban plan…
How Niqula Nasrallah Became John Jacob Astor
In this article, I explore the physical afterlife of one victim of the 1912 Titanic disaster, the Syrian American businessman Niqula Nasrallah, whose remains would widely be identified as those of the famous multimillionaire John Jacob Astor. Syrian emigrants constituted 10-20 percent of the Titanic's third-class passengers, and their names were overwhelmingly altered as casualty lists were transmitted via an early form of radio. Such transformat…
Mapping census data for difference
Participatory Knowledge Production 2.0
In recent years, the role of social media (also referred to as Web 2.0, user-generated content, participation, and crowd sourcing) in nearly all aspects of daily life has hardly been out of the new
Building Better Ecological Machines
Computer models of the economy are regularly used to predict economic phenomena and set financial policy. However, the conventional macroeconomic models are currently being reimagined after they failed to foresee the current economic crisis, the outlines of which began to be understood only in 2007-2008. In this article we analyze the most prominent of this reimagining: Agent-Based models (ABMs). ABMs are an influential alternative to standard ec…
Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine
The Colonizer in the Computer
Chapter 4, “The Colonizer in the Computer”, is an examination of how the colonial past and present can affect maps. The Palestinian Authority (PA), the provisional Palestinian government, was founded in the mid-1990s, and they were immediately charged with making their own maps. Their efforts roughly coincided with the second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation. As such it was part of the broader political practice of…
Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine
Maps are widely believed to be objective, and data-rich computer-made maps are iconic examples of digital knowledge. It is often claimed that digital maps, and rational boundaries, can solve political conflict. But Jess Bier challenges the view that digital maps are universal and value-free. She examines the ways that maps are made in Palestine and Israel to show how social and political landscapes shape the practice of science and technology. Ho…
Palestinian State Maps and Imperial Technologies of Staying Put
Maps are considered to be an ultimate expression of modernity. Empirical cartography plays a central role in daily governance, and it also has a long history of furthering displacement and erasure. In this article I argue that the landscapes of historic British colonialism and the ongoing Israeli occupation influence the digital maps made by the Palestinian Authority. Through an investigation into the borders, roads, and urban areas of one such m…
Bodily circulation and the measure of a life
This article analyzes the process of body recovery that took place after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Focusing on how identification was intertwined with valuation, I show how notions of economic class informed decisions about which human bodies were fit for preservation as human bodies. The RMS Titanic steamship was a microcosm of social circulation in the early 20 th -century Atlantic, and life on board was systematically stratified acco…
Algorithms as folding
This article proposes an analytical approach to algorithms that stresses operations of folding. The aim of this approach is to broaden the common analytical focus on algorithms as biased and opaque black boxes, and to instead highlight the many relations that algorithms are interwoven with. Our proposed approach thus highlights how algorithms fold heterogeneous things: data, methods and objects with multiple ethical and political effects. We exem…
It’s a small, small, small world
Drawing on Roy and Ong’s work on worlding, this article introduces the concept of orders of difference to analyze the selective incorporation of the nation-state into supranational political and economic systems. I argue that attending to orders of difference is necessary to better understand the ways that imagined equality is mobilized to reproduce global injustice. I do so through a combined examination of the liberal globalism of the iconic “I…
Depth beyond 3D
In this study, I argue that attending to decolonial dimensions can add depth to studies of volume and capitalism more broadly. Bringing Black and Indigenous studies into conversation with the volume literature, I analyze several forms of dimension at work in the production of volume as a relational space that can incorporate, and exceed, 3D Cartesian grids. These are illustrated through an examination of the handling of shipping containers, an in…
Displacement without Redistribution
This article analyzes how capitalism is being reproduced through the digitalization of logistics. I examine two cases where efforts are made to digitalize container shipping workflows: a set of global standards for shipping data and a new “sustainable” platform for streamlining the movement of ships through port. In both cases, conceptions and practices of practicality shape digital infrastructures in ways that help maintain the uneven distributi…
Law (10 obras) · Political science (10 obras) · Sociology (10 obras) · Law (8 obras) · Economics (7 obras) · Computer Science (6 obras) · History (6 obras) · Geography (5 obras) · Politics (5 obras) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (4 obras)