A Mackenzie
Biographic Data
| ID | 4645 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Mackenzie |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Mackenzie |
| SIGNATURE | MACKENZIE A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lancaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2174-4645 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1874 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
‘This is a House’: Large Image Collections and Their Platform Embeddings
This paper analyses the active role of image collections in supporting platforms and their operations. Large image collections are increasingly present on media, scientific and other platforms. A case study of Facebook’s predictive modelling of satellite images of human settlement exemplifies how image collections are changing. The treatment of images in a predictive model – a deep neural network – constructs a condensed indexical field, a field …
Some-any: Approximating personalization in contemporary ensembles
The paper situates personalization by comparing widely used numbering practices on social media and other digital platforms. It draws on A.N. Whitehead's analysis of approximation to identify how probabilities and hashes, two key approximating practices, combine to configure platforms and individual users. It shows how personalization in a typical social media setting, the Instagram Explore Page, both distributes individual differences in a stati…
Images of the arXiv: Reconfiguring large scientific image datasets
In an ongoing research project on the ascendancy of statistical visual forms, we have been concerned with the transformations wrought by such images and their organisation as datasets in ‘re-drawing’ knowledge about empirical phenomena. Historians and science studies researchers have long established the generative rather than simply illustrative role of images and figures within scientific practice. More recently, the deployment and generation o…
Experience Distributed in the Biodiversity Science-Base
Critics of biodiversity science and environmental governance point to exclusion and absence of diverse experience from science-based governance, sometimes effectively dividing domains of science and experience/values. This paper, following an alternate line of thought drawn from John Dewey’s Nature and Experience, analyses a series of scientific publications on biodiversity from 1989-2020. It argues that experience abundantly populates the biodiv…
Mapping Platform Urbanism: Charting the Nuance of the Platform Pivot
Urban planners are increasingly working with ideas around datafied cities, such as platform urbanism, to understand urban life and changes with technology. This article seeks to assist urban planners in these efforts by analysing and mapping the qualities of platform urbanism. Drawing on a dataset of approximately 100 examples that detail urban data practices, we trace some of the current tendencies that are shaping the nature and dynamics of pla…
Personalization and probabilities: Impersonal propensities in online grocery shopping
Accounts of big data practices often assume that they target individuals. Personalization, with all the risks of discrimination and bias it entails, has been the critical focus in accounts of consumption, government, social media, and health. This paper argues that personalization through models using large-scale data is part of a more expansive change in probabilization that, in principle, is not reducible to individual or 'personal' attributes …
Five rules of thumb for post-Elsi interdisciplinary collaborations
In this paper we identify five rules of thumb for interdisciplinary collaboration across the natural and social sciences. We link these to efforts to move away from the ‘ethical, legal and social issues’ framework of interdisciplinarity and towards a post-ELSI collaborative space. It is in trying to open up such a space that we identify the need for: collaborative experimentation, taking risks, collaborative reflexivity, opening-up discussions of…
Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology, and the Social
How do new media affect the question of social memory? Social memory is usually described as enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions ? phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how social memory should be understood in an age of digital computing, instant updating, and interconnection in real time, is very…
Taking Roles in Interdisciplinary Collaborations: Reflections on Working in Post-Elsi Spaces in the UK Synthetic Biology Community
Based on criticism of the “ethical, legal and social implications” (ELSI) paradigm, researchers in science and technology studies (STS) have begun to create and move into “post-ELSI” spaces. In this paper, we pool our experiences of working towards collaborative practices with colleagues in engineering and science disciplines in the field of synthetic biology. We identify a number of different roles that we have taken, been assumed to take, or ha…
Programming subjects in the regime of anticipation: Software studies and subjectivity
The economic principles of industrial synthetic biology: Cosmogony, metabolism and commodities
Synthetic biology has been presented as the application of engineering principles to (genomic) biology. But in industrial synthetic biology, alongside the much discussed engineering principles of abstraction, modularity, de-coupling and standardisation, we see many other practices of contextualisation through which engineering projects accrue credibility and realisability. This paper discusses how synthetic biologists working on next-generation b…
Synthetic biology and the technicity of biofuels
Climate variability over the last two millennia in the North American Monsoon region, recorded in laminated lake sediments from Laguna de Juanacatlán, Mexico
High-resolution titanium (Ti) data obtained using an ITRAX XRF core scanner from a laminated sediment core from the Laguna de Juanacatlán, western central Mexico yield a unique high-resolution record of runoff (precipitation) change for the last 2000 years. In the absence of reliable, long-term meteorological records, comparison of the Ti data with information from the rich Spanish colonial period archives and the post-Independence period, confir…
Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology
Economic case study of ash reactivation for a generic 150 MWe Canadian circulating fluidized bed combustor
Reactivation of circulating fluidized bed combustor (CFBC) ash (mainly spent Ca‐based sorbent) has received much attention over the past 25–30 years, because of the inefficiency of the sulphur capture process. A wet grinding reactivation process, developed by CANMET Energy Technology Centre‐Ottawa (CETC‐O) and University of Toronto, has recently shown promising results in pilot‐ and demonstration‐scale testing. The process is effective in improvi…
Mobile Technologies of the City
JavaTM: The practical virtuality of internet programming
The general equation between the virtual and new media which prevailed during much of the 1990s is now openly regarded as untenable. Yet another sense of the virtual remains operative in the eventfulness of new media as cultural-technological processes. This article analyses the practices of ‘the virtual’ at work in the production, circulation and representation of the internet programming language and software platform, Java. Drawing from recent…
Is the actual world all that must be explained? The sciences and cultural theory: Review essay of Manuel Delanda, Intensive Science, Virtual Philosophy (2002) and Isabelle Stengers, The Invention of M…
(2005). Is the actual world all that must be explained? The sciences and cultural theory: review essay of Manuel Delanda, Intensive Science, Virtual Philosophy (2002) and Isabelle Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science (2000) Journal for Cultural Research: Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 101-116
Bringing sequences to life: How bioinformatics corporealizes sequence data
Sequence databases have become more visible through the heavy publicity associated with the Human Genome Project. This paper looks at some of the emerging artefacts and systems developed to read, write, order and visualise sequence data and other kinds of biological data retrieved from databases and databanks such as GenBank. It argues that bioinformatics software can be regarded as a symptom of a broad and powerful transformation in biological k…
Specimens of Native Australian Languages
Climate variability over the last two millennia in the North American Monsoon region, recorded in laminated lake sediments from Laguna de Juanacatlán, Mexico
High-resolution titanium (Ti) data obtained using an ITRAX XRF core scanner from a laminated sediment core from the Laguna de Juanacatlán, western central Mexico yield a unique high-resolution record of runoff (precipitation) change for the last 2000 years. In the absence of reliable, long-term meteorological records, comparison of the Ti data with information from the rich Spanish colonial period archives and the post-Independence period, confir…
Personalization and probabilities: Impersonal propensities in online grocery shopping
Accounts of big data practices often assume that they target individuals. Personalization, with all the risks of discrimination and bias it entails, has been the critical focus in accounts of consumption, government, social media, and health. This paper argues that personalization through models using large-scale data is part of a more expansive change in probabilization that, in principle, is not reducible to individual or 'personal' attributes …
Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology, and the Social
How do new media affect the question of social memory? Social memory is usually described as enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions ? phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how social memory should be understood in an age of digital computing, instant updating, and interconnection in real time, is very…
Synthetic biology and the technicity of biofuels
Specimens of Native Australian Languages
Some-any: Approximating personalization in contemporary ensembles
The paper situates personalization by comparing widely used numbering practices on social media and other digital platforms. It draws on A.N. Whitehead's analysis of approximation to identify how probabilities and hashes, two key approximating practices, combine to configure platforms and individual users. It shows how personalization in a typical social media setting, the Instagram Explore Page, both distributes individual differences in a stati…
JavaTM: The practical virtuality of internet programming
The general equation between the virtual and new media which prevailed during much of the 1990s is now openly regarded as untenable. Yet another sense of the virtual remains operative in the eventfulness of new media as cultural-technological processes. This article analyses the practices of ‘the virtual’ at work in the production, circulation and representation of the internet programming language and software platform, Java. Drawing from recent…
Specimens of Native Australian Languages
Bringing sequences to life: How bioinformatics corporealizes sequence data
Sequence databases have become more visible through the heavy publicity associated with the Human Genome Project. This paper looks at some of the emerging artefacts and systems developed to read, write, order and visualise sequence data and other kinds of biological data retrieved from databases and databanks such as GenBank. It argues that bioinformatics software can be regarded as a symptom of a broad and powerful transformation in biological k…
Is the actual world all that must be explained? The sciences and cultural theory: Review essay of Manuel Delanda, Intensive Science, Virtual Philosophy (2002) and Isabelle Stengers, The Invention of M…
(2005). Is the actual world all that must be explained? The sciences and cultural theory: review essay of Manuel Delanda, Intensive Science, Virtual Philosophy (2002) and Isabelle Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science (2000) Journal for Cultural Research: Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 101-116
Mobile Technologies of the City
JavaTM: The practical virtuality of internet programming
The general equation between the virtual and new media which prevailed during much of the 1990s is now openly regarded as untenable. Yet another sense of the virtual remains operative in the eventfulness of new media as cultural-technological processes. This article analyses the practices of ‘the virtual’ at work in the production, circulation and representation of the internet programming language and software platform, Java. Drawing from recent…
Economic case study of ash reactivation for a generic 150 MWe Canadian circulating fluidized bed combustor
Reactivation of circulating fluidized bed combustor (CFBC) ash (mainly spent Ca‐based sorbent) has received much attention over the past 25–30 years, because of the inefficiency of the sulphur capture process. A wet grinding reactivation process, developed by CANMET Energy Technology Centre‐Ottawa (CETC‐O) and University of Toronto, has recently shown promising results in pilot‐ and demonstration‐scale testing. The process is effective in improvi…
Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology
Climate variability over the last two millennia in the North American Monsoon region, recorded in laminated lake sediments from Laguna de Juanacatlán, Mexico
High-resolution titanium (Ti) data obtained using an ITRAX XRF core scanner from a laminated sediment core from the Laguna de Juanacatlán, western central Mexico yield a unique high-resolution record of runoff (precipitation) change for the last 2000 years. In the absence of reliable, long-term meteorological records, comparison of the Ti data with information from the rich Spanish colonial period archives and the post-Independence period, confir…
Programming subjects in the regime of anticipation: Software studies and subjectivity
The economic principles of industrial synthetic biology: Cosmogony, metabolism and commodities
Synthetic biology has been presented as the application of engineering principles to (genomic) biology. But in industrial synthetic biology, alongside the much discussed engineering principles of abstraction, modularity, de-coupling and standardisation, we see many other practices of contextualisation through which engineering projects accrue credibility and realisability. This paper discusses how synthetic biologists working on next-generation b…
Synthetic biology and the technicity of biofuels
Taking Roles in Interdisciplinary Collaborations: Reflections on Working in Post-Elsi Spaces in the UK Synthetic Biology Community
Based on criticism of the “ethical, legal and social implications” (ELSI) paradigm, researchers in science and technology studies (STS) have begun to create and move into “post-ELSI” spaces. In this paper, we pool our experiences of working towards collaborative practices with colleagues in engineering and science disciplines in the field of synthetic biology. We identify a number of different roles that we have taken, been assumed to take, or ha…
Five rules of thumb for post-Elsi interdisciplinary collaborations
In this paper we identify five rules of thumb for interdisciplinary collaboration across the natural and social sciences. We link these to efforts to move away from the ‘ethical, legal and social issues’ framework of interdisciplinarity and towards a post-ELSI collaborative space. It is in trying to open up such a space that we identify the need for: collaborative experimentation, taking risks, collaborative reflexivity, opening-up discussions of…
Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology, and the Social
How do new media affect the question of social memory? Social memory is usually described as enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions ? phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how social memory should be understood in an age of digital computing, instant updating, and interconnection in real time, is very…
Personalization and probabilities: Impersonal propensities in online grocery shopping
Accounts of big data practices often assume that they target individuals. Personalization, with all the risks of discrimination and bias it entails, has been the critical focus in accounts of consumption, government, social media, and health. This paper argues that personalization through models using large-scale data is part of a more expansive change in probabilization that, in principle, is not reducible to individual or 'personal' attributes …
Mapping Platform Urbanism: Charting the Nuance of the Platform Pivot
Urban planners are increasingly working with ideas around datafied cities, such as platform urbanism, to understand urban life and changes with technology. This article seeks to assist urban planners in these efforts by analysing and mapping the qualities of platform urbanism. Drawing on a dataset of approximately 100 examples that detail urban data practices, we trace some of the current tendencies that are shaping the nature and dynamics of pla…
Images of the arXiv: Reconfiguring large scientific image datasets
In an ongoing research project on the ascendancy of statistical visual forms, we have been concerned with the transformations wrought by such images and their organisation as datasets in ‘re-drawing’ knowledge about empirical phenomena. Historians and science studies researchers have long established the generative rather than simply illustrative role of images and figures within scientific practice. More recently, the deployment and generation o…
Experience Distributed in the Biodiversity Science-Base
Critics of biodiversity science and environmental governance point to exclusion and absence of diverse experience from science-based governance, sometimes effectively dividing domains of science and experience/values. This paper, following an alternate line of thought drawn from John Dewey’s Nature and Experience, analyses a series of scientific publications on biodiversity from 1989-2020. It argues that experience abundantly populates the biodiv…
‘This is a House’: Large Image Collections and Their Platform Embeddings
This paper analyses the active role of image collections in supporting platforms and their operations. Large image collections are increasingly present on media, scientific and other platforms. A case study of Facebook’s predictive modelling of satellite images of human settlement exemplifies how image collections are changing. The treatment of images in a predictive model – a deep neural network – constructs a condensed indexical field, a field …
Some-any: Approximating personalization in contemporary ensembles
The paper situates personalization by comparing widely used numbering practices on social media and other digital platforms. It draws on A.N. Whitehead's analysis of approximation to identify how probabilities and hashes, two key approximating practices, combine to configure platforms and individual users. It shows how personalization in a typical social media setting, the Instagram Explore Page, both distributes individual differences in a stati…
Computer Science (15 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Data science (7 works) · Political science (6 works) · Engineering (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · World Wide Web (5 works) · Biology (4 works) · Artificial Intelligence (3 works)