Data as Symbolic Form

Datafication and the Imaginary Media of W. E. B. Du Bois

Datos Bibliográficos

ID11069878
AutoresDavid Bering-Porter (autor de correspondencia)
Año2022
Volumen48
Número2
Páginas262-285
Fecha de publicación2022-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCritical Inquiry (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0093-1896 • E-ISSN: 1539-7858
EditorialUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/717308
OpenAlexW4200270216
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas4

This article explores datafication as a speculative discourse that fundamentally and instrumentally misunderstands data, not as a representational system, but as an ontology. This analysis of datafication takes a semiotic and media-archaeological approach to datafication, understanding it as an imaginary media system, and the article looks to supplementary discourses in data visualization and big data to clarify and expand an understanding of datafication as a prescriptive and speculative idea. This critique is sharpened through the exploration of a detailed study of the early visualizations and unpublished fictions of W. E. B. Du Bois, whose imagined technology of the “megascope” gives a remarkable blueprint for contemporary discourses in data visualization and data science. Du Bois’s liberatory perspective is contrasted to a more paranoid example coming from the self-documented delusional system of Daniel Paul Schreber, who provides a much different vision of a totalizing media system in the form of an Aufschreibesysteme, which seems to presage another side of datafication as a surveillance system. Taken together, datafication, the megascope, and the Aufschreibesysteme work as three speculative media that imagine themselves as different instances or visions of a totalizing media system, a notion that has become especially significant in the technological, cultural, and economic systems of the twenty-first century

Aesthetics · Art · Blueprint · Epistemology · Perspective (graphical · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Imaginary · Vision · Visual arts · Anthropology · Data Visualization and Analytics · Philosophy · Psychology