DATA FAILUREThis part of my research examines our global data infrastructure through particular ‘failures’, like data glitches and data breaches. What exactly is a ‘global data infrastructure’? It’s what I understand as the material resources and objects – like hardware and software, raw materials, and human resources – that are arranged to produce larger, dispersed and integrated systems for data distribution. ‘Data infrastructure’ is a helpful term because it accentuates the processes and structures of hegemony, imperialism and power through which data is trafficked. The case studies I work with constitute counter-narratives to that which we are asked to embrace as fail-safe: a data infrastructure unerring, efficient, and above all else, devoid of human intervention.
Gloved Fingertips and Severed Hands: Digitizing Labour in the Google Books Project The first case study on data failure explores the (invisible) labour involved in the Google Books Project by reconstructing a narrative of the Scan-Ops, a group of yellow badge workers responsible for digitizing millions of texts that exist in relative secrecy. Fleeting glimpses of the Scan-Ops are found in the imprints left behind in the scanned pages of books: a gloved fingertip, a severed hand. These traces constitute a partial perspective on the supporting acts or gestures of labour. Prompted by what José Estebon Muñoz (2009) refers to as, “ephemera as trace”, I engage in a reading of these fragments as an ephemeral glitch archive in order to locate the supporting acts and integrated circuits of labour that are in fact material but that are sequestered virtually. Interpreting these physical traces or glitches from such a purview summons the invisible work marginalized groups have performed throughout the history of computing and draws attention to the backstage supporting acts of digital culture writ large.
Publications: (Forthcoming) Gloved Fingertips and Severed Hands: Digitizing Labor in the Google Books Project. In Shawna Ross and Andrew Pilsch (Eds.) Humans at Work in the Digital Age: Forms of Digital Textual Labor. Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities Series. New York: Routledge Press Presented at: Toronto Film and Media Seminar. Digital Humanities and/as Cinema and Media Studies. TIFF Bell Lightbox. March 23, 2018. Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). Toronto, Ontario. March 14-18, 2018. The Computable Self and the Politics of Data. McMaster University. March 10, 2017.
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