Thinking digital data metaphors…..
I am currently completing my new book, with the working title of Data Selves, to be published by Polity. Here is an excerpt from a chapter that looks at personal data materialisations.
We have to work hard to find figures of speech and ways of thinking to encapsulate the ontology of digital data. The concept of digital data, a first glance, appears to describe a wholly immaterial phenomenon that does not engage the senses: there seems to be nothing to look at, touch, hear, smell or taste. The metaphors and other figures of language employed to describe digital data are attempts to conceptualise and make sense of these novel forms of information and their ontologies. Even as digital technologies continue to generate and process detailed information about people’s bodies, social relationships, emotions, practices and preferences, prevailing discourses on these data tend to de-personalise and de-humanise them. The use of the…
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Digital learning PD Dr Ann Lawless 