Description
Book SynopsisHaunted Data explores the concepts that are at work in our complex relationships with data. Our engagement with data big or small is never as simplistic or straightforward as might first appear. Indeed, Blackman argues that our relationship with data is haunted with errors, dead ends, ghostly figures, and misunderstandings that challenge core assumptions about the nature of thought, consciousness, mind, cognition, affect, communication, control and rationality, both human and non-human.Using contemporary controversies from weird science' including the field of priming and its uncanny relations to animal telepathy, as well as artificial intelligences and their curious relation to psychic research (clairvoyant computers'), Blackman shows how some of the current crises in science in these areas reveal more than scientists are willing or even able to acknowledge. In addition to proposing a new theory of how we might engage with data,
Haunted Data also provides a nuanced sur
Trade ReviewBe prepared to be haunted in the best way possible: spooked over and over again by joy and wonder. Lisa Blackman tells stories of the ghosts of sciences past, present, and future, stories that will shake affect studies to its bones. -- Gregory J. Seigworth, Professor of Communication Studies, Millersville University, USA
Eschewing the straight path of data analytics, Lisa Blackman has written an alien phenomenology of datafication that returns to us the haunted life of data, its affective ghosts and afterlives. A study in the psychomediation of datafied software culture, Blackman offers a unique and important contribution to the critical study of contemporary computational media. -- Tiziana Terranova, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and New Media, University of Naples, Italy
Table of ContentsPreface: Haunted Data Part 1: Priming and Networked Affect: data mediation and media contagions 1.Transmedial Storytelling, Weird Science and Archives of the Future 2.Social Media Contagion(s): An analysis of Priming Controversies within Cognitive Science 3.Data-mediation and Hauntological Analysis: The “Clever Hans Charge” Part 2: Feeling Futures: Mediating Futures 4.Feeling the Future 5.Pornception and Big Data 6.Open Science and Quantum Matters 7.Conclusion: Affect and Archives of the Future Index
