[NetBehaviour] The Lived Logics of Database Machinery

[info]

The Lived Logics of Database Machinery
A one-day workshop organised by Computational Culture
(http://www.computationalculture.net/)

Date: Thursday 28th June
Location: Central London

With many of the most significant changes in the organisation and
distribution of knowledge, practices of ordering, forms of communication
and modes of governance taking shape around it, the database has
remained surprisingly recalcitrant to anything other than technical
forms of analysis. Its ostensibly neutral status as a technology has
allowed it to play a significant - yet largely overlooked - role in
modelling of populations and configuring practices, from organisational
labour through knowledge production to art.

The importance of the database for gathering and analysing information
has been a theme of many studies (especially those relating to
surveillance) but the specific agency of the database as an active
mediator in its own right, as an actor in constructing, organising and
modifying social relations is less well understood.

A one-day workshop, organised by Computational Culture seeks to rectify
this state of affairs. We are looking for proposals for papers,
interventions, poster presentations and critical accounts of practical
projects that address the theme of the social, cultural and political
logics of database technologies.

Proposals should aim to address the intersection of the technical
qualities of databases and their management systems with social or
cultural relations and the critical questions these raise. We are
particularly interested in work that addresses the ways in which
entity-relations models, or structures of data-atomisation, become
active logics in the construction of the world. Historical
contributions that tease out the connections between the database
'condition' and antecedent technical and theoretical objects (from
indexes and archives to set theory), or which develop critical accounts
of transparency are also particularly welcome.

The focus of the workshop on the lived social dynamics and political
logics of database technologies is envisaged as a means of opening up
paths of enquiry and addressing questions that typically get lost
between the ‘social’ and the ‘technological’:
• How do the ordering of views, permissions structures, the
normalisation of data, and other characteristic forms of databases
contribute to the generation of forms subjectivity and of culture?
• What impact does the need to manage terabytes of data have on
knowledge production, and how can the normative assumptions embedded in
uses of data and database technologies be challenged or counter-effectuated?
• What conceptual frameworks do we need to get a hold on the
operational logics of the database and the immanence of social
categorization to relational algebras?
• Is there a workable politics available for exploring strategies of
data management, the commonalities and differences of practices in
different settings - from genome sequence archiving through supply chain
management to medical records and cultural history?

Abstracts of around 500 words should be sent to
editorial at computationalculture.net by March 9th

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