Situating data cultures and infrastructures: André Brock, Gabriele de Seta and Jill Walker Rettberg

Our personal data is used and reused in many different ways on many different platforms. This panel explores three approaches to analysing social media and other digital media, each emphasising ways in which models of the internet and digital culture need to be specific, local and situated.

This one-hour video workshop will feature ten-minute talks by three scholars of digital culture followed by small group discussions in breakout rooms and finally a 20-30 minute plenary discussion.  

André Brock speaks about his recent book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (NYU Press, 2020), which places issues of race and ethnicity as inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Brock proposes critical technical discourse analysis (CTDA) as a method that prioritizes "the epistemological standpoint of underrepresented groups of technology users" (Distributed Blackness page 6). Brock is Associate Professor of Black Digital Studies at Georgia Institute of Technology

Gabriele de Seta discusses his forthcoming paper "Gateways, sieves, and domes: On the infrastructural topology of the Chinese Stack", in which he extends Benjamin Bratton's model of the stack through three sociotechnical configurations to discuss the geopolitics of Chinese digital infrastructures. De Seta is a postdoctoral researcher on the Machine Vision project at the University of Bergen. 

Jill Walker Rettberg presents situated data analysis, which she introduced in her new paper "Situated data analysis: a new method for analysing encoded power relationships in social media platforms and apps", published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications in June 2020. Rettberg is professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen.