README.first is a bilingual collection of mini-essays, published in the run up to the Plokta filmfestival. We’ve asked writers, researchers, theorists, artists, programmers, and others to pick an online video that functions as a stepping stone for their thought and practice and to comment shortly on why they find the video so significant, funny, or outright disturbing. The resulting reflections speak about Silicon Valley obsessions, our mediated social lives, the impact of technology on centuries old games, and more.Plokta showcases film as a frame of socio-technological themes and discussions. With these essays we want to broaden the scope to one of the most significant developments in visual culture of the past decades: the rise of online video. At the Institute of Network Cultures (INC), online video has been a research topic already since 2007, in a continuous project named Video Vortex. Together, Plokta and INC, hope to stimulate reflections before, during and after the festival on what the moving image has to say to us.
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Lives of Data maps the historical and emergent dynamics of big data, computing, and society in India. Data infrastructures are now more global than ever before. In much of the world, new sociotechnical possibilities of big data and artificial intelligence are unfolding under the long shadows cast by infra/structural inequalities, colonialism, modernization, and national sovereignty. This book offers critical vantage points for looking at big data and its shadows, as they play out in uneven encounters of machinic and cultural relationalities of data in India’s socio-politically disparate and diverse contexts.Lives of Data emerged from research projects and workshops at the Sarai programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. It brings together fifteen interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners to set up a collaborative research agenda on computational cultures. The essays offer wide-ranging analyses of media and techno-scientific trajectories of data analytics, disruptive formations of digital economy, and the grounded practices of data-driven governance in India. Encompassing history, anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), media studies, civic technology, data science, digital humanities, and journalism, the essays open up possibilities for a truly situated global and sociotechnically specific understanding of the many lives of data.
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Ulus Baker (1960 – 2007) was a Turkish-Cypriot sociologist, philosopher, and public intellectual. He was born in Ankara, Turkey in 1960. He studied Sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, where he taught as a lecturer until 2004. Baker wrote prolifically in influential Turkish journals and made some of the first Turkish translations of various works of Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, and other contemporary political philosophers. His profuse and accessible work and the novelty of the issues he enthusiastically introduced to Turkish-speaking intellectual circles, earned him a widely spread positive reputation in early age. He died in 2007 in Istanbul.The text in this edition is edited from essays and notes Ulus Baker wrote between 1995 and 2002. In these essays, Baker criticizes the sociological research turning into an analysis of people’s opinions. He explores with an exciting clarity the notion of ‘opinion’ as a specific form of apprehension between knowledge and point of view, then looks into ‘social types’ as an analytical device deployed by early sociologists. He associates the form of ‘comprehension’ the ‘social types’ postulate with Spinoza’s notion of ‘affections’ (as a dynamic, non-linguistic form of the relation between entities). He finally discusses the possibilities of reintroducing this device for understanding our contemporary world through cinema and documentary filmmaking, by reinstating images in general as ‘affective thought processes’.Baker’s first extensive translation to English provides us with a much-needed intervention for re-imagining social thought and visual media, at a time when sociology tends to be reduced to an analysis of ‘big data’, and the pedagogical powers of the image are reduced to data visualization and infographics.
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In de afgelopen twee jaar heeft het Netwerk Applied Design Research (NADR) bewezen wat de meerwaarde is van lectorenplatforms. Door het bundelen van ontwerpgerichte lectoraten uit verschillende hogescholen is een gremium gecreëerd dat de gezamenlijke noemer ‘Applied Design Research’ op de kaart heeft kunnen zetten. Door zich vanuit gezamenlijkheid onder andere te presenteren op de Dutch Design Week heeft Applied Design Research in Nederland inhoud en gezicht gekregen als een waardevolle aanvulling op het bestaande ecosysteem rond toegepast en praktijkgericht onderzoek. Door juist die samenhang tussen lectoren te benadrukken en van daaruit te acteren is ‘Applied Design Research’ een aspect binnen de Nederlandse onderzoeksagenda geworden. Dat is een goede, maar slechts een eerste stap. De tweede stap is, naast doorgaan met verdieping van het onderwerp, het verankeren van het netwerk in de bredere onderzoekswereld door verbinden met andere thema’s en sectoren via cross-over samenwerking. Belangrijk daarvoor is dat we Applied Design Research als onderzoeksmethodologie kwalitatief goed kunnen definiëren, dat we de impact ervan zichtbaar kunnen maken en dat we de gewenste en noodzakelijke cross-over netwerken beter ontwikkelen. Met dit netwerk beogen we het onderscheidende karakter en de maatschappelijke relevantie van Applied Design Research te bestendigen. Juist daar waar kennis en praktijk elkaar vinden, zijn aspecten als creativiteit, vorm, uitvoering, systeem en gebruik van groot belang. Daarbij sluiten we direct aan op de impact thema’s uit de Strategische Onderzoeksagenda hbo en verbinden die ook onderling met elkaar. Daarmee heeft NADR een belangrijke taak, namelijk het verbinden van kennis richting een praktijkgerichte toepassing. Dit is geheel in lijn met de Topsector Creativiteit en de invulling van Kennis- en Innovatieagenda van ClickNL Dit project is een verdere bestendiging en verankering van die ambitie.
