[Reader-list] Call for Abstracts - Lives of Data v2.0: Computing, Money, Media’ Workshop, 05-06 Jan 2018 | Deadline: 15 Oct 2017

[The Sarai Programme]

We are excited to announce the *‘Lives of Data v2.0: Computing, Money,
Media’ Workshop, on 05-06 January 2018*.

*Call for Abstracts*

The first ‘Lives of Data’ Workshop
<http://sarai.net/lives-of-data-workshop-january-5-7-2017/>, in January
2017, initiated engaging, cross-disciplinary conversations
<http://sarai.net/lives-of-data-workshop-report-recordings/> on the
historical, cultural, political, and technological conditions of
data-driven knowledge production and circulation in India and South Asia.
The workshop brought together a diverse group of interdisciplinary
researchers and practitioners with backgrounds in history of science,
anthropology, media and technology studies, software engineering, data
science, economics, and policy-making. The first workshop addressed a
region and polity emboldened by a futuristic nostalgia for sovereignty via
digitality and biometrics, and everyday ‘ends of history’ through
technological disruptions.

The Lives of Data v2.0 workshop aims to further examine the implications of
the data revolution, and the historical and emergent computational cultures
in India and South Asia. The workshop will build upon a mix of academic and
practice-based research on history of statistics, media and computational
cultures, politics and practices of data-driven governance, and big data
infrastructures and imaginaries.

In addition to the themes of the first workshop
<http://sarai.net/call-for-abstracts-lives-of-data-workshop/>, this
iteration will also focus on questions concerning digital money and machine
intelligence. In light of the currency demonetisation, forced cashless-ness
and the rise (and stagnation) of digital payments apps and
crypto-currencies, and the establishment of Goods and Services Tax Network
(GSTN), a centralised digital infrastructure for tax collection and
monitoring, it is crucial to look at digital money as a medium and a data
object. The new circuits of official income tax surveillance and analytics,
speculative finance, mobile wallet apps, and bitcoin brokers, generate and
operate through versatile, big data shadows; reconfiguring the meanings of
money, the ultimate medium of exchange.

On a related register of aggregation and monetisation of data, after AI,
the founding chairman of the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) and
the architect of Aadhaar, recently remarked that, “Data is its own means
<http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/gm1MNTytiT3zRqxt1dXbhK/Why-India-needs-to-be-a-data-democracy.html>”.
Irony aside, the conditions of possibility for such an accumulative
episteme of computing that informs technocratic claim-making about
disruptive potentials of data and machine intelligence, are yet to be
thoroughly examined. After the Indian Supreme Court’s August 2017 decision
to uphold Right to Privacy as a fundamental right
<https://www.scribd.com/document/357098939/SC-Right-to-Privacy-Judgment#from_embed>,
there is also a need take a fresh look at the affordances of digital media
in conjunction with the evolving boundaries of public and private.

Continuing our concerted efforts to map the proliferation of digital
technology <http://sarai.net/category/projects/social-media/> and media
infrastructures
<http://sarai.net/category/projects/media-and-information-infrastructures/>,
through academic and practice-based research, the workshop will explore the
substantive and performative bundling of different media-technology and
computational forms, which afford ‘disruption’. Expressions of such
bundling range from Machine Learning based assistive technologies and
chatbots, to the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones in
marriage video production, to name a few. Thus, a critical focus on both
the subtle and radical, mathematical and aesthetic shifts that have made
machine intelligence possible, is key to reflect upon the contemporary, and
its constitutive data objects, infrastructures, and imaginaries.
The key questions which the workshop will explore are:
– What is data? How is it imagined, collected, archived, developed,
scraped, parsed, mined, cleaned, used, interpreted, re-produced, circulated
and deleted?
– How do we map the relationships between data, infrastructure, and
knowledge production?
– How can we develop a historically and materially grounded understanding
of financialisation of data, and the emergence of media forms such as
digital money, mobile-wallets, and blockchains?
– What is the status of intermediaries in a world of extant devices,
paper-based records, cashless transactions, biometric authentications,
third-party apps, AI bots, and (leaky) MIS, among other things?
– What are the stakes involved in analysing the ever increasing volume,
velocity, variety and value of data? How do practitioners understand the
changing nature of their work with data?
– How do we conceptualise the data publics <http://datapublics.org/>?

Workshop themes include:
– Histories of State and Statistics, Classification, Enumeration, and
Planning
– Data, Memory, and Materiality: Archives, Paper/Digital Databases,
Warehouses, Data Centres, Server Farms
– Data Analytics in Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences
– Thinking through the ‘Digital’: Hardware, Code, Meta-Data, Formats,
Protocols, Programming Languages, Information Architectures, Algorithms,
Apps, APIs, Interfaces, Platforms, Dashboards, etc.
– Modelling and Engineering Performativity: Metrics, Ratings, Analytics
– Data Objects, Relationalities, Ontologies of Machine Learning
– ‘Beautiful Data <https://www.dukeupress.edu/beautiful-data>’: Design,
Aesthetics, Vision, and Visualisation
– Data-Driven Urbanism
<http://twentynine.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-217-socio-technical-imaginaries-of-a-data-driven-city-ethnographic-vignettes-from-delhi/>:
Geographies of Mobile Computing, Locative Apps and Social Media, GIS, and
Smart Cities
– Openness and Access amidst Data Shadows: Practices, Communities, and
Contestations around Open Data, Hacks, and Leaks
– Disruptive and Everyday Monetisation of Data: Digital Payments,
Cashless-ness, Speculative Flows, and Data/Value. #FinTech
#CryptoCurrencies #MobileMoney
– ‘SysAdmin <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_administrator>’ like the
State: Bio-Politics, Surveillance, User/Citizen, Governance, Policing, and
Law. #Demonetisation #Aadhaar #RightToPrivacy #DataProtectionLaw

 *The Sarai Programme invites submission of abstracts for the ‘Lives of
Data v2.0: Computing, Money, Media’ Workshop. Besides academic researchers,
we strongly encourage media, design, and software practitioners to apply
for the workshop. Abstracts should **not exceed 300 words**, and should be
sent to **dak at sarai.net* <dak at sarai.net> *by 15 October, 2017**, with the
subject heading ‘Proposal for the Lives of Data Workshop.’ Authors of the
selected abstracts will be notified by 30 October, 2017.*

*The workshop will be held on 05-06 January, 2018 at Sarai-CSDS, 29 Rajpur
Road, Delhi. The Sarai Programme will cover three days of accommodation for
outstation participants. In addition, participants from India will be
eligible for travel support.*

URL: http://sarai.net/call-for-abstracts-lives-of-data-v2-0-
computing-money-media-worksh
<http://sarai.net/call-for-abstracts-lives-of-data-v2-0-computing-money-media-workshop/>
*op/
<http://sarai.net/call-for-abstracts-lives-of-data-v2-0-computing-money-media-workshop/>*
*The Sarai Programme*
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
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