Final Project - Rohan

My final paper will build on my presentation in the Surveillance week about data subject access requests (DSAR) under data protection regulations such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

My approach to this topic builds on literature we have read in class about critical approaches to studying data, specifically by Andrejevic (2017), Cheney-Lippold (2017), Chun (2021), and Gaboury (2018). Their analyses focus on data collection, computation, and application, and thus center companies and other surveillant actors that collect and use digital data. However, I will also draw on critical data studies literature that points to different entry points in the genealogy of data, such as collection, storage, manipulation, abstraction, and sharing (e.g., Denton et al., 2021).

DSAR datasets represent a different moment in the genealogy of data: disclosure. Prior work has examined the politics of data disclosures. In particular, I have been reading work by Poirier (2022) in which she analyzes public data disclosures—either as regulatory requirements or transparency efforts by government agencies—as cultural texts that offer a unique epistemic vantage point through which we can learn not only about data but also about processes that accompany datafication.

In contrast, DSAR datasets are private, individualized disclosures. Most prior work I have read on individual disclosures are interested in individuals’ responses—for example, how their feelings or attitudes toward products or values change in response to awareness about data collection. But analyzing public stakes of individual disclosures is not without precedent. For example, Browne’s (2015) anecdote about filing FOIA requests to examine how Fanon had been surveilled reminds us that there is much to learn from traces of individualized surveillance.

Nevertheless, there is a novelty to DSAR datasets, primarily because GDPR and CCPA have begun taking effect in the past four years. Interest in and access to DSAR datasets is likely to increase as beneficiaries of each regulation take advantage of their new rights. In addition, new data protection regulations are being passed every year, many of which are modeled after GDPR and/or CCPA. Therefore, the politics of DSAR datasets are increasingly relevant.

My questions are: What are the cultural politics of DSAR disclosure datasets? What do they reveal about datafication and what are their potential implications for conceptualizing, imagining, and re-imagining data policy?

In terms of methods, I am interested in applying a framework offered by Poirier (2021) for studying datasets. She distinguishes between three approaches: a denotative approach examines technical definitions to clarify what data exists in a dataset, a connotative approach analyzes the implied cultural grammar, and a deconstructive approach scrutinizes absences in what is represented.

At the same time, I am also interested in thinking about DSAR disclosure datasets as technological products that prefigure their users and uses. To accommodate this, I’m interested in applying the walkthrough method (Light et al., 2018) on the DSAR disclosure datasets that I have received over the years from various apps and services. The walkthrough method is a way of reading a technical interface that combines STS with cultural studies. It begins with first selecting an object, like a mobile app, and evaluating its sociocultural and economic context by examining things like who created it, how it makes money, who can access it, why it was created. The second step is to step through the app, screen by screen, to systematically engage with it as an ideal user. The final step is to analyze these two sets of observations to explore the implications of the app’s structure, its origin, its expectations, and so forth. This approach complements Poirier’s modes of analysis by reading the expectations imposed by the app upon the user.

I will apply these methods to three DSAR disclosure datasets—likely from utility, media, and social apps. Ultimately, I’m excited to think through the public stakes of DSAR disclosure datasets as a way to think about the politics of data protection and privacy policy.


References

Andrejevic, M. (2017). To pre-empt a thief. International Journal of Communication, 11, 879–896.

Browne, S. (2015). Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press.

Cheney-Lippold, J. (2017). We are Data: Algorithms and the Making of our Digital Selves. NYU Press.

Chun, W. H. K. (2021). Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. MIT Press.

Denton, E., Hanna, A., Amironesei, R., Smart, A., & Nicole, H. (2021). On the genealogy of machine learning datasets: A critical history of ImageNet. Big Data & Society, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211035955

Gaboury, J. (2018). Becoming NULL: Queer relations in the excluded middle. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 28(2), 143-158. https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2018.1473986

Light, B., Burgess, J., & Duguay, S. (2018). The walkthrough method: An approach to the study of apps. New Media & Society, 20(3), 881–900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816675438

Poirier, L. (2021). Reading datasets: Strategies for interpreting the politics of data signification. Big Data & Society, 8(2), 20539517211029320. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211029322

Poirier, L. (2022). Accountable data: The politics and pragmatics of disclosure datasets. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 1446–1456. https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533201

Final Project -- Mahnoor

The Digital Museum

For my final project, I will consider the evolving relationship between the museum, as cultural institution and physical space, and the digital or virtual realm. More and more museums are digitizing not only their collections but gallery space itself. Not only can you browse a museum's collection through a slideshow function on its website, you can virtually meander through it. Here, for example, is a gallery in the Art Institute of Chicago. On a personal level, I was initially delighted to "walk through" the Art Institute. But as I continued to move from room to room, I came to the eerie realization that the space felt wrong. There is not another visitor in sight. Virtualizing the museum space certainly has upsides--it makes visiting a museum more accessible. However, at the same time, it alters the nature of the space completely, morphing a communal experience into a solitary one.

Further, while virtual museum spaces may be more accessible, there are still pitfalls. Digitizing collections, for example, has reinforced hierarchies of art rooted in imperial modes of cultural consumption. There was an interesting article published last year analyzing how the Google Arts and Culture platform, on which one can find the virtual Art Institute, has enacted “an unintentional digital amplification of conventional traditions of art collection and interpretation that dominate museum displays in larger Western cities” (Kizhner et al.). This digital re-inscription of harmful conceptions of the Other is something we have seen in Chun, Crawford, and many other scholars we have read this semester.

I am also interested in other topics within the broad umbrella of "The Digital Museum," which is one of the reasons I have decided to format my project according to the third provided project option, a three-article series written with the intention to submit to platforms like mediacommons or Flow Journal. While my first article will focus on the Google Arts and Culture platform, I also plan to explore the effect of the pandemic on museum spaces and the emergence of websites like VOMA, a virtual museum with no physical site whatsoever. Can a space like this, so radically different from a brick-and-mortar museum, even still be called a museum? Or is one's visual and tactile engagement with it more like one's engagement with a video game or a film? Is it a different kind of space, a new kind of medium or platform, all together?

Pratik Nyaupane final project

 My final project is a continuation of the ideas discussed during my presentation during the week we read and explored surveillance. Just as a refresher, I touched on the stadium, as a site where surveillance and datafication have significantly influenced. The stadium is a unique space that allows for meaning-making practices of community and belonging for many, yet the same space has also been one of difference, exclusion, control, and hyper-surveillance. My final paper will investigate how the technologization of the world’s game, soccer, or football as it is called around the globe, has allowed for the articulation, promotion, and authorization of violent and invasive surveillance and screening practices at the sports venues and beyond, reconstructing their spatial logic and effectively transforming the spectators’ experience. Stadia as significant sites for performing the nation in multiple ways, serve as an impetus for the state to exercise power and reconfigure dynamics of violence in various forms.  

The narrative that champions the use of technology as the way of sterilizing the stadia from violence, threats, and difference, conceals the displacement that precedes gentrification; the corporate interests in extracting data; the exclusionary and racial logic upon which the police operate, and how both players and fans embody the anxieties and tensions of nationalism and technologization in the global era. Thus, this project questions how the technologization of the stadium reconfigures how the space is socially, materially, and aesthetically constructed. Particularly I want to explore and investigate how the technologization of stadium produces knowledge informed by and that recursively shapes hegemonic logics of race, gender, class, and other demographic identities.

For the scope of this paper, I plan to analyze and investigate the recently built Banc of California Stadium, a soccer-specific stadium near Downtown Los Angeles and the campus of the University of Southern California. I contextualize the technologization of “The Banc” as it is referred to by its frequent patrons but through the framework of globalization, where the stadium is often a microcosm of the community or region it resides in. Globally, technological implementation has started to transform how the space inside and around the stadium is constructed, navigated, and experienced. However, it is also imperative to situate the stadium’s relationship with Los Angeles, valuing the rich historical and cultural understanding of the city and its members who play an important role as the subjects of spectators and the surveilled.

The Banc of California stadium, unlike other technologically advanced stadiums such as SoFi in Inglewood or Crypto.com Arena in Downtown Los Angeles, presents a uniqueness that allows for a rich cultural and localized analysis. The stadium was built specifically for the Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC) of Major League Soccer (MLS), who in their five short years have already created a community of members that dictate the culture of support. On any given match day, the stadium is occupied by a union of supporter groups who each equally share a passion not only for LAFC, but for their Korean heritage, or with the LGBTQ+ community, the Palestinian liberation movement, or other political and social causes (Barajas, 2022). The entire “North End” of the Banc has space for 3252 individuals and is a safe standing area, designed after the result of several stadium tragedies from overcrowding, stampeding, and crushing fatalities from various parts of the world but mainly the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 (Henderson et al, 2019). Not only is the North End of the Banc, safe standing, but is regarded as a “safe space” where members of marginalized identities are not only present, but openly displaying their identities through flags, chants, and banners. 

In many American sports, there is a strong nationalist and patriotic component to the performance within the stadium, and while that does exist in American soccer, the supporters and players often challenge those hegemonic ideas of American-ness. At a Major League Soccer match, one may likely see flags of other countries (including non-Latin American countries such as Palestine and Catalonia) more than the flag of the United States. With the prevalence of media objects that openly display signages of the Palestinian flag, gay and trans rights, anti-fascist and anti-Nazi slogans, and anti-state slogans (Zirin & Boykoff, 2019), I am fascinated by the ways in which security and surveillance technologies are deployed in the stadium to surveil the crowd. Ultimately, I am looking to investigate the stadium through the grounded frameworks that help critique and understand the notion of the datafied stadium and surveillance mechanisms through corporate and state authorities. 

Marisol Vasquez, Final Presentation

 

Introduction

For my presentation, I had planned on presenting some of the evidence and thinking behind a larger project. Broadly construed this piece will relate to questions regarding race, labor, and technology. In particular, I am interested in the role of silica—as an environmental material appearing in the history of computation—and its material relations related to devalued labor of sex work in a global Asias context. I’m adding some descriptions beneath my original slides, but I had planned on articulating some connections behind my objects of interest and precedents for my thinking. 

This quote appears in a passage from The World Computer, which Tania disliked, but I have been thinking about it quite literally in regards to silica as the materiality and metaphor of skin in the devalued labor of anthropomorphic AI sex robots. 

While I might be taking the quote related to silica out of context, I am still inspired by its provocation to consider the racialization of Asianness as devalued labor across the Transpacific—not only in terms of the visibility of ‘sex dolls,’ but also the invisibility of Asian labor in Southeast Asia and China constituting the material relations of mining silica, the laborers molding and painting the silica in factories, along with the materiality of silica as part of computation itself within AI sex robots. 

Silica sand mining has a strong projected growth rate in the Asia Pacific region. 

This article appears in Verge: Global Asias and discusses sand, silica, and silicon as different territories. This author also discusses where silica / silicon appear in undersea cables. I am perhaps situating this inquiry in a Transpacific context combining the overlap between Global Asias and Asian American, as part of a racialization of Asianness (the last point on Asian American coming later). 

Inspiration and Precedents

In the next slides, I discuss some earlier precedents and inspiration for this project. I wrote this project to consider Asian fashion labor, as set forth by scholars like Minh-Ha T. Pham and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. Here’s a short abstract: 

By analyzing the fashion performances of CFGNY, a queer Asian diasporic art collective, and their conceptual garments, this essay addresses the broader contradictions emergent between the visible and invisible race and class representations of Asian fashion labor in global capitalism. By deploying Jose Esteban Muñoz’s brown worldings, this article argues that CFGNY's construction of conceptual garments and their accompanying performances generate countervisualities through an attunement to brownness that troubles the dominant hegemony of fashion capitalism’s visuality. These countervisualities index to a temporal and spatial logic that disorients and collapses the uneven race and class hierarchies within contemporary Asian fashion labor and the afterlives of colonial labor from the Asian trades.

I am basically modulating this interested in Asian labor and how it emerges in Asian diasporic visual art and cultures (more on that down below). However, now I am focusing on sexuality inscribed into Asianness within a global framework.

I view Huan He’s work as a precedent to my research interests, not only for this project, but also for my dissertation interests. This passage offers a brief summary of his project. 

Primary Sources

I wrote a blog post about this film, it’s a recent documentary about China’s class hierarchies. I would consider this a Chinese-American and diasporic film because Kingdon is a Chinese American film director and much of her interest in starting this documentary originates from trying to understand or make sense of her heritage located in China, and feeling abstracted or distanced from it. This distance is often apparent through the observational mode of this documentary. I am interested in how and why Kingdon films the production of sex dolls as devalued form of labor related to gender, sexuality, and race.

This film, Air Doll by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, postulates a sentience within a blow-up sex doll. She has a silicone genitalia. This film, I believe, uses the performance of silicon as materiality and metaphor tied to the sexuality inscribed into Asianness. I’m not sure if this portrayal relates to Japanese comfort women. I’ve also been researching a bit on this article “Racist Attachments: Dakko-chan, Black Kitsch, and Kawaii Culture” by Erica Kanesada, even though this article isn't completely related to my interest, I think it sets a precedent for some of my concerns regarding commodification and circulation of a good.

Secondary Literatures

The Hypersexuality of Race by Celine Parreñas Shimizu

Traffic in Asian Women by Hyun Yi Kang

Dealing in Desire by Kimberly Kay Hoang

are some examples that have discussed sexuality, sex work, and Asian women.

Surrogate Humanity by Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski

The World Computer by Jonathan Beller

The Digitally Disposed by Seb Franklin

Working Abstract (Rough Draft)

Tanushree Core Post #4 (Labour)

Several of the readings for our module on Labour, contend with the idea of “invisible labour”, an almost subterranean “underwater” layer of work that is made invisible to cultivate the myth of the internet as a space of smooth flows, of a direct interaction between platform and user with no middlemen. 

I was quite intrigued by the connections the authors forged between race, gender, class heirarchies and this invisible labour. D’Ignazio and Klien, and Beller, all forge a connection between slavery, capitalism an computation. D’Ignazio and Klien, insist on the need to trace the virtual products of digital technology back to their source. In “Show Your Work”, they argue that forms of labour, beyond the writing of the code also need to be considered. This “underwater labour” - of managers, content moderators, customer service employees, among others - which puts together emotional and affective labour, and technical expertise, needs to be made visible. 

Roberts adds another layer of complexity to these ideas, arguing that there are many layers to the process of content moderation. First, the free labour of the users who flag content, and the labour of the content moderators. This work, which is usually outsourced to women in the global south, working at minimum wage, involves a great deal of emotional and affective labour, because they are confronted with a barrage of disturbing and violent content. 

These content moderation workers occupy an ambivalent sort of position - they are often underpaid and overworked, but they also have a key role in screening the content that we see online, often deciding the tone or “flavour” of the website. However, this is further complicated by the idea that social media sites have their own rules for content moderation, and image to uphold - all of which are quite inextricably connected to ad revenues and profit motives. So even when YouTube ostensibly takes on the responsibility of advocacy, by hosting testimonies against abusers on their platform, this must also be viewed through the ethical/moral prism of the idea that with each click, YouTube earns ad revenue. 

Sometimes, the jokes write themselves. (Tanushree, non-core post #2)

 

Tanushree Core Post #3 (Waste)

I found many continuities between our module on labour and the one on waste. Particularly in the authors’ engagement with the idea of the “invisibility”, first of digital labour, and then of digital waste. Questions of materiality and the digital have long dogged scholars of new media. And I was struck by the parallels between the excavation of the materiality of the digital image and its relation to the body, and the authors’ excavation of the invisible geographies and materials of information technology and computation.

Ensmenger, for instance, argues that if we only consider the consumption of digital technology, and don’t probe the circumstances of their production, we risk losing sight of its connection to older modes of production. He contends that the ostensible immateriality of the digital comes from a deliberate obfuscation of the circumstances of its labour, its geography, and its raw materials. Materiality then was never lost, and ideas of information technology as heralding an era of “clean” production without large material and environmental costs, were inherently flawed. 

Hogan’s ideas regarding Facebook and the “invisibilities of the archive” tie in with this quite neatly, the “cloud” and discourses of ephemerality that surround it, only serve to invisibilize the massive amounts of energy, resources and labour that goes into their creation, functioning and upkeep. 

If the “places and processes used to produce virtual commodities are very similar to those in traditional forms of manufacturing” - a more serious link could be forged between neo-liberal capitalism, the production of information technology, older forms of infrastructure, and older structures of power. Ensmenger, notes that sites for Bitcoin mining clustered around the power grid and nuclear power plants, which themselves built parallel to (and perhaps even in service of) railroad networks. This layering of infrastructures which challenges the idea of a the digital as a “break” of sorts from older infrastructures and production processes, also brings to light the question the idea of a layering of a politics of extraction, as countries in South America and South East Asia grapple with human rights violations and environmental degradation, in the tussle for rare earth minerals.