[Air-L] [Book Announcement] Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India

[Sandeep Mertia]

Hello,


(Hope you are safe and well. Apologies for cross posting)


I’m happy to announce the publication of my edited volume, "*Lives of Data:
Essays on Computational Cultures from India*", with the Institute of
Network Cultures, Amsterdam <
https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/lives-of-data-essays-on-computational-cultures-from-india/>.
It is available for download in ePub and PDF formats and for
print-on-demand orders (Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International).


Foreword by Ravi Sundaram. Authors: Sandeep Mertia, Karl Mendonca,
Sivakumar Arumugam, Ranjit Singh, Puthiya Purayil Sneha, Lilly Irani,
Anumeha Yadav, Preeti Mudliar, Prerna Mukharya and Mahima Taneja, Guneet
Narula, Gaurav Godhwani, Noopur Raval, Aakash Solanki, and Anirudh Raghavan.


Blurb:
*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.

Reviews:
"This remarkable collection is the first major portrait and assessment of
the social and technical relationalities that constitute the ecology of big
data in India today. Equally remarkably, the authors represent the first
generation of scholars of digital media who speak through an Indian lens
while being totally conversant with the cutting edge of global scholarship
on big data."
— Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication,
New York University

"Wide-ranging and incisive, *Lives of Data* is essential reading for those
who wish to understand the seductions and contingencies of being or
becoming data-driven."
— Lisa Gitelman, author, *Paper Knowledge* and editor, *‘Raw Data’ Is an
Oxymoron*

...

Regards,

Sandeep Mertia

PhD Candidate, Dept. of Media, Culture, and Communication

New York University