IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB779695946

Databases and Doppelgängers: New Articulations of Power (2018)

Robinson, Sandra (Author)

Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology
Volume: 26
Issue: 4
Pages: 411-440

URI: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/705084

DOI: 10.1353/con.2018.0035

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Surveillance Power (social sciences) Social media Relational databases; management Big data Data mining Data collection; methods Databases 21st century

This article explores the power and efficacy of databases as part of the turn to intensive datafication in contemporary life in which we are all enfolded within a datafied milieu: a catalogued and curated data assemblage comprising aspects of our life. This assemblage of people, processes, and things is described as having a generative power—data power—producing not the "one" profiled individual, but the many multiple proxies out of the data assemblage. I reimagine the profiled individual through the literary figure of the doppelgänger: a data doppelgänger that gestures to difference and repetition and all that is ambiguously changeable within digital culture. Thinking with the data doppelgänger to interrogate the profiling apparatus enables a more complex understanding of data power beyond panoptic metaphors that ground the subject in descriptive and spectral terms rather than performative simulations. To illustrate aspects of the contemporary profiling apparatus, I briefly explore the troubling relationship between Facebook and the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to demonstrate how effective profiling systems are when enriched with large, social datasets.

...More

Citation URI

http://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB779695946/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Boris Jardine; Matthew Drage; (2018)
The Total Archive: Data, Subjectivity, Universality (/isis/citation/CBB683350181/)

Essay Review Martha Poon; (November 2016)
Review Essay: Corporate Capitalism and the Growing Power of Big Data (/isis/citation/CBB247254530/)

Book Viktor Mayer-Schönberger; Kenneth Cukier; (2013)
Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform how We Live, Work, and Think (/isis/citation/CBB394194579/)

Article Anu Masso; Maris Männiste; Andra Siibak; (2020)
‘End of Theory’ in the Era of Big Data: Methodological Practices and Challenges in Social Media Studies (/isis/citation/CBB632756299/)

Article Stephen P. Weldon; (2018)
Building Infrastructure in the Digital Age: Case Study of the Isis Bibliography of History of Science, 2002-2018 (/isis/citation/CBB244630894/)

Book Colin Koopman; (2019)
How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person (/isis/citation/CBB981384434/)

Article Niccolò Tempini; Sabina Leonelli; (October 2018)
Concealment and discovery: The role of information security in biomedical data re-use (/isis/citation/CBB165158249/)

Book Bruno J. Strasser; (2019)
Collecting Experiments: Making Big Data Biology (/isis/citation/CBB580929859/)

Thesis Michael C. Castelle; (2017)
Transaction and Message: From Database to Marketplace, 1970-2000 (/isis/citation/CBB873579988/)

Article Rui Costa; (2018)
The Internet of Moving Things (/isis/citation/CBB210233176/)

Article Alexander Trauth-Goik; (December 2019)
"Constructing a Culture of Honesty and Integrity": The Evolution of China's Han-centric Surveillance System (/isis/citation/CBB323886145/)

Article Jeremy Trevelyan Burman; (2018)
Through the Looking-Glass: PsycINFO as an Historical Archive of Trends in Psychology (/isis/citation/CBB529674486/)

Article Włodzimierz Gogołek; (2017)
Refining Big Data (/isis/citation/CBB158654943/)

Article Shi, Yong; (Winter 2014)
Big Data History, Current Status, and Challenges going Forward (/isis/citation/CBB511260715/)

Article David Moats; Liz McFall; (2019)
In Search of a Problem: Mapping Controversies over NHS (England) Patient Data with Digital Tools (/isis/citation/CBB339833803/)

Article Peter M. Asaro; (June 2019)
AI Ethics in Predictive Policing: From Models of Threat to an Ethics of Care (/isis/citation/CBB655687648/)

Book Jim Thatcher; Andrew Shears; Josef Eckert; (2018)
Thinking Big Data in Geography: New Regimes, New Research (/isis/citation/CBB720972061/)

Article Watts, Duncan J.; (Winter 2013)
Computational Social Science: Exciting Progress and Future Directions (/isis/citation/CBB953214411/)

Book Germaine Halegoua; (2020)
Smart Cities (/isis/citation/CBB219487083/)

Article Hallam Stevens; (2017)
A Feeling for the Algorithm: Working Knowledge and Big Data in Biology (/isis/citation/CBB599481425/)