PHIL 607: Seminar in Data Genealogy

Looking for an NMCC class to take this Spring? Interested in engaging with our contemporary data-driven society through a philosophical and historical lens? Try Colin Koopman’s PHIL 607: Seminar in Data Genealogy

“What makes possible the formatting of selfhood that we perform on social media?  What motivates our idyllic dreams for big and ever-bigger data?  What historical cunning informs the obsessive surveillance of today’s corporate and governmental surveillance regimes?  How new—and how old—are new media, cutting-edge information technologies, and the informatics of our present?

The course will have two aims in taking up these questions.  Firs, through the  philosophical methodologies of archaeology and genealogy associated with the work of Michel Foucault and media archaeologist Friedrich Kittler.  Equipped with this methodological apparatus, we will consider various approaches to what might be considered a genealogy (in a broader sense) of contemporary informational assemblages.  The class will draw on a variety of disciplines and read (at a relatively quick pace) texts authored by philosophers and historians of science, historians of technology, historians of literature, and a range of other critical genealogists.  Some of the books we will read from include Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud, Bernard Harcourt’s Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, and James Purdon’s Modernist Informatics: Literature, Information, and the State.”

***

Colin is currently working on a book manuscript project on these subjects, tentatively entitled How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person.  The project engages with contemporary debates in new media theory and political theory in order to frame an argument around early twentieth-century informatics technologies in such domains as personality psychology, identity documentation, and the racialization of property. See more about Colin on his blog.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *