Book Club (in-person & online)
Book Club (in-person & online) In-Person / Online
Join us to discuss How we Became our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person, by UO Philosophy Professor Colin Koopman. Unlimited access to the e-book is available at this link. Each week we will focus on a section of the book--details will be emailed to registered participants. Feel free to attend even if you didn't do the reading! Prof. Koopman will attend at least one meeting (TBD) to answer your burning questions about his work.
We will be meeting in-person in the Sofa area of the DREAM Lab in Knight Library. Coffee and cookies will be provided. Attendees will also have the option to join via Zoom.
More about the book: We are now acutely aware, as if all of the sudden, that data matters enormously to how we live. How did information come to be so integral to what we can do? How did we become people who effortlessly present our lives in social media profiles and who are meticulously recorded in state surveillance dossiers and online marketing databases? What is the story behind data coming to matter so much to who we are?
In How We Became Our Data, Colin Koopman excavates early moments of our rapidly accelerating data-tracking technologies and their consequences for how we think of and express our selfhood today. Koopman explores the emergence of mass-scale record keeping systems like birth certificates and social security numbers, as well as new data techniques for categorizing personality traits, measuring intelligence, and even racializing subjects. This all culminates in what Koopman calls the “informational person” and the “informational power” we are now subject to.
- Dates & Times:
- 12:00pm - 1:00pm, Friday, January 20, 2023
12:00pm - 1:00pm, Friday, February 3, 2023
12:00pm - 1:00pm, Friday, February 17, 2023
- Time Zone:
- Pacific Time - US & Canada (change)
- Location:
- Knight DREAM Lab Sofa Area (122B)
- Campus:
- Knight Library
- Categories:
- Data Management Databases Geospatial Programming > Python Programming > R Statistics Version Control Visualization
Professor Koopman writes that summaries of parts of the book are available elsewhere in:
- An early preivew piece on 'Infopolitics' from the New York Times (2014) and my more recent New York Times piece on Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal (2018)
- "Information before information theory: The politics of data beyond the perspective of communication" in New Media and Society
- "Infopolitics, Biopolitics, Anatomopolitics: Toward a Genealogy of the Power of Data" in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal
- Or, see my talk "New Media, New Power?" at the University of Utah, or a more recent presentation on "Infopolitics" at my undergrad alma mater
