scholarly journals Datastructuring—Organizing and curating digital traces into action

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 205395171879911 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikkel Flyverbom ◽  
John Murray

Digital transformations and processes of “datafication” fundamentally reshape how information is produced, circulated and given meaning. In this article, we provide a concept of “datastructuring” which seeks to capture this reshaping as both a product of and productive of social activity. To do this we focus on (1) how new forms of social action map onto and are enabled by technological changes related to datafication, and (2) how new forms of datafied social action constitute a form of knowledge production which becomes embedded in technologies themselves. We illustrate the potential of the datastructuring concept with empirical examples which also serve to highlight some new avenues for research and some empirical questions to explore further. We suggest a focus on datastructuring can ignite scholarly debates across disciplines that may share an interest in the technological configurations, sorting activities, and other socio-material forces that shape digital spaces, but which are rarely brought together. Such cross-disciplinary conceptualizations may give more attention to how information is structured and organized, becomes “algorithmically recognizable”, and emerges as (in)visible in digital, datafied spaces. Such a concept, we suggest, may help us better understand the novel ways in which “backstage datawork” and “data sorting processes” gain traction in political interventions, commercial processes, and social ordering.

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 340-357
Author(s):  
Daniel P. Rhodes

AbstractTheological Action Research (TAR) is a way of doing and teaching theology and forming students that surmounts the problems associated with both formal theologies and theological ethnographies. Drawing from models of action research developed in other fields, this paper outlines an approach to teaching practical ministry grounded in a collaborative mode of inquiry capable of generating new insights into humanity's relation to God while also engendering the ethical-political powers that give shape to collective life. As a process of what anthropologist Lia Haro calls eth-o-graphy, Christian formation and knowledge production cannot be disconnected from cooperative participation in communities of practice dedicated to this kind of social, ecclesial activity. The paper goes on to describe how the author has begun to implement this TAR model at a Catholic, Jesuit institution, offering some promising preliminary findings on the potential it holds for training ministry students.


2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aziz Choudry

Research is a major aspect and fundamental component of many social struggles and movements for change. Understanding social movement networks as significant sites of knowledge production, this article situates and discusses processes and practice of activist research produced outside of academia in these milieus in the broader context of the ‘knowledge-practice’ of social movements. In dialogue with scholarly literature on activist research, it draws from the author’s work as an activist researcher, and a current study of small activist research non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with examples from movement research on transnational corporate power and resistance to capitalist globalization.. It explicates research processes arising from, and embedded in, relationships and dialogue with other activists and organizations that develop through collaboration in formal and informal networks; it contends that building relationships is central to effective activist research practice. In addition to examining how activist researchers practice, understand and validate their research, this paper also shows how this knowledge is constructed, disseminated and mobilized as a tool for effective social action/organizing.


Author(s):  
Andreas B. Kilcher

AbstractEarly modern literature has high epistemological claims. In particular, the novel as the most innovative genre of the 16th and 17th centuries was expected to negotiate and transmit knowledge about the world in an extensive way. This epistemological optimism must be understood against the background of contemporary encyclopaedic models, which offered new possibilities of reaching out for universal and total knowledge. Two variants of encyclopaedic writing are most efficient for the novel: the logic of Lullism and the miscellaneous knowledge production of Polyhistorism. Both techniques were used in baroque novels of the 17th century: Polyhistorism produced a centrifugal dispersion of knowledge throughout the texts, whereas Lullism aimed at recollecting and ordering it. This interplay is evidently present in Daniel Casper von Lohenstein’s highly digressive 3,000 page novel „Arminius“ (1689/90), with its paratextual framework of prefaces, annotations, and indices. Moreover, the reception of „Arminius“ in 18th and 19th centuries is pertinent for the subsequent critique of encyclopaedic knowledge.


2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-117
Author(s):  
I.S. Duisenova ◽  

The article deals with the problems of social anxiety in the context of social activity. Social action is one of the phenomena of everyday life, so the study of anxiety that suddenly occurs in familiar conditions for a person, and its manifestations in social relations occupies an important place in sociological science today. Attempts to explain this were made using the works of T. Parsons, Y. Habermas, and G. Garfinkel. Various manifestations and forms of social anxiety affect the social actions of society.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-79
Author(s):  
Nicholas Gamso

AbstractThrough a reading of Teju Cole’s novel Open City (2011), this article argues that the exposure of black migrants constitutes the principal organizing conceit of global literary culture and knowledge production. The novel’s protagonist, a Nigerian emigre named Julius, is faced with ceaseless scrutiny as he traverses urban spaces in the US, Europe, and West Africa, meeting other migrants. In staging Julius’ encounters with others, the novel allegorizes a structure of racialized subjection continuous with the modern history of western epistemology and glaringly present in the contemporary. Yet it also provides grounds for a recursive ethic of opacity, which Julius eagerly endorses. The article surveys critical studies of race, migration, infrastructure, and world literature, in addition to Cole’s writings on photography. The aim is not only to uncover the logics of racialization at play in the enactment of culture, but also to conceive of culture itself as a historical infrastructure of privation and control.


1989 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelica Fargas-Babjak

Acupuncture is one of the oldest healing methods which is used in traditional medicine. in modern medicine we are witnessing a renaissance of this ancient treatment applied mainly in the management of chronic pain. A number of modern technological changes are being applied to replace, or modify, the classical needle treatment Among many of the modalities used at present are light, in the form of laser, and electrical stimulation. CODETRON TENS, the novel addition to Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS), has been evaluated in a clinical trial, over a two year period, in a multidisciplinary pain clinic on patients who came for acupuncture therapy. Indications, effectiveness and experiences with this form of treatment are presented.


Meliora ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther Goldberg

This thesis attends to the slippages between life and nonlife in Emily Fridlunds 2017 novel History of Wolves. It traces the matter that is granted life or animacy, as well as the matter that is devitalized. Through the protagonist, Linda, the novel investigates the role of both scientific knowledge production and Christian Science in placing arbitrary biological limits on life forms, making some visible and others unseeable and unsayable. The thesis fleshes out the characters’ climate denial as yet another erasure of the animate agents. Ultimately, the thesis asks: if we can expand what is worthy of life, can we, in turn, expand what agents, actors, and matters are deserving of care?  


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Clisby

ABSTRACT In this introduction to this special issue about creative community activism in global contexts, we draw together key conceptual and methodological principles of this collection. We begin from the standpoint that equality is a cultural artefact, a socio-cultural and political product specifically located in time and space and as such subject to creation and re-creation. Creative activism offers us a medium to both engage with and take action on issues of culture and gender in/equality. Through the creative activisms explored here, communities, researchers, and artists combine social action with creativity and arts to challenge inequalities, promote positive futures, and enable socio-cultural wellbeing in innovative ways that can be simultaneously engaging and participatory, and decolonising and democratising. They underscore how through creative activism hierarchies of power and knowledge production and lived experiences of in/equalities can be explored, understood, and contested.


Author(s):  
Zorina Serhiivna Vykhovanets

Urgency of the research. The evolutionary path of transformation prevented the destruction of traditionally accepted ways of organizing collective interaction, so the issue of socio-historical dynamics of the formation of a certain system of social life undoubtedly remains relevant. Target setting. The basis of the social order is created by the typology of social action, which has a historical character and is manifested in various social structures. Hence the idea of combining social and spiritual-cultural projects of society formation in the philosophy of theism, and the process of their implementation provides a mechanism for conceptualizing holistic social order. Actual scientific researches and issues analysis. The sources of our research were the works of such famous thinkers as M. Weber, J. Dewey, E. Durkheim, N. Luhmann, T. Parsons and others. Theoretical and methodological analysis of the concept "social activity - spirituality - culture" is presented in the works of such domestic scientists as A. Yermolenko, S. Krymskyi, M. Popovych and many others. Uninvestigated parts of general matters defining. The analysis of the complex problem of solving the phenomenon of formation of the ideal typology of social action with the help of the spiritual and practical potential of philosophical theism is carried out in the scientific literature for the first time. The research objective. To investigate the phenomenon of social action in the constructions of the philosophy of theism. The statement of basic materials. The national cultural space includes a complex configuration of a combination of value-rational actions, which ensures the formation of the characteristic features of the national tradition of building a social form of life. Philosophical theism has a huge culturological and social significance, because due to the differential set of its forms it acts as a mediator between religious principles and socio-cultural environment. Conclusions. The ideas of philosophical theism are always in the nature of philosophical conceptualization, which is carried out on the basis of a certain religious and cultural tradition and has a specific historical and semantic dimension. Philosophical theism, thanks to the possibilities of forming an ideal typology of social action, provides a process of unique combination of the spiritual potential of the Christian tradition and the modern socio-legal structure of basic European values to ensure fundamentally stable foundations of social order.


2019 ◽  
pp. 69-73
Author(s):  
O.A. Vertiyevets

Социальное конструирование в информационно-коммуникативной сфере является важнейшим элементом современного информационно-коммуникативного пространства. Лавинообразное увеличение объемов информации и коммуникативных взаимодействий сформировало информационно-коммуникативные потоки, захлестнувшие человека. Это расширило рамки используемых им социокультурных паттернов. Включенность в потоковые информационно-коммуникативные структуры значительно сократило возможности рефлексивного осмысления и переработки получаемой информации, внедрив в современные информационно-коммуникативные практики пассивно-созерцательные схемы восприятия. В статье раскрываются и анализируются модели социального конструирования в информационно-коммуникативном поле стратегии и технологии мифологизации и симулякризации информации, направленной на управляющее ментальное воздействие в сфере индивидуального сознания отдельных людей, образующих целевые аудитории, и на общественное сознание выделенных сообществ со сходными идентификационными признаками целевых групп.Modern people, immersed in intensive information and communication flows, do not perceive the surrounding world on the basis of personal experience, subordinated to the algorithmized authorized requirements of the normative value system of the society. They perceive it through these flows determination by protocols and algorithms of everyday sociocultural practices and mental schemes frames, focused on maintaining social consensus. The actualization of the mental algorithms and schemes, sanctioned in the community and integrated in the common information and communication field in the context of information redundancy, has led to the predominance of subconscious immediate reactions to what is happening in the environment of the event thus, the choice of social actions becomes an instant reaction based on the choice of a particular model of social action, and this choice is actually prescribed by the collective unconscious. Under these conditions, the more communicative support in the form of repetitions, judgments of various experts and analysts such information receives (public response), the more active people and social institutions act in the given vector of social activity. The preservation and deepening of the asymmetry of distribution and interpretation of information in society results in the homogenization of meanings. The perception of the outside world based on personal experience is replaced by a visually illustrated description of events and life conflicts in the media that generate mediareality, including in social networks in the Internet space. Social roleplaying narratives are common there. The result is a sociocommunicative field with high emotional stress, which produces an emotional echo in the public opinion of the target group emotional ressponse based, on the one hand, on the averaging of public opinion and, on the other hand, on the multiple strengthening of emotional impact and empathy to the interpretation, perceived as normative and acceptable, of a social and communicative construct that is designed to integrate the target audience of the information and communicative impact. Therefore, peoples modern perception of reality in the information and communication field is constructed on the schemes that adapt people to a collective average public opinion and partially design and supplement the image of the world around with the use of factoids taking into account peoples personal experience and conditions of their rootedness in community to which they belongs, according to the Veblen effect.


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