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Our intimate lives feed the meat grinder of big data. The first casualty of climate change: this adorable rodent. Racial bias in healthcare research, and why it’s dangerous. An exoplanet could soon go the way of Alderaan. The next great American novelist might be your computer, not you.
...moreThe New Yorker’s Jill Lepore laments the devaluation of truth in politics with the rise of “big data”: The era of the fact is coming to an end: the place once held by “facts” is being taken over by “data.” This is making for more epistemological mayhem, not least because the collection and weighing of […]
...moreOver at The Nation, Moira Weigel gives a thought-provoking perspective on digital humanities, and identifies some of the field’s intellectual precursors. The idea that big data holds the key to unlocking mysteries of literature and history is the logical extension of a larger cultural obsession with computer analysis; it’s also a little absurd to any […]
...moreIf there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google, and if there isn’t, it doesn’t matter since the operations of that genius and vision are being developed and performed collectively by operators on the payroll of that company, or of one like it. […]
...moreLiterary history has two sides, I think. One is the normative side: deciding what is good and what is less good. The other is the explanatory side. It’s two very different modalities of thought, and I’ve always been inclined toward the explanatory. That’s what fires my mind. And in the study of the humanities, the […]
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