Book Review: Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Daniela Agostinho, Annie Ring, Catherine D’Ignazio, Kristin Veel

Abstract

Thylstrup, Agostinho, Ring, D'Ignazio, and Veel's Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data is a substantial addition to the emerging canon of critical scholarship on big-data uses and methodologies. An outgrowth of the Uncertain Archives research group founded at the University of Copenhagen, the collection includes contributions from more than 70 authors from disciplines across the arts, humanities, and social and information sciences, each taking on a concept central (or in some cases, adjacent) to the datafication of human experience. Part encyclopedia, part critical commentary, the keyword glossary offers ruminations on and critical approaches to the collection, archiving, and uses of data in a networked world. Expansive though not exhaustive-the collection has little to say about scholarly data collection, for example-the anthology provides numerous jumping-off points for those interested in critically reflecting on the uses and consequences of big-data methodologies.At its core, Uncertain Archives is an attempt to inject, reflect, and interrogate uncertainty in the datafication of modern life. The authors in the collection turn a critical eye to technologies both familiar and clandestine, asking how viewing human experience as data reifies arbitrary and potentially harmful categorization, privileges some experiences over others, and both grants and restricts access to personal information-in short, the collection, as Risam writes in the entry "Digital Humanities," aims to "uncover and complicate our understanding of the relationship between 'humanity ' and 'technology'" (p. 161). By destabilizing the purported objectivity of Book Review