Making a Killing: On Race, Ritual, and (Re)Membering in Digital Culture

Sutherland, Tonia

doi:10.1515/pdtc-2017-0025

Cited by 51 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Such all-encompassing archives have never sounded more creepy and intimidating, as the subjects of largescale surveillance increasingly recognise that being archived and mapped comes with new and unforeseeable risks. A new human right has even given a juridical name to this uncertainty: "the right to be forgotten," which suggests that not all memory is desirable, and that it also matters in what context a memory is presented and into whose hands it falls (Sutherland 2017b). We may wish to unknow things, or we may wish for others to unknow things about us and our communities, as in recent European Union and Argentinian legislation.…”

Section: Mapping: Unknowns/unknowablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Through her reading of the archives of transatlantic slavery, Browne shows that current surveillance practices are part of a historical continuum of commodification and violence upon black bodies that render these subjects more vulnerable to current data archives. These questions recentre the archival tension between capture and exclusion, that is, the dangers of being both included and excluded by data gathering processes, how datafication amplifies the commodification and visibility of specific bodies (Sutherland 2017b;Noble 2018), and how big data archives are embedded in historical relations of racial capitalism. Such issues are addressed by La Vaughn Belle's (n.d.) artistic work, which uses the framework of the ledger to add alternative records to the archives of colonial history in the US Virgin Islands, while also exploring material remnants of colonial times that shed light on current capitalist extractive practices (see Navarro 2018).…”

Section: Subjecting: Vulnerabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Uncertain Archives: Approaching the Unknowns, Errors, and Vulnerabilities of Big Data through Cultural Theories of the Archive

Agostinho

D’Ignazio

Ring

et al. 2019

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From global search engines to local smart cities, from public health monitoring to personal self-tracking technologies, digital technologies continuously capture, process, and archive social, material, and affective information in the form of big data. Although the use of big data emerged from the human desire to acquire more knowledge and master more information and to eliminate human error in large-scale information management, it has become clear in recent years that big data technologies, and the archives of data they accrue, bring with them new and important uncertainties in the form of new biases, systemic errors, and, as a result, new ethical challenges that require urgent attention and analysis. This collaboratively written article outlines the conceptual framework of the Uncertain Archives research collective to show how cultural theories of the archive can be meaningfully applied to the empirical field of big data. More specifically, the article argues that this approach grounded in cultural theory can help research going forward to attune to and address the uncertainties present in the storage and analysis of large amounts of information. By focusing on the notions of the unknown, error, and vulnerability, we reveal a set of different, albeit intertwined, configurations of archival uncertainty that emerge along with the phenomenon of big data use. We regard these configurations as central to understanding the conditions of the digitally networked data archives that are a crucial component of today’s cultures of surveillance and governmentality.

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Section: Mapping: Unknowns/unknowablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Subjecting: Vulnerabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Uncertain Archives: Approaching the Unknowns, Errors, and Vulnerabilities of Big Data through Cultural Theories of the Archive

Agostinho

D’Ignazio

Ring

et al. 2019

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“…For example, open source investigators find that bearing witness and documenting human rights violations are increasingly challenged in the face of content moderation policies that delete and ban evidence on YouTube [8]. Many racial justice activists and scholars have observed that social media platforms have become sites where the ritualized public mourning and remembering of Black lives who have been brutalized and murdered assumes content where "death and trauma are continuously reinscribed" [9]. Such content that becomes viral and may risk desensitizing viewers to the police violence and brutality that users who post these images seek to critique and draw awareness to.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 Community Archives and the Platformization of Digital Cultural Memory

Acker¹,

Flamm²

2021

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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In this study we aim to understand how GitHub is used by COVID-19 interest groups for organizing community archives to protect their knowledge from the Chinese government's censorship efforts. We introduce two case studies of such COVID-19 community archives published with GitHub that appeared online in early 2020. Using public GitHub repository documentation and web archive web crawls from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, we describe how these digital community archives emerge and exist on the platform, how knowledge of them circulated on other US based social media sites and show strategies and tactics these volunteers used to keep these community archives alive, resist censorship, and guard the safety of these collections. We argue that these COVID-19 community archives are at risk because of their platform accessibility as much as the content they document, and that understanding how organizers use GitHub's platform affordances is essential to theorizing how platforms are impacting approaches to preserving cultural memory.

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“…(Brink, Ducey, and Lorang 2016:18) Alongside others who share the discomfort of unmediated access to, and batch scanning of, cultural memory, I too turn my attention to further troubling images; revisiting those breaches (in trust) and colonial hauntings that follow photographed Afro-diasporic subjects from moment of capture, through archive, into code. Activism and critical awareness-raising in data and internet studies provide an important (and urgent) context for these concerns, since they are grappling with wideranging manifestations of coloniality in technology, such as cyber racism, recording of black life and death in digital culture, white prototypicality in biometrics and identity management, and algorithmic bias (Browne 2010(Browne , 2015Nakamura 2013;Sutherland 2017). 2 However, this particular discussion really represents a specific request or demand of the cultural heritage sector to drop the illusion of techno-neutrality.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Crying Child

Odumosu¹

2020

Current Anthropology

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This article sketches key concerns surrounding the digital reproduction of enslaved and colonized subjects held in cultural heritage collections. It centralizes one photograph of a crying Afro-Caribbean child from St. Croix, housed in the Royal Danish Library, to demonstrate the unresolved ethical matters present in retrospective attempts to visualize colonialism. Working with affect and haunting as research material, the inquiry questions how museums and other cultural heritage institutions are caretaking historical violations, identifying themselves as hosting agents, and navigating issues of trust and accountability as they make their colonial collections available online. Speculating about what an ethics of care in representation could look like, the article draws on reparatory artistic engagements with such imagery and proposes how metadata could be rethought as a cataloging space with the potential to alter historical imbalances of power. Why risk the contamination involved in restating the maledictions, obscenities, columns of losses and gains, and measures of value by which captive lives were inscribed and extinguished? Why subject the dead to new dangers and to a second order of violence? Or are the merchant's words the bridge to the dead or the scriptural tombs in which they await us? ("Venus in Two Acts," Saidiya V. Hartman 2008) While researching I become part of your army of ghosts. Haunting. Haunting. (Unearthing. In Conversation, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński) 1

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Making a Killing: On Race, Ritual, and (Re)Membering in Digital Culture

Cited by 51 publications

References 4 publications

Uncertain Archives: Approaching the Unknowns, Errors, and Vulnerabilities of Big Data through Cultural Theories of the Archive

Uncertain Archives: Approaching the Unknowns, Errors, and Vulnerabilities of Big Data through Cultural Theories of the Archive

COVID-19 Community Archives and the Platformization of Digital Cultural Memory

The Crying Child

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