Read more
Beautiful Data is both a history of big data and interactivity, and a sophisticated meditation on ideas about vision and cognition in the second half of the twentieth century. Contending that our forms of attention, observation, and truth are contingent and contested, Orit Halpern historicizes the ways that we are trained, and train ourselves, to observe and analyze the world. Tracing the postwar impact of cybernetics and the communication sciences on the social and human sciences, design, arts, and urban planning, she finds a radical shift in attitudes toward recording and displaying information. These changed attitudes produced what she calls communicative objectivity: new forms of observation, rationality, and economy based on the management and analysis of data. Halpern complicates assumptions about the value of data and visualization, arguing that changes in how we manage and train perception, and define reason and intelligence, are also transformations in governmentality. She also challenges the paradoxical belief that we are experiencing a crisis of attention caused by digital media, a crisis that can be resolved only through intensified media consumption.
List of contents
Acknowledgments vii
Prologue. Speculating on Sense 1
Introduction. Dreams for Our Perceptual Present 9
1. Archiving. Temporality, Storage, and Interactivity in Cybernetics 39
2. Visualizing. Design, Communicative Objectivity, and the Interface 79
3. Rationalizing. Cognition, Time, and Logic in the Social and Behavioral Sciences 145
4. Governing. Designing Information and Reconfiguring Population circa 1959 199
Conclusion 239
Epilogue 251
Notes 271
Bibliography 307
Index 327
About the author
Orit Halpern is Assistant Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College.
Summary
Beautiful Data is both a history of big data and interactivity, and a sophisticated meditation on ideas about vision and cognition in the second half of the twentieth century.
