CFP: “Data Cultures, Culture as Data” – Special Issue of Cultural Analytics (15 Nov 2017)

CFP: “Data Cultures, Culture as Data” – Special Issue of Cultural Analytics
Guest editors – Amelia Acker & Tanya Clement, University of Texas at Austin

“Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems” Donna Haraway Environmental Humanities 6 (2015), p. 160.

Data have become pervasive in research in the humanities and the social sciences. New areas, objects, and situations for study have developed; and new methods for working with data are shepherded by new epistemologies and (potential) paradigms shifts.  But data didn’t just happen to us. We have happened to data. Karen Barad writes that “We are responsible for the world in which we live not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing, but because it is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping” (102).

Yet where is our agency in that responsibility? What is the role we play in the data cultures/culture as data we form around sociomaterial practices? How can we better understand how these practices effect, and affect, the materialization of subjects, objects, and the relations between them? How can we engage our data culture in practical, critical, and generative ways?

In every field, boundaries have been drawn between data and human as if making meaning with data is innocent work, but these boundaries are never innocent. Questions are emerging about data cultures and culture as data—urgent questions that range across concerns with the datafication of culture including the codification (or code-ification) of social and cultural bias; the integrity of data and of human agency, subjectivity, and identity. This special issue of Cultural Analytics invites responses to these concerns.


We invite submissions related (but not limited) to:

*Proximity and distance between the creation of data and its collection
*The nature of data as object or content
*Modes of data circulation; dissemination and preservation
*Data audiences
*Histories and imaginary data futures
*Data expertises and folkways
*The environmental impact of data work
*Data and technological progressivism
*Data Accessibility and ethics
*Data ontologies
*The cultivation, taming, cleaning, and standardization of data
*The ethical and social implications of data mining
*The cultures, communities, and consciousness of data production
*Data literacies

Cultural Analytics  is looking for
Research or theory articles (7,000 to 8,000 words)
Data reviews or Case studies of datasets (2,000 to 3,000 words, including visualizations or demonstrations)

Opinion pieces (4,000 to 5,000 words)

Timetable for Submissions
Deadline for abstracts (250-500) -- early November 15, 2017
Deadline for paper submissions – June 15, 2018
Deadline review papers – August 15, 2018
Deadline revised papers – October 15, 2018

Publication of special issue December 1, 2018

Send abstracts and submissions to:
cultures.data@gmail.com

About the journal
Cultural Analytics is an open-access journal dedicated to the computational study of culture. Its aim is to promote high quality scholarship that intervenes in contemporary debates about the study of culture using computational and quantitative methods. The journal’s Editor-in-Chief is Andrew Piper.