The Nature of Data

Infrastructures, Environments, Politics

Jenny Goldstein, Eric Nost (Herausgeber)

Buch | Softcover

344 Seiten

2022
University of Nebraska Press (Verlag)
978-1-4962-3250-2 (ISBN)

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By synthesizing scholarly work at the intersection of political ecology, digital geography, and science and technology studies, The Nature of Data analyzes how new digital technologies affect environments and their control.

When we look at some of the most pressing issues in environmental politics today, it is hard to avoid data technologies. Big data, artificial intelligence, and data dashboards all promise “revolutionary” advances in the speed and scale at which governments, corporations, conservationists, and even individuals can respond to environmental challenges.

By bringing together scholars from geography, anthropology, science and technology studies, and ecology, The Nature of Data explores how the digital realm is a significant site in which environmental politics are waged. This collection as a whole makes the argument that we cannot fully understand the current conjuncture in critical, global environmental politics without understanding the role of data platforms, devices, standards, and institutions. In particular, The Nature of Data addresses the contested practices of making and maintaining data infrastructure, the imaginaries produced by data infrastructures, the relations between state and civil society that data infrastructure reworks, and the conditions under which technology can further socio-ecological justice instead of re-entrenching state and capitalist power. This innovative volume presents some of the first research in this new but rapidly growing subfield that addresses the role of data infrastructures in critical environmental politics.

Jenny Goldstein is an assistant professor of global development at Cornell University. Eric Nost is an assistant professor of geography, environment, and geomatics at the University of Guelph.

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Introduction: Infrastructuring Environmental Data
Jenny Goldstein and Eric Nost
Part 1. Sensors, Servers, and Structures
1. Data’s Metropolis: The Physical Footprints of Data Circulation and Modern Finance
Graham Pickren
2. An Emerging Satellite Ecosystem and the Changing Political Economy of Remote Sensing
Luis F. Alvarez León
3. Smart Earth: Environmental Governance in a Wired World
Karen Bakker and Max Ritts
4. Data, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Nature in the Pacific Northwest
Anthony Levenda and Zbigniew Grabowski
Part 2. Civic Science and Community-Driven Data
5. Environmental Sensing Infrastructures and Just Good Enough Data
Jennifer Gabrys and Helen Pritchard
6. Collaborative Modeling as Sociotechnical Data Infrastructure in Rural Zimbabwe
M. V. Eitzel, Jon Solera, K. B. Wilson, Abraham Mawere Ndlovu, Emmanuel Mhike Hove, Daniel Ndlovu, Abraham Changarara, Alice Ndlovu, Kleber Neves, Adnomore Chirindira, Oluwasola E. Omoju, Aaron C. Fisher, and André Veski
7. Citizen Scientists and Conservation in the Anthropocene: From Monitoring to Making Coral
Irus Braverman
8. Data Infrastructures, Indigenous Knowledge, and Environmental Observing in the Arctic
Noor Johnson, Colleen Strawhacker, and Peter Pulsifer
9. Digital Infrastructure and the Affective Nature of Value in Belize
Patrick Gallagher
10. Infrastructuring Environmental Data Justice
Dawn Walker, Eric Nost, Aaron Lemelin, Rebecca Lave, Lindsey Dillon, and Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI)
Part 3. Governing Data, Infrastructuring Land and Resources
11. “A Poverty of Data”? Exporting the Digital Revolution to Farmers in the Global South
Madeleine Fairbairn and Zenia Kish
12. Illicit Digital Environments: Monitoring and Surveilling Environmental Crime in Southeast Asia
Hilary O. Faxon and Jenny Goldstein
13. Data Gaps: Penguin Science and Petrostate Formation in the Falkland Islands (Malvinas)
James J. A. Blair
14. Data Structures, Indigenous Ontologies, and Hydropower in the U.S. Northwest
Corrine Armistead
15. How Forest Became Data: The Remaking of Ground-Truth in Indonesia
Cindy Lin
Conclusion: Toward a Political Ecology of Data
Rebecca Lave, Eric Nost, and Jenny Goldstein
Source Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	19.08.2022
Zusatzinfo	17 photographs, 3 illustrations, 3 maps, 3 tables, 5 charts, 1 graph, index
Verlagsort	Lincoln
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Mathematik / Informatik ► Informatik ► Datenbanken
	Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Ökologie / Naturschutz
	Naturwissenschaften ► Geowissenschaften ► Geografie / Kartografie
ISBN-10	1-4962-3250-X / 149623250X
ISBN-13	978-1-4962-3250-2 / 9781496232502
Zustand	Neuware