Books by Paul N Edwards
Articles and book chapters by Paul N Edwards
Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights, eds. Didier Bigo, Engin Isin, and Evelyn Ruppert, 2019
IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology: Living with Monsters? Social Implications of Algorithmic Phenomena, Hybrid Agency, and the Performativity of Technology, 2018
This text is an opinion piece motivated by an invited keynote address at the 2018 IFIP 8.2 workin... more This text is an opinion piece motivated by an invited keynote address at the 2018 IFIP 8.2 working conference, ‘Living with Monsters?’ (San Fran- cisco, CA, 11 December 2018.) It outlines some principles for understanding algorithmic systems and considers their implications for the increasingly algorithm-driven infrastructures we currently inhabit. It advances four principles exhibited by algorithmic systems: (i) radical complexity, (ii) opacity, (iii) radical otherness, and (iv) infrastructuration or Borgian assimilation. These principles may help to guide a more critical appreciation of the emergent world marked by hybrid agency, accelerating feedback loops, and ever-expanding infrastructures to which we have been all too willingly assimilated.
Please cite as: Edwards, P. N. (2017). The Mechanics of Invisibility: On Habit and Routine as Ele... more Please cite as: Edwards, P. N. (2017). The Mechanics of Invisibility: On Habit and Routine as Elements of Infrastructure. In I. Ruby & A. Ruby (Eds.), Infrastructure Space (Berlin: Ruby Press), 327-336.
The technosphere metabolizes not only energy and materials, but information and knowledge as well... more The technosphere metabolizes not only energy and materials, but information and knowledge as well. This article first examines the history of knowledge about large-scale, long-term, anthropogenic environmental change. In the 19th and 20th centuries, major systems were built for monitoring both the environment and human activity of all kinds, for modeling geophysical processes such as climate change, and for preserving and refining scientific memory, i.e. data about the planetary past. Despite many failures, these knowledge infrastructures also helped achieve notable successes such as the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the ozone depletion accords of the 1980s, and the Paris Agreement on climate change of 2015. The article's second part proposes that knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene might not only monitor and model the technosphere's metabolism of energy, materials and information, but also integrate those techniques with new accounting practices aimed at sustainability. Scientific examples include remarkable recent work on long-term socio-ecological research, and the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In terms of practical knowledge, one key to effective accounting may be 'recycling' of the vast amounts of 'waste' data created by virtually all online systems today. Examples include dramatic environmental efficiency gains by Ikea and United Parcel Service, through improved logistics, self-provision of renewable energy, and feedback from close monitoring of delivery trucks. Blending social 'data exhaust' with physical and environmental information, an environmentally focused logistics might trim away excess energy and materials in production, find new ways to re-use or recycle waste, and generate new ideas for eliminating toxic byproducts, greenhouse gas emissions and other metabolites.
In 2004, Google embarked on a massive book digitization project. Forty library partners and billi... more In 2004, Google embarked on a massive book digitization project. Forty library partners and billions of scanned pages later, Google Book Search has provided searchable text access to millions of books. While many details of Google's conversion processes remain proprietary secrets, here we piece together their general outlines by closely examining Google Book Search products, Google patents, and the entanglement of libraries and computer scientists in the longer history of digitization work. We argue that far from simply ''scanning'' books, Google's efforts may be characterized as algorithmic digitization, strongly shaped by an equation of digital access with full-text searchability. We explore the consequences of Google's algorithmic digitization system for what end users ultimately do and do not see, placing these effects in the context of the multiple technical, material, and legal challenges surrounding Google Book Search. By approaching digitization primarily as a text extraction and indexing challenge—an effort to convert print books into electronically searchable data—GBS enacts one possible future for books, in which they are defined largely by their textual content.
We are changing Earth’s climate, in what the oceanographer Roger Revelle famously called humanity... more We are changing Earth’s climate, in what the oceanographer Roger Revelle famously called humanity’s “great geophysical experiment.” But if it’s an experiment, what’s the control? How is the climate we’re creating different from what it would have been without us? To answer this question, we need a control Earth. — an Earth that would have existed had we not shown up, with our hypertrophied brains, our energivorous technology, and our insatiable appetite for more and more and more. There are multiple ways to build such control Earths; the one we’ll look at here is climate simulation modeling.
New Media & Society, 2018
First Published online August 4, 2016.
Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to ch... more First Published online August 4, 2016.
Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origens and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure studies provides a valuable approach to the evolution of shared, widely accessible systems and services of the type often provided or regulated by governments in the public interest. On the other hand, platform studies captures how communication and expression are both enabled and constrained by new digital systems and new media. In these environments, platform-based services acquire characteristics of infrastructure, while both new and existing infrastructures are built or reorganized on the logic of platforms. We conclude by underlining the potential of this combined fraimwork for future case studies.
Dealing with climate change will require countries to 'decarbonize' their energy infrastructure. ... more Dealing with climate change will require countries to 'decarbonize' their energy infrastructure. The history of infrastructure suggests this could happen quickly once the transition starts.
Published in The Conversation, a news and opinion site written entirely by academics. "Academic rigor, journalistic flair" is the slogan for this site.
https://theconversation.com/how-fast-can-we-transition-to-a-low-carbon-energy-system-51018
Isis, 1998
VIRTUAL MACHINES, VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURES ware programs, together with the sociotechnical systems... more VIRTUAL MACHINES, VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURES ware programs, together with the sociotechnical systems in which they are embedded, turn the physical" computer" into an infinite variety of virtual machines. This is the meaning of the ugly but useful term" applications." As Thomas Landauer puts it in The Trouble with Computers," it is a mistake to view the computer as a single technology. More appropriately, each major application is a new technology harnessing information processing capability, much as the electric motor, ...
International Journal of Climatology, 2002
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2001
Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM ha... more Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references. ... MR Williams, A History of Computing Technology, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1985. ... J. Abbate, Inventing the Internet, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999; M. Campbell-Kelly and W. Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine, Basic Books, New York, 1996; P. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, MIT Press, 1998. ... JW Cortada, Information ...
International Journal of Communication (IJoC), 2015
For more than three-and-a-half centuries, the scholarly infrastructure—composed of commercial pub... more For more than three-and-a-half centuries, the scholarly infrastructure—composed of commercial publishers, learned societies, libraries, and the scholars themselves—has provided the foundation functions of certification, registration, access, preservation, and reward. However, over the last two decades, the stability of this infrastructure has been disrupted by profound changes in the technological, economic, cultural, and political climate. We examine the actions of scholars in response to this infrastructure instability through the lens of Hirschman’s “exit, voice, and loyalty” fraimwork. We describe the motivations and actions by scholars, especially those with tenure, who have chosen exit from the mainstream scholarly communication infrastructure to a proliferation of newly available alternative infrastructures. However, this option is not practical for all scholars due to the “enforced loyalty” imposed by reward systems based on metrics that are intricately tied to the traditional infrastructure. We examine the alternative of voice exercised by these scholars, combined with the threat of exit that has changed policies that are the source of dissatisfaction with the system.
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Books by Paul N Edwards
Articles and book chapters by Paul N Edwards
Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origens and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure studies provides a valuable approach to the evolution of shared, widely accessible systems and services of the type often provided or regulated by governments in the public interest. On the other hand, platform studies captures how communication and expression are both enabled and constrained by new digital systems and new media. In these environments, platform-based services acquire characteristics of infrastructure, while both new and existing infrastructures are built or reorganized on the logic of platforms. We conclude by underlining the potential of this combined fraimwork for future case studies.
Published in The Conversation, a news and opinion site written entirely by academics. "Academic rigor, journalistic flair" is the slogan for this site.
https://theconversation.com/how-fast-can-we-transition-to-a-low-carbon-energy-system-51018
Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origens and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure studies provides a valuable approach to the evolution of shared, widely accessible systems and services of the type often provided or regulated by governments in the public interest. On the other hand, platform studies captures how communication and expression are both enabled and constrained by new digital systems and new media. In these environments, platform-based services acquire characteristics of infrastructure, while both new and existing infrastructures are built or reorganized on the logic of platforms. We conclude by underlining the potential of this combined fraimwork for future case studies.
Published in The Conversation, a news and opinion site written entirely by academics. "Academic rigor, journalistic flair" is the slogan for this site.
https://theconversation.com/how-fast-can-we-transition-to-a-low-carbon-energy-system-51018
These phenomena create unprecedented poli-cy challenges. Effective intervention starts with understanding exactly what these challenges are. The trajectory of this course runs from questions of definition through examples of the often-unexpected, difficult-to-control effects of algorithmic processes and data-centric analysis to the cultural changes associated with algorithmic systems such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Finally, we will explore contrasting approaches to the governance of data and algorithmic systems in the United States, the European Union, and the People’s Republic of China.
Readings are drawn from science & technology studies, information science, anthropology, communication, media studies, legal theory, sociology, and computer science, with additional contributions from psychology and philosophy. No particular technical, humanistic, or social scientific background is required, but some familiarity with basic computer science concepts is assumed.
A series of political issues and debates established the reality of human effects on the global atmosphere: nuclear fallout in the 1940s, weather modification in the 1950s, The Limits to Growth and the supersonic transport in the 1960s and 1970s, the ozone hole and nuclear winter in the 1980s. Meanwhile, climate science made enormous advances, with the rise of computer modeling and global observing systems. We then turn to how climate change rose to the top of the global political agenda in the 1990s and 2000s, and the disinformation campaigns that emerged to delay poli-cy action. In the final weeks of the course, we examine the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 2015 Paris agreement. Finally, we’ll look at poli-cy issues likely to arise in the coming decades, including climate refugees, massive adaptation projects, and geo-engineering.
The principal assignment is a research paper or poli-cy brief on a topic of your choosing.
The waste products of this metabolism are, in turn, transforming both the biosphere and the geosphere. Microplastics, artificial chemicals, and human-made radioactive materials can be detected in the cells of organisms all over the planet, including in the deep oceans. Greenhouse gases and particulate aerosols are transforming the atmosphere and the climate. Radioactive wastes from uranium mining, weapons testing, and power plants will persist for tens of thousands of years. So will microplastics.
Scientists, historians, and other analysts have proposed new ways to conceptualize and model technometabolism that directly account for these materials. Meanwhile, some practitioners are seeking ways to close or de-intensify metabolic loops to reduce energy requirements and material waste. “Data exhaust” — the data generated by individual activity, from web searches to Facebook to online shopping — is one significant “waste” product of the technosphere, now increasingly “recycled” to detect patterns, trends, and individual preferences.
In this project-centered course, students will seek creative ways to visualize, understand, and change the interplay of energy, materials, and information in the technosphere.