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.
Orit Halpern is Assistant Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College.
Table 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 Behaviour Sciences 145
4 Governing Designing Information and Reconfiguring Population Circa 1959 199
Conclusion 239
Epilogue 251
Notes 271
Bibliography 307
Index 327
What People are Saying About This
Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time - Peter Galison
"From the title to the last page, Orit Halpern experiments with a heady mix of memory, speculation, and the physical world. Beautiful Data starts with the early days of cybernetics, back when the nascent discipline was undisciplined, roaming through the world, as much about architecture and design as it was about mathematics, physics and the functioning of the brain and body. Halpern then pushes on that openness, exploring design in the work of Kepes and Corbusier, up on through the vast new Korean smart-city Songdo, always returning to the control of data as it restructures our archival past and sketches our possible futures. An ambitious book, Beautiful Data is like a light pipe, pumping an ever-changing flow of new ideas about data and feedback in sudden and productive combination."
Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative - Priscilla Wald
"Beautiful Data is a wonderful book, deeply engaging and full of compelling insights. Reading across fields, disciplines, borders, and issues, Orit Halpern chronicles the emergence of a new way of thinking about the world for the digital moment. It is crucial reading for anyone interested in the new directions in which the humanities, the arts, and education are moving."
