Where Cloud Is Ground: Placing Data and Making Place in Iceland
Where Cloud Is Ground offers an ethnography of the international data storage industry and an inquiry into the relationship between data and place. Based in Iceland, which is fast becoming a hot spot for data centers—facilities where large quantities of data are processed and stored—the book traces the fraught work of siting data’s material manifestations in relation to landforms and earth processes, local politics, national narratives, and still-open questions of spatial justice and sovereignty. Doing so, it unsettles techno-utopian ideals of connectivity and offers a window into what it means to live with our data, in a place where more and more data now lives.
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Where Cloud Is Ground: Placing Data and Making Place in Iceland
Where Cloud Is Ground offers an ethnography of the international data storage industry and an inquiry into the relationship between data and place. Based in Iceland, which is fast becoming a hot spot for data centers—facilities where large quantities of data are processed and stored—the book traces the fraught work of siting data’s material manifestations in relation to landforms and earth processes, local politics, national narratives, and still-open questions of spatial justice and sovereignty. Doing so, it unsettles techno-utopian ideals of connectivity and offers a window into what it means to live with our data, in a place where more and more data now lives.
29.95 In Stock
Where Cloud Is Ground: Placing Data and Making Place in Iceland

Where Cloud Is Ground: Placing Data and Making Place in Iceland

by Alix Johnson
Where Cloud Is Ground: Placing Data and Making Place in Iceland

Where Cloud Is Ground: Placing Data and Making Place in Iceland

by Alix Johnson

Paperback(First Edition)

$29.95 
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Overview

Where Cloud Is Ground offers an ethnography of the international data storage industry and an inquiry into the relationship between data and place. Based in Iceland, which is fast becoming a hot spot for data centers—facilities where large quantities of data are processed and stored—the book traces the fraught work of siting data’s material manifestations in relation to landforms and earth processes, local politics, national narratives, and still-open questions of spatial justice and sovereignty. Doing so, it unsettles techno-utopian ideals of connectivity and offers a window into what it means to live with our data, in a place where more and more data now lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780520396364
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication date: 10/24/2023
Series: Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century , #11
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 228
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Alix Johnson is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Macalester College.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Figures 
Acknowledgments
Note on Language and Naming 

Introduction: Putting Data in Its Place 

PART I ARTICUTION

1. A Natural Fit 
2. The Switzerland of Bits 

PART II ANCHORING 

3. Something from Nothing 
4. Data Centers, Data Peripheries 

PART III EXCESS 

5. Inside Out 
Conclusion 

Notes 
Bibliography 
Index
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