caroline bassett | University of Cambridge (original) (raw)
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Papers by caroline bassett
The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2011
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, 2006
Objectives The objectives of this research project were the following: 1. To investigate Big Data... more Objectives The objectives of this research project were the following: 1. To investigate Big Data – and what it means in the context of community and cultural spheres and in relation to forms of austerity that are tending to challenge the capacity of community organisations to undertake their work. 2. To investigate how Brighton's third sector is familiar and/or engages with Big Data, as a new development in digital media, and if so in what ways. To explore the felt need amongst individuals associated with these groups to explore the potential for utilising Big Data, and to identify obstacles in doing so. 3. To offer the opportunity to individuals from culture and community organisations in and around Brighton to build basic expertise in social analytics and data visualisation tools.
The arc and the machine, 2013
SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience, 2013
Computational culture is often explored through discourses of completion and in terms of the comp... more Computational culture is often explored through discourses of completion and in terms of the complete and this bias extends to accounts exploring new media and the senses, where it may be expressed in terms of priority as an assertion of the ‘proper’ ratio of the senses. In response this article explores the aesthetics of the incomplete, the latter understood as an intrinsic element of new media culture rather than an exception. It begins with claims that new media are essentially (ontologically) sonic, reading this in contrast to the New Aesthetic and visual glitch and focussing on the consequences of the NA’s fierce concentration on the visual. This frames a consideration of sonic glitch in a public sound art work in which audiovisual technologies are reprogrammed to break down language – and open up a form of common space. The article concludes that the incomplete can be productively viewed as an intrinsic part of the contemporary digital formation: something ontologically given,...
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2015
Big Data promises informational abundance – something that might be useful to cultures and commun... more Big Data promises informational abundance – something that might be useful to cultures and communities in times of austerity. However many local organizations lack the skills to develop expertise in new forms of computation or the desire to develop them; Big Data is often viewed as the terrain of Big Business and Big Government. Drawing on issues arising from action research into Big Data and community in Brighton, England, this article explores questions of technological expertise in relation to Big Data, everyday life and critical practice – the latter understood as something that may be undertaken not only as a theoretical but also as an operational endeavour. The outcome of the article is thus not a prescription for training but a series of questions concerning desirable forms of co-constitution: How should expertise be shared between humans and machines?
Three short essays for the Abcderius section of 'Sensorium' designed to accompany the int... more Three short essays for the Abcderius section of 'Sensorium' designed to accompany the international exhibition of the same name opening at the MIT List Visual Arts Center Boston, Autumn 2006.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2015
This special issue sets out to explore questions of digital skill and expertise, asking how vario... more This special issue sets out to explore questions of digital skill and expertise, asking how various forms of expertise are engendered, distributed and valued in computational culture. We begin with the following questions: Who can use digital technologies, and to what level, with what facility, in relation to which forms of use? What are the relays through which expertise may circulate and be shared? What is the relationship between the automation of expertise that computerization undertakes and what is asked of human users in various situations? How is digital expertise generated and shared? How is digital expertise specific and how does it relate to other forms of aptitude, other skills or capacities? How are forms of expertise variously gauged, judged or valued? We are thus broadly concerned with questions of access-and with a politics of access-asking what is needed for individuals and groups to be able to access new forms of knowledge and information, to exploit emerging possibilities for cultural production and expression and to maintain their grip on services translated onto digital platforms. But we are concerned that questions framed in terms of access are content with access and that it is taken as 'enough' to have opened the door. Of course, there are ways this question has been taken forwards in digital scholarship-notably in relation to discussions of digital literacy, which are themselves often concerned with the digital native, and distinctions between the born digital and the digital immigrant. However, our sense is that these terms too refuse a certain set of questions, for instance, about what it means to be technologically literate, about the adequacy of 'literacy' as an end goal and/or the effectiveness-or need-for intervention; if 'the native' already has the skills and 'the immigrant' is constitutionally unable to acquire them, what is to be done for either group? It is partly because we believe that terms like digital literacy, digital native, born digital, digital immigrant, mask, if not negate, issues we feel are important to address (e.g. see Bassett et al., 2013; Thornham and McFarlane, 2011) that we have sought to find a new way to address them.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2015
This article explores the stakes of digital transformation through a consideration of digital exp... more This article explores the stakes of digital transformation through a consideration of digital expertise. Expertise is investigated as it operates in everyday situations – drawing on empirical research undertaken in Brighton, UK, as part of the Communities and Cultures Network+ project. It is also deployed as a heuristic for inquiry into questions of use and the policy of use and investigated in relation to questions of automation that provoke reconsideration of the role of humans and machines in circuits of expertise. This latter necessitates reconsideration of how expertise can be theorized, and this is developed through an account that insists on the importance of both the material and the circulating imaginary for understanding the operations of digital expertise. Drawing these together to develop a new understanding of the economy of digital expertise, inspiration is finally drawn from earlier attempts to develop new models of technological expertise in the context of public sci...
The Arc and the Machine, 2007
Understanding Digital Humanities
The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 2011
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, 2006
Objectives The objectives of this research project were the following: 1. To investigate Big Data... more Objectives The objectives of this research project were the following: 1. To investigate Big Data – and what it means in the context of community and cultural spheres and in relation to forms of austerity that are tending to challenge the capacity of community organisations to undertake their work. 2. To investigate how Brighton's third sector is familiar and/or engages with Big Data, as a new development in digital media, and if so in what ways. To explore the felt need amongst individuals associated with these groups to explore the potential for utilising Big Data, and to identify obstacles in doing so. 3. To offer the opportunity to individuals from culture and community organisations in and around Brighton to build basic expertise in social analytics and data visualisation tools.
The arc and the machine, 2013
SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience, 2013
Computational culture is often explored through discourses of completion and in terms of the comp... more Computational culture is often explored through discourses of completion and in terms of the complete and this bias extends to accounts exploring new media and the senses, where it may be expressed in terms of priority as an assertion of the ‘proper’ ratio of the senses. In response this article explores the aesthetics of the incomplete, the latter understood as an intrinsic element of new media culture rather than an exception. It begins with claims that new media are essentially (ontologically) sonic, reading this in contrast to the New Aesthetic and visual glitch and focussing on the consequences of the NA’s fierce concentration on the visual. This frames a consideration of sonic glitch in a public sound art work in which audiovisual technologies are reprogrammed to break down language – and open up a form of common space. The article concludes that the incomplete can be productively viewed as an intrinsic part of the contemporary digital formation: something ontologically given,...
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2015
Big Data promises informational abundance – something that might be useful to cultures and commun... more Big Data promises informational abundance – something that might be useful to cultures and communities in times of austerity. However many local organizations lack the skills to develop expertise in new forms of computation or the desire to develop them; Big Data is often viewed as the terrain of Big Business and Big Government. Drawing on issues arising from action research into Big Data and community in Brighton, England, this article explores questions of technological expertise in relation to Big Data, everyday life and critical practice – the latter understood as something that may be undertaken not only as a theoretical but also as an operational endeavour. The outcome of the article is thus not a prescription for training but a series of questions concerning desirable forms of co-constitution: How should expertise be shared between humans and machines?
Three short essays for the Abcderius section of 'Sensorium' designed to accompany the int... more Three short essays for the Abcderius section of 'Sensorium' designed to accompany the international exhibition of the same name opening at the MIT List Visual Arts Center Boston, Autumn 2006.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2015
This special issue sets out to explore questions of digital skill and expertise, asking how vario... more This special issue sets out to explore questions of digital skill and expertise, asking how various forms of expertise are engendered, distributed and valued in computational culture. We begin with the following questions: Who can use digital technologies, and to what level, with what facility, in relation to which forms of use? What are the relays through which expertise may circulate and be shared? What is the relationship between the automation of expertise that computerization undertakes and what is asked of human users in various situations? How is digital expertise generated and shared? How is digital expertise specific and how does it relate to other forms of aptitude, other skills or capacities? How are forms of expertise variously gauged, judged or valued? We are thus broadly concerned with questions of access-and with a politics of access-asking what is needed for individuals and groups to be able to access new forms of knowledge and information, to exploit emerging possibilities for cultural production and expression and to maintain their grip on services translated onto digital platforms. But we are concerned that questions framed in terms of access are content with access and that it is taken as 'enough' to have opened the door. Of course, there are ways this question has been taken forwards in digital scholarship-notably in relation to discussions of digital literacy, which are themselves often concerned with the digital native, and distinctions between the born digital and the digital immigrant. However, our sense is that these terms too refuse a certain set of questions, for instance, about what it means to be technologically literate, about the adequacy of 'literacy' as an end goal and/or the effectiveness-or need-for intervention; if 'the native' already has the skills and 'the immigrant' is constitutionally unable to acquire them, what is to be done for either group? It is partly because we believe that terms like digital literacy, digital native, born digital, digital immigrant, mask, if not negate, issues we feel are important to address (e.g. see Bassett et al., 2013; Thornham and McFarlane, 2011) that we have sought to find a new way to address them.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2015
This article explores the stakes of digital transformation through a consideration of digital exp... more This article explores the stakes of digital transformation through a consideration of digital expertise. Expertise is investigated as it operates in everyday situations – drawing on empirical research undertaken in Brighton, UK, as part of the Communities and Cultures Network+ project. It is also deployed as a heuristic for inquiry into questions of use and the policy of use and investigated in relation to questions of automation that provoke reconsideration of the role of humans and machines in circuits of expertise. This latter necessitates reconsideration of how expertise can be theorized, and this is developed through an account that insists on the importance of both the material and the circulating imaginary for understanding the operations of digital expertise. Drawing these together to develop a new understanding of the economy of digital expertise, inspiration is finally drawn from earlier attempts to develop new models of technological expertise in the context of public sci...
The Arc and the Machine, 2007
Understanding Digital Humanities