Collecting Lives Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literatures

By:

Rodrigues, Elizabeth [auth]

Material type: Text

TextLanguage: English Series: Publication details: University of Michigan Press 2022Description: 1 electronic resource (238 p.)Content type:

text

Media type:

computer

Carrier type:

online resource

ISBN:

9780472038909
mpub.11618648

Subject(s):

Literary studies: from c 1900 -
Literature: history & criticism
data, critical data studies, critical digital studies, critical information studies, information studies, information science, modernism, multiethnic modernism, modernist studies, US modernism, multiethnic US literature, US literature, American literature, African American literature, life writing, autobiography, narrative, selfhood, W.E.B Du Bois, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, Ida B. Wells, Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Online resources:

Summary: On a near-daily basis, data is being used to narrate our lives. Categorizing algorithms drawn from amassed personal data to assign narrative destinies to individuals at crucial junctures, simultaneously predicting and shaping the paths of our lives. Data is commonly assumed to bring us closer to objectivity, but the narrative paths these algorithms assign seem, more often than not, to replicate biases about who an individual is and could become. While the social effects of such algorithmic logics seem new and newly urgent to consider, Collecting Lives looks to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century U.S. to provide an instructive prehistory to the underlying question of the relationship between data, life, and narrative. Rodrigues contextualizes the application of data collection to human selfhood in order to uncover a modernist aesthetic of data that offers an alternative to the algorithmic logic pervading our sense of data's revelatory potential. Examining the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Rodrigues asks how each of these authors draw from their work in sociology, history, psychology, and journalism to formulate a critical data aesthetic as they attempt to answer questions of identity around race, gender, and nation both in their research and their life writing. These data-driven modernists not only tell different life stories with data, they tell life stories differently because of data.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Materials specified	Status	Date due	Barcode
Electronic-Books	OPJGU Sonepat- Campus	E-Books Open Access			Available

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On a near-daily basis, data is being used to narrate our lives. Categorizing algorithms drawn from amassed personal data to assign narrative destinies to individuals at crucial junctures, simultaneously predicting and shaping the paths of our lives. Data is commonly assumed to bring us closer to objectivity, but the narrative paths these algorithms assign seem, more often than not, to replicate biases about who an individual is and could become. While the social effects of such algorithmic logics seem new and newly urgent to consider, Collecting Lives looks to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century U.S. to provide an instructive prehistory to the underlying question of the relationship between data, life, and narrative. Rodrigues contextualizes the application of data collection to human selfhood in order to uncover a modernist aesthetic of data that offers an alternative to the algorithmic logic pervading our sense of data's revelatory potential. Examining the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Rodrigues asks how each of these authors draw from their work in sociology, history, psychology, and journalism to formulate a critical data aesthetic as they attempt to answer questions of identity around race, gender, and nation both in their research and their life writing. These data-driven modernists not only tell different life stories with data, they tell life stories differently because of data.