Living in Data
A Citizen's Guide to a Better Information Future
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Jer Thorp’s analysis of the word “data” in 10,325 New York Times stories written between 1984 and 2018 shows a distinct trend: among the words most closely associated with “data,” we find not only its classic companions “information” and “digital,” but also a variety of new neighbors—from “scandal” and “misinformation” to “ethics,” “friends,” and “play.”
To live in data in the twenty-first century is to be incessantly extracted from, classified and categorized, statisti-fied, sold, and surveilled. Data—our data—is mined and processed for profit, power, and political gain. In Living in Data, Thorp asks a crucial question of our time: How do we stop passively inhabiting data, and instead become active citizens of it?
Threading a data story through hippo attacks, glaciers, and school gymnasiums, around colossal rice piles, and over active minefields, Living in Data reminds us that the future of data is still wide open, that there are ways to transcend facts and figures and to find more visceral ways to engage with data, that there are always new stories to be told about how data can be used.
Punctuated with Thorp's original and informative illustrations, Living in Data not only redefines what data is, but reimagines who gets to speak its language and how to use its power to create a more just and democratic future. Timely and inspiring, Living in Data gives us a much-needed path forward.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Data artist Thorp takes an enlightening excursion through humans' ever-changing relationship with data in his spot-on debut. To "tell the real story of data," Thorp writes, one must look beyond Facebook and machine learning, and toward "places where the story bubbled up a century ago, and the places where we can find new stories just beginning to flow." To that end, he recounts his adventures through the Angolan wilderness collecting data about plant and animal life, atop a melting glacier as part of an effort to track the ice's movement, and 1,100 meters below the surface of the ocean in search of methane "cold seeps." Central is the tension between two futures: one in which "living in data" means being acted on largely without one's knowledge, and a people-first alternative in which individuals and communities maintain sovereignty over their data. With a gift for explaining technical matters—he describes algorithms via a comparison to gym class team selection—Thorp makes accessible the technical, moral, and political implications of data collection and distribution. Those with qualms about living in an ever more data-driven world owe it to themselves to pick this up.
