ICS Seminar Series - Liam Magee and Ned Rossiter

Date: Thursday 7 May 2015
Time: 11.30am - 1pm
Venue: EA.G.15, Western Sydney University, Parramatta South campus

Liam Magee and Ned Rossiter

Statistical Institutions and Database Disasters

Abstract

Arguably the relational database has had greater impact on the transformation of organisational cultures and the world economy than the Internet. This is compounded with the recent intersection of distributed and 'service-oriented' computational infrastructures, where databases and data centres combine with network protocols and novel financial arrangements in ways that organise contemporary institutions underscored by computational operations. The computational analytic potentials of databases coupled with the materiality of data has produced models of this world without historical precedent. Key here is the question of scale. Our central interest in this chapter is to consider the role of the database as a technology of governance and the scramble of power as it relates to a capacity to model the world and exert influence upon it. Moreover, we argue software-as-a-service is more than a new vogue term of the IT industry, constituting a longer temporal horizon and more complex rearrangement of relations between data and labour to which the database and its entailments remain critical.

Biography

Liam Magee is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. He is co-author of Towards a Semantic Web: Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research (2010).

Ned Rossiter is Professor of Communication at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. His book Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares is forthcoming in 2015.

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