New book: Quantification of Bodies in Health

Btihaj Ajana, Professor of Ethics and Digital Culture at the Department of Digital Humanities, published a new book with Simone Guidi (Italian National Research Council) and Joaquim Braga (University of Coimbra) under the title, Quantification of Bodies in Health: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. This book aims to deepen understanding of the growing phenomenon of quantification in the context of health and the role of self-tracking practices in everyday life. It brings together established and emerging authors working at the intersection of philosophy, sociology, history, psychology, and digital culture, while bridging between philosophical and empirical approaches.

 

Table of Content

INTRODUCTION 

Btihaj Ajana, Joaquim Braga and Simone Guidi 

PART I: Body Quantification and Subjectivity: Philosophical Perspectives  

1 Body, Media and Quantification  

Joaquim Braga 

2 I Quantify, Therefore I Am: Quantified Self Between Hermeneutics of Self and Transparency  

Lorenzo De Stefano  

3 Quantified Care: Self-Tracking as a Technology of the Subject  

Alessandro De Cesaris  

PART II: Body Quantification: Historical and Empirical Perspectives   

4 Historical Context of Tracking Public Health and Quantifying Bodies:   From the UK Welfare State to Digital Self-Care  

Rachael Kent   

5 Metrics of the Self: A Users’ Perspective  

Btihaj Ajana  

6 Whose Bodies? Approaching the Quantified Menstruating Body Through a Feminist Ethnography  

Amanda Karlsson  

PART III: Body Quantification and Mental Health   

7 #Wellness or #Hellness: The Politics of Anxiety and the Riddle of Affect in Contemporary Psy-care  

Ana Carolina Minozzo  

8 Me Apps: Mental Health and the Smartphone  

Zeena Feldman     

PART IV: Body Quantification and Smart Machines  

9 The ‘Smart’ AI Trainer & her Quantified Body at Work  

Phoebe V. Moore  

10 Towards a Quanto-Qualitative Biological Engineering: The Case of the Neuroprosthetic Hand  

Laura Corti   

Looking for academics to help with marking and teaching

The Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) has opportunities for academics and is looking for hourly paid lecturers to assist with marking and teaching. The lecturer needs a PhD (or equivalent expertise) and the right to work in the UK. The hourly pay is £21.27 (tbc) per hour, and most work can start right away.

The expertise we are looking for is:

Marking Essays in Gender and in Technology & Society
We are looking for markers in the areas of the gender (in particular the roles of gender and technology in films) and an undergraduate course on Investigating Science, Technology, and Society. The essays are 2,000 and 3,000 words long. We pay an hour for the marking of 4,000 words. The deadline for finishing this is in early or mid-February.

Marking MA Dissertations in Digital Culture and Digital Economy
We are looking for help with the marking of dissertations that cover the fields of digital culture, digital marketing, critique of platforms, and digital economy. The dissertations are 15,000 words long. Payment will be calculated as follows: we pay between 4 and 2.5 hours per dissertation. The deadline for finishing this is in early or mid-February.

Teaching Essay Writing
We are looking for weekly teaching help with hosting the Writing Lab’s informal and optional group writing support sessions (on-campus). The lab provides general guidance on ‘how to structure an academic essay/report’, ‘how to critically frame an argument’, ‘how to cite using Harvard referencing’, and ‘how to make sense and incorporate the feedback from your assessment’ etc. The teaching would start now and runs until 1 April 2022.

Please get in touch with the Deputy Head of the Department, Mercedes Bunz, sending your CV if you are interested: mercedes DOT bunz AT kcl.ac.uk. 

New project: SUPERB to promote forest restoration and adaptation across Europe

I’ll be part of a new research project on forest restoration and adaptation, led by the European Forest Institute and funded under the European Union’s H2020 programme.

Together with Jonathan Gray, I’ll co-lead a team at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London exploring how humanities-based digital methods can be used to understand forest issues and to explore engagement around reforestation. Our contributions will draw on and be developed in conversation with work in science and technology studies and internet studies.

You can find more about the project here and an excerpt from the press release is copied below.

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CfP for Special Issue “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Digital Experiment in Museology and Museum Design” of Herança Journal

Guest edited by Dr Gabriele Salciute Civiliene and Dr Kristen Schuster, DDH, King’s College London, the forthcoming Special Issue of Herança – Revista de História, Património e Cultura invites you to submit papers in English or Portuguese on the topics related to the issue’s title “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Digital Experiment in Museology and Museum Design”.

Don’t hesitate to contact Gabriele at gabriele.salciute-civiliene@kcl.ac.uk and Kristen at kristen.schuster@kcl.ac.uk if you have questions.

More information on the scope and the important dates here, and details of the call are copied below.

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Welcome to Rahel Süß, visiting researcher at the Department of Digital Humanities ✨

We are delighted to announce that Rahel Süß will be joining us as a visiting researcher at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London.

During her stay, she will continue her research on a political theory of digital democracy. A key question regards what the task of democracy has become in digital-mediated societies. Beyond demands for scaling deliberative problem-solving, she poses the problem differently. Her main contribution to contemporary debates is a conceptual framework that calls for a better understanding of digital democracy as a practice of problematisation. More about her research interests can be found in her bio (below) and she can be found on Twitter at @RahelSuess. Welcome Rahel! 🎊

Rahel Süß is a political theorist and the founding director of the Data Politics Lab at Humboldt-University of Berlin. Her work explores new forms of power relations that shape possibilities for democratic renewal. Drawing on democratic theory, critical algorithms studies, and activist political theory she is currently investigating how ‘a right to disidentification’ can enhance collective self-governance in the context of automated systems. By engaging with a series of examples, from ‘the right to be forgotten’, to the project DECODE and disruptive technologies, she shows that digital democracy requires not simply adequate mechanisms of recognition but also the capacity for non-identity—for anonymity (at times)—to engage in transformative processes.

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Welcome to Jean-Christophe Plantin, visiting researcher at the Department of Digital Humanities ✨

Jean-Christophe Plantin (@JCPlantin) is joining the Department of Digital Humanities over the coming months as a visiting researcher. In the following post he discusses what he will be working on. Welcome Jean-Christophe! 🎊

It is an honor to be a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Digital Humanities during Fall 2021. I have been a long-time admirer of the groundbreaking work of its Faculty members, regarding both digital humanities and key aspects of digital culture and economy. As the concept of infrastructure is central to my work, I look forward to engaging in discussions on this niche (but fascinating!) topic with its researchers.

While at King’s College London, I will carry on my work on my current book project, currently with the working title: The Infrastructural Power of Platform Companies. This book argues first that US-based tech companies (Google, Amazon and the likes) are now akin to infrastructures in society, due to their indispensability and capacity to shape the economic and social life. It moreover adopts the material focus from science & technology studies to show, second, how the same tech giants are literally and materially becoming infrastructure in four segments of the global networking infrastructure: data centers, subsea cables, terrestrial cables networks, as well as non-terrestrial connectivity.

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“Interrogating Global Traces of Infrastructure” workshop, 18th November 2021

A workshop on “Interrogating Global Traces of Infrastructure” will take place on 18th November 2021, organised by Urszula Pawlicka-Deger as part of her Marie Skłodowska-Curie DH Infra project. The event is organised together with the King’s Digital Lab, the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and the Critical Infrastructure Studies collective.

The schedule is available here and copied below, and you can register here.

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“You don’t own that data” – Btihaj Ajana on self-tracking in the Guardian

Btihaj Ajana has been interviewed in The Guardian about a piece on “Intimate data: can a person who tracks their steps, sleep and food ever truly be free?”. Here are some quotes from the piece:

Such quandaries will only become more common and complex, says Btihaj Ajana, a reader in media and digital culture at King’s College London and a specialist in self-tracking. She traces our tracking instincts in the digital age to the “quantified self” movement. It took shape in 2007 as a way for individuals to use technology to optimise themselves like machines. “What started as a positive phenomenon then got hijacked,” Ajana says.

Constant advances in tracking have given tech companies new ways to keep selling their latest devices, while happily collecting the data we generate and sign away without reading the terms and conditions. “You don’t own that data,” Ajana says. Apple promises to encrypt and guard the multiplying streams of health data it collects for us. But much of the concern about privacy in this growing market is what we consent to share with third-party apps and services that have their own privacy policies. “We are so blase about privacy,” Ajana says.

It is easy to imagine the value of health data not only to insurers, but also advertisers and employers. Around 2014, a number of big businesses started giving Fitbits to staff, collecting information on their sleep, activity and location. The rise of corporate tracking, which is presented as an employee perk (free watch! Better health!), may be hastened by Covid. LifeSignals, a California startup that has developed a chest patch to measure signals including breathing, temperature and even posture, noted a spike in demand last year from big businesses that wanted to screen staff for Covid symptoms.

“Some employers ask employees to compete with each other to be more healthy,” Ajana adds. “It can all seem benign and nice – but what if that data also gets used to decide who gets the next promotion or whose health insurance policy needs adjusting?” Opting out of such programmes can feel like a career risk of its own.

#FacebookOutage highlights our social media addictions – Rachael Kent interviewed in The Independent

Rachael Kent was interviewed for a piece in The Independent on “What happens psychologically when we’re cut off from social media?”, exploring what the recent outage of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp tells us about our social media addictions. Here are a couple of quotes from the piece:

This showed just how addicted many of us are to social media. “It was hugely challenging and immediately forced us to not only have a digital detox, but also confront our addictive relationship with not only our phones, but also the applications themselves,” explains Dr. Kent.
For Kent, this relationship “really illustrates how much they’d have become an extension of our physicality, as a mediating tool to enable so much: community, connection, communication, sociality. The inability to stop picking it up despite the fact that you know it’s not working really illustrates that dependence.”

“Techno-snitching is definitely a thing” – Kate Devlin interviewed for Wired piece on Amazon Astro robots

Kate Devlin at the Department of Digital Humanities was recently interviewed for a piece in Wired on how “Amazon’s Astro robot uses fear to get into your home”. You can read the article here, and below is the transcript of the interview that Kate did with Jack Needham…

 

From what you have seen so far, what’s different about an Amazon robot to other home robot products that have been on the market for a while? I imagine the sheer monster that is Amazon brings some huge differences.

A lot of the robots we have in our homes aren’t robots like this. Most common are robot vacuum cleaners, for example. The Astro robot aims to provide more broad service (such as video calls on wheels – essentially a telepresence robot) and also some scope to deliver small objects from one room to another.

Yes, Amazon has a lot of market power, but will people be happy to fork out for essentially a screen on wheels?

 

These things are billed as being a convenience – something that switches on lights, makes video calls etc. But it’s still a product that’s designed to make money and gather data. Do you think the everyday person forgets that? Why?

There’s a tendency to overlook or disregard privacy if it’s a barrier to convenience. We’re pretty much all guilty of that. How many of us read through pages of terms and conditions to use an app or service that we need? But in some instances, consumers may not be aware of just how much data is being gathered about them, or what happens to their personal information.

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