King's College London Digital Humanities

Our research project “Our Data Ourselves” was an AHRC-funded grant being undertaken at King’s College London in 2013-15, to broadly consider the personal data generate in the everyday lives of young people, through their mediated, cultural and communicative practices. Our aims are to increase our understanding of the nature and role of the data that young people produce when they use platforms and applications on their smartphones.

By working with members of Young Rewired State, who are between the ages of 14 and 18, we will develop tools and applications to visualise components of the Big Social Data (BSD) that they generate. Part of this research will also highlight areas for policy development around privacy, given that the time that is spent participating within socially networked environments is only increasing. We produced an open environment for BSD research with tools, applications and an infrastructure predicated on an ethical framework for data sharing available for widespread community use.

King’s lead researchers: Tobias Blanke; Mark Cote; Jennifer Pybus

Associated organisations: Young Rewired State

This project considers how the ubiquity and specificity of digital culture come into dialogue with food culture (nb. Rousseau 2012).

In what ways do routine digital technologies – for instance, social media platforms, smartphone apps and algorithms – contribute to the ethical, political, economic and social registers of cooking and eating?
How do these technologies contribute to wider understandings of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ food?
How do digitised food practices map onto existing geographies of knowledge, power and cultural representation?
Is digital culture rewriting the narratives of authority, authenticity and access by which food cultures have traditionally been theorised?

This interdisciplinary project reflects on these and related questions.

King’s lead researcher: Zeena Feldman

Frontispiece to Charles Howard Hinton’s 1904 book The Fourth Dimension, illustrating the tesseract, the four-dimensional analog of the cube. Hinton’s spelling varied: also known, as here, “tessaract”.

In an 1880 article entitled “What is the Fourth Dimension?”, Hinton suggested that points moving around in three dimensions might be imagined as successive cross-sections of a static four-dimensional arrangement of lines passing through a three-dimensional plane, an idea that anticipated the notion of world lines. Hinton’s explorations of higher space had a moral basis:

Hinton argues that gaining an intuitive perception of higher space required that we rid ourselves of the ideas of right and left, up and down, that inheres in our position as observers in a three-dimensional world. Hinton calls the process “casting out the self”, equates it with the process of sympathizing with another person, and implies the two processes are mutually reinforcing.

Hinton created several new words to describe elements in the fourth dimension. According to the OED, he first used the word tesseract in 1888 in his book A New Era of Thought. He also invented the words kata (from the Greek for “down from”) and ana (from the Greek for “up toward”) to describe the additional two opposing fourth-dimensional directions (an additional 4th axis of motion analogous to left-right (x), up-down (y), and forwards-backwards (z)).

Hinton’s Scientific romances, including “What is the Fourth Dimension?” and “A Plane World”, were published as a series of nine pamphlets by Swan Sonnenschein & Co. during 1884–1886. In the introduction to “A Plane World”, Hinton referred to Abbott’s recent Flatland as having similar design but different intent. Abbott used the stories as “a setting wherein to place his satire and his lessons. But we wish in the first place to know the physical facts.” Hinton’s world existed along the perimeter of a circle rather than on an infinite flat plane.[15] He extended the connection to Abbott’s work with An Episode on Flatland: Or How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension (1907).

Source: Wikipedia