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The Rhetoric of Big Data: Collecting, Interpreting, and Representing in the Age of Datafication
Get PDFRhetorical studies of science, technology, and medicine (RSTM) have provided critical understanding of how argument and argument norms within a field shape what we mean by “data.” Work has also examined how questions that shape data collection are asked, how data is interpreted, and even how data is shared. Understood as a form of argument, data reveals important insights into rhetorical situations, the motives of rhetorical actors, and the broader appeals that shape everything from the kinds of technologies built, to their inclusion in our daily lives, to the infrastructures of cities, the medical practices and policies concerning public health, etc. Big data merits continued attention from RSTM scholars as our understanding of its pervasive use and its ethos grows, but its arguments remain elusive (Salvo, 2012). To unpack the elusivity of big data, we explore one particularly illustrative case of big data and political, democratic influence: the Cambridge Analytica scandal. To understand the case, we turn to social studies of data to explore the range of ethical issues raised by big data, and to examine the rhetorical strategies that entail big data
Big Data, Congress, and the Rhetoric of Technology: Or, How to Industrialize Cyberspace
Get PDFAs new and developing technologies impact public and private life, rhetoricians would be remiss to overlook the deliberative rhetorics that justify their development, implementation, use-value, and impact. Using the 2013 joint congressional hearing “Next Generation Computing and Big Data Analytics” as an example, I argue that justificatory rhetorics about technology intersect with rhetoric from technology, obscuring information vital to critical deliberation. I demonstrate that the expert witnesses at this hearing draw upon rhetoric traditionally associated with American industrialization. Doing so allows them to articulate Big Data as a resource situated upon a metaphorical, American landscape and thus encourages the public to treat it as a natural resource that must be exploited for the betterment of the nation. Ultimately, I argue the use of this rhetoric dissuades critical analysis of the worth of Big Data and investigation of its technical aspects. This raises troubling questions about the ability of rhetoric about technology to both veil and guides what the public accepts as ethical rhetoric from technology
Big Data Drive: The Rhetoric of Biometric Big Data
Get PDFIn this essay, we seek to develop a concept of “big data drive.” Influenced in part by Lacan’s theory of drive, we study the drive toward biometric big data. Biometric big data (BBD) refers to the data collected around facial recognition, eye recognition, thumb prints, and other types of technology whose task is to identify a specific being through unique bio characteristics. “Big Data Drive” refers to the energies that pulsate around Big Data, as both a signifier and fetishized object, to promise “something more” that may never be fulfilled
Five considerations for engaging with Big Data from a rhetorical-humanistic perspective
Get PDFThis essay offers five conceptual entry points for engaging with Big Data from a rhetorical perspective. These five concepts—data in/as relationships, observability/action, patterns, diachronicity, and audience—serve as points of deep conceptual commonality between definitions of Big Data and principles in rhetorical studies, and are offered here as considerations for critiquing uses of Big Data from a rhetorical-humanistic perspective, as well as for guiding rhetorical work that uses Big Data
Rhetorical Implications of Contact Tracing Mobile Applications: An Examination of Big Data’s Work on the Body
Get PDFFor nearly a decade, big data has been hyped as an amazing new technology that will benefit corporations and consumers alike. By promising customized knowledge at an accelerated pace, big data technologies have slowly saturated the digital systems American consumers use to live, work, and play. Yet have the promised benefits materialized? An examination of the proposed contact tracing applications in response to the novel coronavirus alongside existing wearable technologies reveal that our trust and vulnerability, opening our bodies to be sensed by these networked systems, is a fraught rhetorical activity: not because an omniscient system now sees us and cares for us in our time of grave need. Rather, the opaque system misunderstands our embodied rhetorical actions, is incapable of moving the American polis, and cannot generate the promised collective action
“It’s just a cycle”: Resilience, poetics, and intimate disruptions
Get PDFThe phrase “It’s just a cycle” is commonly articulated in coastal resilience efforts and it also shapes broader public debates about climate change. Identifying the structure of arguments around cycles is a useful starting point for defining differences in perspective, but there is more to competing claims about cycles. It is this more that this essay aims to explore, starting with an opening example from an engaged rhetorical ethnographic project with Maine’s clam fishery. The example helps set up a methodological orientation to working with cycles within resilience-focused collaborations that draws from aesthetics and poetics. This approach aims to show how cycles shape world making and how attending to cycles as a trope can create a space for critical disruptions of colonial patterns. This is a space of intimate connection that allows cyclical rhythms, like those of tides, to help reveal a passageway to resilience
Resilience and Self-Reliance in Canadian Food Charter Discourse
Get PDFThis article interrogates the rhetoric of “self-reliance” as a common feature of discourses about individual and community resilience by examining Canadian food charters in the context of regional food systems aimed at improving community food security. Despite the association of food charters with alternative food systems and progressive politics, we find that their ambiguous and shifting appeals to self-reliance largely conflict with their stated social justice goals of community food security, particularly the goal of alleviating the distress of food insecurity for vulnerable community members. Overall, we argue that the rhetoric of self-reliance in Canadian food charters primarily perpetuates a neoliberal ideology of resilience that promotes an active, enterprising ethos of responsibility for one’s own well-being, whether at the level of individuals, communities, or food systems. Our study thus contributes to critical scholarship that contextualizes and problematizes specific sites and practices of resilience discourse
Dementia, Rhetorical Schemes, and Cognitive Resilience
Get PDFI argue for the importance of rhetorical schemes for understanding, diagnosing, and coping with forms of dementia. Schemes give salience (recruit attention), memorability (affect storage and facilitate retrieval), and aesthetic effects (induce a pleasurable emotional response) to configurations of language. They do so because of the way they play to neurocognitive pattern biases, like repetition, sequence, and position. Dementia is a condition under which language use degrades, alongside memory and attention, but pattern biases appear to remain and schemic configurations become more and more frequent in dementia speech. Rhetorical schemes, that is, are notably resilient to the forces that diminish language use in dementia
