by
Nick Seaver
139
[...] Richard, an engineer at Whisper, once asked me: "We have to recommend Filipino music to people in the Philippines, but we have no Filipino staff -- what should we do?" Neither he nor I were in positions to actually influence such decisions at the corporate level, and my suggestion, that perhaps his company didn't need to operate in the Philippines, was not tenable within an industry predicated on continuous expansion.
[...] Richard, an engineer at Whisper, once asked me: "We have to recommend Filipino music to people in the Philippines, but we have no Filipino staff -- what should we do?" Neither he nor I were in positions to actually influence such decisions at the corporate level, and my suggestion, that perhaps his company didn't need to operate in the Philippines, was not tenable within an industry predicated on continuous expansion.
149
Although critics may refer to Lévi-Strauss when talking about raw and cooked data, they are rarely pursuing this kind of analysis. Instead, they are usually working in the Lakoffian mode, making and evaluating mappings between domains in terms of their adequacy. The anthropologist Tom Boellstorff (2013), for instance, digs deeper into structuralism than most writers on data metaphors, drawing on an elaboration of the raw-cooked dichotomy, where Lévi-Strauss (1966) adds a third term, "rotten," to create "the culinary triangle." In this set, rawness comes to signify unelaborated materials in general: raw materials can be elaborated culturally, by cooking, or naturally, by rotting. In a Lakoffian move, Boellstorff seeks out a data analogue for "rot" and finds it in the notion of "bit rot" -- a technical term for the degradation of data as its material substrates age.
The media theorist Maria Eriksson (2016) picks up Boellstorff's term to describe the lively, error-prone musical data that people like Ellie manage. What Ellie described as "the garden," Eriksson calls " rotten data": this data is neither raw nor cooked but exists in a state of error and decay. Such errors are intrinsic to constantly shifting data, and they persist in the analytic engines of companies like Whisper, making computational outputs more unpredictable and less rational than they may seem. By bringing in the idea of "rot," Boellstorff (2013) aims to draw attention to the persistence of "the unplanned, unexpected, and accidental," identifying a third option beyond the assumed opposites of natural stability and cultural intentionality.
Although critics may refer to Lévi-Strauss when talking about raw and cooked data, they are rarely pursuing this kind of analysis. Instead, they are usually working in the Lakoffian mode, making and evaluating mappings between domains in terms of their adequacy. The anthropologist Tom Boellstorff (2013), for instance, digs deeper into structuralism than most writers on data metaphors, drawing on an elaboration of the raw-cooked dichotomy, where Lévi-Strauss (1966) adds a third term, "rotten," to create "the culinary triangle." In this set, rawness comes to signify unelaborated materials in general: raw materials can be elaborated culturally, by cooking, or naturally, by rotting. In a Lakoffian move, Boellstorff seeks out a data analogue for "rot" and finds it in the notion of "bit rot" -- a technical term for the degradation of data as its material substrates age.
The media theorist Maria Eriksson (2016) picks up Boellstorff's term to describe the lively, error-prone musical data that people like Ellie manage. What Ellie described as "the garden," Eriksson calls " rotten data": this data is neither raw nor cooked but exists in a state of error and decay. Such errors are intrinsic to constantly shifting data, and they persist in the analytic engines of companies like Whisper, making computational outputs more unpredictable and less rational than they may seem. By bringing in the idea of "rot," Boellstorff (2013) aims to draw attention to the persistence of "the unplanned, unexpected, and accidental," identifying a third option beyond the assumed opposites of natural stability and cultural intentionality.