Data Friction and Infrastructural Globalism

Well it has come to the end of my blog posts and I feel like I have learned a lot about publishing in the short time that I have been studying it. This course has really expanded my mind and allowed me to see that there is a wide variety of ways that information can be published and that it can affect many different types of publics. 

The reading this week by Paul Edwards (2010) explored how the gathering of climate data has changed over time and how it has become more global through the use of data models rather then absolute observations that give people 100% accurate data. 

One of the terms that it examined is data friction, which is the process of recovering contextual knowledge about old records (Edwards, 2011). If one is successful they can discover new perspectives, find flaws in old data and new ways to correct them. I thought this was an interesting claim as sometimes I think people are busy trying to find the latest information and neglect to look at the data that has been gathered in the past so that they can see if is relevant or whether it can give you a new insight on things. 

Another point that the reading made was about infrastructural globalism, which is when technical systems are used to gather global data, which could lead to global institutions and organizations (Edwards, 2011). Even though the reading was focusing on climate change I thinks this is happening in many other areas of publishing whether it is traditional forms of publishing like print or newer forms like Facebook. This new way of collecting data is significant as more communities are able to understand what is been published but I also think that it can have a negative affect as there is more of a tendency to standardise content and some originality and can be lost as data goes through one type of process in order for it to be understood by the global community. 

Well that’s all for this week, I hope that my blog posts have demonstrated my reflections on publishing in a variety of different ways. 

References: 

Edwards, Paul N. (2010) A Vast Machine [online]. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press. Available at: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12080&mode=toc [Accessed 20 May 2011].