Figure 5. Graphic included in the Data Ethics Decision Aid, a handbook for assessing ethical issues with regard to data projects, developed by the Utrecht Data School in conjunction with The Ethics of Coding project.
Using Hannah Arendt’s writings to rethink the role of documentary in visualizing and producing common worlds, The World Records Journal has launched Vol. 4 In The Presence of Others.
This issue of World Records puts Arendt’s work into counterpoint with documentary media and cultures.
Included is Conditions: Warren Sack in conversation with Jenny Reardon and Bonnie Honig, a trialogue to discuss questions like:
- What are the prevailing trends in science, biotech, and software engineering?
- What kinds of trajectories are implied by computational theory and machine learning? What are the risks of these developing fields as they come into contact with modes of privatized, bureaucratic rationality, or with statism and surveillance?
- How does Arendt’s work help us think more deeply about these questions?
Warren Sack is a media theorist, software designer, and artist whose work has been exhibited at SFMoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the ZKM Center for Art and Media. Warren is an affiliate of the Science & Justice Research Center and Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of The Software Arts (MIT Press, 2019).
Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research. She is the author of The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (Chicago University Press, Fall 2017).
Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University, and (by courtesy) Religious Studies (RS) and Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS). She is author of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993, Scripps Prize for best first book), Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, 2001), Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, 2009, David Easton Prize), Antigone, Interrupted. (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Fordham, 2017).