Deep Search II

Vienna, May 28 2010

The automatic classification of data, its indexing, and its evaluation are at the heart of new communication environments. What lies beneath is not just a drive to organize the world’s information, but also to classify human relations: from the management of the modern workplace and consumers in mass societies, to the bio-political management of the network society. Sociometric algorithms quantify all areas of life in order to mathematically model and predict human behavior. In today’s booming world of data mining, algorithmic methods based on large digital datasets are routinely used for determining political influence and analyzing social dispositions or contagious trends. Digital transactions provide huge amounts of private and semi-private data on personal preferences that are harvested to customize and transform everyday experiences.

A key nexus is provided by search engines, multi-purpose tools present in many dimensions of life, and the increasingly comprehensive environments of services offered by search engine providers. Understanding search-based societies does not only require an analysis of the deep history of the storing and indexing of information, but also the study of complex new forms of retrieval and data analysis. This includes the new position of search engines in a top-down control matrix as well as “bottom-up” recommendation systems, “push-search”, folksonomies and the presumed wisdom of crowds. Search can only be understood if the still evolving redistribution of power in digital networks is addressed in both its centralizing and de-centralizing dimensions.

The conference Deep Search II focuses on key issues in this fast and dynamic field. First, we want to highlight the historical dimensions of our attempts to organize information and people. Second, we want to investigate the politics of search, conflict and dimensions of power, and, finally, future classification schemes beyond search, tracking and social recommendation systems, including new forms of pattern recognition in large data sets.

Deep Search II - Program

World-Information Institute Conference
Friday 28.5.2010 10:30 - 20:00

Hotel Imperial Riding School Vienna

10:30
Registration and Welcome

11:00
Panel 1: Visions of Organizing the World

Google Before Google, or, On the History of Search
Chad Wellmon, Assistant Professor of German at the University of Virginia
Website

Critique of search and the problem of knowledge
Yuk Hui, PhD researcher of the Metadata Project in the Centre of Cultural Studies and Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London.

12:30
Lunch Break

14:00
Panel 2: Sociometry, Networks and Classification

From Sociometry to Social Networks. Networking as Technique of the Social
Sebastian Giessmann, research fellow at the Excellence Cluster TOPOI in the cross- sectional group "Cultural Theory and its Genealogies", Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Website

Networked Campaigns: Traffic Tags and Cross Platform Analysis on the Web
Greg Elmer, Bell Globemedia Research Chair, Associate Professor of Radio TV Arts, and Director of the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada
Website

15:30
15 min Break

15:45
Panel 3: Rent and Bias

Economic Bias in Search Results
Elizabeth von Couvering, recent PhD graduate, London School of Economics
Website

Surplus and the immaterial: political notes on the "industrial revolution of data"
Matteo Pasquinelli is a writer, curator and researcher working at the intersection of French philosophy, media culture and Italian post-operaismo at Queen Mary University of London
Website

17:15
30 min Break

17:45
Panel 4: Contextual Modelling

Beyond Keyword Search
dr mc Schraefel, reader in the Intelligence Agents Multimedia (IAM) Group, University of Southampton, UK
Website

From a Tiny Island of Survey Data to the Ocean of Transactional Data
Karl H. Müller, Director of the Wiener Institute for Social Science Documentation and Methodology (WISDOM)
Website

19:15
Closing Discussion

20:00
End