Skip to content
You are not logged in |Login  
     
Limit search to available items
Record:   Prev Next
Resources
More Information
Bestseller
BestsellerE-book
Author Rodrigues, Elizabeth (Librarian), author.

Title Collecting lives : critical data narrative as modernist aesthetic in early twentieth-century U.S. literatures / Elizabeth Rodrigues.

Publication Info. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2022.
©2022

Item Status

Description 1 online resource.
text file
Series Digital culture books
Digital culture books.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary On a near-daily basis, data is being used to narrate our lives. Categorizing algorithms draw from amassed personal data to assign narrative destinies to individuals at crucial junctures, simultaneously predicting and shaping the paths of our lives. Data is commonly assumed to bring us closer to objectivity, but the narrative paths these algorithms assign seem, more often than not, to replicate biases about who an individual is and could become. While the social effects of such algorithmic logics seem new and newly urgent to consider, Collecting Lives looks to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century US to provide an instructive prehistory to the underlying question of the relationship between data, life, and narrative. Rodrigues contextualizes the application of data collection to human selfhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century US in order to uncover a modernist aesthetic of data that offers an alternative to the algorithmic logic pervading our sense of data's revelatory potential. Examining the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Rodrigues asks how each of these authors draw from their work in sociology, history, psychology, and journalism to formulate a critical data aesthetic as they attempt to answer questions of identity around race, gender, and nation both in their research and their life writing. These data-driven modernists not only tell different life stories with data, they tell life stories differently because of data.
Funding Sponsored by The Eugene B. Power Fund.
Note This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Access Open access
Local Note JSTOR Books at JSTOR Open Access
Subject American literature -- 20th century -- Data processing.
American literature.
Chronological Term 20th century
Subject American literature -- 20th century -- Research -- Methodology.
Research.
Methodology.
Modernism (Literature) -- United States -- 20th century -- Aesthetics.
Modernism (Literature)
United States.
Aesthetics.
United States -- Biography -- 20th century -- Data processing.
Genre/Form Biographies.
Subject United States -- Biography -- 20th century -- Research -- Methodology.
American literature -- Research -- Methodology.
Biography -- Data processing.
Biography -- Research -- Methodology.
Chronological Term 1900-1999
Genre/Form Electronic books.
Added Author Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.
Other Form: Print version: Rodrigues, Elizabeth Collecting lives Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2022 9780472038909 (DLC) 2021062827
ISBN 9780472902637 (ebook other)
0472902636
9780472038909 (paperback)
Standard No. 10.3998/mpub.11618648