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This paper explores the relationships of subjects in the context of data and data technologies, and advances an original theoretical framework called Informatic Personhood to better conceptual subjects and their relationships. Because of the enormous structural change that data has contributed to, subjects are sometimes distant and backgrounded in studies of data, despite data having significant impacts on their lives. Data-mediated relationships mean an increased scale to a relationship, with individuals able to connect to much broader contexts of data, but also have these structures reach down to their subjective context through data. Informatic Personhood seeks to capture the dynamics of data present in everyday life, addressing this distance and better conceptualising the scale of data-mediated relationships. This framework has two parts. The first – The Informatic Context – explores salient structural developments around data and conceptualises this as being defined by the presence of 'data interfaces' (that connect individuals to digital contexts), 'data circulation' (trends in the movement and storage of data), and 'data abstraction' (data manipulation practices). The second part concerns the Informatic Person, and the embodied, affective, and sensemaking relationships of individuals occurring across and through the Informatic Context. This framework better addresses the scale of data-mediated relationships, and places subjects firmly in the foreground of how data is understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From smart vehicles to smart city sensors, the millions of new devices connected over the next few years will generate huge amounts of highly personal data that needs to be processed in real time. Transmitting this data to the cloud, with its centralized data centers and high latency, is both economically and technically unviable. As a result, the industry is moving towards processing data closer to the source, a major shift from the cloud to the so-called edge. This new architecture is understood as a necessary augmentation to the cloud. Indeed, in many ways, the edge is the polar opposite of the cloud: ad hoc networks, composed of resource-poor devices, that function at the hyperlocal level of the home, office, or neighborhood. However, this article argues that such technical supplementation is also about control, filling a critical void in contemporary formations of power. Coupled together, this cloud-edge formation is both centralized and decentralized, resource intense yet geographically dispersed. Drawing on Foucauldian theory, such power augments heavy, situated force with a more flexible, economic architecture – conforming to a trajectory of 'intensification' while also complicating it. While each mode of power has certain strengths and weaknesses, combining their operations forms a twinned power with new capacities for subjectivation and governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role that technologies have historically played in producing and reproducing global inequalities is well documented. Although technological innovation is associated with progress that does not mean that it necessarily narrows the gap between rich and poor, instead technological inequalities tend to exacerbate other inequalities. This applies also to information and communication technologies (ICT) and Big Data, which play an increasingly important role in humanitarianism. In this article, we address the socio-technical work that is necessary to acquire, process, store and use data and study the power relations that are embedded in these processes. We focus in particular on the use of Big Data in digital humanitarianism and argue that at each stage of the digital data life-cycle (data acquisition, data processing, data storage, and data usage and decision making) different resources are required. These include not only access to hardware, software and connectivity but also the ability to make use of the affordances of digital technologies. We posit that in the context of humanitarianism, ICT and Big Data are a particularly intriguing to study due to their ambivalent position of seeking to address inequalities while at the same time perpetuating them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]