This art book is my second collaboration with Orkney publisher and poet, Alistair Peebles. This time we have been working with the wonderful artist and designers, Rachel Barron and Nathan Clydesdale.
Dawn Nafus, anthropologist from Intel Labs, and I wrote the text during an exploration of how our two fieldsites re-imagined ‘Big Data’. Together we have created this elegant risograph-printed fold-out book, to speak to our colleagues who work with Big Data differently. Part map, and part collection of ethnographic moments, this little publication is an arts project, ethnography project, and technology project. But what matters is that this publishing project tells different kinds of data stories.
The book was funded through a grant from Intel Labs.
Order Book from Brae Editions (Limited Edition)
Abstract
‘Big Data’ rises and accumulates today from so much of our activity, off and online, that our lives seem almost suffused by ‘The Cloud’. But perhaps data might be otherwise? In this collection, Laura Watts and Dawn Nafus, two ethnographers, bring together stories from different data sites: from the marine energy industry, and from the Quantified Self movement. These Data Stories speak, not of clouds, but of transformations: in things, in energy, and in experience.
Reference
Watts, L and Nafus, D. (2013) Data Stories. Sand14/Brae Editions, Orkney. ISBN 9781907508059.