New Frontiers of Philanthro‐capitalism: Digital Technologies and Humanitarianism

Digital technologies that allow large numbers of laypeople to contribute to humanitarian action facilitate the deepening adoption and adaptation of private‐sector logics and rationalities in humanitarianism. This is increasingly taking place through philanthro‐capitalism, a process in which philanthropy and humanitarianism are made central to business models. Key to this transformation is the way private businesses find supporting “digital humanitarian” organisations such as Standby Task Force to be amenable to their capital accumulation imperatives. Private‐sector institutions channel feelings of closeness to aid recipients that digital humanitarian technologies enable, in order to legitimise their claims to “help” the recipients. This has ultimately led to humanitarian and state institutions re‐articulating capitalist logics in ways that reflect the new digital humanitarian avenues of entry. In this article, I characterise this process by drawing out three capitalist logics that humanitarian and state institutions re‐articulate in the context of digital humanitarianism, in an emergent form of philanthro‐capitalism. Specifically, I argue that branding, efficiency, and bottom lines take altered forms in this context, in part being de‐politicised as a necessary condition for their adoption. This de‐politicisation involves normalising these logics by framing social and political problems as technical in nature and thus both beyond critique and amenable to digital humanitarian “solutions”. I take this line of argumentation to then re‐politicise each of these logics and the capitalist relations that they entail.     

Digital harm and addiction: An anthropological view

A broad trend of anti-tech rhetoric has raised fears about the dangers of digital overuse and reliance and suggests that technology is addictive, unnatural or harmful. Some people have limited their hours of ‘screen time’ or resorted to the practice of ‘digital detoxing’ – a catch-all term to describe temporarily ‘leaving’ the digital world. Using her ethnographic work in a North American digital detox retreat, the author considers an anthropological approach to digital harm and addiction that emphasizes their socially constructed nature. Following Horst and Miller (2012) and the view that digital harms are socially constructed, she argues that digital technology will be removed in different places for different reasons, and that geographically bound cultural values are vital to understanding how digital harms come to be imagined and counteracted. Whether or not digital use will ever be proven to be clinically harmful, digital harm is best viewed as a ‘social fact’.     

Unconsented Sterilisation,Participatory Story‐Telling,and Digital Counter‐Memory in Peru

This article aims to prompt reflection on the ways in which digital research methods can support or undermine participatory research. Building on our experiences of working on the Quipu Project ( quipu‐project.com ), an interactive, multimedia documentary on unconsented sterilisation in Peru, it explores the ways in which digital technologies can enable participatory knowledge production across geographic, social and linguistic divides. It also considers the new forms of engagement between knowledge‐producers and audiences that digital methods can encourage. Digital technologies can, we contend, help build new spaces for, and modes of engagement with, participatory research, even in contexts such as the Peruvian Andes where digital technologies are not well established or commonly used. Doing so, we argue, entails responding sensitively to the social, linguistic and digital inequalities that shape specific research contexts, and centring the human relationships that are easily sacrificed at the altar of technological innovation.     

数字

12项新闻出版总署日前下发《关于制定和报送2010年图书出版计划的通知》（以下简称《通知》）,明确了2010年图书出版工作思路,确定了2010年图书出版工作的重点。从《通知》来看,2010年出版计划亮点纷呈,12项重点勾勒出2010年图书出版蓝图。     

Pencils and Pixels: Drawing and Digital Media in Archaeological Field Recording

Within the context of a growing emphasis on digital recording, what is the place of analog drawing in archaeological fieldwork? In this article, we situate the increased application of digital drawing methods by providing several historical examples of archaeological field drawing in British archaeology to demonstrate the connection between understanding the archaeological record and illustration. Given this background of analog archaeological recording, we then explore the current state of archaeological field drawing and the affordances of digital illustration for recording and interpreting the archaeological record, review literature in architecture and design regarding the cognitive function of analog and digital drawing, and discuss the possible future implications of born-digital or paperless archaeology.     

Digital cameras: agents in research with children

In a study on children's relations to outdoor places, 41 six- to eight-year-old children took photos with digital cameras during walks in schoolyards and nature environments. In the present article, the cameras and their role in the research process are in focus. A materialist approach has guided the analysis [Barad, K. 2003. “Post Humanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–831 and Barad, K. M. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press]. The research process is seen as a materialist-discursive phenomenon in which several human and non-human agents intra-act. The results indicate that the cameras give rise to explorative activities and function as a third party in social situations. These activities occasionally counteract the purpose of the study.     

论数字城市与地方志

信息时代的城市发展正在向依赖知识和信息的知识经济和信息社会迅速转变。建设数字城市是社会经济发展的必然。地方志是数字城市最重要的广义数据源。地方志部门要想在数字城市建设中发挥积极作用,需要抓住机遇,加快地方志资源网络化建设,扩大地方志的影响,研究网络环境下地方志的编纂理论和方法,为用户提供有价值的决策信息。     

Digital containment and its discontents

This essay explores a set of existential risks that accompany digital storage capacities, devices, and promises: the anxious exhaustion of digital housekeeping; the disorientation of self-archiving; and the annihilating sense of loss that strikes when digital containment fails.     

Digital fixation: the law and economics of a fixed e-book price

Fifteen OECD countries, ten of which EU members, have regulation for fixing the price of printed books. At least eight of these have extended such regulation to e-books. This article investigates the cultural and economic arguments as well as the legal context concerning a fixed price for e-books and deals with the question of how the arguments for and against retail price maintenance for e-books should be weighted in the light of the evidence. It concludes that while the evidence in defence of a fixed price for printed books is slim at best, the case for a fixed price for e-books is weaker still while the legal acceptability within EU law is disputable. Against this background, introducing a fixed price for e-books is ill-advised.     

数字时代的博物馆:快乐、体验和新知

在数字时代背景下,"快乐"成为博物馆体验的重要组成部分,同时也是现代博物馆吸引观众、提升自身竞争力的重要手段.数字媒体技术为博物馆提供了前所未有的工具,通过将快乐与博物馆展览相结合,可以更好地服务观众,为观众提供更加丰富的参观体验."游戏"作为一个重要展示方式,不仅对儿童具有强大吸引力,对成年人也同样重要,数字时代的博物馆应该充分利用游戏机制使展览变得更具吸引力.创造快乐也是实现博物馆教育功能的重要途径,数字时代博物馆需要将知识与趣味相结合,使观众在快乐的博物馆体验中获得新知.     

Digital extraction: Blockchain traceability in mineral supply chains

Digital data — including technologically-mediated data generated by blockchain-enabled traceability — is performing an increasingly integral role in extractive operations, but scarce attention has been paid to the structuring effect of these digital technologies or the socio-economic spatiality of data-driven mining operations. Drawing on extensive qualitative research (interviews, participant observation, and two sets of survey data among actors relevant to these mineral supply chains), this article advances the notion of “digital extraction” to describe the collection, analysis, and instrumentalization of digital data generated under the banner of blockchain-based due diligence, chain of custody certifications, and various transparency mechanisms, situated alongside and in support of mineral extraction. The article mobilizes concepts from political geography and political ecology to argue that digital technologies of traceability in extractive processes potentially create new forms of control and exclusion or exacerbate existing social, political, and territorial dispossession through asymmetric relations of power and knowledge in mineral supply chains. Despite industry efforts to make mineral supply chains more sustainable by resorting to digital certification and traceability, the strategic uses of uncertainty, ignorance, and ambiguity undergirding blockchain-enabled traceability systems fail to challenge existing inequalities in resource use and access or fulfill the promise of transparency and accountability.     

SahulTime: Rethinking Archaeological Representation in the Digital Age

SahulTime is an experimental development project to explore how archaeological knowledge might best be represented within a digitally native mode. The system incorporates an interactive, zoomable timeline with a changing geographic view, time-aware icons and detail-boxes that can themselves express temporal visualisations. The core knowledge domain currently represented is Australian archaeology in the context of changing sea-level, but the visualisation concepts developed are more generally applicable at a global level on all timescales, and may offer a first step towards the ‘Digital Earth’ vision of a top-down interface for exploring the world and its history.