Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 146.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2024-09-18 12:52:31+00:00
        From: Gerald Sim <gsim@fau.edu>
        Subject: New book: SCREENING BIG DATA: FILMS THAT SHAPE OUR ALGORITHMIC LITERACY

Hi everyone,

I write with news of my recently published book, Screening Big Data:
Films that Shape Our Algorithmic Literacy

<https://www.routledge.com/Screening-Big-Data-Films-that-Shape-Our-
Algorithmic-Literacy/Sim/p/book/9780367772635?fbclid=IwAR1AkIhTnE0-GnW-2UdnELOCk
vP9Fkkuv5yULvIISvrJ2UaILVlboWLsZvg>.

Here's an excerpt from the official synopsis, followed by generous
endorsements that the book received from Mark Andrejevic, Neta
Alexander, Nick Seaver, and Melissa Gregg.

 From star-powered blockbusters to civic-minded documentaries positioned
to facilitate weighty debates about artificial intelligence, these texts
frame our discourse and mediate our relationship to technology. Above
all, they impact society's abilities to regulate Al and navigate big
tech's political and economic maneuvers to achieve market dominance and
regulatory capture. Foregrounding data politics with close readings of
key films like Moneyball, Minority Report, The Social Dilemma, and Coded
Bias, Gerald Sim reveals compelling ways in which films and tech
industry-adjacent media define apprehension of Al. With the mid-2010s
techlash in danger of fizzling out, Screening Big Data explores the
relationship between this resistance and cultural infrastructure while
highlighting the urgent need to refocus attention onto how technocentric
media occupy the public imagination. This book will interest students
and scholars of film and media studies, digital culture, critical data
studies, and technopolitics.

"Screening Big Data understands that developments in digital culture
reach far beyond the technology — they are cultural phenomena with their
own legends, heroes, and villains. The result is an invaluable and
wide-ranging guide to the myths of big data and how these play out
across our screens, large and small, shaping our understanding of the
technology that is transforming our world. Gerald Sim's wide-ranging
account provides invaluable insight into 'big data: that it is not
enough to understand the technology, we need to understand the culture
that has grown up around it." -Mark Andrejevic, Monash University

"Drawing on an impressive plethora of sources, Screening Big Data
unpacks the paradoxes within the data mythologies and cultural
imaginaries that have come to shape our current techno-media-industrial
complex. Rigorous yet highly engaging, this book is a must-read for
media scholars, critical data researchers and anyone seeking to distill
the capabilities and limitations of Al from the cinematic narratives
that both capture our imagination and distort our understanding of
techno-political systems." - Neta Alexander, Yale University

"The social power of data doesn't come from data alone. In Screening Big
Data, Gerald Sim takes us on a compelling tour through the cinematic
landscape of technoscientific imagination, exploring how algorithms,
artificial intelligence, and data science have been represented on
screen. Sim shows how these representations shape our understanding of
what these tools can do, making a persuasive argument for including
popular media in our analyses of new technologies." - Nick Seaver, Tufts
University

*In this essential work of media scholarship, Gerald Sim identifies the
critical role that older technologies play in ushering the new. Through
exquisite close readings, summoning extensive research into each film's
cultural and technical production, a handful of companies and
individuals are shown to command an outsized influence on our visions of
the future. Sim successfully litigates the case for algorithmic literacy
to overcome our current indenture to machinic ways of seeing and
valuing. Screening Big Data is an exemplary demonstration of how
relevant film and screen studies can be for our shared emancipation." -
Melissa Gregg, Sustainability Consultant, Reality Labs



Be well, everyone.
Gerald


Gerald Sim PhD |​  Professor, School of Communication & Multimedia Studies
Florida Atlantic University   777 Glades Rd, Boca Raton, FL 33431



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