“The quandary before me—a blessing or a vexation, depending on one’s perspective—is a deceptively simple one: how do we read?”
“Literary scholars such as myself are often guilty of naming everything a “text” that can be “read,” and despite recognizing the temptation for what it is, I nonetheless find the question of how (and why) we read (whether literary text the world around us, or the dreams we collectively share with others) a compelling one. This is in no small part because the reading methods we deploy are the same we use to make, create, and build the world around us. But I find the question an urgent one for the simple reason that it offers us an entry point into asking how do we study? That, perhaps, is at the crux of what we call Black digital humanities.”
Co-authored with Kimberly Bain, Ph.D.
Citation (Chicago)
Bain, Kimberly and Elizabeth Murice Alexander. “The Street Finds Its Uses: A Black Digital Humanities Call and Response.” Studies in Romanticism 61, no. 1 (2022): 161-174. https://doi.org/10.1353/srm.2022.0016
“Since the beginning, I have been fascinated by the ways in which Black women acknowledge and self-critically subvert structures of power without giving themselves over to those structures.”
“I have also been fascinated by the ways in which power crystallizes around technology, particularly technologies of capture and narrative. […] I did not set out to write a Lordian erotic reading of codes, data surveillance, and digital technologies, and I do not have a set of UI/UX best practices for erotic digital platform design. I don’t even know if I want that—is the answer to Facebook’s myriad ideological issues simply an erotically structured Facebook? Rather, I learned through experiencing this project that the best way for me to read, analyze, and understand digital technology was through the erotic. Where the surveillance structure pins down a datalogical answer, I want to locate the excess context around that answer and see how the narratives compare…”
ABSTRACT
Corporate actors increasingly use networked technology as a storytelling device, drawing on a long federal history of writing citizens through surveillance, data aggregation, and analysis. Social and juridical infrastructures are racing to keep up with the rapid pace of data-based technological development, but existing guardrails around aggregation serve instead to foster an environment of algorithmic data storytelling. In this context, narratives written by data are deemed more truthful than the stories told by the data’s subject.
Dirty Computers: Erotic Data Poetics turns to Black womanist poetics to glean an alternative ideological framework for collecting, analyzing, and using data. In this dissertation, I argue that queer womanist writer Audre Lorde’s concept of the erotic allows us to think about information capture and analysis as a generative collective poetics rather than institutional datafication and itemization.
In chapter one, “Surveillance States,” I explore and contextualize federal surveillance ideology through Black women’s surveillance history. In chapter two, “Zami: Erotic Data,” I analyze Lorde’s biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name as an erotic analysis of her life. The text distills the facts of her young adulthood to their most salient and revelatory elements—largely stories about loving other women—and leaving out that which was not an erotic measure. Zami stands in stark contrast to the federal narrative of Lorde’s young adulthood as it is captured in her FBI file.
The project then turns to compare the narratives produced by surveillant analytics and erotic analytics. In chapter three, “Data States,” I read data analysis company/federal contractor Palantir Technologies against itself, focusing on its contracts with the Chicago PoliceDepartment to analyze CPD surveillance data. In chapter four, “Riot: Erotic Analysis,” I explore poet Gwendolyn Brooks’s analysis of the 1968 MLK assassination riots in her chapbook Riot. Though the text predates Palantir Technologies by many decades, they offer an interesting comparison point on the topic of capturing, reading, and writing data. Both work to read and speak data about Black Chicago citizens in crisis, but arrive at critically different ends.
In chapter five, “Pynk: Erotic Objects,” I conclude my analysis by considering how Janelle Monáe and her contemporary singers negotiate control over their surveillance. The entire project uses Monáe’s Dirty Computer (2018) and the dirty computer protagonist Jane 57821 as a theoretical starting point to vision escaping surveillance, and this chapter returns here. The mysteriousness of her information narrative ultimately functions as a pathway of escape from the surveillance network. Finally, in the “Return” the project explores the idea of technocultural choreography from two endpoints; the platform company end, and the culturally grounded movement end. Platform companies design technologies that attempt to datafy and predict user behavior in order to influence it, akin to teaching users the choreography of a new dance. However, an exploration of movement choreography through the lens of virtual reality technology elucidates a level of embodied and grounded nuance that cannot easily be algorithmically delimited.
Citation (Chicago)
Alexander, Elizabeth Murice. “Dirty Computer Data: Erotic Data Poetics.” PhD diss., Cornell University, 2021.
