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Emerging Data Cultures: Writing the Datafied Subject in Whitman and Melville
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- Author / Creator
- Miya, Chelsea
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This dissertation reads the informational ethos of authors Herman Melville and Walt Whitman through the lens of critical data studies and surveillance studies, examining how emerging data cultures in the nineteenth century gave rise to new subjectivities. The study situates these authors at a critical juncture in the ascendence of data: when the small-scale grassroots data activism carried out by reform-era citizen scientists began to be displaced by the large-scale, professionalized and bureaucratized information gathering practices of the state. The political and cultural tensions of this shift are captured in Whitman’s journalism and early versions of Leaves of Grass, as well as Melville’s south seas novels and Moby-Dick. In placing these literary works in conversation with newspaper reports, census tracts, maritime employment contracts, and whaling charts, the study describes the ways in which subjects have historically been constituted as data, in turn, and how those subjects resisted and remade those datafying systems. The study, moreover, draws attention to the role of art and literature in the data assemblage, not only in the dissemination and interpretation of data, but in the construction and dismantling of the mythologies that surround and uphold these systems, including presumptions of neutrality and objectivity.
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- Subjects / Keywords
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- Graduation date
- Spring 2022
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.