Category Archives for Visualise me
Generating portraits from DNA: Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s Becoming Chelsea
Did you know you can generate a portrait of a person’s face based on a sample of their DNA? The thing is, despite companies selling this service to the police to help them identify suspects, it’s not really that accurate. … Continue reading
Best Guess for this Image: Brassiere ( The sexist, commercialised gaze of image recognition algorithms.)
Did you know the iPhone will search your photos for brassieres and breasts, but not for shoulders, knees and toes? Or boxers and underpants either for that matter. “Brassiere” seems to be a codeword for cleavage and tits.
Transmediale: the opening
I’m in Berlin at the digital arts festival Transmediale for the first time, and of course I’m excited about the topic: CAPTURE ALL. An entire digital arts festival about the datafication of the world, which invited artists to “outsmart and outplay … Continue reading
Tracking culture: a workshop on intimate surveillance
I’m traveling home from a wonderful two day workshop in Aarhus, organized by surveillance scholar and philosopher Anders Albrechtslund. It was wonderful: a smallish group of scholars all researching what self-tracking means spending hours each day just talking about it. … Continue reading
How the Narrative Clip utterly fails to document my life
I was excited to receive my Narrative Clip this spring. It’s the first consumer lifelogging camera: you clip it to your clothes and it silently takes a photo every 30 seconds. Then you connect it to your computer. It uploads … Continue reading
My TEDxBergen talk: What Can’t We Measure in a Quantified World?
A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at TEDxBergen about wearables, the Quantified Self movement, dataism and all the things we cannot and might not want to measure. The talk is a shorter version of chapter 5 in my new … Continue reading
How we pose in photographs: hand signs and cultural differences
One of the highlights for me from the Association of Internet Researchers conference (#IR15) in South Korea last week was the extra-curricular learning. About many things, but in this post let me focus on what I learnt about selfie culture and … Continue reading
Cerebrally sincere? Why the humanities need to address dataism.
Katie Warfield posted a link to this fascinating study of what people think they look like, or wish they look like or to be more accurate, which of a series of photoshopped versions of a photograph of their face they have the … Continue reading
New book out now: Seeing Ourselves Through Technology
HOORAY! My new book, Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves was published today by Palgrave!!! The book is open access (CC-BY) so you can download it right now for free, either … Continue reading
Who sees our health data?
One of the topics in my upcoming book, Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves, is activity trackers and health information, which I consider both as a form of quantitative self-representation … Continue reading
