Computers and Composition Sep 2021 Open Access

Critical infrastructure literacies and/as ways of relating in big data ecologies

Dustin W. Edwards San Diego State University

Abstract

In response to the numerous ethical issues involving big data, this article positions the infrastructural dynamics of big data storage and circulation as a concern for social and environmental justice. After identifying how big data accumulate in place-based ecologies that are made vulnerable to sustain ever-increasing quantities of data, the author explains how most, if not all, digital writing practices are relationally tethered to often distant places. In response, the author argues for developing and sustaining critical infrastructure literacies where big data infrastructures are not perceived as ethereal, cloud-like entities, but as materialities with relations to place, land, water, history, climate, culture, nation, and much else. Attending to infrastructure with a cultural rhetorics orientation attentive to relationality, accountability, and story, the article details four critical practices that place digital citizens within relational matrices where they are asked to account for how data practices affect a constellation of people, places, and environments.

Journal
Computers and Composition
Published
2021-09-01
DOI
10.1016/j.compcom.2021.102653
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Topics
cultural rhetorics digital rhetoric literacy studies affect and writing editorial matter
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (4)

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