Haunted Data, Transmedial Storytelling, Affectivity: Attending to "Controversies" as Matters of Ghostly Concern

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Blackman, Lisa. 2019. Haunted Data, Transmedial Storytelling, Affectivity: Attending to "Controversies" as Matters of Ghostly Concern. Ephemera: theory and politics in organisation, 19(1), pp. 31-52. [Article]

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Official URL: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/

Abstract or Description

This article will explore the organizational dynamics of knowledge and scientific truths in a digital age and the hauntological implications inherent in such processes. It will consider the concept of haunted data and its methodological and performative force in relation to the question of what accrues power, status and authority within the context of changing conditions of truth-claims within digital archives. The article will focus on a scientific controversy related to priming, which largely took shape within the context of post-publication-peer-review. Post-publication-peer-review (PPPR) is a distributed form of commentary made possible by social and digital media. Different publics can now add their own commentary to published academic journal articles as they circulate across websites, blogs and weblogs, twitter, Google+ posts, in Reddit communities, in comments attached to Wikipedia, online science journalism articles, newspaper articles and so on. For some scientists, the digital disruption of the publishing industry is opening scientific conversation up to new publics and can help contribute to the impact of the article. For others it is dangerous and might damage the integrity of science and the concepts used to adjudicate truth-claims. What is missing from these debates are the hauntological consequences of these new publishing forms and their implications for how we might understand the affectivity and dynamism of data and digital archives once thought fossilized or fugitive. This includes the particular organisation of practices of memory and forgetting, and attention and inattention within digital controversies.

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Article