DH-relevant talk today over at the Program in Science in Human Culture:

SARAH IGO (Vanderbilt)

“Tracking the ‘Surveillance Society’”

Description: This talk explores the cultural effects of new ways of housing and accessing personal data in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. It was in this period that citizens first mobilized around what they had known, in low-grade fashion, since at least the 1930s: that many agencies, public and private, were collecting information about them. New suspicions attended the mundane data-gathering operations of agencies like the Internal Revenue Service and Census Bureau, while hidden monitoring devices, vast warehouses of private information, and menacing bureaucracies loop through the cultural and political texts of the period. Faster computers, larger bureaucracies, and expanding databanks, I will argue, generated novel claims and claimants for the protection of “private” information. They also led to a distinctive understanding of the postindustrial U.S. as a “surveillance society,” which depended on the collection of personal data for its very operation.

Hagstrum Room (University Hall Room 201) on Mondays from 4pm-5:30pm.

http://www.shc.northwestern.edu/klopsteg/index.html

Fascinating and DH-relevant article by Igo: Sarah Igo, “Knowing Citizens,” Sensate Journal.