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Translating Technology in Africa brings together authors from different disciplines who engage with Science and Technology Studies (STS) to stimulate curiosity about the diversity of sociotechnical assemblages on the African continent. The contributions provide detailed praxeographic examinations of technologies at work in postcolonial contexts. The series of 5 volumes aims to catalyse the development of a field of research that is still in its infancy in Africa and promises to offer novel insights into past, present, and future challenges and opportunities facing the continent. The first volume, on "Metrics", explores practices of quantification and digitisation. The chapters examine how numbers are aggregated and how the resulting metrics shape new realities.
Contributors include Kevin. P. Donovan, Véra Ehrenstein, Jonathan Klaaren, Emma Park, Helen Robertson, René Umlauf and Helen Verran
Contributors include Kevin. P. Donovan, Véra Ehrenstein, Jonathan Klaaren, Emma Park, Helen Robertson, René Umlauf and Helen Verran
Translating Technology in Africa brings together authors from different disciplines who engage with Science and Technology Studies (STS) to stimulate curiosity about the diversity of sociotechnical assemblages on the African continent. The contributions provide detailed praxeographic examinations of technologies at work in postcolonial contexts. The series of 5 volumes aims to catalyse the development of a field of research that is still in its infancy in Africa and promises to offer novel insights into past, present, and future challenges and opportunities facing the continent. The first volume, on "Metrics", explores practices of quantification and digitisation. The chapters examine how numbers are aggregated and how the resulting metrics shape new realities.
Contributors include Kevin. P. Donovan, Véra Ehrenstein, Jonathan Klaaren, Emma Park, Helen Robertson, René Umlauf and Helen Verran
Contributors include Kevin. P. Donovan, Véra Ehrenstein, Jonathan Klaaren, Emma Park, Helen Robertson, René Umlauf and Helen Verran
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Abstract
Non-human animals are commonly classified according to their “role”, such as “livestock”, “wild” or “companion” animals. But what if those classifications overlap? This article presents a report of the retreat week “ZooCan – Zoonoses of companion animals as case study for animal ethics” at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, Germany, in November 2022. The workshop included participants from different European countries with interdisciplinary backgrounds (animal law, bioethics, epidemiology, philosophy, biology and veterinary medicine). We address ethically relevant issues that emerge when companion animals are used as research animals, particularly in zoonoses research. The outcomes of the multi-disciplinary approach are used to i) define criteria to classify “companion” and “research” animals, ii) provide guidance to overcome the challenges with classificational overlaps, iii) give insights into cutting-edge zoonoses research with an example of SARS-CoV-2 in cats, and iv) discuss animal ethics approaches with regard to classifications.
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In the late Middle Ages, Christine de Pizan contributed decisively to the development of Renaissance humanist ideas, which later resulted in the principle of the Enlightenment. In The Book of the City of Ladies, she laid the foundation for establishing a self-determined way of thinking that did not rely on authorities in the search for truth, but on the individual mind and one’s own experience as primary sources of knowledge—she urged people to have the courage to use their own senses. This now famous appeal is mainly and primarily associated with Kant and the Enlightenment, although de Pizan had already formulated a similar postulate 380 years earlier. The study of de Pizan also provides evidence that ideas of (early) female thinkers are partly integrated into the (philosophical) work of later male thinkers and sold as their own sole intellectual property. Only by determining the role of women in (philosophical) history do such facts become clear.
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The chapter inquires into the duality of metrics in contemporary Yorùbá life. I begin with an experience had by the author in a Yorùbá primary school classroom in a southwestern Nigerian city where a class of children near the end of their primary school career showed expert capacity in working the two very different metrics of contemporary Yorùbá life together. This ethnographic story provides a framing and offers preliminary data. In the body of the chapter, first I summarise the very different arithmetical workings of the Yorùbá language metric compared to the standard modern decimal system taught in schools and associated with English language. Then I show how numbers sit in the workings of Yorùbá language quite differently than the way decimal numbers sit in the English language. In making something of these differences, after briefly developing the idea that as cultural resources, metrics are linguistic-arithmetical meshes which have life through the sociomaterial happening of numbers in the here and now, I present accounts of bilingual children telling how they see differences between the metrics—literally; they tell of having an embodied sensibility of difference between Yorùbá numbers and decimal numbers. I relate the felt sociomaterial differences to difference between iconic and indexical numbers, noting iconic numbers feature in trade, whereas indexical numbers feature in experimental science.
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The term digital divide is used to describe the social, political, and economic effects that result from the decoupling or only partial integration of entire regions and populations. It is assumed that currently only about half of the world’s population has the necessary technical prerequisites to be able to use digital services reliably. Many Sub-Saharan countries are affected by this. Against this backdrop, I will follow the hypothesis that new forms of digital work in African contexts promote, and in some cases accelerate, the decoupling and the inequalities that arise from it. In order to be able to examine this ethnographically, I will engage with the work of Samasource, a globally operating impact sourcing company. Since 2012 Samasource, a San Francisco based organisation, operates a crowdsourcing and digital micro-work factory on the campus of Gulu University in Northern Uganda. About three hundred students and graduates work in twelve-hour shifts assigning specific digital attributes to large amounts of data (also called annotation work). What I refer to as data enrichment practices refers to both the circulation of commercialised raw data for machine learning or training data, as well as specific types of broadband internet used in low-resource contexts. The paper aims to find out how this form of neo-tayloristic, anti-innovative, “taskified” work relates to global and local discourses on wage labour and digital education. The conceptual framework of the paper attempts to critically situate this new form of digital mass labour as part of a particular form of post-colonial technopolitics.
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Increasingly, classifications generated by machine-learning models are playing a role in decision-making. Such classifications play a role, for example, in decisions regarding the creditworthiness of a loan applicant, the likely recidivism of a convicted person, and the malignancy of a lung tumour. Classification with a high degree of accuracy is possible both in cases in which human experts do the classificatory work and in which the classification is generated by such a machine-learning model. Part of what characterises such experts, in the former case, is that they can be said to possess the relevant concept(s). Indeed, despite the variation in circumstance, language, practice, and behaviour that accompanies such classification, we take such experts to possess the same concept and for this variation to be translatable in virtue of this concept. In the case in which the classification is generated by a machine-learning model, we similarly find variation, and indeed greater variation, in the circumstances, “language,” and behaviours accompanying this classification. Is there any sense in which the machine can similarly be said to possess the relevant concept(s)? To what extent, if any, can the machine that has attained the relevant degree of accuracy in classifying creditworthy applicants from non-creditworthy, malignant tumours from benign, or rabbits from non-rabbits, be said to possess the concept creditworthy or malignant or rabbit? This chapter addresses these questions by appealing to a number of analytic-philosophical accounts of human concept possession. It is shown that, even according to the most uncommitting account of human concept possession, machines that attain the relevant degree of accuracy in classification seemingly cannot be said to possess the relevant concept.
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This chapter elaborates a case of co-production. It asks how legal attempts to pursue the rights of access to information and privacy have shaped and vice versa have been shaped by information technologies and jointly impacted the socio-political order. In South Africa’s initial transition from apartheid to constitutional democracy, a discourse of open democracy justified the constitutional right to information and its associated vision of citizenship, including the achievement of socioeconomic rights. The Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA), a statute enacted as required by the constitutional right in 2000, needed to account for the closely related legal right to privacy. PAIA’s enforcement powers were strengthened through enactment of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) in 2013. The chapter seeks to show that PAIA’s construction, meaning, power and social life are not pure legal matters. Intended to serve as a tool for access to paper documents, PAIA has encountered and been shaped the introduction of large electronic databases and, most recently, digital information ecosystems. The chapter first inquires into expert technical knowledge, the classification and categorization of knowledge, and instruments of measurement to illuminate the meaning and use of the PAIA. The chapter then details the emergence and social life of the statute over two periods: the first from the introduction of constitutional democracy to the prominent role of large electronic databases in the South African public administration around 2005 and the second from that point to the present, where the related discourses of open government and data protection are ascendant and where digital information ecosystems are increasingly employed in public bodies.
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Anthropologists have long examined how debt builds upon and occasions interpersonal relations. The recent rise of digital lending in Kenya suggests the necessarily relational dynamics of digital data as well. Despite promises of borrowing unencumbered by social forces, decisions regarding sums lent, tactics to ensure repayment, and profits, are all secured through discerning the relational social dynamics that undergird everyday life. Drawing on these insights, this chapter examines a notion that we call infrastructured personhood through the case of digital data and debt, foregrounding the tensions between attachment and detachment—among and between persons and infrastructures. These anxieties must be understood in terms distinct from the liberal emphasis on individual privacy, seeing digital debt in the context of local ideas of personhood and ongoing histories of privation. This analysis cuts against much of the literature on neoliberalism which argues that, today, we are witnessing the emergence of novel forms of subjectification as people are moulded to operate as autonomous mini-firms; entrepreneurs of the self guided by the same logic as the corporation. By contrast, we foreground how peoples’ social relations and their lifeworlds are not being replaced by forms of autonomy but reconfigured as they are filtered through digital databases, infrastructures, and algorithms.
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For a few decades now, scientists have been warning us that the habitability of our planet cannot be taken for granted. Changes in the global climate call for improving the understanding of large-scale biochemical cycles, in particular that of carbon dioxide circulating between the atmosphere, the oceans, and the terrestrial vegetation. This chapter thus examines the ways in which the carbon stored in tropical forests becomes an object of scientific attention demanding measurement. The focus is on Gabon in central Africa, where there have been various attempts at estimating the mass of carbon contained in its forests. The chapter describes the accounting infrastructure required to quantify carbon losses and gains; the contribution of destructive sampling studies to the development of a unique equation that indirectly weighs tropical forests; a data campaign of Euro-American space agencies to which Gabonese forests served as material representatives; and the political strategies of a nation aspiring to establish itself as a green champion. I seek to show how scientific practices, technologies, funding arrangements, and politics, which come together to make a particular place—in this case a highly forested country like Gabon—have planetary significance. This planetary re-positioning is not the sole outcome of seeing from afar, using satellites, and remote sensing. It also depends upon myriad measurements and calculations obtained from going into the forest itself; setting up plot networks, cutting down trees, and compiling sparse data. All these efforts invested in weighing the forest have their own complications, and metrologically speaking, the uncertainty is high. And yet, there is no other way to acknowledge the importance of the carbon stored in 18.5 million square kilometres of tropical vegetation for the earth’s climate system.