Aggregation is experience not content

Show and Tell your favourite example of Publishing - iTunes

What is it background? What are the impacts? What 'data' does it publish? 

iTunes is a media player and media library application developed by Apple Inc. It is used to play, download and organise audio and video. iTunes publishes song/album, movie/TV data frequently.

How is this placed within what Paul Edwards calls 'infrastructural globalism'? What are the dynamics involved?

Top Charts for single/album etc. are compiled by a 'technical system,' tallying downloads and views refreshed daily. iTunes runs nationally - putting 'your' news within your computers iTunes Store.

How do you get from local to the global and back when it comes to data, its many forms of content and expression, the archives involved and the process of distribution?

To look at global music charts you have to search Top 100 for example, because iTunes on your computer displays charts on a national level. Archives of songs are available when searched under artist and are ranked by popularity.

What kinds of 'data friction' are involved? How open is all this to manipulation or variation?

The question posed is how reliable is this information? The raw numbers on iTunes aren't available to the public so there is an element of scepticism as to whether the data on Top Song/Album is completely correct. The fact that this is an online software data friction is more likely to occur compared to traditional forms of media i.e. newspapers, with editing and revision denied once printed.



Infrastructural Globalism.... Data Friction

Paul N. Edwards "A Vast Machine" states that "without models, there are no data," meaning they cannot exist alone, past models will affect future data. Edwards believes that you cannot understand time and space without a series of data models.

His example, Climate Change as a Global Knowledge Infrastructure, is combining an issue with a system. Climate is the history of the weather over time, and the collecting of weather data from the past creates global data and data friction. The information generated can be modelling in order to explain, predict and visualise. 'Infrastructure,' has connotations of man-made, carefully constructed and measurable objects and when combined with 'global,' we have the building of systems of global thinking institutions like World Meteorological Organisation and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, creating models for data. The mass of data can cause data friction, the "difficulty of recovering contextual knowledge about old records," data is open to manipulation and variation, so a model is utilised, the data is compared and interpreted for slight discrepancies.



Key WORD: aggregation