In May 2021, we held a launch event for the new special issue “Towards an Anthropology of Data”, which I co-edited with Antonia Walford and Nick Seaver. The full collection is available here.

The online event was fun- amazingly we found a time that all the contributors, in all their different timezones, could make it. The JRAI organisers told s afterwards we had 151 people show p online from 37 countries – United Kingdom, United States, France, Canada, India, Italy, Brazil, Turkey, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Belgium, Netherlands, China, South Africa, Argentina, Kenya, Spain, Colombia, Ireland, Singapore, Luxembourg, Mauritius, Latvia, Hong Kong SAR, Lithuania, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Taiwan, Ukraine, Republic of Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Portugal, Denmark, Norway.

Instead of having presentations, I paired the contributors and asked them to introduce each other’s paper, and then pose a question. This conversational format was good for Zoom. We had some great questions, so thanks to everyone who came, and especially to Haidy Geismar for chairing it for us: a real time challenge to keep each pair to 5 minutes when all of us could have discussed this work for hours.