Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science

Haunted Data explores the challenges of 21st century media and computational cultures to our understandings of the media, mediation, representation, affect, power and subjectivity. The book specifically looks at how software-driven transactions are changing scientific innovation, progress, discussion, review, debate and the nature of consensus and controversy. Focusing specifically on two controversies in the area of “weird science”, including interspecies communication and extra-sensory perception, it argues that focusing on the odd, strange, anomalous, aberrant, freakish, bizarre, peculiar and unusual provides a route into developing the possibilities for more creative, speculative, open and adventurous science. The book suggests that both science and computational culture are haunted by both the histories and excesses of their own storytelling and that these excesses surface in “queer aggregations” or haunted data to be mined, poached and put to work in newly emergent contexts and settings. Haunted Data develops a form of transmedial storytelling drawn from postcolonial and critical race studies in order to re-move “ghost data” as they appear in dead-ends, deferrals, redactions, re-codings and gaps. These often lead to submerged and displaced narratives and disavowed and disqualified actors and agents. Drawing from radical philosophies of science, feminist science studies, queer theory, cultural studies, and the field of affect studies, the book develops a manifesto for how artists, philosophers and humanities scholars might engage creatively and critically with science within the context of digital communication