Labour in the Digitized World

This page is to give you a sense of some of the readings which cover the important topic of labour in the digitized world---that is, the idea that behind "Artificial Intelligence" and "the Cloud" there are actual working humans, such that the digital world is not (yet) as non-human as we might (want to) imagine it to be. Such a topic has a much longer history, of course: to take one obvious example, the communications revolution of the mid-late nineteenth century, in which steamships plied the world at ever greater speeds (contemporaries talked of the world "shrinking"), was only possible because of the work of coal miners, stevedores, engine room firemen and so on. Please add to this list if you find anything relevant and interesting.

Readings

• Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri, Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2019). Chapter 1: Humans in the Loop
• Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). (Ditto) See also the website which accompanies this book.
• Amelia Chesley, “The In/Visible, In/Audible Labor of Digitizing the Public Domain”, Digital Humanities Quarterly 13, 2 (2019)
• Katrina Anderson et al, “Student Labour and Training in Digital Humanities”, Digital Humanities Quarterly 10, 1 (2016)