In this episode, we speak with Sam Kinsley, Senior Lecturer in Human Geographies at the University of Exeter, in Devon, England, and the inaugural Co-Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal Digital Geography & Society. Sam is interested in spatialities and geographical imaginations of technology and the future; about how our situated existence is inherently technical, as well as the stories we tell about technologies in our daily lives. He is a close interpreter, and occasional translator, of the work of late French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. So we took the opportunity to ask Sam about his own work, as well as Stiegler’s writing, and how it might be a way to step back and think through how and why we might think about digital data, and the systems through which data are collected and mobilised, as ‘industrial-scale’ systems of memory.


The interview for this episode was recorded in July 2021.

Music from filmmusic.io "Clean Soul" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) License: CC BY (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

About the podcast: Data Materiality is a podcast series about the ways in which digital data depends on physical forms and infrastructures, and comes to matter in practice and imagination. The impetus for this podcast is a three-year research project by the same name – Data Materiality – co-sponsored by Birkbeck’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture and the Vasari Centre for Art and Technology. The series is co-hosted by Joel McKim and Scott Rodgers.

For more information: www.bbk.ac.uk/vasari

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Data Materiality

Data Materiality Episode 5: Sam Kinsley on Data, Technicity and the Industrialisation of Memory

Good-Enoughing: Software Work Cultures at a Middle Tech Company

Contrary to much of the popular discourse, not all technology is seamless and awesome; some of it is simply “good enough.” In this lecture, Prof. Paula Bialski (University of St. Galen) offers an ethnographic study of software developers at a non-flashy, non-start-up corporate tech company. Their stories reveal why software isn’t perfect and how developers communicate, care, and compromise to make software work—or at least work until the next update. Exploring the culture of good enoughness at a technology firm she calls “MiddleTech,” Bialski shows how doing good-enough work is a collectively negotiated resistance to the organizational ideology found in corporate software settings.

Paula Bialski Good-Enoughing: Software Work Cultures 12 February 2025

The Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology is based at Birkbeck, University of London. It supports research projects, hosts related events, and has a range of unique connections to other media research institutions, large and small museums and galleries, and the creative industries. For more information: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/vasari/about/

Data Materiality Episode 5: Sam Kinsley on Data, Technicity and the Industrialisation of Memory

Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology

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