DISA

Arwid Lund, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Cultural Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Linnaeus University will give a talk within the emerging field of Digital Humanities (DH) that is a part of the DH Seminar series hosted by the Digital Humanities Initiative at the Linnaeus University.

• Date: 6 December 2017
• Time: 13:00-14:00
• Location: K1040, Building K, Växjö

Abstract: Open Data in the Age of Big Data Capitalism, Arwid Lund

The digital world has transformed the conditions for discussing freedom within liberalism. Private property more obviously clashes with the freedom of speech (the public sphere), when the costs of mediated and reproduced art, journalism, information and literature nears zero and the exchange of these takes fluid forms, similar to social communication. The concept of “open”, similar but still opposite to “free”, has taken on an accentuated ideological importance in this context, but so have also alternative visions of intellectual commons. This article contains a case study of Open Knowledge Network’s perspective on openness’ relation to private property and capitalism in the informational field. It does so first through an analysis of the network’s understanding of the copyleft principle, and second through an analysis of the organisation’s view on open business models. A theoretical reading of classical political perspectives on the concept of freedom supports the analysis. One result is the identification of a central ideological lacuna in absent discussions of unconditionally opened-up resources that strengthen the accumulation cycle of capital. This logic favours the negative freedom of closed business models in the competition with open ones that could foster more positive notions of freedom, although open business models are generally advocated and commons are mentioned as desirable. In a dominant ideological formation, openness is used to promote its opposite in the economic field.

The seminar will be streamed through the following link, https://connect.sunet.se/dhseminars/; and recorded video will be available at, https://lnu.se/en/research/searchresearch/digital-humanities/dh-seminars/.

The seminar is open to everyone, but please sign up via dh@lnu.se.

Arwid Lund, photo from lnu.se

The lecture is a part of the Digital Humanities Seminar series which is aiming at providing a forum for relevant DH discussion in the region and beyond, inspiring collaboration with wider audiences about the emerging field of DH field and University’s DH Initiative, thus both strengthening the DH Initiative’s established network, as well as creating a space for collaboration between universities and cross-sectoral partners at national and international levels.