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The political integration of the European Union (EU) is fragile for many reasons, not least the reassertion of nationalism. That said, if we examine specific practices and infrastructures, a more complicated story emerges. We juxtapose the political fragility of the EU in relation to the ongoing formation of data infrastructures in official statistics that take part in postnational enactments of Europe’s populations and territories. We develop this argument by analyzing transformations in how European populations are enacted through new technological infrastructures that seek to integrate national census data in “cubes” of cross-tabulated social topics and spatial “grids” of maps. In doing so, these infrastructures give meaning to what “is” Europe in ways that are both old and new. Through standardization and harmonization of social and geographical spaces, “old” geometries of organizing and mapping populations are deployed along with “new” topological arrangements that mix and fold categories of population. Furthermore, we consider how grids and cubes are generative of methodological topologies by closing the distances or differences between methods and making their data equivalent. By paying attention to these practices and infrastructures, we examine how they enable reconfiguring what is known and imagined as Europe and how it is governed.

In business and government, databases contain large quantities of digital transactional data (purchases made, services used, finances transferred, benefits received, licences acquired, borders crossed, tickets purchased). The data can be understood as ongoing and dynamic measurements of the activities and doings of people. In government, numerous database devices have been developed to connect such data across services to discover patterns and identify and evaluate the performance of individuals and populations. Under the UK’s New Labour government, the development of such devices was part of a broader policy known as ‘joined-up thinking and government’. Analyses of this policy have typically understood joining up as an operation of adding together distributed data about subjects, which can then be used in the service of government surveillance, the database state or informational capitalism. But rather than such technical or managerialist analytics, I argue that topological analytics capture what these database devices enact and do: they materialize the ‘individuality’ of subjects in intensified, distributed and fluctuating ways and materialize and intensify a logic of what Deleuze describes as modulating controls. Through examples of UK New Labour social policy initiatives over the past decade, I argue that topological analytics can account for these as immanent rather than exceptional properties of database devices and, as such, part and parcel of a governmental logic and ontology of subjects.

We develop the concept of ‘aesthetic practices’ to capture the work needed for population data to come into relation so that it can be disseminated via government data portals, in our case, the Census Hub of the European Statistical System (ESS) and the Danish Ministry of Education’s Data Warehouse. The portals form part of open government data (OGD) initiatives, which we understand as governing technologies. We argue that to function as such, aesthetic practices are required so that data produced at dispersed sites can be brought into relation and projected as populations at data portals in forms such as bar charts, heat maps and tables. Two examples of aesthetic practices are analysed based on ethnographic studies we have conducted on the production of data for the Hub and Warehouse: metadata and data cleaning. Metadata enables data to come into relation by containing and accounting for (some of) the differences between data. Data cleaning deals with the indeterminacies and absences of data and involves algorithms to determine what values data can obtain so they can be brought into relation. We attend to how both aesthetic practices involve normative decisions that make absent what exceeds them: embodied knowledge that cannot or has not been documented; and data that cannot meet the forms required of data portals. While these aesthetic practices are necessary to sustain data portals as ‘sites of projection,’ we also bring critical attention to their performative effects for knowing, enacting and governing populations.

The chapter examines the various ways that data captures and colonizes minds, souls, bodies and spaces and makes data subjects through practices of production, accumulation, aggregation, circulation, valuation, and interpretation. We draw attention to how these practices operate together yet differently in the metropole and postcolony and produce different data subjects. By first describing how European empires in the nineteenth century invented various data collection and analysis methods for producing colonial populations, the chapter outlines how postcolonial practices build on these imperial infrastructures and logics. Through the example of the UN’s Global Pulse initiative as an instance of postcolonial data politics, the chapter argues for decolonising data politics.

The article explores the politics of making worlds legible, transparent and actionable through devices that governments and international organizations mobilize in the quest to achieve moral certainty about their activities and decisions. Through an analysis of three distinct examples, we examine the effects of such attempts to open things up in the name of the public good: the performance metrics that are part of the UK government's 'Transparency Agenda’; ‘conflict mapping’ as part of Kyrgyzstan’s internationally-sponsored programmes of Preventive Development; and the procedures of Peru’s National System of Public Investment (SNIP) through which public investments are regulated. We explore these three as instances of what we call ‘transparency devices’. It is to past moral failures—of wrongdoing, conflict or corruption—that these devices react and consequently it is the anticipation of future moral failings towards which they are then oriented. Each device does so by establishing matters of fact as moral certainties through technical settlements carried out in ‘public.’ But in their enactment of social realities, such devices are also generative of what we call collateral effects and affects. First, technical settlements require establishing what is to be included/excluded but such stabilizations are only fleeting, always and already partial, and provisional. As such rather than alleviating uncertainty they come to amplify it. Furthermore, while they can be understood as neoliberal techniques of producing active, rational witnessing subjects who take responsibility for ensuring moral futures, they are also generative of affective dispositions of suspicion and hypervigilance; fostering subjects with a greater awareness of that which is yet to be revealed. We suggest that these effects and affects should not be considered weaknesses, but rather that uncertainty and hypervigilant responsibilised subjects call for the continuation of more of the same and thus are a source of the very authority and legitimacy of transparency devices.

How might we think differently? This book is an attempt to respond to this question. Its contributors are all interested in non-standard modes of knowing. They are all more or less uneasy with the restrictions or the agendas implied by academic modes of knowing, and they have chosen to do this by working with, through, or against one important Western alternative – that of the baroque. Why the baroque? One answer is that the baroque made space for and fostered many forms of otherness. It involved knowing things differently, extravagantly, excessively, and in materially heterogeneous ways, and it apprehended that which is other and could not be caught in a cognitive or symbolic net. It also involved knowing in ways that did not gather into a single point, and knew itself to be performative. A part of a great Western division between rationalist and non-rationalist modes of knowing, the baroque is therefore a possible resource for creating ways of knowing differently, a storehouse of possible alternative techniques. To say this is not to say that it is the right mode of knowing. The book’s authors do not seek to create a ‘baroque social science’ whatever that might be, but instead work in a range of ways to explore how drawing on the ‘resources of the baroque’ can help us to think differently.

[About the book]: This book considers the state of the city and contemporary urbanisation from a range of intellectual and international perspectives. - The most interdisciplinary collection of its kind - Provides a contemporary update on urban thinking that builds on well established debates in the field - Uses the city to explore economic, social, cultural, environmental and political issues more broadly - Includes contributions from non Western perspectives and cities

Data is the new raw material of the 21st century; it allows citizens to hold governments to account, drives improvements in public services by informing choice, and provides a feedstock for innovation and growth. Google Data Analytics Social Science Research (2012) Introduction In 2010 the Cabinet Office of the UK government introduced its Transparency Agenda (TA) as a key part of its efficiency and reform programme and as a means of taking power away from Whitehall and putting it in the hands of the public. Through the oversight of the Public Sector Transparency Board, all Whitehall departments must publish key public data-sets, from expenses to business plans, on their websites in specified open data standards as a means of advancing a public right to data. A number of platforms then consolidate all of the data via online and interactive access points. In addition to spurring service delivery improvements and stimulating the digital economy, the TA is said to be liberating and making government data more accessible, interesting and dynamic via websites, mobile device apps and other platforms. Along with powerful visualization devices, quantitative data about the performance of the state is being rendered accessible and legible in innovative ways. Through the TA government data is on the move and travelling to myriad sites and even sceptics see the possibilities that are opened up by this ‘big data’. As the title of this chapter suggests, open government data constitute indicators of the state's performance just as indicators in general make phenomena visible so that they can be assessed, compared and ranked. The TA ostensibly renders the state visible to scrutiny such that the gaze is turned from the governed back onto the governors where subjects of ‘dataveillance’ now engage in ‘sousveillance’ – a ‘watchful vigilance from underneath’ (Dennis 2008). In a time of Wikileaks, MPs' expenses and open government data, it is tempting to conclude that ‘seeing like a state’ (Scott 1998) is being transformed into ‘seeing a state’. However, rather than considering the TA as a practice of disclosure and oversight, I argue that the transparent state is being done by a changing configuration of mediators that is generative of data publics and multiple versions of the state and the very condition that it seeks to eradicate: distrust in the workings of the state.

Social and cultural research has changed dramatically in the last few years in response to changing conceptions of the empirical, an intensification of interest in interdisciplinary work, and the growing need to communicate with diverse users and audiences. Methods texts, however, have not kept pace with these changes. This volume provides a set of new approaches for the investigation of the contemporary world. Building on the increasing importance of methodologies that cut across disciplines, more than twenty expert authors explain the utility of 'devices' for social and cultural research – their essays cover such diverse devices as the list, the pattern, the event, the photograph, the tape recorder and the anecdote. This fascinating collection stresses the open-endedness of the social world, and explores the ways in which each device requires the user to reflect critically on the value and status of contemporary ways of making knowledge. With a range of genres and styles of writing, each chapter presents the device as a hinge between theory and practice, ontology and epistemology, and explores whether and how methods can be inventive. The book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of sociology and cultural studies.