Small Data is Beautiful (Grattan Street Press, 2023)

Small Data is Beautiful investigates the conceptual, artistic, and computational qualities of small data. This original collection presents a challenge to discussions centred on big data – algorithms, surveillance and the datafication of human lives – by exploring the seditious and revelatory potential of radically rethinking data in creative research and practice.

Taking inspiration from the ‘small is beautiful’ mantra of the 1970s, a counter-cultural pursuit of planetary survival, the book interrogates the scale of the digital age through narratives, intimacies, representations, and ecologies. It offers a rich interdisciplinary dialogue from perspectives including cultural history, sociology, visual art, performance studies, musicology, literary studies, and data science.

“Small data and big data are two sides of the same coin, capable in their own ways of offering unique insights on political, social and economic life. As much as we benefit from the macroanalysis that big data facilitates, we are equally reliant on the microanalyses that small data offers – and each must inform each other.” — Roopika Risam, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth.

“Working across disciplines, forms and practices, Small Data is Beautiful attunes us to the significance of the micro in a globalised and increasingly digitised world where scale and “bigness” rule.’ — Rebecca Coleman, Professor at the Digital Futures Institute, Bristol University, UK.

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Lyric Eye: The Poetics of Twentieth-Century Surveillance (Routledge, 2021)

Lyric Eye is a detailed study of the relationship between poetry and surveillance. It critically examines the close connection between American lyric poetry and a burgeoning U.S. state surveillance apparatus from 1920 through the 1960s, roughly the period during which J. Edgar Hoover ran the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It includes a wide range of close readings of the poetry of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, and others.

Lyric Eye appears in The University of North Carolina’s Surveillance Studies Key Books list, curated by Torin Monahan and is reviewed by Jade Hinchliffe in Surveillance & Society Journal.

“Lyric Eye makes an incisive and persuasive contribution to our understanding of the contours of lyric poetry in twentieth-century American culture. It offers a sophisticated, informed and perspicacious reading of the complex choreography of scrutiny and evasion during the period.” — Jo Gill, Professor of Twentieth-Century & American Literature at University of Exeter

“Engrossing, elegantly written and eminently readable, this volume has much to offer not only to scholars of poetry, but to anyone interested in US American culture, history and politics.” — Erin Carlston, Professor of English at University of Auckland