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This book shows how data people leave on the Internet is being employed to answer questions of health and medicine. When we use search engines such as Google or Bing, post messages on social networks, read email or browse the web, we generate a digital trail that is reflective of our activities both online and offline. In the last few years, these digital trails have been used to advance medical research in a variety of ways, including the discovery new side effects of medical drugs, demonstration of the links between eating disorders and the portrayal of celebrities in the media, and the monitoring infectious diseases. More generally, the questions Internet data can answer are difficult and even impossible to answer using traditional tools of medical research, because these data provide unprecedented access to the daily activities of very large populations with fewer biases than those of traditional research tools. Much of the recent discussions on the use of Internet data have been focused on the dangers to personal privacy as a result of the collection of these data. This books shows that this information can serve as a benefit to mankind, without sacrificing the privacy of individuals. As evidence, the book discusses studies that utilized Internet data to advance medical research in a variety of areas, ranging from personal questions to those of public health.

The image of the scholar as a solitary thinker dates back at least to Descartes’ Discourse on Method. But scholarly practices in the humanities are changing as older forms of communal inquiry are combined with modern research methods enabled by the Internet, accessible computing, data availability, and new media. Hermeneutica introduces interpretative text analysis using computer-assisted practices. It offers theoretical chapters about text analysis, presents a set of analytical tools (called Voyant Tools) that instantiate the theory, and provides example essays that illustrate the use of these tools. Tools like Voyant allow users to integrate interpretation into texts by creating hermeneutica—small embeddable “toys” that can be woven into essays published online or into such online writing environments as blogs or wikis. The book’s companion website, Hermeneutic.ca, offers the example essays with both text and embedded interactive panels. The panels show results and allow readers to experiment with the toys themselves. The use of these analytical tools results in a hybrid essay: an interpretive work embedded with hermeneutical toys that can be explored for technique. The hermeneutica draw on and develop such common interactive analytics as word clouds and complex data journalism interactives. Embedded in scholarly texts, they create a more engaging argument. Moving between tool and text becomes another thread in a dynamic dialogue.

Planetary-scale computation presents a fundamental challenge to Modern geopolitical architectures. As calculative reason and as global infrastructure, it not only deforms and distorts Westphalian political geography it creates new territories in its own image, ones that don’t necessarily replace the old but which are superimposed on them, each grinding against the other. These thickened and noisy jurisdictions are our new normal. They are the scaffolds through which our cultures evolve through them, and they represent our most difficult and important design challenge. Computation is changing not only how governments govern, but what government even is in the first place: less governance of computation than computation as governance. Global cloud platforms take on roles that have traditionally been the domain of States, cities become hardware/software platforms organized by physical and virtual interfaces, and strange new political subjects (some not even human) gain unforeseen sovereignties as the users of those interfaces. To understand (and to design) these transformations, we need to see them as part of a whole, an accidental megastructure called The Stack. This book examines each layer of The Stack–Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User—as a dynamic technology that is re-structuring some part of our world at its particular scale and as part of the whole. The Stack is a platform, and so combines logics of both States and Markets, and produces forms of sovereignty that are unique to this technical and institutional form. Fortunately, stack platforms are made to be re-made. How the Stack-we-have becomes the Stack-to-come depends on how well we understand it as a totality, By seeing the whole we stand a better chance of designing a system we will want to inhabit. To formulate the “design brief” for that project, as this book does, requires a perspective that blends philosophical, geopolitical and technological understandings and methods.