Humans at Work in the Digital Age

Humans at Work in the Digital Age explores the roots of twenty-first-century cultures of digital textual labor, mapping the diverse physical and cognitive acts involved, and recovering the invisible workers and work that support digital technologies. Drawing on 14 case studies organized around four sites of work, this book shows how definitions of labor have been influenced by the digital technologies that employees use to produce, interpret, or process text. Incorporating methodology and theory from a range of disciplines and highlighting labor issues related to topics as diverse as census tabulation, market research, electronic games, digital archives, and 3D modeling, contributors uncover the roles played by race, class, gender, sexuality, and national politics in determining how narratives of digital labor are constructed and erased. Because each chapter is centered on the human cost of digital technologies, however, it is individual people immersed in cultures of technology who are the focus of the volume, rather than the technologies themselves. Humans at Work in the Digital Age shows how humanistic inquiry can be a valuable tool in the emerging conversation surrounding digital textual labor. As such, this book will be essential reading for academics and postgraduate students engaged in the study of digital humanities; human-computer interaction; digital culture and social justice; race, class, gender, and sexuality in digital realms; the economics of the internet; and technology in higher education.

Shawna Ross is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University, where she researches and teaches on British modernism, Victorian literature, and the digital humanities. Her monograph Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene is under contract at SUNY Press, while her co-written collection Reading Modernism with Machines was released in 2016 and her co-written book Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom was released in 2017. Her other works may be found in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Victorians, the Journal of Interactive Pedagogy, the Journal of Modern Literature, the Henry James Review, and Modernism/modernity PrintPlus, among other venues. Andrew Pilsch is an Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, where he teaches and researches rhetoric and the digital humanities. His first book, Transhumanism: Evolutionary Futurism and the Human Technologies of Utopia, was released by University of Minnesota Press in 2017, when it was awarded the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize. His research has been published in Amodern, Philosophy & Rhetoric, and Science Fiction Studies.

Introduction; Part One: Government; 1. Racialized Surveillance and the US Census: Tabulating Labor; 2. Digital Labor and Trans Histories: Resisting Assigned Gender in the Early Mainframe Era; 3. Big Data and Universal Design in The Home Market: Are There Market Researchers in Utopia?; Part Two: Industry; 4. Working in the Shadow of the Object; 5.Work, Play, and the Banality of the Digital: Boredom as Form; 6.Labor, Data, and Amateur Inventor in the Age of the Silicon Valley Boy Billionaire: Edisonade, Zuckerbergade; 7. Digitizing Labor in the Google Books Project: Gloved Fingertips and Severed Hands; Part Three: Out of the Office; 8. Reading Women's Labor in the Cybernetic Seventies: Vital Work; 9. The Economy of Online Comments; Part Four: University; 10. The Digital Labor of Blended Learning: The Reading Cities Project; 11. Using Video Games to the Test the Boundaries Between Work, Play, and Cultural Criticism: The Labor of Critique; 12. (Re)canonizing World Literature with Digital Archives and Online Magazines from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China; 13. The Stakes of Digital Labor in the 21st Century Academy: The Revolution Will Not Be Turkified; 14. Scaling Black Feminisms: A Critical Discussion about the Digital Labor of Representation