Originally published on A New AI Lexicon on 18th August 2021. \ ˌre-zə-ˈlü-shən \ Definition: the act or process of resolving: such as the act of analyzing a complex notion into simpler ones the act of determining the process or capability of making distinguishable the individual parts of an object, closely adjacent optical images, or sources of […]
Imbrication
Originally published on A New AI Lexicon on 13th July 2021. \ ˌim-brə-ˈkā-shən \ Definition: an overlapping of edges (as of tiles or scales) The tribal areas of Rajasthan [a state in the west of India] are very hilly. How would you get network [internet] there? Let me give you an example. The Fair Price Shop is […]
Orphaning
Paper Title: “The Living Dead”: Orphaning in Aadhaar-enabled Distribution of Welfare Pensions in RajasthanAuthors: Ranjit SinghJournal: PUBLIC Journal: Art Culture IdeasVolume: 30Issue: 60Pages: 92-104Year: 2020 Abstract: This paper follows the mutual shaping of the lives of citizens and their data records to illustrate how precarious forms of citizenship emerge in the use of biometrics-based data infrastructures for governance. It presents a case […]
Histories of Infrastructuring
Author: Ranjit SinghWorkshop: Fostering Historical Research in CSCW & HCI Venue: The 22nd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing Date: 10 November 2019 Abstract: This paper outlines the evolution of my work to narrate the history of Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based national identification infrastructure, in one of my dissertation chapters. I describe how and why this […]
Managing Aadhaar’s Scale
Paper Title: Give Me a Database and I Will Raise the Nation-StateAuthors: Ranjit SinghJournal: South Asia: Journal of South Asian StudiesVolume: 42Issue: 3Pages: 501-518 Year: 2019 Abstract: This paper draws on an ethnographic study of Aadhaar, India’s biometrics-based national identification infrastructure, to investigate how members of its design team conceptualised and understood their techno-bureaucratic enterprise of assigning unique numbers to Indian […]
Whose fault is it anyway?
“I do not understand why certain activists blame Aadhaar in this pension case. Aadhaar is designed to store only four data attributes about a person and their biometric information. It only guarantees uniqueness of their record with us. If you ask the database to confirm a person’s identity using their fingerprints, we only certify that […]
Action at a Distance
“Data collection always has errors. Spelling mistakes in names, wrong dates of birth, incorrect or makeshift addresses… the list can go on. The work is also so time-consuming that we have had to outsource it. So, there are new private sub-contracting agencies that also add to large-scale errors in data collection and curation. Language is […]