Books & ideas

Digital Literature

Florent Coste — 2018-02-05T08:00:00Z

How does big data contribute to our understanding of Hugo, Balzac or Flaubert? A great deal, because far from being a mechanical accumulation of data on literary texts, the digital humanities transform our relationship to works and the way we read them.

A Digital Age Without Proletarians

Sébastien Broca — 2017-12-18T08:00:00Z

Has the digital economy definitively made the main tools of Marxist analysis obsolete? This is Mariano Zukerfeld's argument, in a lively essay that suggests rethinking the critique of capitalism around the question of knowledge rather than labour. However, his demonstration lacks a convincing theory of value.

Who Benefits from the Crime?

Bilel Benbouzid — 2016-10-31T08:00:00Z

Can an algorithm predict crime? For several years, United States police forces have used software that is said to detect the locations of future crimes and offences. Of the many companies working in this field, Predpol is the name that is mentioned the most. But the success of this Californian start-up is more the result of marketing than any actual predictive effectiveness. The stance of this paper is twofold: first, a closer look from the seismologist who developed the algorithm reveals that this solution is far from having the predictive capacity boasted by its promoters. Second, the ethical problem with Predpol's algorithm appears not to be police discrimination, as many feared, but rather the exclusion of a section of the population from the public security offering.