Mining/Data Mining is an ongoing project, a lab that explores the material and conceptual intersections of resource mining and data mining as two regimes that obey the same epistemological idea of extraction. Our goal is to shed light on the social, economic, and environmental impacts of systems that create value by extracting and manipulating material that has been construed as raw and open to exploitation.
This project emerged as an idea through which we wanted to explore the intersection between diverse forms of extraction that power our worlds whether analog or digital. As time has passed, the project evolved to become a lab in which we invite students, faculty, creators and community organizations to think about, interact with and produce work related to the idea of mining and data mining. The projects we feature here are developed from diverse academic and epistemological perspectives: from the digital humanities, the visual arts, the data science, literary studies, to game studies, philosophy, and community organizing among others. We are constantly looking for connections, and people interested in thinking, producing and developing approaches to investigate how connected Mining and Data Mining are.
From rock to record. The same systems of value, labor, and extraction shape both physical mining and data mining.
Industrial mining shapes landscapes, labor, and capital. From underground rail lines to e-waste yards, extraction leaves a physical record — one we can photograph, map, and audit.
Deep-mine tunnels, shaft towers, processing plants, circuit-board waste, satellite views of open-pit sites.
Data mining inherits the metaphor — and the politics. Tape archives, scatterplots, and inference systems treat human behavior as a resource to be refined into prediction.
Early computing rooms, statistical plots, woodcut diagrams of mechanical extraction, control-flow charts.
Some of the projects we feature are: