What is a Digital Object?

We find ourselves in a media-intensive milieu comprising networks, images, sounds, and text, which we generalize as data and metadata. How can we understand this digital milieu and make sense of these data, not only focusing on their functionalities but also reflecting on our everyday life and exist...

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Published in:Metaphilosophy Vol. 43; no. 4; pp. 380 - 398
Main Author: Hui, Yuk
Format: Article
Published: Wiley-Blackwell Jul2012
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        10.1111/j.1467-9973.2012.01761.x
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        au: Hui, Yuk
        affil: Institut de Recherche et d′Innovation, 4 rue Aubry le Boucher, 75004, Paris France
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        Digital Object Identifiers
        Computer networks
        HTML (Document markup language)
        XML (Extensible Markup Language)
        SGML (Document markup language)
        Metadata
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          Digital Object Identifiers
          Computer networks
          HTML (Document markup language)
          XML (Extensible Markup Language)
          SGML (Document markup language)
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        digital objects
        metadata
        phenomenology
        Simondon
        Stiegler
      ab: We find ourselves in a media-intensive milieu comprising networks, images, sounds, and text, which we generalize as data and metadata. How can we understand this digital milieu and make sense of these data, not only focusing on their functionalities but also reflecting on our everyday life and existence? How do these material constructions demand a new philosophical understanding? Instead of following the reductionist approaches, which understand the digital milieu as abstract entities such as information and data, this article proposes to approach it from an embodied perspective: objects. The article contrasts digital objects with natural objects (e.g., apples on the table) and technical objects (e.g., hammers) in phenomenological investigations, and proposes to approach digital objects from the concept of 'relations,' on the one hand the material relations that are concretized in the development of mark-up languages, such as SGML, HTML, and XML, and on the other hand, Web ontologies, the temporal relations that are produced and conditioned by the artificial memories of data.
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    language: English
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