New Methods for Studying Labour in the Global Logistics Industry

Canberra.
The final speaker in this session at DHA 2012 is Ned Rossiter, who shifts our focus to the question of labour. He highlights what he calls the new zeal in visualising humanities research, but suggests that there isn’t enough drive towards new research methods, or towards the recognition of labour issues in the industries which digital humanities research investigates.

His example here is a study of the global logistics industry, with specific focus on transit labour in a number of cities in Asia, Australia, and Europe; logistics is key to forms of differential inclusion (for example through special administrative zones and similar constructs). The advanced data tracking technologies now used in this industry also affect labour in this industry, of course, and software studies must move further towards investigating such effects.

Projects such as Lev Manovich’s Cultural Analytics, Ned claims, mainly simply transpose existing methods to new digital objects of analysis; by contrast, a study of software in the global logistics industry needs to move well beyond this, for example, and raises important questions of method – it must deal with complex, difficult-to-obtain datasets of variable provenance, for example. It generates new metrics, and these metrics themselves imply certain points of focus on different aspects of labour and productivity.