Tatiana Thieme explores how doing your business has become an opportunity for business in Nairobi.

Christopher Kelty opens up a toolkit from the 1990s to explore the prehistory of apps, platforms, and algorithms.

Andrew Lakoff revisits the received wisdom that the WHO was slow to respond. Slow to respond to what exactly?

Leaders of the Human Genome Project promised a genomic total archive. Jenny Reardon argues that their quest inspired visions of freedom and imprisonment vital to understanding today’s ambivalences around open genomic data.

Google wanted to digitize all the world’s books but eventually abandoned that goal. Mary Murrell explores the rise and fall of one utopian library project and the emergence of new ones in its wake.

Rebecca Lemov relates how the stories in the a “database of dreams” leak out of the edges, and sometimes overwhelm totality with particularity.

Vanessa Manceron argues that when naturalists take part in monitoring programs on their “local patch,” they are caught between two forms surveillance: care and control.

How do you plan for the sudden onset of total war? Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff describe the construction of a vast collection of data about the vital, vulnerable systems of every nation in the world in the aftermath of World War II.