Sandeep Mertia
Sandeep Mertia is an Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the Stevens Institute of Technology.
Previoulsy, he was a Joint Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) and the Center on Digital Culture and Society (CDCS), Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. He completed his Ph.D. with Distinction at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University in Summer 2023. He is an ICT engineer by training and former Research Associate at The Sarai Porgramme, Center for the Study of Developing Societies (Sarai-CSDS), New Delhi.
He is broadly interested in historical and anthropological research on media technologies, computing, urbanism, and futures. His current book project, "Starting-up with the State: Computing, Entrepreneurship, and the Governance of Aspiration in India," examines the imaginaries, infrastructures, and everyday practices of digital future-making at the intersections of the state and technology start-ups in India. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and NYU’s inaugural Urban Doctoral Fellowship, among others.
Sandeep is the editor of "Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India" (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2020), and the convener of "Lives of Data" workshop series at Sarai-CSDS. He has served as the Assistant Editor of 'Public Culture'. His work has appeared in the Economic & Political Weekly, The Fibreculture Journal, Computational Culture, Sarai, LSE Impact, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, DataKind, and other venues. He has been affiliated with civic tech initiatives such as DataMeet, DataKind and HillHacks, and has taught school children for non-profits such as Make a Difference and Sambhav.
Previoulsy, he was a Joint Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) and the Center on Digital Culture and Society (CDCS), Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. He completed his Ph.D. with Distinction at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University in Summer 2023. He is an ICT engineer by training and former Research Associate at The Sarai Porgramme, Center for the Study of Developing Societies (Sarai-CSDS), New Delhi.
He is broadly interested in historical and anthropological research on media technologies, computing, urbanism, and futures. His current book project, "Starting-up with the State: Computing, Entrepreneurship, and the Governance of Aspiration in India," examines the imaginaries, infrastructures, and everyday practices of digital future-making at the intersections of the state and technology start-ups in India. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and NYU’s inaugural Urban Doctoral Fellowship, among others.
Sandeep is the editor of "Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India" (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2020), and the convener of "Lives of Data" workshop series at Sarai-CSDS. He has served as the Assistant Editor of 'Public Culture'. His work has appeared in the Economic & Political Weekly, The Fibreculture Journal, Computational Culture, Sarai, LSE Impact, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, DataKind, and other venues. He has been affiliated with civic tech initiatives such as DataMeet, DataKind and HillHacks, and has taught school children for non-profits such as Make a Difference and Sambhav.
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Books
Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India
Edited by Sandeep Mertia
Foreword by Ravi Sundaram
Authors: Sandeep Mertia, Karl Mendonca, Sivakumar Arumugam, Ranjit Singh, Puthiya Purayil Sneha, Lilly Irani, Anumeha Yadav, Preeti Mudliar, Prerna Mukharya and Mahima Taneja, Guneet Narula, Gaurav Godhwani, Noopur Raval, Aakash Solanki, and Anirudh Raghavan.
This publication is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerrivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
-----------------------------------
Reviews:
Chintan Girish Modi, Business Standard, 29 January 2021. “Data and the Indian State: A set of essays examines the interaction between the expansion of the digital economy and India’s socio-political framework.” https://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/data-and-the-indian-state-121012901948_1.html
Nafis Hasan, The Wire, 06 February 2021. “Book Review: The Many Lives of Data in India: The book 'Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India', edited by Sandeep Mertia, delivers a fantastic range of meditations on how data lives, and how we, as individuals and collectives, are shaped by it.” https://thewire.in/books/book-review-the-many-lives-of-data-in-india
Vikas Pathe, “Book Review: Lives of Data (ed.) Sandeep Mertia.” Mainstream, Vol. LIX, No. 30, 10 July 2021, http://mainstreamweekly.net/article11184.html
Vikas Kumar, Book Review, “The Transition to Big Data in India.” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 56, No. 47, 20 November 2021, https://www.epw.in/journal/2021/47/book-reviews/transition-big-data-india.html
Nimmi Rangaswamy, “Book review: Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India.” Online Information Review, Vol. 46 No. 3, 639-641. June 2022. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-06-2022-622
Kim Fernandes, “Review of Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India by Sandeep Mertia.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 74-75, 1 April-June 2022, doi: 10.1109/MAHC.2022.3169868.
--------------------------------------
Book talks and podcasts:
‘Lives of Data’ Book Launch and Discussion Panel with Jahnavi Phalkey, Nimmi Rangaswamy and Stefania Milan, Chaired by Ravi Sundaram, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi, 19 February 2021.
Technology / Society in Action, Alumni Lecture Series, DA-IICT Gandhinagar, 13 March 2021.
‘Lives of Data’ Book Discussion Panel with Sarah Sharma, Tong Lam and Marian Valverde, Chaired by Francis Cody, Asian Institute, University of Toronto, 09 April 2021.
‘Lives of Data’ Book Discussion Panel with Natasha Schüll, Ramesh Srinivasan and Sareeta Amrute, Chaired by Arjun Appadurai, New York University, 23 April 2021.
‘Lives of Data’ Book Discussion Panel with Jasmine Folz and Pradip N. Thomas, Chaired by Urvashi Aneja, Tandem Research Institute, Goa, 30 June 2021.
‘Lives of Data’ Book Discussion Podcast with Aakash Solanki, hosted by Noopur Raval, New Books Network – Science & Technology Studies, 05 July 2021. https://newbooksnetwork.com/lives-of-data
‘Lives of Data’ Book Discussion Podcast with Kathik Nachiappan, Lekh Review, 11 December 2021. https://lekhreview.com/2021/12/11/sandeep-mertia-lives-of-data/
Book Chapters
Edited by Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Peter Ronald deSouza.
URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/keywords-for-india-9781350039247/
...
"Open Data aus internationaler Perspektive
Editor - Tobias Wangermann,
by
Patrick Bessler, Clémentine Desigaud, Emmanuel Garcia, Marcin Kaczmarczyk, Ronald U. Mendoza, Sandeep Mertia, Adil Morrison, Josh New, Dinita Andriani Putri, Raoul Sinner, Magnus Smidak, Fabro Steibel, Günther Tschabuschnig, Mario Viola, Tobias Wangermann
Länderberichte aus europäischen und asiatischen Ländern sowie den USA
Grundbaustein der Digitalisierung sind die Daten selbst. Ihre Anzahl, Qualität und der Zugang zu ihnen entscheiden darüber, welchen gesellschaftlichen Nutzen die digitale Transformation hervorbringen wird. Daten, die nicht personenbezogen sind oder anderen schutzwürdigen Belangen unterliegen, können als offene Daten (Open Data) bereitgestellt und von allen genutzt werden. Die Publikation bietet mit Berichten zum Stand von Open Data in zehn Staaten auf unterschiedlichen Kontinenten für Deutschland einen Referenzrahmen, zeigt alternative Wege auf, stellt Modelle vor und regt Fragestellungen an."
Teaching
To engage with these and other questions, we will draw upon some of the key concepts and debates at the intersections of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Media Studies, History, Anthropology, Information Science, and Software Studies. We will focus on different ways to understand how technology and media — mechanical, electronic, and digital — shapes and is shaped by cultural, political, and social values. Students will become acquainted with different conceptual approaches to understanding the interplay of technology and society (e.g. technological determinism, social construction of technology, actor networks, affordances) and how these have been applied to various media technologies.
Examining a wide range of “revolutionary” technologies and discourses associated with modern computing from the late 19th century to the present, we will ask: a) what or who has been envisioned and operated as a “computer” at different moments, and how did it / they work? b) why is the study and development of computing (still) largely centered on the modern West? and c) how have new computational inventions and innovations emerged alongside various social and political shifts in the world in roughly the last hundred years?
Students will learn how to approach the interdisciplinary and intersectional histories of mechanical and electronic computing, colonialism, cybernetics, cold war, software programming, labor, race, caste, gender, internet, digital mediation, and automation.
Papers
'Lives of Data' Workshop
The workshop initiated wide-ranging conversations on history of statistics, media and computational cultures, politics and practices of data-driven governance, and Big Data infrastructures and imaginaries.
A detailed report and audio recordings from the workshop are available on this link - http://sarai.net/lives-of-data-workshop-report-recordings/
Book Reviews
Articles
"I have consistently found, through my fieldwork and those of other scholars, that ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) projects in rural areas are context insensitive. However, I am yet to come across a sound description of the invoked rural ‘context’. The ethnographic studies on ICTs in rural areas, including my own earlier work, have often focused only on those factors which seem to most directly affect success or failure of technology led development. This was perhaps for a good reason, given the millennial euphoria of ICT4D. Moving forward however, one needs a broader understanding of socio-technical changes in rural life, which have outpaced scholarship [1]. In this final research note, I would like to introduce some important features of the ‘rural’ socio-technical context by presenting a comparative picture of my two field sites, briefly discussing the emerging discursive practices of social and digital media access and uncertainties which characterise ICT ecologies in the villages."
"Many scholars have tried to reconceptualise digital divide as a socio-technical problem, by pointing out the continuum of gradations between the information haves and have-nots [1], still there are several nuances left to be grasped. One such subtlety which I have come across in my fieldwork is that of an intra-technological divide between telecentre’s computers and individuals’ mobile phones.
As I mentioned in my previous post [2], the dominant mode of Internet access in Rampur is through mobile phones, rather than the telecentre’s computers, which have optical fibre based high speed Internet facility. Such technological choices are hard to understand. Why would anyone in a resource constrained environment pay from his pocket for a mobile Internet pack rather than avail the free and much faster Internet service at the telecentre? A major part of the answer lies in the social and political positioning of the two technologies in the village.
"Q. So, which one do you like more, your school classes or the digital literacy class here at the telecentre?
A. Yeh toh timepass hai, school mein toh padhai hoti hai! (Translation: This is just a time pass (fad), real learning happens in school)"
This is an excerpt from one my field interviews with a boy studying in secondary school, who visits the telecentre (or Kiosk) regularly.
His response, similar to many other Internet users in the tehsil (block) village Rampur [1] in Rajasthan, suggests that using social media in particular is not really considered to be a productive thing in the village. However, this inference is not as simple as it seems. As I spent more time in the field following the actors [2], the fairly visible interest in digital media, especially the ones accessible via mobile phones, moved me to question the authenticity, and thus the layered complexity, of what so many of my field respondents consider ‘timepass’.
In this post, Sandeep Mertia, one of the researchers who received the Social Media Research grant for 2014, introduces his proposed work.
"Why rural people, especially the youth, are attracted to social media and how do they use it?
Why would an ICT engineer-cum-STS (Science & Technology Studies) researcher be interested in asking this question which perhaps has obvious responses such as – a natural stage of technological development, progress towards becoming an ‘information society’, pervasiveness of social networking sites, improved infrastructure in rural areas, etc.?
My problem begins with these responses."
Undergrad Stuff [2010-2014]
Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India
Edited by Sandeep Mertia
Foreword by Ravi Sundaram
Authors: Sandeep Mertia, Karl Mendonca, Sivakumar Arumugam, Ranjit Singh, Puthiya Purayil Sneha, Lilly Irani, Anumeha Yadav, Preeti Mudliar, Prerna Mukharya and Mahima Taneja, Guneet Narula, Gaurav Godhwani, Noopur Raval, Aakash Solanki, and Anirudh Raghavan.
This publication is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerrivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
-----------------------------------
Reviews:
Chintan Girish Modi, Business Standard, 29 January 2021. “Data and the Indian State: A set of essays examines the interaction between the expansion of the digital economy and India’s socio-political framework.” https://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/data-and-the-indian-state-121012901948_1.html
Nafis Hasan, The Wire, 06 February 2021. “Book Review: The Many Lives of Data in India: The book 'Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India', edited by Sandeep Mertia, delivers a fantastic range of meditations on how data lives, and how we, as individuals and collectives, are shaped by it.” https://thewire.in/books/book-review-the-many-lives-of-data-in-india
Vikas Pathe, “Book Review: Lives of Data (ed.) Sandeep Mertia.” Mainstream, Vol. LIX, No. 30, 10 July 2021, http://mainstreamweekly.net/article11184.html
Vikas Kumar, Book Review, “The Transition to Big Data in India.” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 56, No. 47, 20 November 2021, https://www.epw.in/journal/2021/47/book-reviews/transition-big-data-india.html
Nimmi Rangaswamy, “Book review: Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India.” Online Information Review, Vol. 46 No. 3, 639-641. June 2022. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-06-2022-622
Kim Fernandes, “Review of Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India by Sandeep Mertia.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 74-75, 1 April-June 2022, doi: 10.1109/MAHC.2022.3169868.
--------------------------------------
Book talks and podcasts:
‘Lives of Data’ Book Launch and Discussion Panel with Jahnavi Phalkey, Nimmi Rangaswamy and Stefania Milan, Chaired by Ravi Sundaram, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi, 19 February 2021.
Technology / Society in Action, Alumni Lecture Series, DA-IICT Gandhinagar, 13 March 2021.
‘Lives of Data’ Book Discussion Panel with Sarah Sharma, Tong Lam and Marian Valverde, Chaired by Francis Cody, Asian Institute, University of Toronto, 09 April 2021.
‘Lives of Data’ Book Discussion Panel with Natasha Schüll, Ramesh Srinivasan and Sareeta Amrute, Chaired by Arjun Appadurai, New York University, 23 April 2021.
‘Lives of Data’ Book Discussion Panel with Jasmine Folz and Pradip N. Thomas, Chaired by Urvashi Aneja, Tandem Research Institute, Goa, 30 June 2021.
‘Lives of Data’ Book Discussion Podcast with Aakash Solanki, hosted by Noopur Raval, New Books Network – Science & Technology Studies, 05 July 2021. https://newbooksnetwork.com/lives-of-data
‘Lives of Data’ Book Discussion Podcast with Kathik Nachiappan, Lekh Review, 11 December 2021. https://lekhreview.com/2021/12/11/sandeep-mertia-lives-of-data/
Edited by Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Peter Ronald deSouza.
URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/keywords-for-india-9781350039247/
...
"Open Data aus internationaler Perspektive
Editor - Tobias Wangermann,
by
Patrick Bessler, Clémentine Desigaud, Emmanuel Garcia, Marcin Kaczmarczyk, Ronald U. Mendoza, Sandeep Mertia, Adil Morrison, Josh New, Dinita Andriani Putri, Raoul Sinner, Magnus Smidak, Fabro Steibel, Günther Tschabuschnig, Mario Viola, Tobias Wangermann
Länderberichte aus europäischen und asiatischen Ländern sowie den USA
Grundbaustein der Digitalisierung sind die Daten selbst. Ihre Anzahl, Qualität und der Zugang zu ihnen entscheiden darüber, welchen gesellschaftlichen Nutzen die digitale Transformation hervorbringen wird. Daten, die nicht personenbezogen sind oder anderen schutzwürdigen Belangen unterliegen, können als offene Daten (Open Data) bereitgestellt und von allen genutzt werden. Die Publikation bietet mit Berichten zum Stand von Open Data in zehn Staaten auf unterschiedlichen Kontinenten für Deutschland einen Referenzrahmen, zeigt alternative Wege auf, stellt Modelle vor und regt Fragestellungen an."
To engage with these and other questions, we will draw upon some of the key concepts and debates at the intersections of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Media Studies, History, Anthropology, Information Science, and Software Studies. We will focus on different ways to understand how technology and media — mechanical, electronic, and digital — shapes and is shaped by cultural, political, and social values. Students will become acquainted with different conceptual approaches to understanding the interplay of technology and society (e.g. technological determinism, social construction of technology, actor networks, affordances) and how these have been applied to various media technologies.
Examining a wide range of “revolutionary” technologies and discourses associated with modern computing from the late 19th century to the present, we will ask: a) what or who has been envisioned and operated as a “computer” at different moments, and how did it / they work? b) why is the study and development of computing (still) largely centered on the modern West? and c) how have new computational inventions and innovations emerged alongside various social and political shifts in the world in roughly the last hundred years?
Students will learn how to approach the interdisciplinary and intersectional histories of mechanical and electronic computing, colonialism, cybernetics, cold war, software programming, labor, race, caste, gender, internet, digital mediation, and automation.
The workshop initiated wide-ranging conversations on history of statistics, media and computational cultures, politics and practices of data-driven governance, and Big Data infrastructures and imaginaries.
A detailed report and audio recordings from the workshop are available on this link - http://sarai.net/lives-of-data-workshop-report-recordings/
"I have consistently found, through my fieldwork and those of other scholars, that ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) projects in rural areas are context insensitive. However, I am yet to come across a sound description of the invoked rural ‘context’. The ethnographic studies on ICTs in rural areas, including my own earlier work, have often focused only on those factors which seem to most directly affect success or failure of technology led development. This was perhaps for a good reason, given the millennial euphoria of ICT4D. Moving forward however, one needs a broader understanding of socio-technical changes in rural life, which have outpaced scholarship [1]. In this final research note, I would like to introduce some important features of the ‘rural’ socio-technical context by presenting a comparative picture of my two field sites, briefly discussing the emerging discursive practices of social and digital media access and uncertainties which characterise ICT ecologies in the villages."
"Many scholars have tried to reconceptualise digital divide as a socio-technical problem, by pointing out the continuum of gradations between the information haves and have-nots [1], still there are several nuances left to be grasped. One such subtlety which I have come across in my fieldwork is that of an intra-technological divide between telecentre’s computers and individuals’ mobile phones.
As I mentioned in my previous post [2], the dominant mode of Internet access in Rampur is through mobile phones, rather than the telecentre’s computers, which have optical fibre based high speed Internet facility. Such technological choices are hard to understand. Why would anyone in a resource constrained environment pay from his pocket for a mobile Internet pack rather than avail the free and much faster Internet service at the telecentre? A major part of the answer lies in the social and political positioning of the two technologies in the village.
"Q. So, which one do you like more, your school classes or the digital literacy class here at the telecentre?
A. Yeh toh timepass hai, school mein toh padhai hoti hai! (Translation: This is just a time pass (fad), real learning happens in school)"
This is an excerpt from one my field interviews with a boy studying in secondary school, who visits the telecentre (or Kiosk) regularly.
His response, similar to many other Internet users in the tehsil (block) village Rampur [1] in Rajasthan, suggests that using social media in particular is not really considered to be a productive thing in the village. However, this inference is not as simple as it seems. As I spent more time in the field following the actors [2], the fairly visible interest in digital media, especially the ones accessible via mobile phones, moved me to question the authenticity, and thus the layered complexity, of what so many of my field respondents consider ‘timepass’.
In this post, Sandeep Mertia, one of the researchers who received the Social Media Research grant for 2014, introduces his proposed work.
"Why rural people, especially the youth, are attracted to social media and how do they use it?
Why would an ICT engineer-cum-STS (Science & Technology Studies) researcher be interested in asking this question which perhaps has obvious responses such as – a natural stage of technological development, progress towards becoming an ‘information society’, pervasiveness of social networking sites, improved infrastructure in rural areas, etc.?
My problem begins with these responses."