This chapter focuses on techniques of detecting anomalies, starting with some of the basic statistical techniques and going into data analytics techniques.

Delving into the specifics of spatial and temporal analytics, this chapter explores topics such as spatial neighborhood and temporal evolution of large amounts of network traffic data.

This chapter extends the ideas of complex data by looking into cybersecurity through network and graph data.

This chapter introduces the basic concepts of cybersecurity and the data analytics perspective to cybersecurity. It lays out the areas of study and how data analytics should be a key part of the spectrum of cybersecurity solutions.

Focusing on the big data elements of cybersecurity, this chapter looks at the landscape of the big data technologies and the complexities of the different types of data, including spatial and graph data. It outlines examples in these complex data types and how they can be evaluated using data analytics.

THE LEAD STORY in Vanity Fair on July 1, 2018, reads like the script of a Hollywood thriller, “Nearly three decades earlier, Berners- Lee invented the World Wide Web. On this morning, he had come to Washington as part of his mission to save it.” It was a day in summer 2018, just weeks after the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, which had made it decidedly clear to the public that their data was not in safe hands on the Web. Instead, each individual's personal thoughts and political preferences were analyzed by unknowns in the service of exploitative and manipulative third-party interests. A few months later, on the thirtieth anniversary of the WWW, Berners-Lee explains in an open letter: “While the web has created opportunity, given marginalized groups a voice, and made our daily lives easier, it has also created opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred, and made all kinds of crime easier to commit.” Berners-Lee's “pain in watching his creation so distorted,” in the words of Vanity Fair, culminated in an appeal to take a stand for the Web—for the Web We Want—as his campaign came to be known. This campaign, started by Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium, which he founded on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Web, begins:

The main problem for Berners-Lee is the centralization of the Web that has transformed it from a safe place for the exchange of knowledge and the interaction of its users into a constantly surveilling, data-consuming monstrosity. His response to this unwelcome change is a platform called Solid, which will, “reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots.”

Surveillance Capitalism and Google Data Collection

THE PROLIFERATION OF personal computing devices—coupled with advances in network bandwidth, geolocation, “big data” analytics, and targeted advertising—has led to the rise of “surveillance capitalism,” where large high-tech companies monetize personal data they collect by monitoring the online behavior and physical movement of their users around the world. The term “surveillance capitalism” was popularized by Shoshana Zuboff in the mid-2010s. Surveillance capitalism constitutes practices conducted by large high-tech companies to monitor, predict, and control the behavior of consumers who use their products and platforms, either directly or indirectly.

Awareness of how personal data is collected by large high-tech companies is intensifying, with many people beginning to realize who is invested in knowing their online behaviors. For example, Facebook's enabling of data collection by Cambridge Analytica and the effect on the 2016 elections changed the conversation in the United States of America. Many people were rightly surprised by that vast collection and non-transparent use of their personal data, as well as the ways this information can be used to monitor, predict, and control many aspects of their lives.

Earlier means of monitoring, predicting, and controlling people relied on fear and shame to maintain order in society and ensure conformity with the interests of those in power. A classic example is the totalitarian regime represented by “Big Brother” in Orwell's dystopian novel 1984. In contrast, surveillance capitalism is based on a more subtle—and ultimately more pernicious—form of monitoring, predicting, and controlling what Zuboff calls “Big Other,” which are digital networks trained to monitor and shape users’ actions remotely based on machine learning technologies that are regulated by neither national nor international laws.

At the forefront of today's surveillance capitalism practices is the world's largest digital advertising company, Google. Included among its products and platforms are the most popular web browser, mobile platform, and search engine—Chrome, Android, and Google Search, respectively—in the world. Google's video platform (YouTube), email service (Gmail), and map application (Google Maps) each have over 1 billion monthly active users. The tremendous popularity and reach of Google's products enable it to collect detailed information about user online behaviors and physical movements that it then applies to target users with paid advertising. Google's revenues increase significantly as it refines its targeting technology and data collection methods.

COLLECTING IS A CULTURAL PRACTICE characterized by an uncanny dialectic of violence and preservation. It willfully tears helpless objects out of their original and presumably “natural” context in order to integrate them into the new framework of the collection, whose selection criteria, values, and goals reflect the individual collector's subjectivity or the policies of cultural-political institutions like museums and archives. In many ways, collecting is the desperate attempt to reign in the dispersion, fragmentariness, and enigmatic aura of artifacts that seem to have an elusive life of their own. In his “Passagen-Werk” (Arcades Project, 1927–40), Walter Benjamin sketched a general theory of collecting that points to the illusory nature of this practice. In fragment H 4 a, 1, he juxtaposes the archetype of the modern collector with the Baroque allegorist. These supplementary types are defined by differences while also sharing some of each other's attributes. The “most deeply hidden motive” of the collector, Benjamin suggests, is his “struggle against dispersion.” Collecting is motivated by the futile attempt to impose an order and a systematic meaning over the widely scattered objects of the collector's fascination; this order, however, is something the allegorist's passionate gaze of reflective contemplation, willfully dislodging things from their original contexts, has long abandoned. But, as Benjamin stresses, “in every collector hides an allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector.” What the collector shares with the allegorist is the acknowledgment that a collection can never be complete. His discovery of “just a single piece missing” reveals that the collection “remains a patchwork,” resembling the ruinous landscape of dispersed fragments pondered by the melancholic allegorist. Conversely, the allegorist, intent on deciphering objects as “keywords in a secret dictionary,” shares with the collector the intimation that he “can never have enough of things”: harboring, in other words, an unfulfillable desire for ideal completion, order, and shared significances.

This dialectic of assemblage and dispersal applies equally to the gathering of pictorial objects (pictures, sculptures, coins, stamps, etc.) and textual documents (books, autographs, newspaper articles, and so on). But does it also apply to sonic phenomena, especially to music? Can music be collected, and if so, in what form and in what ways? What are the implications with regard to aesthetic value, social function, and mediatechnological reproduction when music is considered in terms of collectibility?

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED to the concept of “collecting” and its shifting meanings in a digital context. It explores in what ways individual collectors and collecting institutions such as archives, museums, and libraries have espoused various forms of data processing; it offers insights into the practice of collecting as a cultural phenomenon and how this practice changes in an era in which computers are ubiquitous and the Internet dominates our time; and it discusses what is being collected in the digital domain, why digital objects are different from non-digital ones, and what it means when we “collect data.” Its essays and case studies examine the practice of collecting in a digital context from the perspectives of art historians, media and cultural-studies scholars, preservationists, museum theorists, librarians, and computer scientists.

The Western idea of “collection” signifies an intentional and selective accumulation of like elements, may they be physical objects or ideas and experiences. The all-encompassing meaning of “collecting,” correspondingly, ranges from shopping lists to address books, from remembering days past to focusing on the here and now, and from sorting comestibles to tracking debts. Almost unfathomable in its breadth, “collecting” requires conceptual framing to avoid its use as an imprecise, hollowedout metaphor. Such frames have been outlined in the past to think about “collecting,” but they failed to capture the idea of collecting in all its multifaceted manifestations. As a result, each of these preliminary and heterogenous frames exist largely in isolation from one another. For example, psychologists point to the prominent role of collecting in the development of the self and stress the mirroring of subjects and collected objects; historians emphasize the sociopolitical circumstances in which collecting rose to prominence among cultural elites; and economists investigate the significance of collecting in consumer societies, considering the cycles of “acquisition, possession, and disposition” of goods that constitute and dissolve what is called a “collection.” Each of these unique conceptual frameworks, however, introduces an additional feature of collecting, namely the role of influential agents—members of the nobility, wealthy merchants, naturalists, curators, gallery owners, librarians, and archivists— who began to collect for the benefit of the collection.

Introduction

CONSERVATION IS A COMPLEX FIELD that draws on many different disciplines. Broadly speaking, conservators are concerned with the future of the past. While we are primarily focused on preserving material aspects of objects (that is, artworks, artifacts, specimens, and other historic documents), we are also concerned with the meanings present in objects, and how those objects are used to tell histories. Conservators work in a wide variety of contexts, ranging from archaeological sites to libraries, national parks, museums, and private practice studios (these conservators in turn work for galleries, private collectors, artists, historic homes, auction houses and so on). Acting as translators between different fields, we must manage different professional languages and collaborate with a variety of partners. Despite our field's deep roots in archaeology and art history, conservators’ vocabulary has been augmented with new approaches to contemporary and media art—and this new lexicon also helps to understand emerging approaches to the conservation of historic works better. In discussing the evolving language of conservation, this lexicon can be understood in both a narrow sense (that is, recent terms coined in the conservation of time-based media and contemporary art) and in a broader sense. In this more expansive definition, fluency in multiple languages functions as a metaphor for how conservators codeswitch between different skill sets and vernaculars to manage interactions with diverse professional collaborators.

While we are adept at mediating between different professional languages, this is not the only codeswitch that informs the practices of modern conservation. Foundational coursework in American conservation training programs includes learning the history of conservation practices across specialties. My own training was focused on archaeological and anthropological collections, a subfield of object conservation (sculpture, decorative arts, artifacts, and so on) with its own particular history, practices, and ethics. Now working at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, I work with an interdisciplinary team confronted with many challenging new digital acquisitions. While there have been perceptive articles on the links between the conservation of contemporary art and cultural materials collections, contemporary design requires a new hybrid approach that draws on many other subcultures of conservation.

The field of conservation has been revolutionized once again by technological changes, but only recently have we started to register the changes in our practice and theory engendered by the inventions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Time Capsule as a Case in Point

ON THE 23RD OF SEPTEMBER 1938, the first ever so-called time capsule was buried at the site of the New York World's Fair, which was set to open in April 1939. To this day, it remains one of the most ambitious projects of its kind. Should the creators of the capsule have it their way, the cylindrically shaped, metal container, 7.5 feet tall and 8.75 inches in diameter, will not be unearthed until the year 6939 CE. The Westinghouse Time Capsule will then present its receiver from the far future with a tangible impression of the “achievements” of Western civilization on the eve of World War II. This, at least, is the scenario as imagined in the Book of Record, copies of which were deposited in the capsule and also distributed widely, including, in 3,649 copies, to lamaseries in Tibet, Shinto shrines in Japan, and Buddhist temples in India, and to 2,000 libraries, museums and universities across the world. Like the time capsule, the Book of Record was conceived by the Westinghouse Electric Company, in collaboration with a group of scientists, engineers, and advertising experts. The capsule's content was selected by way of a public idea contest under the direction of the vice president of the company; it provides a colorful display: from small items of daily use, such as a can opener, safety pin, and toothbrush, to samples of textiles and other materials, to all manner of seeds, banknotes, and other trifles, to texts and images on microfilm and contemporary newsreels. Framed by the capsule, such seemingly random everyday objects form a potentially meaningful snapshot of the beginnings of the consumer age.

That after 5,000 years the capsule's “message” might no longer be intelligible is something its creators took into account. They equipped it with a “Rosetta stone,” a linguistic apparatus intended to help reconstruct the information inside the capsule by way of a reconstruction of the language in which it is couched. In addition to the capsule itself, the intelligibility of its content is therefore perishable too, and hence requires protection from the various threats of loss and forgetting. Collecting has in this sense always been at once a “structure of objective devotion” and an “epistemological practice,” a practice that the collector can nevertheless only control to a certain degree.