Figure Concept and Method Edited by Celia Lury William Viney Scott Wark Figure Celia Lury • William Viney • Scott Wark Editors Figure Concept and Method Editors Celia Lury William Viney Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies Department of Anthropology University of Warwick Goldsmiths, University of London Coventry, UK London, UK Scott Wark Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies University of Warwick Coventry, UK ISBN 978-981-19-2475-0 ISBN 978-981-19-2476-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2476-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022. This book is an open access publication. 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The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Preface Knights of the Oblong Table —Di Sherlock When I call them Knights of The Round Table it’s a spur to the collective wit. The nomenclature derided, others are proffered, dismissed, until, all things considered, someone comes up with Knights of The Oblong Table. There we have it. The confederacy shifts dune-like, presence, absence configure, reconfigure in the uncertain wind. The Table a stout ship, the Crew vociferous – riffing, roaring, cursing, complaining, joking, jibing, expleting, explaining, v vi Preface sparing, sparring, fooling, finagling, loquacious, voracious, complicit, explicit, hopeful, doubtful, always respectful always remembrance. No captains stowaways hostages tourists. Passengers by invitation only. Acknowledgements The editors would like to acknowledge the help and support of their col- leagues from the project ‘People Like You’: Contemporary Figures of Personalisation—Sophie Day, Helen Ward, Roz Redd, and Yael Gerson— and the artists associated with this project—Felicity Allen, Stefanie Posavec, and Di Sherlock. This volume was collated from presentations given at a conference called Figurations: Persons In/Out of Data, which was organised under the auspices of the ‘People Like You’ project and held at Goldsmiths, University of London, December 16—17, 2019. We would like to thank our keynote speakers, Wendy H. K. Chun, Jane Elliott, John Frow, and AbdouMaliq Simone, all of our presenters, and everyone who attended the conference and participated in discussions. In particular, we would like to thank our conference assistants, Avery Delaney, Stephanie Guirand, Ming-Te Peng, and Saba Zavarei, for their hard work, and Lizzie Malcolm and Daniel Powers from Rectangle for designing our conference poster and booklet. The ‘People Like You’ project is funded by a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award in the Medical Humanities and Social Sciences, 2018-2022 (205456/Z/16/Z). We thank the Wellcome Trust for their support in making this volume Open Access. vii Contents 1 Introduction: Figure, Figuring and Configuration 1 Celia Lury, William Viney, and Scott Wark 2 The Work That Figures Do 21 Leila Dawney 3 In “The Cloud”: Figuring and Inhabiting Media Milieus 41 Scott Wark 4 Figure to Ground: Felicity Allen Interviewed by Celia Lury 65 Felicity Allen and Celia Lury 5 The Research Persona Method: Figuring and Reconfiguring Personalised Information Flows 77 Liliana Bounegru, Melody Devries, and Esther Weltevrede 6 Engines, Puppets, Promises: The Figurations of Configuration Management 105 Matt Spencer 7 Figuring Molecular Relapse in Breast Cancer Medicine 127 William Viney and Sophie Day ix x Contents 8 The Gardener and the Walled Garden 149 Sophie Day, Jayne Smith, and Helen Ward 9 Data Through Time: Figuring Out the Narrative Self in Longitudinal Research 173 Jane Elliott 10 Figuring Out Exposure: Exploring Computational Environments and Personalisation in Interdisciplinary Air Pollution Research 197 Emma Garnett and Srishti Bhatnagar 11 Figures of Speech: Stuck in the Middle with ‘People Like You’ 221 Celia Lury 12 Ubiquitous Surveillance and Data Selves 243 John Frow 13 Figuring Accompaniment: The Creation of Urban Spaciousness 263 AbdouMaliq Simone Notes on Contributors Felicity Allen is an artist and writer whose current work is mainly focussed in two forms, the concept of the Disoeuvre (exhibited in 2019 at x-hibit, Vienna, and published by Ma Bibliothèque) and Dialogic Portraits, which she makes in series through watercolour on paper as well as textual, audio, and video recordings. Her first series produced the two- volume artist’s book Begin Again nos 1–21, collected by Tate and the Getty. The third series, commissioned by Turner Contemporary, pro- duced the film As If They Existed (2015). She is currently making Dialogic Portraits with Refugee Tales and with the cross-disciplinary research proj- ect ‘People Like You’. See also www.felicityallen.co.uk. Srishti Bhatnagar is a medical anthropologist interested in health, gen- der, and intersectionality. She obtained an MSc from the University of Delhi, with a specialization in Social Anthropology and has held research positions at The Institute of Economic Growth and Purple Audacity Research & Innovation, New Delhi. She has conducted ethnographic research on the social and cultural perceptions of asthma, air pollution, and sexual and reproductive health. Currently, she’s pursuing a qualita- tive UI study on the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on food delivery applications. xi