So can you walk through what this means?

Absolutely.

So the Bronze Age featured something that's really interesting and unique for its time, which was a number of civilizations from the Hittites to Mycenaean Greece to Cyprus, all working in concert with each other, certainly around trade, but also these relationships, um, in which they would send their tablets to each other with their envoys, calling each other brother, and asking often for help or offering aid.

And so around the period of the Bronze Age collapse, there were a number of compounding ecological and political disasters that were making it difficult for each of these networked civilizations to sustain themselves, let alone offer aid to each other.

And so the tablets stopped coming, and- The Hittite king might write to the Egyptian Pharaoh and ask for grain, but the Egyptian Pharaoh didn't have any to give.

And so ultimately, it was the flow of information that was keeping their economies alive.

And when the information stopped flowing, they had no way to actually communicate with each other about their needs, even if they had anything to give them.

[upbeat music]

Um, what was the role i- of data in categorizing and dehumanizing people in that early colonial period?

In the context of the transatlantic slave trade, people were treated as commodities.

Uh, first Indigenous people, and then later kidnapped people from Africa.

And there's a whole host of kinds of documents, whether the record books on plantations or the ship manifests from the transatlantic slave trade, that were essentially pricing human beings, and played that role in recording people as commodities.

And what's really interesting is that this becomes a way to also protect the slave traders for the plantation owners, what they felt was their property.

And so we also saw insurance companies in England and in the US issuing policies on the enslaved people that were owned by these, um, enslavers, uh, and, and slave traders so that they would be compensated if someone self-emancipated or died during the transatlantic slave trade.

And it's this really dark moment where we see the role that data plays in helping turn people into not human beings, but items that could be bought and sold.

But what does that piece about community involvement or the involvement of communities affected by data governance in the questioning the creation and the control of data from here forward? Instead of being in that passive role, what would it look like for us to be more engaged and, and to take hold of that record-keeping and all of that power that you're describing available in it?

Mm

... that I didn't know how to talk about, being an immigrant to the US myself as a young child, and coming from a, a family Who's originally from Kashmir.

And so I, I was really interested because I thought, okay, there's a language for talking about why it feels like some countries have more power over each other, and how did I even get here? And so the point of entry for me was literature, but very, very quickly I started becoming interested in history.

I started becoming interested in digital culture and how we have these incredible tools for content creation available to us, whether it's to do it as individuals who want to tell our own stories or as academics who want to tell stories that haven't been told that come out of their research.

And yet I always felt like, why aren't people actually using these tools to do that important thing? And that's why I got interested in the field of digital humanities, and it was at a moment in time in the late 2010s where rather, it was in the early 2010s where the field was sort of starting to be a thing, and I thought, okay, here's actually my moment to say we have these powerful tools.

Let's actually use them to not just tell everybody who Shakespeare is.

Mm-hmm

... that they can write down, and it's been plucked out of its natural context and put down on a piece of paper, and then it can be compared with other measurements, or it could be analyzed or calculated, and then generalized.

quince.com slash NBID.

Hi, I'm Rupika Rizam.

I'm a professor at Dartmouth College and the author of Data Empire, a global history of how information has shaped power from the world's first cities to artificial intelligence.

Today, I'd like to share five key insights from Data Empire.

Insight number one, data built civilization.

Most people think data began with computers, but in reality, data is one of humanity's oldest technologies.

Nearly 5,000 years ago, someone named Cushim carefully recorded deliveries of barley on a clay tablet in ancient Mesopotamia.

create data revolutions.

So in what way is data kind of key to establishing, going beyond the individual and the kind of small scale community to establishing like a civilization and these data empires that you talk about?

So one of the earliest examples of data that we find associated with the rise of civilizations are clay tokens that were used in Mesopotamia, across the Near East, even farther afield to Anatolia.

And we found them there.

Indus Valley civilization in India as well, these small clay tokens made as counters.

And when people began settling down, leaving behind nomadic life, we see the emergence of these little material objects, and they became ways of keeping track of information and if you picture an early settlement where people have decided to give up nomadic life and can no longer simply I suppose they could but they've decided that they are no longer going to pick up and move on if there isn't enough food they need a way to see what they have and they're also beginning to live with each other and and living with people who aren't necessarily their kin.

So they aren't necessarily people they trust.

And so these tokens came into being because people needed a way to track their obligations to each other.

So what did this kind of shift, this computational shift in data management in the 20th century make possible? How important was that in our relationship as humans with data?

So in what way is data kind of key to establishing, going beyond the individual and the kind of small scale community to establishing like a civilization and these data empires that you talk about?

So one of the earliest examples of data that we find associated with the rise of civilizations are clay tokens that were used in Mesopotamia, across the Near East, even farther afield to Anatolia.

And we found them in this valley civilization in India as well, these small clay tokens made as counters.

And when people began settling down, leaving behind nomadic life, we see the emergence of these little material objects and they became ways of keeping track.

And if you picture an early settlement where people have decided to give up nomadic life and can no longer simply, I suppose they could, but they've decided that they are no longer going to pick up and move on if there isn't enough food.

They need a way to see what they have.

And they're also beginning to live with each other and living with people who aren't necessarily their kin.

So what did this kind of shift, this computational shift in data management in the 20th century make possible? How important was that in our relationship as humans with data?