We live in a time where ”the digital graveyard” is starting to overgrow, namely all the inactive digital information that is left behind by people passing away. In april this year Google is one of the first companies to address this issue with their new afterlife service ”Google death manager”. I intend to use the process of this service as an input source for my project and investigate how it can be visualized and translated into an architectural experience. / Vi lever i en tid där "den digitala kyrkogården" expanderar som aldrig förr, nämligen alla den inaktiva digitala information som är kvar efter människor som avlider. I april i år är Google ett av de första företagen att ta itu med denna fråga med sin nya tjänst "Google death manager". Jag tänker använda processen i denna tjänst som en ingångskälla för mitt projekt och undersöka hur den kan visualiseras och översättas till en arkitektonisk upplevelse.

The Canadian Online Harms Legislation (COHL) proposal identifies proactive Automated Moderation as a solution to classifying and removing online content which violates norms such as hate. Emerging automated moderation algorithms include Google Perspective, a machine learning model which scores hateful features in text content as “toxicity.” This study identifies that hateful community content norms are currently emerging on volunteer user moderation platforms such as Reddit. To operationalize these concepts, a Theoretical Framework is constructed using Gorwa’s (2019) Platform Governance models and Massanari’s (2017) overview of Toxic Technoculture communities. While previous research exploring community toxicity is discussed, there is a gap in research which analyzes the Post, Comment, and Image Meme contributions of Reddit Moderator users to hateful community content norms. As such, an analysis of the Reddit community R/Metacanada is constructed which compares the toxicity of Moderator and user contributions using Google Perspective. The results of the applied Mann-Whitney U test analysis indicate that r/Metacanada Moderators and users contribute content at similar toxicity levels. Supplementing these tests, RQ1 then structures a qualitative analysis of false negative results which may emerge in the automated classification of multi-modal image content. Identifying that hate in online memes is structured through layered Signifier and Signified elements, a critical discussion is established which interprets potential marginalizing effects of the COHL’s automated moderation applying Noble’s (2018) theory of Technological Redlining. As such, this thesis immerses itself within the contemporary context of online content regulation, drawing upon existing conceptualizations and methodological approaches, offering a critical discussion of regulating hate content using automated algorithms.

¿Qué es publicidad hoy? Las fronteras se han expandido al nivel de que muchas de las empresas más importantes del mundo, como lo son Google, Apple, Amazon, AliBaBa, Baidu, o Facebook son, a la vez, quienes controlan el negocio. La publicidad ha dejado de ser un eslabón en los procesos de marketing para convivir en todos ellos a la vez.

The climate emergency and the accompanying ecological and cultural crises challenge existing modes of critique in the humanities. Described by terms such as Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Chthulucene, these crises are distributed across large scales of space and time and confound simple notions of causality, requiring new paradigms for research in the humanities. Recent work in media studies engages these concerns by examining the ecologies of media and media infrastructures. The Internet is arguably the most critical media infrastructure. Media studies augments cultural analyses of the Internet by focusing on the materialities of this Internet, foregrounding ways that information, infrastructures, cultures, and materialities are—and always have been—intimately entwined.Data centers—the massive server farms that store data, perform cloud computing, and host much of the Internet—are critical sites of the Internet’s computational power. Project 02: Media, Power, and Ecology at the Google Data Center in The Dalles, Oregon contributes to existing work on data centers by focusing on Google’s first hyperscale data center—named “Project 02” in early permitting documents. In media studies, Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau’s “Where the Internet Lives: Data Centers as Cloud Infrastructure,” and a series of articles by Mel Hogan address the imaginaries of data centers, the discourse around them, and the ecologies they produce. While this work on data centers is foundational, it relies on insights derived primarily from promotional materials and brief site visits. These methodologies address data centers as static objects rather than emergent processes, circumscribing scholars’ ability to address ongoing changes in an industry defined by rapid change and constant growth. Further, these studies often tacitly accept the data centers’ own definition of their spatio-temporal boundaries rather than challenging them. Because data centers are inherently relational, it is necessary to apply a similar network logic to defining the data center itself—as an assemblage of infrastructural relations rather than a self-contained object with discrete connections to the world. My research addresses these methodological and conceptual concerns through a longitudinal study of Google’s first hyperscale data center. Project 02 will be the first book-length study of a single data center, drawing on repeated site visits over four years, talks and publications by Google, and extensive research into government archives. The Introduction, Where the Internet Lives, contrasts this data center’s role in Google’s global network with phenomenological accounts of its ever-expanding security perimeter. Chapter 1, Secrecy, Sustainability, and Security, traces shifts in Google’s discourse, from secrecy to promoting sustainability, through a survey of publications, talks, websites, video tours, and maps. Chapter 2, Territorial, Temporal, and Material Processes in The Dalles, examines political and ecological implications of changes in network topologies and the implementation of artificial intelligence-focused Tensor Processing Units. Chapter 3, Rocks, Water, Salmon, Treaties, and Networks: Making Space for The Dalles data center, frames the data center on an expansive scale of time and space, situating it within the ongoing process of settler colonialism in the northwestern United States. Chapter 4, The Bonneville Power Administration Film Archives: Ecologies of Infrastructural Media from 1939 to the Present, investigates the data center’s source of electrical power, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), through an archiveology of the films and photographs produced by the BPA from 1939 to the present. This survey of BPA films attends to a central infrastructure of settler colonialism, while highlighting Indigenous activists’ success in producing changes to the operation of BPA dams. The Conclusion, An Owner’s Manual, considers potentials for analogous infrastructural activism at the Google data center and foregrounds instabilities within the immense power embodied in Google’s corporate infrastructure. This book project informs—and is shaped by—a multimodal research practice that engages contemporary and archival media related to the data center and the infrastructures that support it. Project 02 interweaves videos produced by Google with photographs and films from the archives of the Army Corps of Engineers, Department of Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Bonneville Power Administration alongside my own video, audio, and photography of the data center and a series of related sites. This media-centric methodology builds meaning from a dual conception of media ecologies as both relations among media objects and as ecologies produced by—and alongside of—these media objects. This method of working through multiple flows of media attends to the expansive spatio-temporal scales of the data center’s ecological, political, and cultural entanglements. In parallel to the book, Project 02 has two multimodal realizations. The media exhibition frames the data center in relation to the last 150 years along a fifteen-mile stretch of the Columbia River. Media produced by Google is interwoven with materials from government archives and my own video and audio of the data center, The Dalles Dam, active Indigenous fishing sites, and the Columbia River. The exhibition immerses the audience in a disparate body of media emerging from, and around, the Google data center, leading the audience to consider long-term implications of the Internet’s central role in our culture. The second multimodal project is a feature-length documentary film which leverages a haptic approach to the data center, cinematic engagements with surrounding environments, and affective encounters with archival media to produce a narrative that spirals outward from the data center to attend to the infrastructural relationships that support it. The book, film, and media exhibition contribute to a broader reckoning with the substantial power accumulated by Google. My research grounds concerns over Google’s monopolization of critical infrastructure in an environmental history of Google’s oldest hyperscale data center. At the hydroelectric dams that power this data center, the New Deal era dream of “power for the people” has evolved into a complexly negotiated system incorporating salmon ecologies, Indigenous land and water rights, and emerging challenges of climate change into the management of an aging network of dams. Project 02 considers analogous potentials for Google’s technological and engineering contributions to be rethought and reconfigured, informed by logics and concerns beyond their original intent. These potential reconfigurations are critical to reimagining the Internet, democratizing the production of knowledge, and bolstering our ability to navigate the ongoing crises of the Anthropocene. / Media Studies & Production

During the 2016 presidential election, public opinion polls consistently showed a lead in the popular vote and Electoral College for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Following Trump's surprise victory, the political pundits and public at large began to question the accuracy of modern public opinion polling. Fielding a representative sample, convoluted and opaque methodologies, the sheer amount of polls, and both the media's and general public's inability to interpret poll results are among the flaws of the polling industry. An alternative or supplement to traditional polling practices is necessary. This thesis seeks to investigate whether Google Trends can be effectively used as a measure of public opinion during presidential elections. This study gathers polling data from the 2016 presidential election from states that were considered swing states. Specifically, this study examines six total polls, three from states that swung in the way the polls predicted they would – Nevada and Virginia – and three from states that swung against the prediction – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Answers to the "Most Important Issue" question in each poll are compared to their corresponding topics in Google Trends by calculating Pearson product moment correlations for each pair. Results indicated that in states that swung as predicted, Google Trends was an effective supplement to traditional public opinion polls. In states that did not swing as predicted, Google Trends was not an effective supplement. Implications of these results and future considerations for the polling industry and Google are discussed. / Master of Arts

Google's AdWords processes information about what sorts of content users are browsing for about a quarter of all web site visits. The significance of AdWords' use of this vast amount of personal data lies not in its use for such obviously authoritarian purposes but instead as a network of grey surveillance with Google acting as the hub and the various publishers, advertisers, and users watching (and controlling) each other in distinct ways. Google's model of collective intelligence in its search and ad ranking systems has so deeply intertwined itself into user experiences online (and offline) that it acts as a shared nervous system. AdWords' use of specific words to target simple ads directly connects advertising topics with the content supported by the advertising, encouraging the content to do more of the work of assigning social meaning traditionally done by the ads themselves. And the AdWords pay-per-click ad auction system greatly increases the level of mechanization within the advertising and content production system, replacing the historical human bureaucracy of the advertising industry with the mechanical bureaucracy that is much more difficult to predict or understand. That mechanical bureaucracy shapes, in constitutive but unpredictable ways, the relationship between content and ads that drives the what content is published online and how advertisers and users interact with that content. / Master of Science

本文主要是透過 Google trends 網站提供的關鍵字搜尋量資料， 探討網路資料是否能夠提供通貨膨脹率的即時資訊。 透過美國消費者物價指數的組成細項作為依據，蒐集美國2004年1月至2015年12月的 Google trends 關鍵字變數，並藉由最小絕對壓縮挑選機制(Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator)、 彈性網絡(Elastic Net)以及主成分分析法(Principal component analysis)等等變數挑選機制，有效地整合大量的關鍵字資料。實證結果發現，透過適當變數挑選後的 Google trends 關鍵字變數確實可改善美國通貨膨脹率的即時預測表現，並為美國通貨膨脹率提供額外有效的資訊。此外，我們透過台灣的關鍵字資料檢驗，也確認Google trends 關鍵字資料可以幫助台灣通貨膨脹率的即時預測。

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

The project is to design and implement a Web application for realizing an innovative, hands-on interactive learning experience for the Google Maps API. This learning environment was developed based on a real-world Geographic Information System (GIS), the Gulf of Mexico Coastal Geospatial Information Support System. Significant efforts were invested not only in development of this GIS system, but also in the design and implement that turns the production system into a learning environment. The Web development aspect attracts computer science students, while the opportunity to learn GIS concepts in an interactive way to attract students from the geography department and the opportunity to learn the Google Maps API proves interesting to regular internet users. The Web learning system was given to a focus group whose feedback was collected through a survey. The survey results reveal a favorable response to the interactive, hands-on learning model and the Web implementation.

Esta pesquisa tem por objetivo entender as diferentes dinâmicas estabelecidas entre contracultura, economia e ciência a partir da noção de matriz de entrelaçamento. A empresa Google Inc e o objeto que melhor permite analisar as zonas fronteiriças que entrelaçam esses três elementos, preservando seus referentes e suas fronteiras.Assim este e um trabalho que tenta explorar por meio de quais processos as praticas e valores da contracultura e da produção de conhecimento científico que, ao mesmo tempo em que não eram frontalmente anti-mercado, mas que inicialmente não estavam subordinadas à produção capitalista, acabam muitas vezes se impondo aos objetivos de mercado, à forma de produção de conhecimento do capitalismo flexível, por provarem sua eficiência tecnica e sucesso comercial. Irei me referir a esses três elementos dentro de uma perspectiva dos regimes, que estabelece que cada regime tem sua base histórica, possui sua própria divisão de trabalho, seus próprios modos de produção cognitiva e de artefatos e tem audiências específicas. / This research aims to understand the different dynamics between established counterculture, economics and science from the notion of entanglement matrix. The company Google Inc. is therefore the best subject for an analysis of edge cases that intertwine these three elements, preserving their referents and their boundaries. In this manner, this research attempts to explore which processes the practices and values of counterculture and the production of scientific knowledge that, while they were not outright anti-market, but initially were not subordinated to capitalist production, often end up imposing marketing objectives, influencing the production of knowledge in a flexible capitalism for proving its technical efficiency and \"commercial\" success. I will refer to these three elements within a perspective of the regimes, which states that each regime has its historical basis, has its own division of labor, their own modes of cognitive production and has specific audiences.