The Recalling RFID seminar on Friday was nicely complemented by workshops on Saturday. With the Digital Methods Initiative we conducted research on various aspects of RFID on the web which resulted in five different projects. I worked on a project titled “RFID Imagery: ‘Wet’ and ‘Dry’ Associations Compared” with Esther Weltevrede, Laura van der Vlies and Richard Rogers. We researched how “wet” (as inspired by Timothy Weaver, University of Denver) the RFID imagery is according to Google.
Our findings are that the RFID imagery is very dry as as associations to the biological are limited (for example human tagging, animal chip implants, etc.) Associations with machines and machinic diagrams predominate as only eight out of the 100 results are wet. I visualized these findings in the following graphics:
click images to enlarge
More details on the project, the research method and the findings can be found on the Digital Methods Initiative wiki.