ABSTRACT This essay contributes to scholarship on precarity and rhetoric by exploring how participatory epideictic rhetorics, data, and infrastructure contribute to precarity. We concentrate on how shared data practices (i.e., systems for archiving, storing, distributing, and communicating information) produce and sustain human/material vulnerabilities for users, developers, and systems with observational research of VirtualLearners, a business that created, aggregated, and sold data (i.e., videos, texts, and games) to educators. We argue that VirtualLearners’s glitching online ratings system and its associated data nurtured user precarity by encouraging barriers to education, the basis of economic and social mobility. In this essay, we expose VirtualLearners’s backstage computational techniques and tactics that transformed the rhetorical capacities made available to students and teachers. As part of this study, we introduce the concept of affective data technologies to explain how publics are encouraged to become invested in data practices that can make them complicit in their own precarity.

中文翻译：

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不稳定的数据：影响、基础设施和公共教育

摘要本文通过探索参与性流行修辞、数据和基础设施如何导致不稳定，为不稳定和修辞的学术做出贡献。我们专注于共享数据实践（即用于归档、存储、分发和交流信息的系统）如何通过对 VirtualLearners 的观​​察研究为用户、开发人员和系统产生和维持人为/物质漏洞，VirtualLearners 是一家创建、聚合和向教育者出售数据（即视频、文本和游戏）。我们认为，VirtualLearners 故障的在线评级系统及其相关数据通过鼓励教育障碍（经济和社会流动的基础）来培养用户的不稳定。在这篇论文中，我们展示了 VirtualLearners 的后台计算技术和策略，这些技术和策略改变了学生和教师可用的修辞能力。作为这项研究的一部分，我们引入了情感数据技术的概念，以解释如何鼓励公众对数据实践进行投资，从而使他们成为自己不稳定的同谋。