[Air-L] CfA: “Digital Twinning”, New Media & Society, Special Issue

[Christoph Borbach]

Dear colleagues and AoIR fellows,

We would like to draw your attention to the following call for abstracts 
of the journal /*New Media & Society*/ for a special issue on “*Digital 
Twinning*”. We look forward to receiving your paper proposals until 
December 31! Please feel free to forward the CfA to potentially 
interested colleagues.

thanks & best greetings,
Christoph
___

*Call for Abstracts: _/New Media & Society/_, Special Issue “Digital 
Twinning”
/Ed. Christoph Borbach, Wendy Chun, and Tristan Thielmann/*

Datafication in the analogue era followed a different logic than do 
today’s media processes, with all their entanglements and 
interdependencies with and within the ‘real’ world. Human bodies, system 
processes, and their data traces and virtual models are deeply 
intertwined in current postdigital—or rather, more-than-human (Lupton 
2019)—media cultures. It is surely not a new idea that data and the 
technologies of its collection, storage, circulation, and evaluation are 
shaping how societies and individuals see themselves. But it is a 
novelty that processes of datafication within the context of ‘digital 
twinning’ and their future predictions and simulations of 
behavior—mostly systems behavior but also human purchasing and movement 
behaviors, with their political implications—are fundamentally changing 
the methods of production planning, processes, and products. 
Technologies of digital twinning ask once more how data practices affect 
and mold decision-making within institutions (Vertesi 2020).

‘Digital twins’ are currently the most important drivers of the fourth 
industrial revolution. These ever-more-complex technical products and 
processes are now developed and tested in the virtual sphere as software 
models before they emerge in the ‘real’ world. The paradigm of digital 
media technologies is therefore subject to fundamental change through 
the prevalence of digital twins in industry and research. The digital is 
no longer a real-time virtual representation of a real-world physical 
object: it is exactly the opposite and concurrently much more than that, 
allowing new forms of “premediation” (Grusin 2010), in the analysis of 
future performances of objects without the physical presence of the 
objects. Digital twinning therefore promises not only the potential of 
making futures predictable through recognition and correlation of 
digital and analog, virtual and physical (Chun 2021), but the ability to 
do so without physical counterparts. Digital twinning is no longer 
restricted to single entities—like objects being studied—but allows for 
modeling complex chains of co-operations. What is most striking from a 
media theory perspective is that technical objects, models, services, 
operations, or even entire cities, metro systems, or logistical 
architectures can be objects of digital twinning.

Digital twins make clear that the real world is just one possible 
realization of the primarily virtual world. At the same time, digital 
twins and other haunting ‘data doppelgangers’ allow overarching data 
exchange and cooperation. They are more than pure data, proving once 
more that so-called “raw data” does not exist (Bowker 2005; Gitelman 
2013). Digital twins consist of technical and social models of acting 
objects, and integrate various embedded sensors related to vital areas 
of functionality that make things and processes ‘sense-able’ (Gabrys 
2019). Digital twins can therefore also include simulations and 
services, asking anew if there is anything worldly which may must remain 
“uncomputable” (Galloway 2021).

Taking digital twinning as an analytic lens, the special issue will also 
try to understand aesthetics, politics, genders, and economies of ‘data 
doubles.’ These new symptoms of postdigital media and data cultures 
differ from previous motifs of doubles, e.g. literary doppelgangers as 
in the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann, among others. Selfies are emblematic 
of digital data cultures and their visual regime (Eckel et al. 2018), as 
are avatar images in avatar-based gaming (Klevjer 2022), since they are 
not mere pictorial representations but digital images of self-perception 
and self-modeling. They stand as digital doubles exemplary for the self 
in extended realities (XR), self-embodiment in digital spheres, and the 
continuum between offline and online (Coleman 2011). Similar to digital 
twins, digital ‘doubles’ even without a physical ‘original’ can unfold 
influence, literally, as virtual influencers or actors such as Hatsune 
Miku demonstrates.

Media practices of doubling and storing the self might have predigital 
histories (Humphreys 2018). But only digital tracking applications can 
be regarded as real-time feedback loops that influence human behavior. 
This can be seen positively since it transforms the way humans 
self-optimize, e.g. their athletic behavior, as quantified self-movement 
shows. But it can also be critically reflected from a political 
standpoint, since it evokes a shift from individuals to ‘dividuals’ and 
an interpretation of human beings as conglomerates of sensor technology, 
flesh, and data doubles within surveillant assemblages (Haggerty and 
Richard 2000).

To account for this complex technological situation and its social 
impacts, the special issue “Digital Twinning” will bring together 
researchers from different fields: engineering and social science, 
informatics and media studies. The aim is to understand concepts and 
practices but also politics and aesthetics of data doubling and digital 
twinning that are not restricted to purposes of system and production 
monitoring, maintenance, and simulation—that is, processes of digital 
engineering. We will also expand the scope, to include real-time 
interrelations of digital data acquisition and simulation, on the one 
hand, and the physical performance of humans, things, and systems, on 
the other.

We are seeking *abstracts* (500 words) for submissions until *December 
31, 2023* (to be sent to *christoph.borbach at uni-siegen.de, subject: 
“NM&S Special Issue: Digital Twinning”*), that might address—but are not 
limited to—one or more of the following topics:

  * how is data agential (in digital twinning)?
  * interrelations and interdependencies between physical and digital
    twins and doubles
  * politics, (data) economies, and technologies of digital twinning and
    doubling
  * boundaries in the modeling of twins
  * (de)central places of twinning: where is it to be done, and by whom?
  * twinning as labor: precarious work, and/or precarious for workers?
  * histories of twinning: from science fiction, to NASA, to the public?
  * future digital practices of twinning
  * imaginaries and aesthetics of twinning
  * gendering and aesthetics of avatars
  * challenges and difficulties of data governance, data rights, and
    data sustainability
  * sensor ecologies and their impact on digital twinning
  * media and social theories of digital twinning
  * digital methods, ethnographic, and ethnomethodological approaches
    for further research on digital twinning
  * applications for digital twins in the industrial and consumer metaverse

-- Dr. Christoph Borbach Team »Science, Technology and Media Studies« 
www.mobilemedia.uni-siegen.de University of Siegen