In an era of digital technologies, exponential rates of data
production, and market-based technocratic governance,
diverse practices of numeracy, quantitative inquiry, and
software analytics become ever more ubiquitous. Yet, the
dominant epistemological and ontological assumptions
about number continue to rest on outdated philosophical
frameworks. What is more, the data sciences continue to
operate according to an ontology in which the natural world
is assumed to be underwritten by mathematical laws
(Manovich, 2013; Ruppert et al., 2013). Not only have these
assumptions been deconstructed by posthumanist scholars,
but recent work in philosophy begins to point toward alternative ontologies of number (Badiou, 2008; Châtelet, 2000;
Deleuze, 1994; Meillessoux, 2008; Rotman, 2000) and new
ways of theorizing measure and quantification (Barad,
2006; Kirby, 2011; Parisi, 2013). This special issue takes up
these developments in the context of cultural studies,
exploring computational reconfigurations of subjectivity
and the social.