Pervasive, high-powered digital information processing has been instrumental in turning the Earth and its constitutive systems into an object of thought and practice. But how does digitised informatics look when we approach it as a process that emerged out of and through the dynamic planetary body we inhabit? In this chapter, we review work that has probed and troubled the division between the domain of abstract, disembedded, dematerialised information systems and the “stuff” of the material world. We argue that human informatic technologies capture and elaborate upon information-processing capabilities that inhere in the Earth’s physical systems – both organic and inorganic.
This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities on 12/09/2022, available online: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-the-Digital-Environmental-Humanities/Travis-Dixon-Bergmann-Legg-Crampsie/p/book/9780367536633
