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M. Doyle, S. Savic, V. Bühlmann:
""Introduction"";
in: "Ghosts of Transparency - Shadows cast and shadows cast out (Introduction)", V. Bühlmann, S. Savic, M. Doyle (Hrg.); Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel, 2019, ISBN: 978-3-0356-1911-9, S. 8 - 19.

Information and data are not synonyms: data (etymo- logically, the `given´) has to be treated, articulated, read or deciphered in such a way as to contain information. The sheer amount of data today tends to obscure this important difference between data and information: data is entropic, while information is where this entropy is negated; infor- mation is negentropic. An emerging political imperative of `transparency´ conflates the abundance of data with an increase in information. Unfortunately, the reverse is often the case: The more `data´ is rendered available and passed off as `information´ or `knowledge´, the more opaque the dealings with `information´ become. This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges we face with regard to becoming lit- erate in the algorithmic and symbolization processes that organize data in our world today-processes we refer to here as `ghosts of transparency´.

This book is above all about architectonics and com- munication. What, you may ask, does this have to do with architecture and urbanism? Data and software are thought to reshape the city, while the word `architecture´ refers equally often to buildings and to the organization of com- puter software and hardware components. With this book, we want to cast a projective space that accommodates vari- ous Auseinandersetzungen (settings, or setting ups, artic- ulated dispositions of grounds that are quarrelsome) with implicit and explicit mixtures of these two domains inter- penetrating each other. Contributions are short enough to make a point, yet long enough to glimpse the great variety of `scales´ of abstractive contemplation that these points index.