Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 220

of information. For the unnamed author of The Cloud of Unknowing , the
danger lies in being overwhelmed by information, the banal bits of data
and discourse that literally cloud our vision and keep us from achieving
transcendence. David Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas begins with a
seeming oxymoron and challenges basic conceptions of time, space, and
information.
How can one even conceive of an atlas of clouds? After all, an atlas
provides a map of relatively stable forms, like land masses and bodies of
water. We think of an atlas as mapping the world, the nation, the universe,
or perhaps the city, but not the masses of quick-moving vapor that dart
about the sky and change shape in the blink of an eye. We do give them
names and some people keep a record of common and rare forms, just as
do birders. But there are far fewer people who “collect” clouds for a life
list than those who go in search of feathered creatures, a testament to just
how strange it is to capture clouds, by whatever means. Because of their
inherent ambiguity, clouds lend themselves to subjectivity and so we are
more likely to use poetry than an atlas to describe them. Of course there
is a science of clouds on which many a weather forecast rises and falls. But
we have tended to leave their description to those who conjure sublime
images, such as William Wordsworth, who writes that after wandering
“lonely as a cloud,” the viewer comes upon a ield of “golden daffodils” that
forever appear in the “inward eye” to provide a source of pleasure in “bliss-
ful solitude.” The key to a lifetime of such joy is, for the poet, to become
a cloud. Or one thinks of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who in “The Cloud,” a
poem that generations of students were made to learn, presents the cloud
as the key to a cyclical vision of time in nature. Mitchell's seemingly odd
juxtaposition of the two words in his novel's title suggests a challenge: if
one sees people not as data points to be captured in a network diagram
or in a statistical regression analysis, but rather as ephemeral formations
drifting or wandering through time and space, then what would a map
of their lives, their cloud atlas, look like?
Mitchell's novel, which won numerous awards and nominations, was
also adapted for the screen by the creators of The Matrix trilogy, to tepid
reviews, perhaps evidence of how dificult it is to turn a novel whose
author is primarily taken with the metaphor of the cloud into a ilm
whose creators take their metaphors from the world of data. Cloud Atlas
features six characters whose lives extend from the nineteenth century