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Before liability is incurred under the Consumer Protection Act 1987, a product containing a defect must cause damage. Section 1(2) of the Act provides a definition of ‘product’. It states that ‘product’ means ‘any goods or electricity and … includes a product which is comprised in another product, whether by virtue of being a component part or raw material or otherwise’. Notwithstanding the short title of the Act, the definition of product is sufficiently broad to have a wider application than merely to consumer goods. For example, disasters resulting from chemicals or aircraft could be litigated under the Act, as could asbestos and other toxic substances which have given rise to much litigation in the United States.

This chapter, written by Lev Manovich, discusses digital visualizations of Dziga Vertov’s films. Manovich argues that Vertov’s desire for a ‘graphic language’ anticipates the recent work of a number of data visualization designers and artists who use computational analysis and computer graphics to visualize patterns in artistic works, including literary texts and films. Yet Manovich’s work also explores how new visualization techniques can help us comprehend cinema differently, revealing patterns and dimensions that are hard or impossible to study through established film analysis methods. Like a digital counterpart to what Vertov theorized as the Kino-Eye, the digital photography and software applications Manovich manipulates collectively extend and transform the capacities of the human eye and its relation to film. Manovich thus reveals a whole new science and aesthetics of cinema in the data sets, maps, patterns, and graphics that lie latent in the celluloid image.

N. Katherine Hayles’ essay is concerned with the transposition of the paradigmatic onto the syntagmatic in Only Revolutions. Pointing to the proliferation of different kinds of data in the text, Hayles claims that it manifests a ‘deterritorialized spatial dynamic’, involving ‘a profound shift from narrative as a temporal trajectory to an element of a topographic plane upon which a wide variety of interactions and permutations are staged.’ Hayles highlights how the text’s distinctive topography is only made possible by the use of sophisticated computer software; thus although technology is literally absent from the narrative of Only Revolutions, it permeates the text in her view: ‘nowhere present within the narrative diegesis, digital technologies are everywhere apparent when we consider the writing-down system as a whole.’