Originally a 2003 book by financial journalist Michael Lewis, the 2011 film with Brad Pitt tells the story of the Oakland Athletics’ 2002 season. Struggling with fewer resources than his competitors and lacking the resources to replace star players who have been poached, general manager Billy Breane embraces data analytics to assemble “an island of […]
My notes on Morozov, E. (2019) Digital Socialism? The Calculation Debate in the Age of Big Data. New Left Review 116/117, 33-66 A range of terms have entered circulation in recent years which suggest a transformation in capitalism. Digital capitalism, platform capitalism, data capitalism and surveillance capitalism point to a shift which is significant in […]
My notes on Mohr, J.W. (2015) Big Data/Big Theory – Part 1. Perspectives 37(2) and Mohr, J.W. (2015) Big Data/Big Theory – Part 2. Perspectives 38(1) It’s often assumed that big data poses a threat to sociological theorising in the traditional sense, with the infamous Wired article on the ‘end of theory’ standing as emblematic of […]
My notes on Kennedy, H., Poell, T., & van Dijck, J. (2015). Data and agency. Big Data & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715621569 This short paper is the editorial for a special section of big data & society, exploring the role of agency in relation to data. Their starting point is the tendency in the literature to focus on how datafication – […]
I’m giving serious thought to this, as much as I’m trying to save money and travel less: Call for Papers for the Conference „Scraping the Demos“: Political epistemologies of Big Data Organizers: Research Group Quantification and Social Regulation (Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society) and DVPW Thematic Group “Internet and Politics. Electronic Governance” Date: 8-9 […]
From an interesting British Academy funded workshop last November: https://methods.sagepub.com/video/embed/srmpromo/oohinf/social-listening-and-reclaiming-the-future
My notes on Andrejevic, M., Hearn, A., & Kennedy, H. (2015). Cultural studies of data mining: Introduction, European Journal of Cultural Studies 18(4-5), 379-394 In this introduction to an important special issue, Mark Andrejevic, Alison Hearn and Helen Kennedy that the ubiquity of data infrastructure in everyday life means that “we cannot afford to limit our thinking about data […]
I’m doing a webinar tomorrow as part of the Critical Realism Network series which I’m really looking forward to. It draws together much of my work, encompassing my contributions to the Centre for Social Ontology’s social morphogenesis and humanism projects, the Accelerated Academy, the Digital Social Science project I ran for the ISRF, my applied […]
In the last few days, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on a remark Susan Halford made at this event about the difference between expertise and discipline. If I understand her correctly, her point was that capacities for knowing and acting in the world (expertise) can have their reproduction organised socially in different ways (discipline) […]
In a recent paper, I’ve argued we find a cultural project underpinning ‘big data’: a commitment to reducing human being, in all its embodied affective complexity, stripping it of any reality beyond the behavioural traces which register through digital infrastructure. Underlying method, methodology and theory there is a vision of how human beings are constituted, […]
I’m interested in how big data is developing within psychology: 1) For “Hotspots in Psychology 2019” (guest editors: Michael Bosnjak & Timo Gnambs) we are looking für meta-analyses and systematic reviews (including methodological studies) from all areas of psychology: https://conferences.leibniz-psychology.org/documents/zfp_a000294.pdf 2) For “Big Data in Psychology: Methods and Applications” (guest editors: Mike Cheung & Suzanne […]
Some tweets about this blog post worry me because it appears as if people think this is my analysis. It’s not. These are my notes on the excellent paper below which I’d strongly recommend reading in full. This thought-provoking article by Malcolm Williams, Luke Sloan and Charlotte Brookfield offers a new spin on the familiar problem […]
It seems passé to talk about the ‘big data revolution’ in 2017. Much of the initial hype has subsided, leaving us in a different situation to the one in which big data was expected to sweep away all that had come before. Instead, we have the emergence of data science as well as the institutionalisation […]
I just came across this remarkable estimate in an Economist feature on surveillance. I knew digitalisation made surveillance cheaper but I didn’t realise quite how much cheaper. How much of the creeping authoritarianism which characterises the contemporary national security apparatus in the UK and US is driven by a familiar impulse towards efficiency? The agencies not only do […]
From Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, loc 2256: Besides, consumer research is all about winning some portion of a fixed number of purchases. It doesn’t create more consumption. If anything, technological solutions tend to make markets smaller and less likely to spawn associated industries in shipping, resource management, and labor services. Digital […]
From The Data Revolution by Rob Kitchin, loc 566-580: Moreover, data constitute an economic resource, one that is a key component of the next phase of the knowledge economy, reshaping the mode of production to one that it is data-driven (see Chapter 7). Since the late 1980s, scholars such as Castells (1988, 1996) have argued […]
I’m very interested in this concept, which I was introduced to through the work of Pierpaolo Donati and Andrea Maccarini earlier this year. It emerged from the work of Arnold Gehlen and refers to the role of human institutions in unburdening us from existential demands. This is quoted from his Human Beings and Institutions on pg 257 […]
This looks so interesting: BIG QUALIDATA: Tackling Analysis of Very Large Volumes of Qualitative Data in Social Science Research Monday 9th May 1-4pm, University of Edinburgh, Manchester and Southampton. Can social researchers scale up techniques of working with qualitative data and meaningfully analyse massively more text than they can possibly read? Our forthcoming seminar will […]
