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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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? […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The argument Daniel Little is making here is an increasingly familiar one, but I’ve rarely encountered such a lucid formulation of it: Can we similarly “map” the spread of new political ideas and slogans during the Arab Spring? No, because the vast majority of those present in Tahrir Square were […]
An interesting set of distinctions from this great Frank Pasquale paper: Beneath the surface of Internet policy disputes, there is a deeper, even ontological set of orientations to technology. On one side are advocates of “mastery,” who try to resurrect old legal principles and public values to order cyberspace. On […]
This is an excellent lecture by Mike Savage. It’s particularly interesting to hear him reflect on the ‘coming crisis’ paper almost 10 years on. Would anyone now deny that he and Roger Burrows were correct?
From Infoglut, by Mark Andrejevic, loc 607. The context to digital innovation in public services: What emerges is a kind of actuarial model of crime: one that lends itself to aggregate considerations regarding how best to allocate resources under conditions of scarcity – a set of concerns that fits neatly […]
Another interesting bit of the Andrejevic book. A lot of these ideas are extremely familiar but he puts them together in extremely creative ways, as well as writing with an astonishing degree of lucidity. From loc 524: Lurking in these two questions is an assumption about the character of knowledge […]
From InfoGlut, by Mark Andrejevic, loc 464: The dystopian version of information glut anticipates a world in which control over the tremendous amount of information generated by interactive devices is concentrated in the hands of the few who use it to sort, manage, and manipulate. Those without access to the […]
From InfoGlut, by Mark Andrejevic, loc 601: The fictional portrayals envision a contradictory world in which individual actions can be predicted with certainty and effectively thwarted. They weave oracular fantasies about perfect foresight. Predictive analytics, by contrast, posits a world in which probabilities can be measured and resources allocated accordingly. […]
