From Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks pg 167: Parents in Allegheny County helped me articulate an inchoate idea that had been echoing in my head since I started my research. In Indiana, Los Angeles, and Allegheny County, technologists and administrators explained to me that new high-tech tools in public services increase transparency and decrease discrimination. […]
Margetts, H. (2017). Political behaviour and the acoustics of social media. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(4), s41562-017. I’ve tended towards acoustic metaphors when making sense of social media since finding inspiration in a remark by David Beer about the challenge of being heard above the din on social media. These platforms are cacophonous, as many voices struggle for […]
This looks like an interesting job at a new institute I’d like to keep track of: The Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University seeks a Postdoctoral Researcher to play a major role in a two-year project on Data Science & Society. We invite applications from scholars with a recent Ph.D. in science […]
From an interesting British Academy funded workshop last November: https://methods.sagepub.com/video/embed/srmpromo/oohinf/social-listening-and-reclaiming-the-future
I find it hard not to wonder how many interactions like this one, satirised so superbly by Silicon Valley, lie behind the tendency of digital elites to pontificate about social trends. On the one hand, data science emerges as a powerful means of generating knowledge of social life, building on past developments while becoming something […]
A few years ago, I was preoccupied by this question after an illuminating six months working in the Data Science Lab at Warwick Business School. I co-organised a ground breaking conference in computational social science and it was clear this represented a mode of expertise distinct from what I had previously been familiar with as […]
One of the most interesting issues raised by the rise of data science in party politics is how to untangle corporate rhetoric from social reality. I have much time for the argument that we risk taking the claims of a company like Cambridge Analytica too seriously, accepting at face value what are simply marketing exercises. […]
I just came across the following passage in this paper by Anna Mary Cooper and Jenna Condie: Bakhtin’s (1984a) literary analysis of Dostoevsky’s novel ‘Poor Folk’ shows how the character Devushkin, who in recognising himself in another story, did not wish to be represented as ‘something totally quantified, measured, and defined to the last detail: […]
In a paper I’m writing for the first volume of the next Centre for Social Ontology project, I’m offering an analysis of what I call the evisceration of the human. I understand this as an intellectual project which seeks to get beyond self-understanding, hollowing out the phenomenological froth which characterises the interpretative human and getting to the underlying behavioural reality […]
In a post yesterday, I expressed my discomfort with how Nick Srnicek invokes the notion of data as a raw material in his Platform Capitalism. In a footnote on loc 1102-1121, he offers a Marxist justification for this use: I draw here upon Marx’s definition of raw material: ‘The land (and this, economically speaking, includes […]
The Cambridge Ethics of Big Data Project Data ethics Case Studies Public dialogue on the ethics of data science in government Ipsos MORI data science ethics dialogue Data Science Ethics MOOC Code of conduct at the Data Science Association
A really interesting section in Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation discusses the role credentials play in recruitment as proxies for sought qualities in potential employees. Once this process of credentialisation-as-filtering is embedded in organisations, surely data science (‘human analytics’) is the logical next step? From loc 2482: The way job markets actually work, argue some economists, […]
I find this argument from loc 270 of Rob Kitchin’s The Data Revolution extremely compelling. It reminds me of Roy Bhaskar’s argument about the fetishisation of facts from his Reclaiming Reality. This is what Kitchin says: Moreover, just as we think of bricks and mortar as simple building blocks rather than elements that are made […]
I wish I could take part in this – it looks fantastic: Call for Submissions and Registration We would like to invite submissions for the 2016 Social Study of IT Open Research Forum (SSIT ORF) Workshop at the London School of Economics on the 19th of May 2016. Aiming at PhD and junior researchers, this year’s workshop will […]
I’m a bit preoccupied by this paragraph from Philip Moriarty’s recent post about the invocation of quantum physics in the social sciences. I’d assumed this was true, inferring from things I’d seen others say and things I’d seen them not say, but I’ve never seen it acknowledged so bluntly before: Social science is important – it provides key […]
From How Google Works loc 2000-2017: Stats are sexy. Deal with it. The sexiest jobs in the Internet Century will involve statistics, and not just in a parallel geeky fantasy world. Hal Varian notes that it is always a good idea for individuals to build expertise in areas that complement things that are getting cheap, […]
An interesting article about the increasing demand for data scientists and the centrality which corporate imperatives should have on data science syllabi. How will data science change as it scales? It seems inevitable that undergraduate programmes will play a crucial role in meeting this demand: o what’s the problem? We have a global talent shortage, and the demand for […]
A really interesting report on the Guardian about the data scientists working within Ted Cruz’s campaign. As Zeynap Tufekci argues, the potential implications of computational politics are remarkably worrying. We urgently need ethical regulation of data science because otherwise this will prove to be the thin end of the wedge: Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is using […]
