The data warriors and the electoral wars they wage
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 […]
Devushkin as the Eviscerated Human
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 […]
The Evisceration of the Human
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 […]
The ontology of data, the ideology of data
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 […]
Interesting material on data science ethics
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
Credentials, recruitment and big data
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 […]
Data Fetishism
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 […]
The Future of Data Science
Data science meets social sciences: Understanding origins, means and consequences of social computing
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 […]
Contempt for the social sciences and the new positivism
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 […]
Eric Schmidt on the century of the data scientists
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 […]
the demand for data science
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 […]
the new frontier of computational politics
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 […]
human centred data science
I’m really interested in this call for human-centred data science and the rationale offered for it: CALL FOR PAPERS/PARTICIPATION: One-day Workshop on *Developing a Research Agenda for Human-Centered Data Science* in conjunction with CSCW 2016 http://cscw.acm.org/2016/ Sunday, February 28th, 2016 San Francisco, CA, USA Workshop Website: https://cscw2016hcds.wordpress.com/ ———————————- Important dates: – […]
images of the human in digital social science
Notes for a talk I’m doing at this event tomorrow An obvious place to start is with what I take ‘images of the human’ to be and what I take ‘digital social science’ to be. Images of the human are fairly straight forward. I mean everything from the most explicit claims about […]
Developing a Research Agenda for Human-Centered Data Science
I really wish I could go to this: CALL FOR PAPERS/PARTICIPATION: One-day Workshop on *Developing a Research Agenda for Human-Centered Data Science* in conjunction with CSCW 2016 http://cscw.acm.org/2016/ Sunday, February 28th, 2016 San Francisco, CA, USA Workshop Website: https://cscw2016hcds.wordpress.com/ ———————————- Important dates: – 11th December 2015: Submission of Position Papers […]
big data, post-democracy and boardroom liberalism
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 […]
interview with the founder and ceo of palantir
Interview with Alex Karp, Founder and CEO of Palantir:
towards a meta-critique of data science
In their new book Retrieving Realism, Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor describe what they term a meta-critique. From loc 592: The idea of a metacritique here is, as the name suggests, to inquire into the basis of first- order critical theory. This latter claims to reflect on the conditions of […]
