For the last few weeks I’ve been preoccupied by the question of what social distancing and the threat of Covid-19 means for our sense of self. It’s remarkable how quickly we have adapted to sustaining a distance from others because of the reciprocal risk inherent in our interaction. There are many cases […]
This is a fascinating observation by Andrew Chadwick on pg 114-115 of The Hybrid Media System concerning Wikileak’s strategic agency with regards to the circulation of data, recognising that ‘information might want to be free’ but the sheer fact of its freedom is insufficient to bring about an effect in […]
My notes on Thompson, G., & Sellar, S. (2018). Datafication, testing events and the outside of thought. Learning, Media and Technology, 43(2), 139-151. In this paper Thompson and Sellar cast a Deleuzian lens upon the data hungry character of contemporary educational institutions. As they put it on 139, “Education institutions, […]
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 […]
My notes on Lupton, D. (2018). How do data come to matter? Living and becoming with personal data. Big Data & Society, 5(2), 2053951718786314. In this paper, Deborah Lupton extends her work on the quantified self into a broader theorisation of how people come to live with data. It foregrounds the voluntary […]
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 […]
From Daniel Rosenberg’s essay in Raw Data Is An Oxymoron, loc 916. What further developments are we beginning to see in the meaning of ‘data’ in a digitalised context? The author’s point is that data is not associated with veracity, such that inaccurate data is still data, but I wonder […]
I love the analogy offered by Elinor Carmi at the start of this excellent Open Democracy piece: Yesterday I walked to the supermarket, like I do every Tuesday morning. All of a sudden I started noticing a few people starting to follow me. I try to convince myself that it is […]
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 […]
An astonishing lucid introduction from loc 257 of Rob Kitchin’s The Data Revolution: Data are commonly understood to be the raw material produced by abstracting the world into categories, measures and other representational forms –numbers, characters, symbols, images, sounds, electromagnetic waves, bits –that constitute the building blocks from which information and […]
This looks like a great opportunity: **Call for participation** The second week of the Summer School is dedicated to the study of ‘data activism’. *What is data activism?* With the diffusion of big data, citizens become increasingly aware of the critical role of information in modern societies. Today’s world is […]
An interesting idea from Craig Lambert’s Shadow Work loc 3116 which deserves to be explored in greater depth: As noted earlier, philosopher John Locke argued that labor creates property; taking his view, if your shadow work made some information, it is your possession. In fact, who owns your data—your informational […]
I was very excited to see this, though on a quick scan through I could see various bits I wasn’t overly impressed with. Still required reading though: Guest Editors: Helen Kennedy, University of Sheffield Thomas Poelle, University of Amsterdam José van Dijck, University of Amsterdam This special theme explores the […]
This looks superb: Open Track: The Lives and Deaths of Data Convenors: Sabina Leonelli and Brian Rappert, Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology & Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences (Egenis), University of Exeter, UK (see also the Exeter Data Studies group: http://www.datastudies.eu) Abstract: This track investigates […]
I’m reading Untangling the Web, by Aleks Krotoski, as an accessible precursor to beginning to engage with the social psychological literature on online behaviour. It’s proving to be an enjoyable read so far, though maybe not quite as much of a pop social psychology book as I had hoped it would be. […]
As the article suggests, this initiative may be the result of the threat posed by Apple music. What interests me is how totally open-ended this is: how do we perceive and evaluate risks when policies take such a form? Sections 3.3 and 3.4 of Spotify’s privacy policy say that the app will […]
From Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich pg 46: Carlos Slim, who studied engineering in college and taught algebra and linear programming as an undergraduate, attributes his fortune to his facility with numbers. So does Steve Schwarzman, who told me he owed his success to his “ability to […]
Over the last six months I conducted a series of interviews for the LSE Impact Blog about the philosophical challenges which data science poses for the social sciences. Here’s a list of the interviews: Rob Kitchin Evelyn Ruppert Deborah Lupton Susan Halford Noortje Marres Sabina Leonelli Emma Uprichard Here are […]
This insightful article paints a worrying picture of the growth of data-driven policing. The technical challenge of “building nuance” into data systems “is far harder than it seems” and has important practical implications for how interventions operate on the basis of digital data. What I hadn’t previously realised was how […]
The Politics of Data (Science) This special issue of Discover Society will explore the political implications of ‘big data’ and the systems of expertise emerging around it, including though not limited to Data Science. In doing so it will aim to bridge the gap between the methodological discourse surrounding data […]
