The Trouble With Big Data: How Datafication Displaces Cultural Practices

by Jennifer Edmond, Anthony Mandal (Editor), Nicola Horsley, Jenny Kidd (Editor), Jörg Lehmann

Overview

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023

This open access book explores the challenges society faces with big data, through the lens of culture rather than social, political or economic trends, as demonstrated in the words we use, the values that underpin our interactions, and the biases and assumptions that drive us. Focusing on areas such as data and language, data and sensemaking, data and power, data and invisibility, and big data aggregation, it demonstrates that humanities research, focusing on cultural rather than social, political or economic frames of reference for viewing technology, resists mass datafication for a reason, and that those very reasons can be instructive for the critical observation of big data research and innovation.

The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Trinity College Dublin, DARIAH-EU and the European Commission.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350239661
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	07/27/2023
Series:	Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures
Pages:	194
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.41(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Edmond is Associate Professor of Trinity College Dublin and the co-director of the Trinity Center for Digital Humanities, Ireland. Jennifer also serves as President of the Board of Directors of the pan-European research infrastructure for the arts and humanities, DARIAH-EU. Additionally she represents this body on the Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP), which supports the European Commission in developing and promoting Open Science policies. Until 2016, Jennifer coordinated the €6.5m CENDARI FP7 (2012-1026) project and is a partner in the related infrastructure cluster, PARTHENOS. She was also coordinator of the 2017-2018 ICT programme-funded project KPLEX, which investigated bias in big data research from a humanities perspective, and is currently a partner on the CHIST-ERA project PROVIDE-DH, which is investigating progressive visualisation as a support for managing uncertainty in humanities research.

Anthony Mandal is Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University.

Nicola Horsley's qualitative research critiques the marginalisation of the social in various discourses and explores the dominance of scientific and technical knowledge as bases for policy and practice. Her co-authored book, Challenging the Politics of Early Intervention: who's 'saving' children and why, explores the scientific evidence base for early intervention policies; and the related article 'Brave new brains: sociology, family and the politics of knowledge' was the winner of The Sociological Review's Prize for Outstanding Scholarship 2016.

Jenny Kidd is a Reader at Cardiff University, UK, researching across the fields of digital media, culture and the creative industries. She has a particular interest in digital cultural heritage, transmedia, self-representation and immersive storytelling, and has published widely on these themes in, for example, Museums in the New Mediascape (Ashgate 2014), Representation (Routledge 2015), and Critical Encounters with Immersive Storytelling (Routledge 2018). She has published in related journals including Information, Technology and People and Continuum, and on related themes in International Journal of Heritage Studies, The Journal of Curatorial Studies and Museum and Society. Jenny is Co-Director of the Digital Media and Society research group in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture, a committee member of the UK Digital Learning Network and in 2016 was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts. She has been an advisor for Welsh Government on digital culture in the curriculum (2018) and has worked closely with the creative sector since 2002 including with BBC Wales, Amguedfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, Tate, yello brick, the Tower of London and Imperial War Museums. Jenny has led collaborative immersive media projects including With New Eyes I See (2013) and Traces-Olion (2016).

Jörg Lehmann is post-doctoral research fellow at the Romanistic Seminar at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany. He studied history and comparative literature at Freie Universität Berlin. He gained experience in digital humanities methodologies, working in the research infrastructure project CENDARI, in the interdisciplinary research project “The Researchers' Affects” (Berlin, Germany/Berne, Switzerland) and in the K-PLEX project. He has published two monographs on war literature as well as several articles on hate speech, depictions of violence in the media, on the quantitative analysis of paratexts and on sentiment and emotion analysis in texts.

Mike Priddy is a Senior Information Systems Engineer at Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) based in The Hague, the Netherlands. He works across the Social Sciences and Humanities on a range of European research infrastructures and development projects, specialising in architectural, process and quality modelling as well as project management. He has been involved in specifying and creating research infrastructures since 2005, including in that time, DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities preparatory phase) DASISH (Data Services Infrastructure for the Social Sciences and Humanities), DwB (Data without Boundaries), EHRI (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure phases 1 & 2), CESSDA-SaW (Strengthening and Widening), HaS-DARIAH (Humanities at Scale).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: Data and Language
Chapter 2: Data and Sensemaking
Chapter 3: Data and Invisibility
Chapter 4: Big Data and the Abyss of Aggregation
Chapter 5: Data and Power
Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

By examining the much-hyped phenomenon of 'big data' through a humanist lens, the authors provide a rich account of the possibilities and limits. They focus on the importance of culture and context for understanding how data are imagined, collected, analysed and understood.” —Sally Wyatt, Professor of Digital Cultures, Maastricht University, the Netherlands

From the Publisher