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The value of mass-digitised cultural heritage content in creative contexts Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-04-06 Melissa Terras, Stephen Coleman, Steven Drost, Chris Elsden, Ingi Helgason, Susan Lechelt, Nicola Osborne, Inge Panneels, Briana Pegado, Burkhard Schafer, Michael Smyth, Pip Thornton, Chris Speed
How can digitised assets of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums be reused to unlock new value? What are the implications of viewing large-scale cultural heritage data as an economic resource, to build new products and services upon? Drawing upon valuation studies, we reflect on both the theory and practicalities of using mass-digitised heritage content as an economic driver, stressing the need
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Between surveillance and recognition: Rethinking digital identity in aid Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-04-01 Keren Weitzberg, Margie Cheesman, Aaron Martin, Emrys Schoemaker
Identification technologies like biometrics have long been associated with securitisation, coercion and surveillance but have also, in recent years, become constitutive of a politics of empowerment, particularly in contexts of international aid. Aid organisations tend to see digital identification technologies as tools of recognition and inclusion rather than oppressive forms of monitoring, tracking
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Data diaries: A situated approach to the study of data Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-03-24 Nathaniel Tkacz, Mário Henrique da Mata Martins, João Porto de Albuquerque, Flávio Horita, Giovanni Dolif Neto
This article adapts the ethnographic medium of the diary to develop a method for studying data and related data practices. The article focuses on the creation of one data diary, developed iteratively over three years in the context of a national centre for monitoring disasters and natural hazards in Brazil (Cemaden). We describe four points of focus involved in the creation of a data diary – spaces
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Heritage-based tribalism in Big Data ecologies: Deploying origin myths for antagonistic othering Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-03-23 Chiara Bonacchi, Marta Krzyzanska
This article presents a conceptual and methodological framework to study heritage-based tribalism in Big Data ecologies by combining approaches from the humanities, social and computing sciences. We use such a framework to examine how ideas of human origin and ancestry are deployed on Twitter for purposes of antagonistic ‘othering’. Our goal is to equip researchers with theory and analytical tools
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Epistemologies of predictive policing: Mathematical social science, social physics and machine learning Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-03-17 Jens Hälterlein
Predictive policing has become a new panacea for crime prevention. However, we still know too little about the performance of computational methods in the context of predictive policing. The paper provides a detailed analysis of existing approaches to algorithmic crime forecasting. First, it is explained how predictive policing makes use of predictive models to generate crime forecasts. Afterwards
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Emotional artificial intelligence in children’s toys and devices: Ethics, governance and practical remedies Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-03-15 Andrew McStay, Gilad Rosner
This article examines the social acceptability and governance of emotional artificial intelligence (emotional AI) in children’s toys and other child-oriented devices. To explore this, it conducts interviews with stakeholders with a professional interest in emotional AI, toys, children and policy to consider implications of the usage of emotional AI in children’s toys and services. It also conducts
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“More like a support tool”: Ambivalences around digital health from medical developers’ perspective Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-03-12 Sarah Lenz
Against the background of the increasing importance of digitization in health care, the paper examines how medical practitioners who are involved in the development of digital health technologies legitimate and criticize the implementation and use of digital health technologies. Adopting an institutional logics perspective, the study is based on qualitative interviews with persons working at the interface
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“Reach the right people”: The politics of “interests” in Facebook’s classification system for ad targeting Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-03-10 Kelley Cotter, Mel Medeiros, Chankyung Pak, Kjerstin Thorson
Political campaigns increasingly rely on Facebook for reaching their constituents, particularly through ad targeting. Facebook’s business model is premised on a promise to connect advertisers with the “right” users: those likely to click, download, engage, purchase. The company pursues this promise (in part) by algorithmically inferring users’ interests from their data and providing advertisers with
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Encrypting human rights: The intertwining of resistant voices in the UK state surveillance debate Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-02-17 Amy Stevens, James Allen-Robertson
The Snowden revelations in 2013 redrew the lines of debate surrounding surveillance, exposing the extent of state surveillance across multiple nations and triggering legislative reform in many. In the UK, this was in the form of the Investigatory Powers Act (2016). As a contribution to understanding resistance to expanding state surveillance activities, this article reveals the intertwining of diverse
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Digital failure: Unbecoming the “good” data subject through entropic, fugitive, and queer data Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-02-11 Lauren E Bridges
This paper explores the political potential of digital failure as a refusal to work in service of today’s dataveillance society. Moving beyond criticisms of flawed digital systems, this paper traces the moments of digital failure that seek to break, rather than fix, existing systems. Instead, digital failure is characterized by pesky data that sneaks through the cracks of digital capitalism and dissipates
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Big data for climate action or climate action for big data? Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-02-11 Maria I Espinoza, Melissa Aronczyk
Under the banner of “data for good,” companies in the technology, finance, and retail sectors supply their proprietary datasets to development agencies, NGOs, and intergovernmental organizations to help solve an array of social problems. We focus on the activities and implications of the Data for Climate Action campaign, a set of public–private collaborations that wield user data to design innovative
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The cancer multiple: Producing and translating genomic big data into oncology care Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-02-09 Tiên-Dung Hà, Peter A. Chow-White
This article provides an ethnographic account of how Big Data biology is produced, interpreted, debated, and translated in a Big Data-driven cancer clinical trial, entitled “Personalized OncoGenomics,” in Vancouver, Canada. We delve into epistemological differences between clinical judgment, pathological assessment, and bioinformatic analysis of cancer. To unpack these epistemological differences,
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Corrigendum to Editorial: The personalisation of insurance: Data, behaviour and innovation Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-02-05
McFall L, Meyers G, Hoyweghen IV (2020). Editorial: The personalisation of insurance: Data, behaviour and innovation. Big Data & Society 7(2): 1–11. doi: 10.1177/2053951720973707
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‘It depends on your threat model’: the anticipatory dimensions of resistance to data-driven surveillance Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-01-29 Becky Kazansky
While many forms of data-driven surveillance are now a ‘fact’ of contemporary life amidst datafication, obtaining concrete knowledge of how different institutions exploit data presents an ongoing challenge, requiring the expertise and power to untangle increasingly complex and opaque technological and institutional arrangements. The how and why of potential surveillance are thus wrapped in a form of
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Archival strategies for contemporary collecting in a world of big data: Challenges and opportunities with curating the UK web archive Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-01-29 Nicola Jayne Bingham, Helena Byrne
In this contribution, we will discuss the opportunities and challenges arising from memory institutions' need to redefine their archival strategies for contemporary collecting in a world of big data. We will reflect on this topic by critically examining the case study of the UK Web Archive, which is made up of the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries: the British Library, National Library of Scotland, National
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The algorithm audit: Scoring the algorithms that score us Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-01-28 Shea Brown, Jovana Davidovic, Ali Hasan
In recent years, the ethical impact of AI has been increasingly scrutinized, with public scandals emerging over biased outcomes, lack of transparency, and the misuse of data. This has led to a growing mistrust of AI and increased calls for mandated ethical audits of algorithms. Current proposals for ethical assessment of algorithms are either too high level to be put into practice without further guidance
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Data sovereignty: A review Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2021-01-22 Patrik Hummel, Matthias Braun, Max Tretter, Peter Dabrock
New data-driven technologies yield benefits and potentials, but also confront different agents and stakeholders with challenges in retaining control over their data. Our goal in this study is to arrive at a clear picture of what is meant by data sovereignty in such problem settings. To this end, we review 341 publications and analyze the frequency of different notions such as data sovereignty, digital
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Caution: Rumors ahead—A case study on the debunking of false information on Twitter Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-12-29 Anna-Katharina Jung, Björn Ross, Stefan Stieglitz
As false information may spread rapidly on social media, a profound understanding of how it can be debunked is required. This study offers empirical insights into the development of rumors after they are debunked, the various user groups who are involved in the process, and their network structures. As crisis situations are highly sensitive to the spread of rumors, Twitter posts from during the 2017
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The digital life of the #migrantcaravan: Contextualizing Twitter as a spatial technology Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-12-14 Margath A Walker, Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah
The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by entangled multi-scalar geopolitical histories among the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Unsurprisingly, the migrants traveling north to the United States garnered widespread attention on social media. So much so that the reaction to the caravan accelerated plans to deploy troops
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COVID-19: What does it mean for digital social protection? Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-12-09 Silvia Masiero
COVID-19 has hit a world in which social protection schemes are increasingly augmented with digital measures. Digital identity schemes are especially being adopted to match citizens’ data with social protection entitlements, enabling authentication through demographic and, increasingly, biometric data at the point of access. In this commentary, I discuss three sets of implications that COVID-19 has
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For a situational analytics: An interpretative methodology for the study of situations in computational settings Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-12-02 Noortje Marres
This article introduces an interpretative approach to the analysis of situations in computational settings called situational analytics. I outline the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this approach, which is still under development, and show how it can be used to surface situations from large data sets derived from online platforms such as YouTube. Situational analytics extends to c
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Understanding the meaning of emoji in mobile social payments: Exploring the use of mobile payments as hedonic versus utilitarian through skin tone modified emoji usage Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Dhiraj Murthy, Sabitha Sudarshan, Jung-Ah Lee, Charulata Ghosh, Pratik Shah, Wei-Jie Xiao, Ishank Arora, Clive Unger, Amelia Acker
Despite research establishing emojis as sites of critical racial discourse, there is a paucity of literature examining their importance in the increasingly popular context of mobile payments. This is particularly important as new forms of social payment platforms such as Venmo bridge the seamlessness of mobile payments with the vibrant communicative practices of social networks. As such, they provide
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A qualitative analysis of sarcasm, irony and related #hashtags on Twitter Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Martin Sykora, Suzanne Elayan, Thomas W Jackson
As the use of automated social media analysis tools surges, concerns over accuracy of analytics have increased. Some tentative evidence suggests that sarcasm alone could account for as much as a 50% drop in accuracy when automatically detecting sentiment. This paper assesses and outlines the prevalence of sarcastic and ironic language within social media posts. Several past studies proposed models
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Innovation under pressure: Implications for data privacy during the Covid-19 pandemic Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Gemma Newlands, Christoph Lutz, Aurelia Tamò-Larrieux, Eduard Fosch Villaronga, Rehana Harasgama, Gil Scheitlin
The global Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in social and economic disruption unprecedented in the modern era. Many countries have introduced severe measures to contain the virus, including travel restrictions, public event bans, non-essential business closures and remote work policies. While digital technologies help governments and organizations to enforce protection measures, such as contact tracing
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Editorial: The personalisation of insurance: Data, behaviour and innovation Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-11-26 Liz McFall, Gert Meyers, Ine Van Hoyweghen
The adoption of Big Data analytics (BDA) in insurance has proved controversial but there has been little analysis specifying how insurance practices are changing. Is insurance passively subject to the forces of disruptive innovation, moving away from the pooling of risk towards its personalisation or individualisation, and what might that mean in practice? This special theme situates disruptive innovations
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Data-bodies and data activism: Presencing women in digital heritage research Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-11-23 Terrie Lynn Thompson
As heritage-as-the-already-occurred folds into heritage-in-the-making practices, temporal and spatial fluidity is made more complex by digital mediation and particularly by Big Data. Such liveliness evokes ontological, epistemological and methodological challenges. Drawing on more-than-human theorizing, this article reframes the notion of data-bodies to advance data activist-oriented research in heritage
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Disrupting the library: Digital scholarship and Big Data at the National Library of Scotland Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-11-23 Sarah Ames, Stuart Lewis
With a mass digitisation programme underway and the addition of non-print legal deposit and web archive collections, the National Library of Scotland is now both producing and collecting data at an unprecedented rate, with over 5PB of storage in the Library’s data centres. As well as the opportunities to support large scale analysis of the collections, this also presents new challenges around data
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The sale of heritage on eBay: Market trends and cultural value Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-11-11 Mark Altaweel, Tasoula Georgiou Hadjitofi
The marketisation of heritage has been a major topic of interest among heritage specialists studying how the online marketplace shapes sales. Missing from that debate is a large-scale analysis seeking to understand market trends on popular selling platforms such as eBay. Sites such as eBay can inform what heritage items are of interest to the wider public, and thus what is potentially of greater cultural
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The birth of sensory power: How a pandemic made it visible? Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-11-05 Engin Isin, Evelyn Ruppert
Much has been written about data politics in the last decade, which has generated myriad concepts such as ‘surveillance capitalism’, ‘gig economy’, ‘quantified self’, ‘algorithmic governmentality’, ‘data colonialism’, ‘data subjects’ and ‘digital citizens’. Yet, it has been difficult to plot these concepts into an historical series to discern specific continuities and discontinuities since the origins
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A post-truth pandemic? Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-10-21 Taylor Shelton
As the coronavirus pandemic continues apace in the United States, the dizzying amount of data being generated, analyzed and consumed about the virus has led to calls to proclaim this the first ‘data-driven pandemic’. But at the same time, it seems that this plethora of data has not meant a better grasp on the reality of the pandemic and its effects. Even as we have the potential to digitally track
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Revisiting the Black Box Society by rethinking the political economy of big data Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-10-20 Benedetta Brevini, Frank Pasquale
The Black Box Society was one of first scholarly accounts to propose a social theory of the use of data in constructing personal reputations, new media audiences, and financial power, by illuminating recurrent patterns of power and exploitation in the digital economy. While many corporations have a direct window into our lives through constant, ubiquitous data collection, our knowledge of their inner
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Techno-solutionism and the standard human in the making of the COVID-19 pandemic Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-10-20 Stefania Milan
Quantification is particularly seductive in times of global uncertainty. Not surprisingly, numbers, indicators, categorizations, and comparisons are central to governmental and popular response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay draws insights from critical data studies, sociology of quantification and decolonial thinking, with occasional excursion into the biomedical domain, to investigate the role
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The “black box” at work Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-10-19 Ifeoma Ajunwa
An oversized reliance on big data-driven algorithmic decision-making systems, coupled with a lack of critical inquiry regarding such systems, combine to create the paradoxical “black box” at work. The “black box” simultaneously demands a higher level of transparency from the worker in regard to data collection, while shrouding the decision-making in secrecy, making employer decisions even more opaque
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Good organizational reasons for better medical records: The data work of clinical documentation integrity specialists Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-10-19 Kathleen H Pine, Claus Bossen
Healthcare organizations and workers are under pressure to produce increasingly complete and accurate data for multiple data-intensive endeavors. However, little research has examined the emerging occupations arising to carry out the data work necessary to produce “improved” data sets, or the specific work activities of these emerging data occupations. We describe the work of Clinical Documentation
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Data/infrastructure in the smart city: Understanding the infrastructural power of Citymapper app through technicity of data Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-10-19 Güneş Tavmen
Over the last few years, smart cities have been a focus of scholarly attention. Most of these critical studies concentrated on the multinational corporations’ discourses and their implications on urban policies. Besides these factors, however, the data-driven city develops within a complex web of entanglements whereby data-driven technologies modulate the urban infrastructure in a multitude of ways
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The value of sharing: Branding and behaviour in a life and health insurance company Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-09-10 Hugo Jeanningros, Liz McFall
As Big Data, the Internet of Things and insurance collide, so too, do the best and the worst of our futures. Insurance is summoned as an example of the interference in our private lives that is already underway everywhere. In this paper, we pause to reflect on this argument. Can changes in the way insurance measures the value of behaviour really serve as an example of the individual and social harms
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Seven intersectional feminist principles for equitable and actionable COVID-19 data. Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2020-07-30 Catherine D'Ignazio,Lauren F Klein
This essay offers seven intersectional feminist principles for equitable and actionable COVID-19 data, drawing from the authors' prior work on data feminism. Our book, Data Feminism (D'Ignazio and Klein, 2020), offers seven principles which suggest possible points of entry for challenging and changing power imbalances in data science. In this essay, we offer seven sets of examples, one inspired by
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Challenges in administrative data linkage for research. Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2018-11-02 Katie Harron,Chris Dibben,James Boyd,Anders Hjern,Mahmoud Azimaee,Mauricio L Barreto,Harvey Goldstein
Linkage of population-based administrative data is a valuable tool for combining detailed individual-level information from different sources for research. While not a substitute for classical studies based on primary data collection, analyses of linked administrative data can answer questions that require large sample sizes or detailed data on hard-to-reach populations, and generate evidence with
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A science that knows no country: Pandemic preparedness, global risk, sovereign science. Big Data & Society (IF 4.577) Pub Date : 2017-12-08 J Benjamin Hurlbut
This paper examines political norms and relationships associated with governance of pandemic risk. Through a pair of linked controversies over scientific access to H5N1 flu virus and genomic data, it examining the duties, obligations, and allocations of authority articulated around the imperative for globally free-flowing information and around the corollary imperative for a science that is set free
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