Reading María Puig de la Bellacasa’s article on feminist notions of care. (more…)
Presenting “Data in place”
We’re presenting a paper at CHI this year on Tenison Road.
Alex S. Taylor, Siân Lindley, Tim Regan, David Sweeney, Vasilis Vlachokyriakos, Lillie Grainger, Jessa Lingel (2015), Data-in-Place: Thinking through the Relations Between Data and Community, CHI 2015.
Here’s the abstract:
We present findings from a year-long engagement with a street and its community. The work explores how the production and use of data is bound up with place, both in terms of physical and social geography. We detail three strands of the project. First, we consider how residents have sought to curate existing data about the street in the form of an archive with physical and digital components. Second, we report endeavours to capture data about the street’s environment, especially of vehicle traffic. Third, we draw on the possibilities afforded by technologies for polling opinion. We reflect on how these engagements have: materialised distinctive relations between the community and their data; surfaced flows and contours of data, and spatial, temporal and social boundaries; and enacted a multiplicity of ‘small worlds’. We consider how such a conceptualisation of data-in-place is relevant to the design of technology.
Reading “ANT, multiplicity and policy”
Some notes on:
Law, J., & Singleton, V. (2014). ANT, multiplicity and policy. Critical Policy Studies, 1–18.
Published Modelling Biology – working through (in-)stabilities and frictions
Just had our paper on Computational Biology published in the online journal Computational Culture.
Alex S. Taylor, Jasmin Fisher, Byron Cook, Samin Ishtiaq and Nir Piterman (2014) Modelling Biology – working through (in-)stabilities and frictions. Computational Culture, 1 (4).
Abstract: Computational biology is a nascent field reliant on software coding and modelling to produce insights into biological phenomena. Extreme claims cast it as a field set to replace conventional forms of experimental biology, seeing software modelling as a (more convenient) proxy for bench-work in the wet-lab. In this article, we deepen and complicate the relations between computation and scientific ways of knowing by discussing a computational biology tool, BMA, that models gene regulatory networks. We detail the instabilities and frictions that surface when computation is incorporated into scientific practice, framing the tensions as part of knowing-in-progress—the practical back and forth in working things out. The work exemplifies how software studies—and careful attention to the materialities of computation—can shed light on the emerging sciences that rely on coding and computation. Further, it puts to work a standpoint that sees computation as tightly entangled with forms of scientific knowing and doing, rather than a wholesale replacement of them.
Reading “Not just neoliberalism…”
Berman, E. P. (2014). Not Just Neoliberalism: Economization in US Science and Technology Policy. Science, Technology & Human Values, 39(3), 397–431.
The title of this paper says it all really. It’s good though to have a cogent argument about the relations between ideology, policy and the changes in how science is being done. I for one very easily slip into an accusatory refrain when talking about and usually criticising what I’ve seen to be the neoliberal (non)interventionist and policy direction in education and science. Elizabeth Berman presents a much more measured position and convinces me that it’s better understood as an economization, as she calls it, where the broader shift is towards prioritising scientific research and innovation vis-a-vis the economy and specifically seeing them as economic inputs. This recognises the tensions and complications and the competing interests that have run through the changing status of the sciences (in the US, but similarly, I think, in the UK).
Something I think Berman leaves open is the relationship between science and innovation. She makes it clear that science and innovation become inexorably linked when science is seen in economic terms. I want, though, to better understand the nexus. Indeed, but conflating science and technology (“S&T” as Berman refers to it), I think there are further complications here that need unraveling, ones pointing to the entanglements of science and technology, and where progress or innovation sits between (or around) them. Can we talk of technology without innovation? If S&T are two-parts of a unit, how can we disentangle innovation?
Published Data and life on the street
We’ve published a short commentary on the Tenison Road project in the new Big Data & Society journal. Download it here (open access).
Taylor, A. S., Lindley, S., Regan, T., & Sweeney, D. (2014). Data and life on the street. Big Data & Society, 1(2).
Abstract: What does the abundance of data and proliferation of data-making methods mean for the ordinary person, the person on the street? And, what could they come to mean? In this paper, we present an overview of a year-long project to examine just such questions and complicate, in some ways, what it is to ask them. The project is a collective exercise in which we – a mixture of social scientists, designers and makers – and those living and working on one street in Cambridge (UK), Tenison Road, are working to think through how data might be materialised and come to matter. The project aims to better understand the specificities and contingencies that arise when data is produced and used in place. Mid-way through the project, we use this commentary to give some background to the work and detail one or two of the troubles we have encountered in putting locally relevant data to work. We also touch on a methodological standpoint we are working our way into and through, one that we hope complicates the separations between subject and object in data-making and opens up possibilities for a generative refiguring of the manifold relations.
on “Leakiness and creepiness in app space”
I recently had an email exchange with Irina Shklovski in which she kindly sent me the paper she presented at the CHI conference this year. It’s a great paper, with some carefully thought through insights into the data we produce and (often inadvertently) share when using smart phones.
Irina Shklovski, Scott D. Mainwaring, Halla Hrund Skúladóttir, and Höskuldur Borgthorsson. 2014. Leakiness and creepiness in app space: perceptions of privacy and mobile app use. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2347–2356.
The paper got me thinking about some broader (and long-standing) issues I’ve been working through myself related to the researcher’s agential (and often inadvertent) role in empirical research. What follows are some slightly amended comments I’ve shared with Irina. (more…)
Reading Bowker on The Theory / Data thing
Bowker, G.C. (2014). The Theory/Data Thing. International Journal of Communication 8 (2043), 1795–1799. (more…)
Reading The “sentient” city and what it may portend
A rambling piece in Big Data & Society by Nigel Thrift: The ‘sentient’ city and what it may portend.
Wasn’t expecting the digression into spirits and performance art, but I do like Thrift’s continual efforts to write about expansive human/agent capacities and extending the .
…the claim is being made that, as computational objects have developed, cities are able to take on new forms of vitality (Stern, 2010), forms of vitality which can develop over time. Perhaps one way in which we might consider this ques- tion is precisely through looking at how vitality devel- ops when computational things are explicitly included in the contours of experience. Then it becomes clear that it has only gradually arisen, line by line, algorithm by algorithm, program by program.
Wikipedia or see Goonewardena, K. (2005). The urban sensorium: space, ideology and the aestheticization of politics. Antipode, 37(1), 46–71.
Thirft, N. (2014). The “sentient” city and what it may portend. Big Data & Society, 1(1).
Reading Data matter(s)
Wilson, M. W. (2011). Data matter(s): legitimacy, coding, and qualifications-of-life. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(5), 857–872.
Really helpful paper from Matthew Wilson on the interminglings of data and geography. Although more concentrated on a particular aspect of community life (namely reporting problems or damage to local facilities etc.), the paper has some strong relevances for the Tenison Road project. Especially useful are Wilson’s thoughts on mattering in relation to feminist technoscience and of course
Wilson cites:
Haraway D J, 1991 Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, New York)
Haraway D J, 1991 Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, New York)
Haraway D J, 1997 [email protected]_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (Routledge, New York)
Haraway D J, 1999, “Knowledges and the question of alliances”, in Knowledges and the Question of Alliances: A Conversation with Nancy Hartsock, Donna Haraway, and David Harvey (Kane Hall, University of Washington, Seattle, WA)
#datapolicy
After a tremendous about of work with Lara Houston, I’m delighted to have finally gone live with our data policy site: data-policy.info. It attempts to detail, in various formats and cuts, the discussions at the day of dialogues on data, policy and civic life, held at Microsoft Research Cambridge. More than this though, we want the site to promote further discussion and expand the ways we might think of the relations between data, social/civic life, and policy. For me, the inspiration here has been the work a few of us have been doing with Tenison Road in cambridge and a community’s efforts to make sense of and use its data. I’d like to think something small and local could make a difference in these big discussions
Dialogues on data, policy and civic life
Next Tuesday a few of us at Microsoft Research are hosting a day-long dialogue to discuss the interminglings of data and social/civic life. We’re bringing together a mix of social theorists, commentators and policy advisers with the hope of drawing out possibilities for doing policy making (as well as technology design) differently. Our preamble for the event follows (a printable PDF can be downloaded here): (more…)