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Table of bike journeys on 3 Oct 2014. My journey from Aberfeldy Street to Bow is highlighted.

Graph of bike hires per day in 2014. Oct 3, the day of my journey is highlighted in green.

Graph of number of rides against duration on 3 Oct. My journey was 45, highlighted in green.

My heart rate variability (HRV) over the course of the bike ride.

1851 Census record of Plaistow households, including household of Elizabeth Frances Ireland.

Highlight of Elizabeth Frances Ireland in 1851 Census record of Plaistow households.

Estimated location of Prospect Fram, where Elizabeth Frances Ireland’s home is recorded in the 1851 Census — intersecting with my cycle route.

One Elizabeth Frances Ireland, beneficiary claimant to the Woodstock Plantation, St Ann, Jamaica, awarded compensation for enslaved people (see Legacies of British Slave-ownership archive).

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I’m really happy to have a short piece by me and Clara Crivellaro included in the publication “Self-Service”, a collection of contributions responding to . Kirsty Hendry and Ilona Sagar produced the publication which was exhibited alongside their film screening at the Glasgow International Festival.

In “Experiments in collective counting”, Clara and I write about the (ac)counting practices on an estate in South East London and our efforts to intervene in a resolutely singular logic of community and value.

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Are we thinking well with #DataPublics? Asks @alxndrt at the start of the final day pic.twitter.com/3URa3FMa96

— Data Publics (@datapublics) April 2, 2017

I presented at the Data Publics conference last weekend, at Lancaster University. Got lots of helpful feedback to some early thoughts on publics (thinking with some of my old favourites, Despret, Haraway, Marres, Stengers, etc.).
Provoked by Vinciane Despret’s “W for Work”, in “What would animals say if we asked the right questions?”, my starting point was the question:

As Despret asks of animals and their work, my provocation was to ask not just whether “data publics” offer us something (whether they are useful), but whether we work well with them, whether they ‘make more interesting’ and give us the ‘chance’ to think differently.

What would animals say if we asked the right Qs? Can Despret’s provocation work for #DataPublics ? pic.twitter.com/LOukw901Fi

— Liz McFall (@allartmarkets) April 2, 2017

My three propositions were:

Proposition #1: “We need room”
Proposition #2: “Versions not visions”
Proposition #3: “Keep Compost”

A big thank you to Clara Crivellaro, Joe Deville, Dan Richards and Seb Weise for a fabulous event. See the Data Publics site for more or search the twitter hashtag #datapublics.

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Lindley, S.E., Thieme, A., Taylor, A.S. et al. (2017). Surfacing Small Worlds through Data-In-Place. Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

 
Abstract

We present findings from a five-week deployment of voting technologies in a city neighbourhood. Drawing on Marres’ (2012) work on material participation and Massey’s (2005) conceptualisation of space as dynamic, we designed the deployment such that the technologies (which were situated in residents’ homes, on the street, and available online) would work in concert, cutting across the neighbourhood to make visible, juxtapose and draw together the different ‘small worlds’ within it. We demonstrate how the material infrastructure of the voting devices set in motion particular processes and interpretations of participation, putting data in place in a way that had ramifications for the recognition of heterogeneity. We conclude that redistributing participation means not only opening up access, so that everyone can participate, or even providing a multitude of voting channels, so that people can participate in different ways. Rather, it means making visible multiplicity, challenging notions of similarity, and showing how difference may be productive.

See more on the CSCW site here. See an early draft here.

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Abstract
This chapter tells a story of promise, one about London’s bike rental data and how it might be used to re-imagine new figurings of human-machine relations. Experimenting with the relational capacities of (bio)sensing and the proliferation of data-everywhere, the possibilities of other worlds are imagined. Mixtures of data at all scales are thrown together, playing with and testing out a thickening and enlivening of relations, new edges, and making room for difference—for different assemblies of bodies, space and time. Relations are brought into being that might just resist the “agencies of homogenization” () and that mess about in the unevenness and plurality that makes London vibrant.

I’ve uploaded a pre-published draft here.

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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.

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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.

Something that strikes me is that the paper presents a set of examples (dare I say data) about how people make sense of worlds from, if you will, outside of them. I wonder to what extent this is different to how we actually use our mobile devices (how we enact these worlds)? So to what extent are the reflections on talk about privacy, creepiness, leekages, helplessness, etc. insights into how we rationalise what we do as opposed to insights into what we do? I’m not saying this (I hope) to make that well-worn argument about people not doing what they say we do. Nor do I say it to lessen the value of the interviews and survey results presented. I think it’s important though to draw attention to the kind of materials being examined and what can be sensibly said about them.
Here’s one take on the paper, just to try to illustrate this point a bit. The theorising from Altman and Nissenbaum suggest the presumption of some discrete (and somewhat stable) ideas of interior, exterior, private, public, space, etc. etc. Yes, there may be a fluidity to how things move between these categories (and they may change over time), but nevertheless, the implication is there are for all intents and purposes a set of stable, applicable categories. My suggestion isn’t that this is a strong claim, but it does feel like it’s more or less the working assumption in the paper.
In being careful about the kinds of empirical materials being used, I think there’s a different way to think about this. I wonder whether performativity might be a useful concept to work with? Might we say that these things the researchers and the informants collectively spoke about, e.g. selves, data, devices, third parties, privacy etc. are being drawn together to enact just these categories? What we might be seeing here is not an indication of how data falls into (or threads across) these categories, but how we enact them when we talk about our mobile devices and how we make sense of data in those self same terms. (This is one of the ideas I take from Nelson Goodman’s “Ways of Worldmaking” (1978). I love his remark: “The uniformity of nature we marvel at or the unreliability we protest belongs to a world of our own making.” p.10).
Take this statement, for example:

“This is completely ridiculous, I would not invite people into my closet, this is way out of line. No I don’t find it appropriate to give up personal information in exchange for this game and that they don’t need more approval than they apparently do.”

What are the circumstances (discursive and material) that would allow a conversation to unfold in this way and for things like smart phones to be talked about like closets? Moreover, how is it that data on these devices should be understood as personal and in some fashion belonging to the person speaking? I don’t see any of these things to be given. Rather, I want to ask in what way the assemblage of interview, people, devices, data, etc. allow for this kind of talk and enactment of categories like personal, information, right vs. wrong, etc. (I take this argument directly from Helen Verran’s wonderful book, “Science and an African Logic”.
This might seem like an unnecessary theorising, but I think it comes back to the question of the kind of empirical materials presented in the paper and what can be said about them. From the results, I don’t know whether one can really say people have stable ideas of values tied to what’s personal and what’s creepy when it comes to infringements on the personal. I do think what can be usefully asked is ‘How is it that this assemblage of actors/agents allows us to talk about things like private, public, creepiness, leekages, helplessness, etc.?’
Where this becomes concrete, I think, is when we then ask how might things be different? So in what other ways might we talk about these things and what are the possibilities of using matter (or design) to intervene? For instance, how might the data being collected be refigured (discursively and materially) as not personal? What would it take in the design of these systems (and their interfaces) for people to talk about the data being collected as not about them in any intimate way, but about some ‘impersonal’ aggregation of data from a network of nodes? For me this offers the beginnings for thinking differently about data and what it might enable.

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