The Trouble With Big Data: How Datafication Displaces Cultural Practices

Description

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, focussing 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.

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 and represents this body on the Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP), which supports the European Commission in developing and promoting Open Science policies. 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 explores the scientific evidence base for early intervention policies. Joerg Lehmann is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Romanistic Seminar at Eberhard Karls University Tubingen, Germany. 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.

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 *