Paper given at the Conference of the Digital Methods Winter School, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, 14 January 2016, with Jonathan Gray and Carolin Gerlitz.
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Towards A Literacy for Data Infrastructures
1. Jonathan Gray, Carolin Gerlitz and Liliana Bounegru
Digital Methods Winter School 2016
University of Amsterdam
TOWARDS A LITERACY FOR DATA
INFRASTRUCTURES
2. 1. Rethinking Data Literacy
2. De- and Re-Assembling Data
Infrastructures
3. Data-Infrastructures and their Publics
4. Data-infrastructural Turn?
FOUR
PARTS
3. 1. Rethinking Data Literacy
2. De- and Re-Assembling Data
Infrastructures
3. Data-Infrastructures and their Publics
4. Data-infrastructural Turn?
1.
4. EVERYBODY LOVES
DATA LITERACY
● Data literacy as “the most important new
skill of the 21st century”.
● It will “help solve world's biggest
challenges”.
● The “road to the future” is paved with it.
● UN report calls for “global data literacy”.
● G8: data literacy will help to “unlock the
value of open data”.
5. DATA LITERACIES FOCUSING ON
DATASETS AS A RESOURCE
● Current conceptions of data literacy
emphasize “competencies of an
extractive and transformative industry”
(Letouzé et al., 2015)?
● Focus on “information as a resource”
(Braman, 2009: 12-15).
● Do they emphasise “auditorial” or
“entrepreneurial” modes of action
(Ruppert, 2012, Birchall, 2015)?
6. FROM DATASETS
TO DATA INFRASTRUCTURES?
● Socio-technical systems implicated in the
creation, processing and distribution of
data.
● Relations of heterogeneous
socio-technical components, rather than
“things” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996)
● Between methodological inscription and
multivalence?
7. 1. Rethinking Data Literacy
2. De- and Re-Assembling Data
Infrastructures
3. Data-Infrastructures and their Publics
4. Data-infrastructural Turn?
2.
8. DE- ASSEMBLING DATA
INFRASTRUCTUREs
● Much data results from grammars of action
(Agre 1994).
● Such pre-structured actions are subject to
“Interpretative flexibility” (van Dijck 2013)
and cross-platform syndication.
● Grammars lead to dynamic & “lively metrics”
(Gerlitz & Rieder 2015).
● Data come with methodological inscriptions.
● Assembly of data & tools leads to “cascades
of inscriptions” (Ruppert et al. 2013).
9. ALIGNMENT & MAL-ALIGNMENT
● How to re-assemble data
infrastructures in imaginative ways?
● Data & methods do not come with
fixed in-build purposes but need to
be aligned with the research
objective.
● Lure objects to pose their own
problems (Lury & Wakeford 2012).
● “Interface methods” embrace
productive capacities of alignment
and mal-alignment (Gerlitz & Marres
2015).
10. 1. Rethinking Data Literacy
2. De- and Re-Assembling Data
Infrastructures
3. Data-Infrastructures and their Publics
4. Data-infrastructural Turn?
3.
11. DATA HAVE PUBLICS
● Data have publics with specific
objectives, needs & skills (Ruppert
2015).
● Emerge in relation to data
infrastructures.
● Operate within the tension between
inscription and multi-valence of data
infrastructures.
● Require specific methodological
alignment.
● Mal-alignment as opportunity for
intervention.
● Journalism, activism and social research
14. 3. Data journalism as redefining the fields of possibility of calculative
infrastructures
15. 1. Rethinking Data Literacy
2. De- and Re-Assembling Data
Infrastructures
3. Data-Infrastructures and their Publics
4. Data-infrastructural Turn?
4.
16. CONCEPTUAL VOCABULARY
● An expansion of the concept of
data literacy to go beyond
competencies in reading and
working with datasets.
● Accounting for wider data
infrastructures which create the
socio-technical conditions for the
creation, extraction and analysis of
data.
● Vocabulary and tactics to respond
to inscriptions and biases of data
infrastructures.
17. REMAKING DATA
INFRASTRUCTURES
● Re-envisioning and re-configuring
data infrastructures through
methodological inventiveness and
“infrastructural imagination”
(Bowker 2014).
● Tactics for re-aligning them with
the interests and concerns of
different publics.
18. “DATA WORLDS”
● Data infrastructures articulate and
project social worlds – or “data
worlds” – which afford their own
ways of knowing and possibilities
for action.
● Data literacies should aim to
cultivate the capacities for
re-thinking, re-configuring,
re-aligning, and re-imagining these
data worlds, not just inhabiting
them or harvesting their fruits.
19. CONSEQUENCES OF A DATA
INFRASTRUCTURAL TURN?
● New sites of political contestation
and societal controversy.
Broadening publics who seek to
shape data infrastructures?
● Alternatives to “platformisation”?
Other ways of organising relations
of people, methods, and machines?