With generous contributions from the Social Media Collective extended family, I have put together a list that brings together academic and popular writing on metaphors of data, along with pieces that approach questions of data and commercial/political power. The goal in assembling this list was to catalog resources that are helpful in unpacking and critiquing different metaphors, ranging from the …
Tag: big data
Big Data, Context Cultures
The latest issue of Media, Culture, and Society features an open-access discussion section responding to SMC all-stars danah boyd and Kate Crawford's "Critical Questions for Big Data." Though the article is only a few years old, it's been very influential and a lot has happened since it came out, so editors Aswin Punathambekar and Anastasia Kavada commissioned …
[C-SPAN] The Communicators feat. Mary Gray
Our own Mary Gray was featured on C-SPAN's "The Communicators," discussing the ethical implications of personal data collection online and its use in commercial and academic contexts. You can watch this special here. via The Communicators | Communicators with Mary Gray [12/3]
A “pay it back tax” on data brokers: a modest (and also politically untenable and impossibly naïve) policy proposal
I've just returned from the "Social, Cultural, and Ethical Dimensions of Big Data" event, held by the Data & Society Initiative (led by danah boyd), and spurred by the efforts of the White House Office of Technology and Policy to develop a comprehensive report on issues of privacy, discrimination, and rights around big data. And …
Big Data Thoughts
401 Access Denied , 403 Forbidden , 404 Not Found , 500 Internal Server Error & the Firehose There is this thing called the firehose. I've witnessed mathematicians, game theorists, computer scientist and engineers (apparently there is a distinction), economists, business scholars, and social scientist salivate over it (myself included). The Firehouse, though technically reserved …
The Hidden Biases in Big Data
Image credit: Harvard Business Review. SMC Principal Researcher Kate Crawford reached the number-one slot on the "Most Read" list of the Harvard Business Review this week with her sharp and insightful blog post on the weaknesses of big data. Debunking the commonly held belief that "numbers speak for themselves" in large data sets, Kate brings …
Six Provocations for Big Data
The era of "Big Data" has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and many others are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing information from Twitter, Google, Verizon, 23andMe, …
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