Datalogical Systems and Us
In this post for ‘The Person in the (Big) Data‘ edition of EM, Helen Thornham
@Thornhambot
talks about how her research into data and the everyday has made her think critically about the power relations that surround “datalogical systems”, particularly in how we as researchers are implicated in the systems we aim to critique.
Data, big data, open data and datalogical systems (Clough et al. 2015) are already, as David Beer has noted, ‘an established presence in our everyday cultural lives’ (2015:2) and this means that the material and embodied configurations of data are already normative and quotidian and novel and innovative. Much of my research over the last 4 years, supported by a range of ESRC [i], EPSRC [ii] and British Academy grants, has engaged with normative and everyday configurations of data – whether that is in terms of routine and mundane mediations, lived subjective experiences framed by datalogical systems and their obscure decision making processes, the relationship between the promises of data for infrastructural change and the realisation of this, or human interrogations of machines. While the scope and breadth of my research into data and datalogical systems is broad and diverse, what connects all of my research is a continued concern with how data and datalogical systems are not just reconceptualising epistemology and ontology more widely (see also Burrows and Savage 2014), but how they implicate us as researchers and reveal to us that our long-term methods of research are equally and always already subject to, and framed by, the very issues we purport, in the digital era, to be critiquing.
To rehash a familiar argument: if we conceive of technology in relation to social media, big data and data flow, the subsequent methods that epistemologically frame this are defined by that initial conception: web analytics, scraping and mining tools, mapping – tools that seek to make visible the power relations of the digital infrastructures but that actually generate those power relations in the act of making them visible (boyd and Crawford 2012). For the ESRC project where we have investigated risks and opportunities of social media for the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), web analytic methods show us very clearly mundane and dull, repetitive mass media management of content. News headlines are retweeted effectively and broadly with limited discussion that is capturable by the scraping tools we use.Read More… Datalogical Systems and Us
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