Download or read book Data and Society written by Anne Beaulieu and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2021-10-27 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Data and Society: A Critical Introduction investigates the growing importance of data as a technological, social, economic and scientific resource. It explains how data practices have come to underpin all aspects of human life and explores what this means for those directly involved in handling data. The book fosters informed debate over the role of data in contemporary society explains the significance of data as evidence beyond the "Big Data" hype spans the technical, sociological, philosophical and ethical dimensions of data provides guidance on how to use data responsibly includes data stories that provide concrete cases and discussion questions. Grounded in examples spanning genetics, sport and digital innovation, this book fosters insight into the deep interrelations between technical, social and ethical aspects of data work.
Download or read book Data in Society written by Evans, Jeff and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2019-08-21 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Statistical data and evidence-based claims are increasingly central to our everyday lives. Critically examining ‘Big Data’, this book charts the recent explosion in sources of data, including those precipitated by global developments and technological change. It sets out changes and controversies related to data harvesting and construction, dissemination and data analytics by a range of private, governmental and social organisations in multiple settings. Analysing the power of data to shape political debate, the presentation of ideas to us by the media, and issues surrounding data ownership and access, the authors suggest how data can be used to uncover injustices and to advance social progress.
Download or read book Digital Black Feminism written by Catherine Knight Steele and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book traces the long arc of Black women's relationship with technology from the antebellum south to the social media era demonstrating how digital culture transforms and is transformed by Black feminist thought"--
Download or read book Data Visualization in Society written by Martin Engebretsen and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-21 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we are witnessing an increased use of data visualization in society. Across domains such as work, education and the news, various forms of graphs, charts and maps are used to explain, convince and tell stories. In an era in which more and more data are produced and circulated digitally, and digital tools make visualization production increasingly accessible, it is important to study the conditions under which such visual texts are generated, disseminated and thought to be of societal benefit. This book is a contribution to the multi-disciplined and multi-faceted conversation concerning the forms, uses and roles of data visualization in society. Do data visualizations do 'good' or 'bad'? Do they promote understanding and engagement, or do they do ideological work, privileging certain views of the world over others? The contributions in the book engage with these core questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives.
Download or read book The Datafied Society written by Mirko Tobias Schäfer and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ability to gather data that can be crunched by machines is valuable for studying society. The new methods needed to work it require new skills and new ways of thinking about best research practices. This book reflects on the role and usefulness of big data, challenging overly optimistic expectations about what it can reveal, introducing practices and methods for its analysis and visualization, and raising important political and ethical questions regarding its collection, handling, and presentation.
Download or read book Data Feminism written by Catherine D'Ignazio and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism. Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In Data Feminism, Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics—one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. They explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization, and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. And they show why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.” Data Feminism offers strategies for data scientists seeking to learn how feminism can help them work toward justice, and for feminists who want to focus their efforts on the growing field of data science. But Data Feminism is about much more than gender. It is about power, about who has it and who doesn't, and about how those differentials of power can be challenged and changed.
Download or read book Data And Society written by Paul Beynon-davies and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most literature thinks of the relationship between data and society as additive, meaning that data and society are seen as two separate sets of things but which overlap to form an intersection. The literature then goes off to unpack the intersection of the two circles and partners the term data in this manner with terms descriptive of the domain of society — ownership, control, surveillance, and privacy, to name but a few.Within this book, we want to promote an alternative viewpoint of the relationship between data and society. Rather than explaining how data fits with or contributes to some burning societal issues, we want to explain how data is constitutive of many such issues. The term constitutive is used here in the sense of data having power to institute, establish, or enact society.Our viewpoint means that if you are to properly understand the constitutive nature of data, you must start from first principles and closely examine the nature of data itself. You must also focus on the mechanics of data — how data is represented and articulated in records or more generally in data structures.Our aim in doing this is to examine the place of data structures across cultures and societies. In doing so, we hope to better understand why we, as humans, make records. In doing this, we can also better understand some of the unintended consequences of the use of records, which particularly plague us in the modern world.
Download or read book All Data Are Local written by Yanni Alexander Loukissas and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to analyze data settings rather than data sets, acknowledging the meaning-making power of the local. In our data-driven society, it is too easy to assume the transparency of data. Instead, Yanni Loukissas argues in All Data Are Local, we should approach data sets with an awareness that data are created by humans and their dutiful machines, at a time, in a place, with the instruments at hand, for audiences that are conditioned to receive them. The term data set implies something discrete, complete, and portable, but it is none of those things. Examining a series of data sources important for understanding the state of public life in the United States—Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, the Digital Public Library of America, UCLA's Television News Archive, and the real estate marketplace Zillow—Loukissas shows us how to analyze data settings rather than data sets. Loukissas sets out six principles: all data are local; data have complex attachments to place; data are collected from heterogeneous sources; data and algorithms are inextricably entangled; interfaces recontextualize data; and data are indexes to local knowledge. He then provides a set of practical guidelines to follow. To make his argument, Loukissas employs a combination of qualitative research on data cultures and exploratory data visualizations. Rebutting the “myth of digital universalism,” Loukissas reminds us of the meaning-making power of the local.
Download or read book Distributed Blackness written by André Brock, Jr. and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2021 Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, given by the Popular Culture Association Winner, 2021 Nancy Baym Annual Book Award, given by the Association of Internet Researchers An explanation of the digital practices of the black Internet From BlackPlanet to #BlackGirlMagic, Distributed Blackness places blackness at the very center of internet culture. André Brock Jr. claims issues of race and ethnicity as inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Distributed Blackness analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how “blackness” gets worked out in various technological domains. As Brock demonstrates, there’s nothing niche or subcultural about expressions of blackness on social media: internet use and practice now set the terms for what constitutes normative participation. Drawing on critical race theory, linguistics, rhetoric, information studies, and science and technology studies, Brock tabs between black-dominated technologies, websites, and social media to build a set of black beliefs about technology. In explaining black relationships with and alongside technology, Brock centers the unique joy and sense of community in being black online now.
Download or read book Open Data and the Knowledge Society written by Bridgette Wessels and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While there is a lot of talk about how we now live in a knowledge society, the reality has been less impressive: we have yet to truly transition to a knowledge society--in part, this book argues, because discussion mostly focuses on a knowledge economy and information society rather than on ways to mobilize to create an actual knowledge society. That all may change, however, with the rise of open data and big data. This book considers the role of the open data movement in fostering transformation, showing that at the heart of any successful mobilization will be an emerging open data ecosystem and new ways for societal actors to effectively produce and use data.
Download or read book The Distance Cure written by Hannah Zeavin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychotherapy across distance and time, from Freud’s treatments by mail to crisis hotlines, radio call-ins, chatbots, and Zoom sessions. Therapy has long understood itself as taking place in a room, with two (or more) people engaged in person-to-person conversation. And yet, starting with Freud’s treatments by mail, psychotherapy has operated through multiple communication technologies and media. These have included advice columns, radio broadcasts, crisis hotlines, video, personal computers, and mobile phones; the therapists (broadly defined) can be professional or untrained, strangers or chatbots. In The Distance Cure, Hannah Zeavin proposes a reconfiguration of the traditional therapeutic dyad of therapist and patient as a triad: therapist, patient, and communication technology. Zeavin tracks the history of teletherapy (understood as a therapeutic interaction over distance) and its metamorphosis from a model of cure to one of contingent help. She describes its initial use in ongoing care, its role in crisis intervention and symptom management, and our pandemic-mandated reliance on regular Zoom sessions. Her account of the “distanced intimacy” of the therapeutic relationship offers a powerful rejoinder to the notion that contact across distance (or screens) is always less useful, or useless, to the person seeking therapeutic treatment or connection. At the same time, these modes of care can quickly become a backdoor for surveillance and disrupt ethical standards important to the therapeutic relationship. The history of the conventional therapeutic scenario cannot be told in isolation from its shadow form, teletherapy. Therapy, Zeavin tells us, was never just a “talking cure”; it has always been a communication cure.
Download or read book Subprime Attention Crisis written by Tim Hwang and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From FSGO x Logic: a revealing examination of digital advertising and the internet's precarious foundation In Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Hwang investigates the way big tech financializes attention. In the process, he shows us how digital advertising—the beating heart of the internet—is at risk of collapsing, and that its potential demise bears an uncanny resemblance to the housing crisis of 2008. From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars, to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers’ attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself—much like subprime mortgages—is wildly misrepresented. And if online advertising goes belly-up, the internet—and its free services—will suddenly be accessible only to those who can afford it. Deeply researched, convincing, and alarming, Subprime Attention Crisis will change the way you look at the internet, and its precarious future. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.
Download or read book Black Software written by Charlton D. McIlwain and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Software, for the first time, chronicles the long relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the Internet. Through new archival sources and the voices of many of those who lived and made this history, the book centralizes African Americans' role in the Internet's creation and evolution, illuminating both the limits and possibilities for using digital technology to push for racial justice in the United States and across the globe.
Download or read book The Data Gaze written by David Beer and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2018-10-29 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A significant new way of understanding contemporary capitalism is to understand the intensification and spread of data analytics. This text is about the powerful promises and visions that have led to the expansion of data analytics and data-led forms of social ordering. It is centrally concerned with examining the types of knowledge associated with data analytics and shows that how these analytics are envisioned is central to the emergence and prominence of data at various scales of social life. This text aims to understand the powerful role of the data analytics industry and how this industry facilitates the spread and intensification of data-led processes. As such, The Data Gaze is concerned with understanding how data-led, data-driven and data-reliant forms of capitalism pervade organisational and everyday life. Using a clear theoretical approach derived from Foucault and critical data studies, the text develops the concept of the data gaze and shows how powerful and persuasive it is. It’s an essential and subversive guide to data analytics and data capitalism.
Download or read book Data Politics written by Didier Bigo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-13 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Data has become a social and political issue because of its capacity to reconfigure relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. This book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its uses in both theory and practice are possible. Data and politics are now inseparable: data is not only shaping our social relations, preferences and life chances but our very democracies. Expert international contributors consider political questions about data and the ways it provokes subjects to govern themselves by making rights claims. Concerned with the things (infrastructures of servers, devices, and cables) and language (code, programming, and algorithms) that make up cyberspace, this book demonstrates that without understanding these conditions of possibility it is impossible to intervene in or to shape data politics. Aimed at academics and postgraduate students interested in political aspects of data, this volume will also be of interest to experts in the fields of internet studies, international studies, Big Data, digital social sciences and humanities. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.routledge.com/Data-Politics-Worlds-Subjects-Rights/Bigo-Isin-Ruppert/p/book/9781138053267, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Download or read book Digital Media and Society written by Simon Lindgren and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2021-11-24 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to live in a digital society? Does social media empower political activism? How do we form and express our identity in a digital age? Do algorithms and search engine results have a social role? How have software and hardware transformed how we interact with each other? In the early 21st century, digital media and the social have become irreversibly intertwined. In this cutting-edge introduction, Simon Lindgren explores what it means to live in a digital society. With succinct explanations of the key concepts, debates and theories you need to know, this is a must-have resource for students exploring digital media, social media, media and society, data and society, and the internet. “An engaging story of the meaning digital media have in societies. The writing is relatable, with diverse and comprehensive references to theories. Above all, this is a fun book on what a contemporary digital society looks like!” - Professor Zizi Papacharissi, University of Illinois at Chicago Simon Lindgren is Professor of Sociology at Umeå University in Sweden. He is also the director of DIGSUM, an interdisciplinary academic research centre studying the social dimensions of digital technology.
Download or read book Your Life in Numbers Modeling Society Through Data written by Pablo Jensen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-06-04 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 300 years ago, Isaac Newton created a mathematical model of the solar system that predicted the existence of a yet unknown planet: Neptune. Today, driven by the digital revolution, modern scientists are creating complex models of society itself to shed light on topics as far-ranging as epidemic outbreaks and economic growth. But how do these scientists gather and interpret their data? How accurate are their models? Can we trust the numbers? With a rare background in physics, economics and sociology, the author is able to present an insider’s view of the strengths, weaknesses and dangers of transforming our lives into numbers. After reading this book, you’ll understand how different numerical models work and how they are used in practice. The author begins by exploring several simple, easy-to-understand models that form the basis for more complex simulations. What follows is an exploration of the myriad ways that models have come to describe and define our world, from epidemiology and climate change to urban planning and the world chess championship. Highly engaging and nontechnical, this book will appeal to any readers interested in understanding the links between data and society and how our lives are being increasingly captured in numbers.
