Pub Date : 2021-02-03DOI: 10.1332/policypress/9781529215144.003.0003
Rob Kitchin
This chapter examines the nature of data from an etymological, philosophical, and technical point of view. Data is derived from the Latin dare, meaning 'to give'. In general use, however, data refers to those elements that are taken. Technically, what is understood to be data are actually capta (derived from the Latin capere, meaning 'to take'); those units of data that have been selected and harvested from the sum of all potential data. It is no coincidence that the use of the word 'data' emerged during the Renaissance. At this time, there was a flourishing of scientific innovation with respect to philosophy, equipment, and analysis that led to new discoveries and theories across the academy and new inventions in business, and transformed the world. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the use of the term 'data' extended from mathematics and natural philosophy to economics and administration. In the 20th century, data came to mean any information stored and used in the context of computing, and its uses multiplied beyond science and administration. The chapter then looks at four dominant scientific paradigms centred on epistemological approaches: experimental science, theoretical science, computational science, and exploratory science. What this discussion reveals is that not only is data manufactured, but the approach to and process of manufacturing has changed over time.
{"title":"The Nature of Data","authors":"Rob Kitchin","doi":"10.1332/policypress/9781529215144.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781529215144.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the nature of data from an etymological, philosophical, and technical point of view. Data is derived from the Latin dare, meaning 'to give'. In general use, however, data refers to those elements that are taken. Technically, what is understood to be data are actually capta (derived from the Latin capere, meaning 'to take'); those units of data that have been selected and harvested from the sum of all potential data. It is no coincidence that the use of the word 'data' emerged during the Renaissance. At this time, there was a flourishing of scientific innovation with respect to philosophy, equipment, and analysis that led to new discoveries and theories across the academy and new inventions in business, and transformed the world. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the use of the term 'data' extended from mathematics and natural philosophy to economics and administration. In the 20th century, data came to mean any information stored and used in the context of computing, and its uses multiplied beyond science and administration. The chapter then looks at four dominant scientific paradigms centred on epistemological approaches: experimental science, theoretical science, computational science, and exploratory science. What this discussion reveals is that not only is data manufactured, but the approach to and process of manufacturing has changed over time.","PeriodicalId":446623,"journal":{"name":"Data Lives","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131167092","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-03DOI: 10.1332/policypress/9781529215144.003.0016
Rob Kitchin
This chapter presents an account of sousveillance and how we produce, monitor, and react to data relating to ourselves, thus creating a quantified self. The term sousveillance refers to the personal monitoring and management of one's life through self-generated data. Continuously tracking personal data via sensors and cameras, and recording and analyzing them, would allow a person to manage and memorialize everyday life. The key technological idea that research teams, companies and artists were exploring at the time was lifelogs. The ultimate aim is the simultaneous digitization of all cognitive inputs experienced by the brain via all five human senses to create a digital parallel memory of the lived experiences of a person. However, lifelogs raise a series of ethical and legal questions that were largely being bypassed. Lifelogs would make an authoritarian, Big Brother society easier to put in place and more difficult to overthrow. At the same time as people became interested in sousveillance and lifelogs, so-called 'intimate technologies' — that is, digital tech that are in service to the individual, such as smartphones and wearable computing — started to grow enormously in popularity. These were complemented, and supported, by what might be termed 'scopophilic technologies', that is, digital tech that enable pleasure in looking and being looked at.
{"title":"The Quantified Self","authors":"Rob Kitchin","doi":"10.1332/policypress/9781529215144.003.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781529215144.003.0016","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter presents an account of sousveillance and how we produce, monitor, and react to data relating to ourselves, thus creating a quantified self. The term sousveillance refers to the personal monitoring and management of one's life through self-generated data. Continuously tracking personal data via sensors and cameras, and recording and analyzing them, would allow a person to manage and memorialize everyday life. The key technological idea that research teams, companies and artists were exploring at the time was lifelogs. The ultimate aim is the simultaneous digitization of all cognitive inputs experienced by the brain via all five human senses to create a digital parallel memory of the lived experiences of a person. However, lifelogs raise a series of ethical and legal questions that were largely being bypassed. Lifelogs would make an authoritarian, Big Brother society easier to put in place and more difficult to overthrow. At the same time as people became interested in sousveillance and lifelogs, so-called 'intimate technologies' — that is, digital tech that are in service to the individual, such as smartphones and wearable computing — started to grow enormously in popularity. These were complemented, and supported, by what might be termed 'scopophilic technologies', that is, digital tech that enable pleasure in looking and being looked at.","PeriodicalId":446623,"journal":{"name":"Data Lives","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133258255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter evaluates the technical and political trials involved in building a suite of open data tools by charting the development of the Dublin Dashboard. Building a city dashboard is a good way to gain an in-depth knowledge of how civic tech can be created using open data, and the politics and praxes involved. Like the process for creating the original city dashboard, the redevelopment of the Dublin Dashboard and production of the Cork Dashboard involved a significant amount of planning, negotiation, and trial and error. Just as these processes and institutional landscape have an effect on how a dashboard is created, the collective manufacture of dashboards reshapes institutions and their practices. How we design dashboards, and what data are included and how they are displayed, influences what knowledge is learned and how it is applied. Importantly, given that dashboards are a key means by which operators monitor urban infrastructure within control rooms, this mutability directly shapes the nature of data driven urbanism and how our cities are managed and run.
{"title":"The Politics of Building Civic Tech","authors":"Rob Kitchin","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1c9hmnq.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1c9hmnq.13","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter evaluates the technical and political trials involved in building a suite of open data tools by charting the development of the Dublin Dashboard. Building a city dashboard is a good way to gain an in-depth knowledge of how civic tech can be created using open data, and the politics and praxes involved. Like the process for creating the original city dashboard, the redevelopment of the Dublin Dashboard and production of the Cork Dashboard involved a significant amount of planning, negotiation, and trial and error. Just as these processes and institutional landscape have an effect on how a dashboard is created, the collective manufacture of dashboards reshapes institutions and their practices. How we design dashboards, and what data are included and how they are displayed, influences what knowledge is learned and how it is applied. Importantly, given that dashboards are a key means by which operators monitor urban infrastructure within control rooms, this mutability directly shapes the nature of data driven urbanism and how our cities are managed and run.","PeriodicalId":446623,"journal":{"name":"Data Lives","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130988742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter evaluates the benefits of evidence-informed policy over anecdote through an account of the financial crash in Ireland and the effect of creating public data stories. If politicians, policy makers, local government, the banks and property developers had paid proper attention to the data, the crash may not have happened, or at least might have had a softer landing. Instead, the data were ignored. The census data showed that all the way through the boom, vacancy rates were increasing, housing completions were running way ahead of household increase, more land was being zoned than could realistically be developed, and land and property prices were overheating. As a consequence, Ireland was still paying the price and continuing to experience a housing crisis. While some oversupply still existed in parts of the country, over a decade of suppressed construction activity and rising population had led to a shortage of housing in the cities and their commuter belts. Moreover, Ireland still has an issue with property data, with some datasets being discontinued, some having quality issues, some released in non-open formats and some still non-existent.
{"title":"When a Country Ignores Its Own Data","authors":"Rob Kitchin","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1c9hmnq.26","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1c9hmnq.26","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter evaluates the benefits of evidence-informed policy over anecdote through an account of the financial crash in Ireland and the effect of creating public data stories. If politicians, policy makers, local government, the banks and property developers had paid proper attention to the data, the crash may not have happened, or at least might have had a softer landing. Instead, the data were ignored. The census data showed that all the way through the boom, vacancy rates were increasing, housing completions were running way ahead of household increase, more land was being zoned than could realistically be developed, and land and property prices were overheating. As a consequence, Ireland was still paying the price and continuing to experience a housing crisis. While some oversupply still existed in parts of the country, over a decade of suppressed construction activity and rising population had led to a shortage of housing in the cities and their commuter belts. Moreover, Ireland still has an issue with property data, with some datasets being discontinued, some having quality issues, some released in non-open formats and some still non-existent.","PeriodicalId":446623,"journal":{"name":"Data Lives","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133847928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter studies how public and private sector organizations are increasingly using key performance indicators (KPIs) and technocratic procedures to manage work and workers and its consequences. Since the 1980s and the introduction of new public management (NPM) — an approach to running public sector institutions in a more business-like way — various kinds of assessment have been introduced to measure and track performance. Usually, these measures are institutionalized through formalized assessment schemes designed to improve efficiency, productivity, and quality. An entire bureaucracy has developed to oversee this datafication, and the management of institutions has transformed to become more instrumental and technocratic, guided by metrics. Decisions concerning individual promotion, departmental staffing and budgets, and strategic investments are informed by KPIs and rankings. In places like the UK and Australia, management through metrics has become deeply ingrained into the working lives of academics and the management of institutions. While Ireland has managed to avoid the worst excesses of management through metrics, it has not been totally immune. KPIs are now a part of the management regime and are used to guide decision-making, but they are used alongside other forms of information rather than narrowly determining outcomes.
{"title":"Management Through Metrics","authors":"Rob Kitchin","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1c9hmnq.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1c9hmnq.22","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter studies how public and private sector organizations are increasingly using key performance indicators (KPIs) and technocratic procedures to manage work and workers and its consequences. Since the 1980s and the introduction of new public management (NPM) — an approach to running public sector institutions in a more business-like way — various kinds of assessment have been introduced to measure and track performance. Usually, these measures are institutionalized through formalized assessment schemes designed to improve efficiency, productivity, and quality. An entire bureaucracy has developed to oversee this datafication, and the management of institutions has transformed to become more instrumental and technocratic, guided by metrics. Decisions concerning individual promotion, departmental staffing and budgets, and strategic investments are informed by KPIs and rankings. In places like the UK and Australia, management through metrics has become deeply ingrained into the working lives of academics and the management of institutions. While Ireland has managed to avoid the worst excesses of management through metrics, it has not been totally immune. KPIs are now a part of the management regime and are used to guide decision-making, but they are used alongside other forms of information rather than narrowly determining outcomes.","PeriodicalId":446623,"journal":{"name":"Data Lives","volume":"500 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123682614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lillian Ablon, Paul S. Heaton, D. Lavery, Sasha Romanosky
{"title":"Data Theft","authors":"Lillian Ablon, Paul S. Heaton, D. Lavery, Sasha Romanosky","doi":"10.7249/ig126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7249/ig126","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":446623,"journal":{"name":"Data Lives","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115605903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter provides an overview of the sociality of data. Data-driven endeavours are not simply technical systems, but are socio-technical systems. That is, they are as much a result of human values, desires, and social relations as they are scientific principles and technologies. The sociality of data is also evident with respect to how we have come to live with data. The data revolution has been transforming work and the economy, the nature of consumption, the management and governance of society, how we communicate and interact with media and each other, and forms of play and leisure. Indeed, our lives are saturated with digital devices and services that generate, process, and share vast quantities of data. This book reveals the myriad, complex, contested ways in which data are produced and circulated, as well as the consequences of living in a data-driven world.
{"title":"Data Stories","authors":"Rob Kitchin","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1c9hmnq.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1c9hmnq.5","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter provides an overview of the sociality of data. Data-driven endeavours are not simply technical systems, but are socio-technical systems. That is, they are as much a result of human values, desires, and social relations as they are scientific principles and technologies. The sociality of data is also evident with respect to how we have come to live with data. The data revolution has been transforming work and the economy, the nature of consumption, the management and governance of society, how we communicate and interact with media and each other, and forms of play and leisure. Indeed, our lives are saturated with digital devices and services that generate, process, and share vast quantities of data. This book reveals the myriad, complex, contested ways in which data are produced and circulated, as well as the consequences of living in a data-driven world.","PeriodicalId":446623,"journal":{"name":"Data Lives","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124351082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-02-03DOI: 10.1332/policypress/9781529215144.003.0023
Rob Kitchin
This chapter details the consequences of data breaches for a company and its customers. Someone has discovered that the company has stored personal details of customers in an unencrypted database on an insecure server located somewhere in Idaho. Unfortunately, an enterprising hacker has put up the entire database for sale on the dark web. The company suspects that somebody probably fell for a phishing attack, then someone got in and dismantled their cybersecurity. As it turns out, other companies, governments, and city administration have all been victims of data breaches. Data breaches could cost companies millions as customers could sue them for identity theft.
{"title":"Data Theft","authors":"Rob Kitchin","doi":"10.1332/policypress/9781529215144.003.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781529215144.003.0023","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter details the consequences of data breaches for a company and its customers. Someone has discovered that the company has stored personal details of customers in an unencrypted database on an insecure server located somewhere in Idaho. Unfortunately, an enterprising hacker has put up the entire database for sale on the dark web. The company suspects that somebody probably fell for a phishing attack, then someone got in and dismantled their cybersecurity. As it turns out, other companies, governments, and city administration have all been victims of data breaches. Data breaches could cost companies millions as customers could sue them for identity theft.","PeriodicalId":446623,"journal":{"name":"Data Lives","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133724363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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