Making Analytics Public: Really Useful Analytics and Public Engagement

• In Event: Really Useful Analytics and the Good Life

Abstract

Bold claims are frequently made about what the analysis of big data might tell us about ‘the public’. People’s web and social media use generates a vast source of data which, it is suggested, can be mined for new insights into how publics behave and what they think, feel, and prefer. At the same time, critical commentators have rightly pointed out that access to analytics tools, to the data itself, and to relevant forms of expertise is uneven and that we are seeing the emergence of new digital inequalities and the private enclosure of digital data (boyd and Crawford 2012, Kennedy et al forthcoming). Drawing on an action research project, which assessed the value of analytics as a way for public sector organizations to know and engage their publics, we argue in this paper that if analytics is to serve the public good, it needs to become more public itself, in three main ways. First, analytics needs to be available to the public to use. Analytics tools and data must be accessible to public organizations and groups and open to public uses and purposes. Second, analytics should be open to public supervision. Whereas the code, algorithms, and methodologies behind analytics are often proprietary and black-boxed, we argue that they should be public so they can be scrutinized and debated. Third, we argue that analytics should be rethought as a more participatory process. Analytics should not just be viewed as a way for experts to track and know the public with ever-greater precision, but can also be understood in more participatory terms, as offering the means and forms of representation by which publics can come reflexively to know and constitute themselves in new ways. In this view, ‘the public’ as a collective subject is something that needs to be imagined and constructed through forms of representation (Barnett 2008). We suggest that thinking of analytics as offering a way for publics to constitute themselves means, as John Durham Peters (1995: 16) argues, that ‘in acting upon symbolic representations of “the public” the public can come into existence as a real actor’.

Authors

• Helen Kennedy, University of Leeds

• Giles Moss, U of Leeds