Geopolitics and Social Science Data Archives: Data Friction at the Organizational Level

• In Event: Politics and Infrastructures of Data Collaboratives

Abstract

Today’s open science initiatives encourage the idea that access to data be geographically frictionless. However, as data move across boundaries they meet resistances and create new ones. In his book A Vast Machine, Paul Edwards described this concept as “data friction”. He writes, “Every movement of data across an interface comes at some cost in time, energy, and human attention. In social systems, data friction consumes energy and produces turbulence and heat – that is, conflicts, disagreements, and inexact, unruly processes” (Edwards et al 2011). Most of the work building on Edwards et al. (2011) has focused on individuals and teams. Our goal in this paper is to widen the lens; that is, explore data friction at the organizational level, the burdens and work of overcoming it, and the implications of geographical and political boundaries. We discuss how the quantitative social sciences, through individual social science data archives (SSDA) and the Council of European Social Science Data Archives (SSDA), contended with “data friction” across archives and national boundaries. We use historical data from the 1970s to the early 2000 to illustrate three specific areas of “data friction”: territoriality and sharing, the clash of business models, and credit for data work. We conclude with a case study of the Eurobarometer dataset as an example of contending with and overcoming organizational data friction. We conclude with implications for current trends in data sharing and organizations.

Authors

• Kristin Eschenfelder, University Of Wisconsin-Madison

• Kalpana Shankar, University College Dublin