Precision and Uncertainty in a World of Data - III

Abstract

Precision and Uncertainty in a World of Data brings the varied disciplines of STS to bear on the variegated nature of uncertainty produced within a data saturated environment. Our aim is to examine how past and present invocations of big data, which hold out the promise of precision and certainty, also proliferate uncertainties within many domains of practice: from medicine to marketing, criminal law to news media, and across almost all scientific fields. We seek new lines of inquiry into the challenges posed to scientific inquiry and social institutions by the consolidation of computational analysis, machine learning and the generation of big data. Papers should cohere around the dialectic of certainty and uncertainty produced by big data and algorithms in practice, with particular interest in four themes: (1) the computational turn in the sciences (what new logics of uncertainty within contemporary data practices will govern scientific inquiry in the future?) (2) shared reality and mis-information (how do presumptions of errors, mistakes, mis-information secrete into everyday life, and manifest as rumors, fears of falsity, and data theft, and raise questions as to whether we partake in a shared reality or live in alternate ones?) (3) the speculative imagination (how do data driven fields of study and analysis, consciously or unconsciously draw upon traditions of futurology in imagining threats and promise of the datafication of self and society?) and (4) citizens and publics (how are new subjectivities and novel spaces for engagement/disengagement articulated as data driven practices in everyday life?).

Chair

• Sarah Chan, University of Edinburgh

Discussant

• Sarah Chan, University of Edinburgh

Individual Presentations

• The Computer in the Clinic: Past Futures of Precision Medicine - Jeremy A Greene, Johns Hopkins University

• Precision Psychiatry - Anna Jabloner, Harvard University

• Making Tumour Genetics Doable in the Clinic: Organizational Fictions and the Management of Uncertainty - Ashveen Peerbaye, Université Paris-Est; Claire Beaudevin, CNRS; Catherine Bourgain, Inserm

• What’s the Use? The "Utility" of DNA Sequences as Intellectual Property and Molecular Diagnostics - Steve Sturdy

Session Organizer

• Jeremy A Greene, Johns Hopkins University