Politics and Infrastructures of Data Collaboratives

Abstract

This session examines how data cultures (including norms, policies, processes, and worries) travel globally, and how they inform data collaboratives. Here we look at who is involved in data-driven collaborations, and how data economies affect ways of working and underlying infrastructures. In thinking about data cultures and collaborations, academics, practitioners, and funders have largely focused on government and private industry—e.g. governmental open data initiatives, access to the “black box” of private industry data, and the alignment of government and private sector data policies. These far-reaching data collaborations and infrastructures have prompted concerns about surveillance, privacy, and prejudice, especially in light of algorithmic bias, the Facebook data debacle, and new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations. Thus far, however, these inquiries have largely laid in Western contexts, and focus on particular kinds of data actors: government and private industry.

We seek to garner insight into the range of stakeholders involved in data collaboratives, and the social dynamics comprised of gathering, storing, and communicating with data in varied contexts and configurations. Here we ask: Who is doing ethnographic studies of data and what are they finding? How do cultures of data in government, academia, and industry compare? What are the complications in studying ecosystems of data? We are interested in rich and diverse examples that expand present perspectives of how data is understood in the field of STS.

Individual Presentations

• Data Sharing in Nairobi: Why, For Whom, and By Whom? - Angela Okune, University of California - Irvine

• Geopolitics and Social Science Data Archives: Data Friction at the Organizational Level - Kristin Eschenfelder, University Of Wisconsin-Madison; Kalpana Shankar, University College Dublin

• Post-GDPR Issues to Confidential Data Management: An Analysis of the Use of Privacy Enhancing Technologies in Health Data Research Centres - Victoria Neumann, Lancaster University

• Reimagining Data Infrastructures through Infrastructural Inversion and Participatory Design - Firaz Peer, Georgia Institute of Technology; Carl DiSalvo, Georgia Institute of Technology

Session Organizers

• Leah Horgan, University of California, Irvine

• Angela Okune, University of California - Irvine