Big Data Economies: Translation and How “Data” Makes Canada and Africa

• In Event: Science, Technology and Innovation Policy in non-hegemonic countries: emulation, adaptation, creation

Abstract

Big data is the emerging field where innovative technology offers new ways to extract value from available information. The idea of translation is central to “big data” - from government censuses to financial markets, to everyday digital transactions and interactions- and its organization in making particular ways of knowing and governing populations. As policymakers, researchers, financial traders pin the possibility of profits and innovation on such information I want to trace how different actors politically mobilize and translate data along with and against official, data-driven, cost-benefit calculations about finances (Jasanoff, 2017). Translation, that is, conveying, moving, or transforming of coordinates in which the new axes are parallel to the old ones, stresses the entanglements of scientifically known bodies such as finance, informatics and now big data. In this paper, we use two major reports produced by the Chamber of Commerce in Canada Data Fast Forward: A Prescription for Innovation, Balance and Trust (2019), A Data Deficit: The Risk of Getting It Wrong (December 2018), and a third report produced by the Brookings Institution Harnessing Africa’s Digital Potential: New Tools for a New Age (2018) to show how Canada and Africa are now assembling and translating different kinds of data and methods to co-produce themselves as powerful states with subjects of innovation. We will show that big data assemblage and its translation co-produces notions of innovation along with sovereign dominant states and subjects that are “left behind.” The big data field is, thus, a rich site of co-production and its analysis.

Authors

• Anna M. Agathangelou, York Univeristy

• Mishall Ahmed, York University, Canada