BD&S Editor Evelyn Ruppert speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland

BD&S Editor Evelyn Ruppert recently spoke at two events at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. In her talk, ‘Enabling digitally inclusive societies’, she drew on her research on citizen rights and data to discuss how the internet  impacts social cohesion - an increasingly pertinent theme for the WEF, which this year has put digital technology and its impact on economies and societies worldwide at the heart of its programme. Her talk was part of an Ideas Lab session, ‘The Science of Social Cohesion', organized by the European Research Council (ERC). Evelyn joined 8 other ERC grantees as part of a delegation to the WEF led by ERC President Prof. Jean-Pierre Bourguignon.

Referring to her ERC project ARITHMUS, she argued that  fostering citizen engagement in how the internet works and rights to the data that it generates are key to making digital societies inclusive 

rather than divisive and controlling. While expanding access to the internet is usually regarded as an answer to ending a digital divide, she argued it is also necessary to provide openings for people to be not merely users and consumers of the internet, but digital citizens with the power to shape what it should be.  

At another invited session Evelyn joined a panel of business leaders and human rights lawyers to discuss the timely question, ‘What if Privacy Becomes a Luxury Good?’ Organised as a partnership between the WEF and TIME Magazine, the session involved a discussion of the implications of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ for societies. The panel addressed how digital devices are monitoring and compiling personal data and the uneven consequences this has for privacy.  The session was live streamed and can be viewed here.

Editor Evelyn Ruppert responding to Frank Pasquale keynote on ‘The Promise (and Threat) of Algorithmic Accountability’

On Tuesday 26 January, 2016, Frank Pasquale, Professor of Law at the University of Maryland and author of The Black Box Society, will be delivering a public lecture at the launch of LSE’s MSc in Media and Communications (Data and Society). He will be focusing on recent controversies over the “right to be forgotten” and alternative credit scoring (such as proposals to base loan approvals on qualities of the applicant’s social network contacts), and propose reforms essential to humane automation of new media and banking. Editor Evelyn Ruppert will be responding to his lecture.

See http://www.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2016/01/20160126t1830vSZT.aspx for more details.

A Social Framework for Big Data: how social composition and effects are related

Editor Evelyn Ruppert, PI of an ESRC funded project, Socialising Big Data, has published, along with seven other researchers, A Social Framework for Big Data. The framework proposes an agenda that understands how social composition and social effects are related and proposes that giving Big Data a ‘social intelligence’ requires acting with an ethic of care. A background document provides a discussion of some conceptual issues and debates related to this agenda. Both can be found here as well as a working paper that led to the development of the framework.

New book by Editor Evelyn Ruppert (with Engin Isin): Being Digital Citizens (2015)

From the rise of cyberbullying and hactivism to the issues surrounding digital privacy rights and freedom of speech, the Internet is changing the ways in which we govern and are governed as citizens. 

These are some of the issues that the book, Being Digital Citizens (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), by Big Data & Society Editor Evelyn Ruppert and Co-chief Editor of Citizenship Studies Engin Isin investigate. They examine how citizens encounter and perform new sorts of rights, duties, opportunities and challenges through the Internet. By disrupting prevailing understandings of citizenship and cyberspace, Isin and Ruppert highlight the dynamic relationship between these two concepts. Rather than assuming that these are static or established ‘facts’ of politics and society, they show how the challenges and opportunities presented by the Internet inevitably impact the action and understanding of political agency. Through the articulation of digital acts they set out a new theoretical understanding of what it means to be a citizen today for students and scholars across the social sciences. More information and a sample chapter are available here. 

Big Data & Society Editors Evelyn Ruppert and Richard Rogers Among Keynotes at Data Power Conference 2015

What is the cost of the data delirium? What kind of power is enacted when data are employed by governments and security agencies to monitor populations? Is there a possibility of agency in the face of data power? 

BD&S Founding Editor Prof. Evelyn Ruppert

These are a few of the key questions that will be addressed at Data Power Conference 2015. Data Power 2015, hosted by The University of Sheffield on June 22-23, is a critical space of reflection on these and other issues related to big data practices and questions of power in big-data-driven environments. Key themes include the political economy of data; data cultures (data and the cultural industries, data journalism); data and the production of subjectivity and identity; data mining regulation; and, resistance, agency, and appropriation. 

The conference draws on a number of expert and critical reflections by a wide range of keynote speakers. Amongst them are Big Data & Society Editor and Founding Editor Evelyn Ruppert (Professor and Director of Research in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London), and Editor Richard Rogers of the Digital Methods Initiative, University of Amsterdam, NL. 

BD& S Editor Prof. Richard Rogers

Professor Ruppert’s talk titled ‘From data subjects to digital citizens’ brings the political subject of data to the centre of concern by challenging a determinist analyses of the Internet — one that imagines people as passive data subjects. To the contrary, Prof. Ruppert attends to political subjectivities that are always performed in relation to sociotechnical arrangements. In compliment, Professor Rogers will build on Dominique Boullier's call for a third generation social science in his talk 'Dashboards, Social Media Monitoring and Critical Data Analytics' to discuss how the dashboard has become the dominant mode of display and social media monitoring as predominant analytical practice.

Data Power Conference 2015 is hosted by The Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Sociological Studies and The Digital Society Network at The University of Sheffield. For more information on programme and registration, visit Data Power Conference 2015.