Introduction to the Data Power Special Issue: tactics, access and shaping

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-10-2019-396
Published date14 October 2019
Date14 October 2019
Pages945-951
AuthorYsabel Gerrard,Jo Bates
Subject MatterLibrary & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Bibliometrics,Databases,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet,Records management & preservation,Document management
Guest editorial
Introduction to the Data Power Special Issue: tactics, access and shaping
The articles in this Online Information Review (OIR) Special Issue were presented at the
Data Power Conference 2017[1] (Carleton University, Canada, 22-23 June), organised by local
hosts Dr Tracey Lauriault and Dr Merlyna Lim, with support from the wider Data Power
Steering Committeecomprising Professor HelenKennedy, Dr Jo Bates and Dr Ysabel Gerrard
(Sheffield, UK).
Now approaching its third iteration[2], the Data Power Conference focuses on critical
questions about the relationship between data and society, with conference speakers invited
to address the social and cultural consequences of datas pervasiveness in our everyday
lives. With this focus on emergent data relations(Kennedy, 2016), the Data Power Special
Issue brings a different slant to the advance of datafication and algorithmic processing than
is commonly seen in regular issues of OIR. Papers were selected by the full conference team
for their quality, as well as their relevance to the Information Science Research Community
who make up the majority of the OIR readership.
The Data Power Conference 2017, and by extension the seven papers in this Special
Issue, addressed three questions:
(1) How can we reclaim some form of data-based power and autonomy, and advance
data-based technological citizenship, while living in regimes of data power?
(2) Is it possible to regain agency and mobilise data for the common good? To do so,
which theories help to interrogate and make sense of the operations of data power?
(3) What kind of design frameworks are needed to build and deploy data-based
technologies with values and ethics that are equitable and fair? How can big data be
mobilised to improve how we live, beyond notions of efficiency and innovation?
These questions broadly emphasise the reclamation of power, retention of agency and ethics
of data-based technologies, and they reflect a broader moment in recent data studies
scholarship. While early critical research on big data”–a term that captures the
technologies, analytics and mythologies of increasingly large data sets (Boyd and Crawford,
2012) could only hypothesise the inequalities and deepened forms discrimination that
might emerge as data sets grew in volume, many of those predictions have now become real.
The articles in this Special Issue ask pressing questions about data power at a time when we
have learned that data are too frequently handled in a way that deepens social inequalities
and injustices (amongst others, Eubanks, 2018; Noble, 2018).
The papers in this Special Issue approach discussions of inequality and injustice through
three broad lenses: the tactics people use to confront unequal distributions of (data) power;
the access to data that are most relevant and essential for particular social groups, coupled
with the changing and uncertain legalities of data access; and the shaping of social relations
by and through data, whether through the demands placed on app users to disclose more
personal information, the use of data to construct cultures of compliance or through the very
methodologies commonly used to organise and label information. While these three themes
do not exhaustively capture the range of topics addressed in this Special Issue, at the Data
Power Conferences, or within the field at large, they represent an emphasis within data
studies scholarship on shedding light on the most pressing issues confronting our
increasingly datafied world.
Online Information Review
Vol. 43 No. 6, 2019
pp. 945-951
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-10-2019-396
945
Guest editorial

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