What difference do data make? Data management and social change
| Published date | 14 October 2019 |
| Date | 14 October 2019 |
| Pages | 971-985 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-02-2018-0052 |
| Author | Morgan E. Currie,Britt S. Paris,Joan M. Donovan |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Bibliometrics,Databases,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet,Records management & preservation,Document management |
What difference do
data make? Data management
and social change
Morgan E. Currie
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK, and
Britt S. Paris and Joan M. Donovan
Data and Society Research Institute, New York, New York, USA
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to expand on emergent data activism literature to draw distinctions
between different types of data management practices undertaken by groups of data activists.
Design/methodology/approach –The authors offer three case studies that illuminate the data
management strategies of these groups. Each group discussed in the case studies is devoted to representing a
contentious political issue through data, but their data management practices differ in meaningful ways. The
project Making Sense produces their own data on pollution in Kosovo. Fatal Encounters collects “missing
data”on police homicides in the USA. The Environmental Data Governance Initiative hopes to keep
vulnerable US data on climate change and environmental injustices in the public domain.
Findings –In analysing the three case studies, the authors surface how temporal dimensions, geographic
scale and sociotechnical politics influence their differing data management strategies.
Originality/value –The authors build upon extant literature on data management infrastructure,
which primarily discusses how these practices manifest in scientific and institutional research settings, to
analyse how data management infrastructure is often crucial to social movements that rely on data to surface
political issues.
Keywords Civic data, Data activism, Data infrastructure, Police data, Statactivism
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
What difference do data make? Over the last decade, scholars have struggled to understand
the rapid informationalization of society, as the data that drive this trend grow larger by the
moment, are increasingly commodified for private profit and are used to control populations
through both finely targeted advertisements and surveillance architectures that link
corporate and government data streams. A rigorous set of scholarship now addresses this
issue of data quantity by focussing on the sociotechnical dimensions of data infrastructures
–how “big data”is collected, categorised, analysed, stored, controlled and accessed, and
how these practices produce widely uneven distributions of political and economic power
(Eubanks, 2018; Bates et al., 2016; Ribes and Jackson, 2013).
Simultaneously, a growing set of literature examines social and activist movements that
organise in response to data collection by corporations and the state (Milan and Van der Velden,
2016; Liboiron, 2015; Currie et al., 2016; Bruno et al., 2014; Dalton and Stallmann, 2018;
Dalton and Thatcher, 2014; Gieseking, 2018). In some cases, these political activists achieve
some agency by avoiding data capture through the use of encryption devices or by designing
alternative, non-commercial and collectively owned platforms. Other activists respond by
creating their own representations and framings of an issue through community data collection,
visualisation and analysis. An example of the latter are data activist projects that collect and
publish data on policing in the USA. Here, the best data generated from the Federal Bureau of Online Information Review
Vol. 43 No. 6, 2019
pp. 971-985
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-02-2018-0052
Received 9 February 2018
Revised 11 September 2018
Accepted 18 September 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
The authors specially thank volunteers from the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative,
Fatal Encounters and Making Sense.
971
What a
difference do
data make?
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