Full Description
There has been a data rush in the past decade brought about by online communication and, in particular, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, among others), which promises a new age of digital enlightenment. But social data is compromised: it is being seized by specific economic interests, it leads to a fundamental shift in the relationship between research and the public good, and it fosters new forms of control and surveillance.
Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data explores how we perform critical research within a compromised social data framework. The expert, international lineup of contributors explores the limits and challenges of social data research in order to invent and develop new modes of doing public research. At its core, this collection argues that we are witnessing a fundamental reshaping of the social through social data mining.
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Ganaele Langlois, York University; Joanna Redden, University of Calgary and Greg Elmer, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada
Part 1: Data, Power and Politics
Big Data as System of Knowledge: Investigating Canadian Governance
Joanna Redden, University of Calgary, Canada
Data Mining Research and the Disintegration of Society: the "Project X" Haren Riots
Ingrid M. Hoofd, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Look at the Man Behind the Curtain: Computational Management in "Spontaneous" Citizen Political Campaigning
David Karpf, George Washington University, USA
Part 2: Data Limit(ed)
Easy Data, Hard Data: The politics and pragmatics of Twitter research after the computational turn
Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Scraping the First Person
Greg Elmer, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada
Open Data and its Enemies? Digital Methods and Compromised Data
Fenwick McKelvey, Concordia University, Canada
Critical Reverse Engineering: The Case of Twitter and TalkOpen
Robert Gehl, University of Utah, USA
Part 3. Alt-Data
Mapping Movements - Social Movement Research and Big Data: Critiques and Alternatives
Sky Croeser and Tim Highfield, Curtin University, Australia
Data Activism
Alessandra Renzi, Northeastern University, USA, and Ganaele Langlois, York University, Canada
A Contribution to the Political Economy of Personal Archives
Yuk Hui, Leuphana University, Germany
The Haunted Life of Data
Lisa Blackman, Goldsmiths University, UK
Index
