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List of contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Data and Language
Chapter 2: Data and Sensemaking
Chapter 3: Data and Invisibility
Chapter 4: Big Data and the Abyss of Aggregation
Chapter 5: Data and Power
Conclusion
About the author
Jennifer Edmond is Associate Professor of Trinity College Dublin and the co-director of the Trinity Center for Digital Humanities, Ireland. Jennifer also serves as President of the Board of Directors of the pan-European research infrastructure for the arts and humanities, DARIAH-EU. Additionally she represents this body on the Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP), which supports the European Commission in developing and promoting Open Science policies. Until 2016, Jennifer coordinated the €6.5m CENDARI FP7 (2012-1026) project and is a partner in the related infrastructure cluster, PARTHENOS. She was also coordinator of the 2017-2018 ICT programme-funded project KPLEX, which investigated bias in big data research from a humanities perspective, and is currently a partner on the CHIST-ERA project PROVIDE-DH, which is investigating progressive visualisation as a support for managing uncertainty in humanities research.Nicola Horsley’s qualitative research critiques the marginalisation of the social in various discourses and explores the dominance of scientific and technical knowledge as bases for policy and practice. Her co-authored book, Challenging the Politics of Early Intervention: who’s ‘saving’ children and why, explores the scientific evidence base for early intervention policies; and the related article ‘Brave new brains: sociology, family and the politics of knowledge’ was the winner of The Sociological Review’s Prize for Outstanding Scholarship 2016.Jörg Lehmann is post-doctoral research fellow at the Romanistic Seminar at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany. He studied history and comparative literature at Freie Universität Berlin. He gained experience in digital humanities methodologies, working in the research infrastructure project CENDARI, in the interdisciplinary research project “The Researchers’ Affects” (Berlin, Germany/Berne, Switzerland) and in the K-PLEX project. He has published two monographs on war literature as well as several articles on hate speech, depictions of violence in the media, on the quantitative analysis of paratexts and on sentiment and emotion analysis in texts.Mike Priddy is a Senior Information Systems Engineer at Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) based in The Hague, the Netherlands. He works across the Social Sciences and Humanities on a range of European research infrastructures and development projects, specialising in architectural, process and quality modelling as well as project management. He has been involved in specifying and creating research infrastructures since 2005, including in that time, DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities preparatory phase) DASISH (Data Services Infrastructure for the Social Sciences and Humanities), DwB (Data without Boundaries), EHRI (European Holocaust Research Infrastructure phases 1 & 2), CESSDA-SaW (Strengthening and Widening), HaS-DARIAH (Humanities at Scale).
Summary
Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023
This open access book explores the challenges society faces with big data, through the lens of culture rather than social, political or economic trends, as demonstrated in the words we use, the values that underpin our interactions, and the biases and assumptions that drive us. Focusing on areas such as data and language, data and sensemaking, data and power, data and invisibility, and big data aggregation, it demonstrates that humanities research, focusing on cultural rather than social, political or economic frames of reference for viewing technology, resists mass datafication for a reason, and that those very reasons can be instructive for the critical observation of big data research and innovation.
The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Trinity College Dublin, DARIAH-EU and the European Commission.
Foreword
This book explores the challenges society faces with big data, through the lens of culture rather than social, political or economic trends, as demonstrated in the words we use, the values that underpin our interactions, the biases and assumptions that drive us.
Additional text
By examining the much-hyped phenomenon of ‘big data’ through a humanist lens, the authors provide a rich account of the possibilities and limits. They focus on the importance of culture and context for understanding how data are imagined, collected, analysed and understood.
