"Today's Data Grow Tomorrow's Citizens"What? Research data management, citizenship and democracy?

Keynote, CASRAI Reconnect 16Toronto, Ontario, October 24, 2016, 13:30-14:15

Dr. Tracey P. Lauriault - orcid.org/0000-0003-1847-2738Critical Media and Big Data

Media Studies and Communication School of Journalism and Communication

Carleton UniversityTracey.Lauriault@Carleton.ca

http://del.icio.us/tlauriau

Do we live in a data based

technological society?

Data and Everyday Life

Infrastructure

Technological and empirical fundamentalism?

Technopolitical Regime

• Grounded in institutions, linked sets of people, engineering and industrial practices, technological artifacts, political programs and institutional ideologies which act together to govern technological development and pursue technopolitics (Hetch)

• Large technopolitical regimes (Hetch) with momentum (Hughes, Feenberg) exhibiting infrastructural determinism (Lauriault & Lenczner)

• Invisible, human built technological fabric of society (Hayes)

Is there technical agency?

• Technology & data shape everyday life, similarly to law it shapes & provides a framework of our existence, for how we do things

• Technocratic ideology:• Technocrats are members of a technical elite, they rely on technical experts• Technical experts are scientists, engineers, statisticians, technologists, etc.• In this ideology, agency is not possible, because technical expertise is required

in order to act, the knowledge component of agency is lacking

“Increased level of abstractness makes it more and more challenging for laypersons and politicians to understand the functioning of contemporary

artefacts and infrastructures”

Feenberg (2011)

Kubitschko (2015)

Are Data Political?

Data power

Cover Popular Science

Data are even a platform!

Lauriault & O’Hara (2015)

What about research data? Are they political?

20101990 1995 2000 2005

National Data Archive Consultation

(SSHRC)

Stewardship of Research Data in Canada: A Gap AnalysisThe dissemination of government geographic data in

Canada: guide to best practicesStanding Committee on Industry, Science and Technology

Toward a National Digital Information Strategy: Mapping the Current Situation in Canada (LAC)

Canadian Digital Information

Strategy (CDIS) (LAC)

IPY

1985 2014

Open Data Consultations

Mapping the Data Landscape:

Report of the 2011 Canadian Research Data

Summit

Digital Economy Consultation,

Industry Canada

Community Data RoundtablePrivacy (Geo)Sensitive Data (Geo)Resolution of Canada’s Access to Information and Privacy Commissioners

Geomatics Accord SignedCanadian Geospatial Data Policy

Liberating the Data Proposal

VGI PrimerCloud (Geo)OD Advisory PanelOGP

G8

Subjectivities &

Forms of Knowledge

• Policies

• Reports

• Proposals

• Recommendations

• Consultation

Research Data Canada

Archiving, Management and Preservation of Geospatial Data

National Consultation on Access to Scientific Data Final Report

(NCASRD)

2008

20101990 1995 2000 20051985 2014

Data LiberationInitiative (DLI)

Geogratis Data Portal

GeoBaseCanadian

Internet Public Policy

Clinic

Maps Data and Government Information Services (MADGIC)

Carleton U

GeoConnectionsGeoGratis

Census Data ConsortiumCanadian Association of Research Libraries(CARL)

Atlas of Canada Online (1st)

CeoNet Discovery Portal

Research Data Network

How'd they VoteCivicAccess.ca

Campaign for Open

Government(FIPA)

Canadian Association of

Public Data Users

Datalibre.ca

VisibleGovernment.caI Believe in Open Campaign

Change Camps Start

Nanaimo BC Toronto

Open Data Portals

EdmontonMississauga launches open data

Citizen FactoryB.C.'s Climate Change Data Catalogue

Open ParliamentDatadotGC.ca

Ottawa

Ottawa, Prince George, Medicine HatData.gc.ca

Global TVHansard in XML

LangleyLet the Data Flow

GovCampFed. ExpensesMontreal OuvertFed.Gov. Travel and Hospitality ExpensesLondonHamiltonWindsorOpen Data Hackfest

Aid AgencyProactive.caDataBC

Hacking Health14 CitiesQuebecOntarioOGP

3 CitiesAlberta

G8

Community Data ProgramFCM Quality of Life Reporting

System

Geographic and Numeric Information

System (GANIS)

Materialities / Infrastructures• Consortia

• Portals/Catalogs

• Maps

• Open data/Open Gov Events

2009

Can we critically re-conceptualize data?

Critical Data Studies Vision

Unpack the complex assemblages that produce, circulate, share/sell and utilise data in diverse ways;

Chart the diverse work they do and their consequences for how the world is known, governed and lived-in;

Survey the wider landscape of data assemblages and how they interact to form intersecting data products, services and markets and shape policy and regulation.

Kitchin and Lauriault (Forthcoming 2017)

Data – big or small (& infrastructures)

Are more than a unique arrangement of objective and politically neutral facts

&

they do not exist independently of ideas, techniques, technologies, systems, people and contexts regardless of them being presented in that way.

Lauriault (2012)

Data Assemblage

Kitchin’s Data Assemblage, 2015

Material Platform

(infrastructure – hardware)

Code Platform

(operating system)

Code/algorithms

(software)

Data(base)

Interface

Reception/Operation

(user/usage)

Systems of thought

Forms of knowledge

Finance

Political economies

Governmentalities & legalities

Organisations and institutions

Subjectivities and communities

Marketplace

System/process

performs a task

Context

frames the system/task

Digital socio-technical assemblage

HCI, remediation studies

Critical code studies

Software studies

Critical data studies

New media studies

game studies

Critical Social Science

Science Technology Studies

Platform studies Places

Practices

Flowline/Lifecycle

Surveillance studies

Doing data citizenship?

Agency and Citizenship in a Technological Society

“Citizenship implies agency, but what is agency and how is agency possible in a technologically [data based] advanced society where so

much of life is organized around technological [data driven] systems commanded by experts?”

Feenberg (2011)

Technological Citizenship

• Agency = Capacity to act

• Capacity to act implies 3 conditions:1. Knowledge

2. Power

3. Appropriate occasion to act

Ex. Politics – Citizen agency is the legitimate right and power to influence political events

• Need to close the expert-public gap

• Strengthen the ability of citizens to gain understanding of complex issues that co-determine socio-technical outcomes

Feenberg (2011)

Expert Culture

• Technology is complicated• Expert public gap

• Experts are called upon to play a role in helping citizens to fulfill their role in democratic constellations by strengthening citizen’s abilities to deliberate and debate public issues

• Democracy and expertise

• What an expert is, is conditioned by social realties

• Forms and modes shift with political landscape

• Expertise• High level of knowledge, skills and experience

Kubitschko (2015)

CASRAI

You are technical experts building a [the] research data management infrastructureYou are creating a technological framework…in the infrastructural trenches - standards, code, metadata, agreements, processes, procedures, regulation…You are a social-technological network…tackling the technocrats…You are engaged in databased technological politics - for a long timeAnd there is a high degree of abstractness in what you do

Technological Citizenship

• Are you doing this to make a Research Data Management Infrastructure?…better system, robust standards, solid agreements, persistent UIDs?

• Or is it more about• you being the technological experts, working to store, manage, disseminate and preserve data

so that we have the requisite artifacts to increase our data and technological literacy in order to build upon collective/collected knowledge?

• good technological and data based governance to enable knowledge production?

If that is you, then I hope you will mobilize your expert knowledge, your specialized data and technological power and act in such a way that we may have a literate and numerate democratic technological society.

Data and technological literacy, I believe, is indispensable in the current democratic system, and that requires having

access to data, data infrastructures - knowledge and technology - and dedicated skilled people and resources to

sustainably care for them. I consider research data management to be our duty.

References

• Barney, Darin. (2004) Network Technology, Chapter 2 in The Network Society, Cambridge: Polity Press. pp.34-68.

• Barney, Darin (2005) The Problem of Education in Technological Society, International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society, Vol. 1

• Feenberg, Andrew, (2011), Agency and Citizenship in a Technological Society. Lecture presented to the Course on Digital Citizenship in a Technological Society, IT University of Copenhagen, pp. 1-13, http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/copen5-1.pdf

• Kitchin, Rob (2014) The Data Revolution, Sage.

• Kitchin,Rob and Tracey P. Lauriault, Forthcoming, Toward a Critical Data Studies: Charting and Unpacking Data Assemblages and their Work, in J. Eckert,, A. Shears & J. Thatcher, Geoweb and Big Data, University of Nebraska Press , Pre-Print http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2474112

• Kubitschko, Sebastian, (2015), Hackers’ media practices: Demonstrating and articulating expertise as interlocking arrangements, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 2015, Vol. 21(3) 388–402. DOI: 10.1177/1354856515579847

• Lauriault, Tracey P. (2012), Data, Infrastructures and Geographical Imaginations. Ph.D. Thesis, Carleton University, Ottawa, http://curve.carleton.ca/theses/27431

• Lauriault, Tracey P. and O'Hara, Kathryn, Working Paper: 2015 Canadian Election Platforms: Long-Form Census, Open Data, Open Government, Transparency and Evidence Based Policy and Science (October 28, 2015). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2682638 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2682638

Abstract

In a technological society such as Canada, it is suggested that a specialized kind of expert citizenship is needed (Andrew Feenberg). In the era of big data, others suggest that there is a need to learn how to read algorithms and to study its high priests and alchemists (Genevieve Bell). While, doing citizenship requires a political ethics of technology to thwart technological and quantitative fundamentalism (Darin Barney). Finally, in the midst of a data revolution we need to critically re-conceptualize data (Rob Kitchin). Quite simply, in today's Canada doing citizenship requires data literacy, technical, philosophical and political. Access to print media - books, government documents, academic journals - in libraries and archives enabled a literate society, the prerequisite of a democratic system. I argue that good governance in knowledge producing institutions, is to have technological experts, both data creators and preservers, working to store, manage, disseminate and preserve data so that we have the requisite artifacts to increase our literacy and build upon collected knowledge. Data literacy I suggest, is indispensable in the current democratic system, and that requires having access to data, data infrastructures -knowledge and technology - and dedicated skilled people and resources to sustainably care for them. I consider research data management to be our duty.

Dr Tracey P. Lauriault, School of Journalism and Communication Carleton University

Bio

• Dr. Tracey P. Lauriault is an Assistant Professor of Critical Media and Big Data in the School of Journalism and Communication, at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is also a research Associate with the European Research Council (ERC) funded Programmable City Project, directed by Professor Rob Kitchin in Ireland and with The Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre in Canada directed Professor D. R. Fraser Taylor.

• Her research domain is critical data studies and she is actively engaged in public policy research as it pertains to data with civil society and government. Her ongoing research with the Programmable City Project entails three case studies investigating How digital data materially and discursively are supported and processed about cities and their citizens? At the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre (GCRC), she is involved in the archiving and preservation of geospatial data; legal and policy issues associated with data. As a consultant she has developed indicators of absolute and the risk of homelessness forthe Federation of Canadian Municipalities Quality of Life Reporting System and has coordinated the Canadian Council on Social Development Community Data Program.

• As a citizen, she is engaged in the promotion of evidence-informed decision-making as part of democratic deliberation and actively advances those issues within civil society organizations, academic institutions and government. This includes activities related to open data and open government in Canada, the Republic of Ireland and internationally. She is also the recipient of the Canadian Open Data Leadership award.