Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data

✍ Scribed by Ganaele Langlois; Joanna Redden; Greg Elmer (editors)

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 297
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1 Introduction: Compromised Data—From Social Media to Big Data
The mineable social
Big social data and governance
Compromised data
Rebuilding the social
References
Part One: Data, Power, and Politics
Chapter 2 Big Data as System of Knowledge: Investigating Canadian Governance
Introduction
Method
Findings
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3 Data Mining Research and the Disintegration of Society: The “Project X” Haren Riots
Understanding the “Accidental” Haren riots
The mediated suppression of social despair and disintegration
The rioters as technocratic “war machines”
Fatalities: The ghostly return of the humanist spirit
References
Chapter 4 Look at the Man Behind the Curtain: Computational Management in “Spontaneous” Citizen Political Campaigning
Introduction
Change.org to the rescue: Trayvon Martin and “GOTP” campaign techniques
MoveOn.org effect 2, electric boogaloo
We The People’s neutral administrative logic
Comparative affordances
A week in the life of a distributed petition site
Stability
Signature growth
Additional trends
Conclusion: Divergent logics and escaping the warehouse metaphor
References
Part Two: Data Limit(ed)
Chapter 5 Easy Data, Hard Data: The Politics and Pragmatics of Twitter Research After the Computational Turn
The implications of the computational turn
Platform politics and regimes of access
The changing scientific affordances of twitter data
Conclusions
References
Chapter 6 Scraping the First Person
Scraper analytics
Screen and interface scraping
Crawler scraping—index and content
API scraping
Conclusions
References
Chapter 7 Openness Compromised? Questioning the Role of Openness in Digital Methods and Contemporary Critical Praxis
Introduction
Digital methods and the value of opening
Digital methods and the exploit
Opening up the black box of the Web: Web archiving and its praxis
The convenience of open data for the digital enclosure
Platform studies and me-centricity
Is openness still relevant?
References
Chapter 8 Critical Reverse Engineering: The Case of Twitter and TalkOpen
Introduction
Reverse engineering and the humanities
The pragmatic orientation
The genealogical orientation
The legal orientation
The normative orientation
Reverse engineering twitter: The case of TalkOpen
Pragmatic
Genealogical
Legal
Normative
What went wrong with TalkOpen?
Conclusion: Critical reverse engineering as a bridge between engineering and humanities
References
Part Three: Alt-Data
Chapter 9 Mapping Movements—Social Movement Research and Big Data: Critiques and Alternatives
Introduction
Big data and social movements
The ethics of social movement research
New biases in data collection and analysis
Mapping big data methodologies for social movement research?
Concluding thoughts and directions forward
References
Chapter 10 Data Activism
Introduction
Transindividuation and data activism: Socio-technical and political considerations
Occupy Streams: Data and social media platform politics
Occupy Data: Data visualization and knowledge production
Creative data activism
Conclusions
References
Chapter 11 A Contribution to the Political Economy of Personal Archives
Introduction
The archive after decentralization
Archive and milieu
Objects and care
Conclusion
References
Chapter 12 The Haunted Life of Data
Introduction: A case for small data
The Bargh controversy
Hans the horse: Scene 1—Refraction
Bargh’s retort: Scene 2—Resurrection and the work of interference
Letting the horse lie: Scene 3—Resurrecting ghosts and diffractive reading
Denouement: Setting the record straight
Acknowledgments
References
Index