The Allure of Big Data
Friday 25th April 2014, Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, LSE
The aim of the workshop is to open up and critically approach the developments subsumed under the label of Big Data. Much of the ongoing debate underscores the opportunities to make informed decisions on the basis of inferences, drawn from large pools of data generated in the global digital ecosystem. But there may be good reasons to wonder whether these developments signal a change of larger proportions. Big Data reinforces a characteristically modern reliance on quantified techniques of decision-making, while producing timely outputs that enable continuous evaluation and (re)action. However, the increasing reliance on quantitative descriptions of reality that Big Data promotes is often predicated on data of a particular kind, quality and coverage.
Data produced in the global digital ecosystem reflects a miscellaneous array of motives and practices that contrast rather sharply with the purposeful, systematic, structured and often expertise-based activities through which corporations and the state have generated data. Much of what is subsumed under the label of Big Data is, in fact, the outcome of large, shifting and transient online crowds (often referred to as social data) whose internet whereabouts captured as data reinsert the messy contingencies of everyday living and personal pursuits at the heart of public and institutional life. In this workshop we will discuss how developments in Big Data perturb established boundaries and refigure a great deal of social practices along with the prevailing relations of power, surveillance and accountability.
Keynote Speaker: Theodore M Porter (UCLA)
Autonomous Information: Antecedents and Consequences of Big Data
In the internet age, the production and management of data has become exciting, again. And yet, like several generations of information technologies, this one has depended on the production of boring routines. It is easy to overlook the historic significance of paper forms, filing systems, and index cards, of tabular and then graphical representation, of the technologies of census, sampling, and measurement of uncertainty. As early as 1830, the “avalanche of numbers,” encouraged the idea that we might act effectively without understanding or explaining, giving shape to the modern alchemy of transforming data into evidence. Data and statistics have become integral to an ambition to act and choose automatically, without hypothesis and even apart from human understanding. But some problems never go away, first of all the impediments to seamless standardization. To categorize, count, and calculate depends on the fabrication of homogeneity, sometimes through manufacturing technologies, but often by means of informational ones. It has not proved possible to banish those fields of tragic mismeasurement and spaces of exploitable ambiguity which continue, for better and worse, to undermine our best-laid plans in such arenas as medicine, education, and finance.
Book your place
Registration is required. Due to limited space in the theatre, places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
Conference Organiser:
-
Jannis Kallinikos, Professor and Head of Group, Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management, LSE
Conference Administrator:
-
Fran White, Research Coordinator, Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management, LSE
Programme
SSIT 14 Programme
|
09.00
|
Registration - coffee
|
|
09.30
|
Welcome and Introduction, Prof George Gaskell, Pro-Director, LSE
|
|
09.45
|
Workshop Outline
Prof Jannis Kallinikos, Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management, LSE
|
|
10.00
|
Keynote Speech by Prof Theodore Porter, UCLA, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
Autonomous Information: Antecedents and Consequences of Big Data
|
|
11.15
|
Coffee Break
|
|
11.30
|
The Myth of Big Data: Challenges for Hermeneutic Social Science
Prof Nick Couldry, Department of Media and Communication, LSE
|
|
12.30
|
Lunch Break
|
|
14.00
|
Panel on 'Big Data and Innovation'
Chaired by Dr Carsten Sorensen, ISI Group, Department of Management, LSE
Panellists
Al Bhimani, Department of Accounting, LSE,
Dr. Leon Michael Caesarius, Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden,
Louis Fernandes, Director, Market Development, SAS
Prof Youngjin Yoo, Fox Business School, Temple University, US
|
|
15.30
|
Coffee Break
|
|
16.00
|
Social Data as Medical Facts: Web-based Practices of Expert Knowledge Creation
Professor Jannis Kallinikos and Niccolo Tempini (PhD Candidate), Information Systems and Innovation Group, Department of Management, LSE
|
|
17.00
|
Techniques of Abstraction: Big Data in an Ecology of Practices
Prof Matthew Fuller, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College
Dr Andrew Goffey, Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham
Prof Adrian Mackenzie, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University
|
|
18.00
|
Workshop Close. Followed by evening reception, 8th Floor, New Academic Building
|
SSIT Open Research Forum
(Related event for PhD students and early years researchers)
Thursday 24th April 2014 - click here for details.