Big Data from the bottom up

By Nick Couldry, Alison Powell. 2014

197 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This short article argues that an adequate response to the implications for governance raised by ‘Big Data’ requires much more attention to agency and reflexivity than theories of ‘algorithmic power’ have so far allowed. It develops this through two contrasting examples: the sociological study of social actors used of analytics to meet their own social ends (for example, by community organisations) and the study of actors’ attempts to build an economy of information more open to civic intervention than the existing one (for example, in the environmental sphere). The article concludes with a consideration of the broader norms that might contextualise these empirical studies, and proposes that they can be understood in terms of the notion of voice, although the practical implementation of voice as a norm means that voice must sometimes be considered via the notion of transparency.

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Citations in the corpus

Critique and Contribute: A Practice-Based Framework for Improving Critical Data Studies and Data Science (2017, background): “Data can become the impetus for a conversation or an opportunity to make a connection(23) and can offer ‘‘voice’’ and other forms of expression.(44) Data ‘‘may be contested at the boundaries of institutions and communities’’ (p.”
Social Injustice in Surveillance Capitalism (2017, background): “…‘social media dashboards’ that collate, aggregate, and correlate one’s behaviours, activities, and preferences, coupled with data literacy initiatives, could empower people to engage in personal and collective analytics, a grassroots data science (see also Couldry and Powell 2014).”
What Communication Can Contribute to Data Studies: Three Lenses on Communication and Data (2017, background): “We should seek ways individuals can participate, collaborate, and rectify unjust power distributions (Couldry & Powell, 2014).”
The Bottom of the Data Pyramid: Big Data and the Global South (2016, unknown): “This fits well with the current call by Couldry and Powell (2014) to situate the “notion of voice” at the center of analyzing the cultures of datafication.”
Big Data from the South(s): Beyond Data Universalism (2019, background): “…attention to “small” or “good enough” data produced by nonexperts (Gabrys et al. 2016; Kitchin and Lauriault 2015), to bottom-up practices (Couldry and Powell 2014), everyday forms of critical engagement with data (Kennedy and Hill 2017), and feminist approaches to data and their uses (D’Ignazio…”