The paper aims at presenting the first empirical results of the research project B-DATA (Big Data Assemblages: Techniques and Actors). Under the umbrella of Science and Technology Studies (Latour 1987), which have long been used to define data infrastructures (Star and Ruhleder 1996), and influential in more recent works about the 'social life of data' (Ruppert 2015), or the ‘data assemblages’ (Kitchin and Lauriault 2014), B-Data inspects the practices and communities of three European data infrastructures to investigate the intertwined socio-cultural and material entities that produce/reproduce big and others digital data. The overall objective is to compare and contrast the practices of data collection and data management, and the interactions of the networks of actors that frame how data are produced and consumed. The results are drawn from focus groups and in-depth interviews of data teams, where respondents were questioned about the practices of setting objectives, design decisions and choices with respect to expert languages, influences, constraints, debates within team or with stakeholders. More specifically, the analysis presented in the paper focuses on three aspects: how interdisciplinarity is practiced and encouraged within the assemblages; the ethical implications of using digital data collected on a wide international scale and coming from a multiple network of administrations and corporations; some methodological issues of data curation (pre-analytics, metadata, harmonization, etc.) and data management (archiving, documentation, data security, storing and sharing, etc.) which arise in a context of multi-stakeholder informational needs and objectives.

Big data assemblages: techniques and actors / Aragona, Biagio; Felaco, Cristiano. - (2018). (Intervento presentato al convegno 7th STS Italia Conference Technoscience from Below tenutosi a Padova nel 14-16 giugno).

Big data assemblages: techniques and actors

Biagio Aragona;Cristiano Felaco
2018

Abstract

The paper aims at presenting the first empirical results of the research project B-DATA (Big Data Assemblages: Techniques and Actors). Under the umbrella of Science and Technology Studies (Latour 1987), which have long been used to define data infrastructures (Star and Ruhleder 1996), and influential in more recent works about the 'social life of data' (Ruppert 2015), or the ‘data assemblages’ (Kitchin and Lauriault 2014), B-Data inspects the practices and communities of three European data infrastructures to investigate the intertwined socio-cultural and material entities that produce/reproduce big and others digital data. The overall objective is to compare and contrast the practices of data collection and data management, and the interactions of the networks of actors that frame how data are produced and consumed. The results are drawn from focus groups and in-depth interviews of data teams, where respondents were questioned about the practices of setting objectives, design decisions and choices with respect to expert languages, influences, constraints, debates within team or with stakeholders. More specifically, the analysis presented in the paper focuses on three aspects: how interdisciplinarity is practiced and encouraged within the assemblages; the ethical implications of using digital data collected on a wide international scale and coming from a multiple network of administrations and corporations; some methodological issues of data curation (pre-analytics, metadata, harmonization, etc.) and data management (archiving, documentation, data security, storing and sharing, etc.) which arise in a context of multi-stakeholder informational needs and objectives.
2018
Big data assemblages: techniques and actors / Aragona, Biagio; Felaco, Cristiano. - (2018). (Intervento presentato al convegno 7th STS Italia Conference Technoscience from Below tenutosi a Padova nel 14-16 giugno).
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11588/757277
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