Excess online coming to terms with users and data. Minna Ruckenstein

Transcription

1 Excess online coming to terms with users and data Minna Ruckenstein

2 HELDIG - Digital innovations and consumer society - Digitalisation of markets and consumption - Datafication of health and self-tracking - Human-technology relations - Data activism: MyData, OurData, NoData Working on articles on non-data-centric data activism, targeted advertisement and everyday notions of algoritms.

3 Aims of the presentation An introduction to the Suomi24 work that I am involved with Conceptual support for data work Positioning the work in terms of the current data economy

4 CITIZEN MINDSCAPES K. Lagus, J. Pakkasvirta, M. Pantzar, M.Ruckenstein, M. Ylisiurua

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6 SUOMI24 open data project ORIGINAL NUMBERS: 86% OF FINNS VISIT MONTHLY 70 OOO OOO COMMENTS 15 YEARS

7 1998 Kuva Nicklas Kosken arkistoista

8 1999

9 part of the effort to reverse the trend towards the private ownership of and differential access to data democratization of data access what kind of research culture the opening of data sources serves?

10 friction Open data serves the technologically-savvy research community Data and methods first? How to make data mining and analytics a more collaborative effort? Research questions first what kind of data is Suomi24 data?

11 Background Increasing availability of data on users and their online behavior Decreasing cost of collecting, storing and processing data Computational social sciences Digital Humanities Digital methods initiatives

12 Background Data mining takes advantage of quantifiable characteristics of discussions (words, likes, mentions, replies, hastags, location, time stamps) Digital methods promise powerful new ways of knowing what citizens and consumers say, do and feel. Access to data and analytics tools is very uneven, with large corporations and governments having a huge advantage in comparison to the research community. The tools and systems that generate knowledge from online data traces are rarely open to public or academic scrutiny.

13 Critics warn of a number of troubling consequences: less privacy and more surveillance, social and economic discrimination, deep personalization. Market/ing value: consumers categorized as targets or waste. The Citizen Mindscapes can be seen as a countermove promoting a more open approach to data mining, actively fostering the research community and possibly public life.

14 What kind of digital data? Proprietary data Secondary data not generated for research purposes Trash data Lively data Broken data

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16 The concept-metaphor of broken data Concept-metaphors are domain terms that open up spaces in which their meanings in daily practice, in local discourses and in academic theorizing can be interrogated (Moore 1999, 16) Concept-metaphors become defined contextually in practice; they are not meant to be foundational concepts, but work as partial and perspectival framing devices. Broken data, rotten data, lively data, dead data, dirty data, leaky data, sick data

17 Broken world theory Stephen Jackson asks what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the nature, use, and effects of information technology and new media? (2014: 174)

18 The data journey begins The Suomi24 data resided in the company servers for over a decade. Once the company decided to open the proprietary data for research purposes, a new infrastructure was needed for hosting the data. One such data infrastructure was already in place, the Language Bank of Finland, maintained by CSC (IT Centre for Science), which has been developed for acquiring, storing, offering and maintaining linguistic resources, tools and data sets The Language Bank gave a new life to the Suomi24 data: it was repurposed as research data for linguistics. The Korp tool, developed for the analysis of data sets stored in the Language Bank allowed word searches, in relation to individual sentences but it did not accommodate the emotional rhythms and topical patterns characteristic to online discussions that the Citizen Mindscapes collective was interested in.

19 BRIDGING RESEARCH DIVIDES language technology CONNECT LAB social sciences SUOMI24 DATA FIN-CLARIN, CSC LANGUAGE BANK K O R P Linguistic searches data analysis contextualizing data visualizations data analysis SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLBOX research ethics collaborative practices data sharing

20 Repair work begins In the past two years, the Citizen Mindscapes project has been repairing and cleaning the data in order to make it ready for additional computational approaches. This work has alerted us to breakages of data, raising more general questions about the origins and nature of (broken) data.

21 In academic research, what appears as broken data varies according to the discipline What appears as broken to a statistician, might be a research opportunity for a machine learning expert (or a cultural analyst) Isn t data always broken?

22 From the societal perspective, the Suomi24 data is broken, offering discontinuous, partial and interrupted views to individual, social and societal aims. The preparation of data for research that takes societal brokenness seriously underlines the importance of understanding the production of the data, including insights into how the data might be broken. The moderation practices of the company shape the data set by excluding certain kinds of messages. Moderators input needed for contextualizing the data

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24 messages : This message has been removed by admin.

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26 Clean and wild discussions Recent discussions topics that generate an exceptionally large amount of removed messages (personal communication): religion, particularly islam climage change nuclear power The Swedish National Party (RKP)

27 climage change and nuclear power same two people fighting, or are they, in fact, one person?

28 conspiracy theory and atheism partly same writers, religious themes, evolution (which is also a red discussion area)

29 pois pakkoruotsi no to obligatory Swedish

30 from echo chambers to discussion dynamics Finland24 discussions tell of clashes of ideas and human forces that threaten identities, the social order or the community Moral and political efforts exercised on behalf of identities and communities replicate certain battlefronts How to make visible the repetitious nature of these discussions?

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32 Mary Douglas (1966): Purity and Danger threats and dangers are condensed claims, eagerly used to stone opponents in those conversations which all communities have about their own construction (2000[1966], p. 43 ) E.g. Finland24 discussion about abortion

33 How to study Finland24 with Mary Douglas? A focus cultural categories and their social, moral and political justifications Finland24 discussions are useful for marking cultural divides and tensions Discussions give shape to cultural, social, political, moral relations: enables people to know their own identity and community and become a part of it How to make this dynamic visible?

34 organization and direction of discussion What is classified as risky and dangerous for woman/man/child/finnish culture/society? What is the underlying structure of the discussion? How does the talk recharge itself time and again? How does Finland become in these discussions? Metaculture Suoli24/Gut24 Emotional waves - fear-worry/joyhappiness talk

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36 Social physics Social physics relies on counting it can detect repetition, circulation, networks and transmutation of ideas But it remains ontologically flat: it does not tell us why the replication or circulation occurs The social physics fails in digging deeper into the conversational dynamics and user positioning A bird s eye view

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38 towards knowing publics How could the Citizen Mindscapes project be used in ways that enable to reflect on matters of shared concern, and decide how to act collectively, thereby allowing known publics to constitute themselves as more reflexive and active agents? Could the project be part of producing conditions in which the people, who share aspects and details of their lives on platforms such as Suomi24, could act with greater agency in relation to data mining and the knowledge produced through it? Social and political life of methods