While there are now an increasing number of studies that critically and rigorously engage with Big Data discourses and practices, these analyses often focus on social media and other forms of online data typically generated about users. This introduction discusses how environmental Big Data is emerging as a parallel area of investigation within studies of Big Data. New practices, technologies, actors and issues are concretising that are distinct and specific to the operations of environmental data. Situating these developments in relation (...) to the seven contributions to this special collection, the introduction outlines significant characteristics of environmental data practices, data materialisations and data contestations. In these contributions, it becomes evident that processes for validating, distributing and acting on environmental data become key sites of materialisation and contestation, where new engagements with environmental politics and citizenship are worked through and realised. (shrink)

How are data science systems made to work? It may seem that whether a system works is a function of its technical design, but it is also accomplished through ongoing forms of discretionary work by many actors. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork with a corporate data science team, we describe how actors involved in a corporate project negotiated what work the system should do, how it should work, and how to assess whether it works. These negotiations laid the (...) foundation for how, why, and to what extent the system ultimately worked. We describe three main findings. First, how already-existing technologies are essential reference points to determine how and whether systems work. Second, how the situated resolution of development challenges continually reshapes the understanding of how and whether systems work. Third, how business goals, and especially their negotiated balance with data science imperatives, affect a system’s working. We conclude with takeaways for critical data studies, orienting researchers to focus on the organizational and cultural aspects of data science, the third-party platforms underlying data science systems, and ways to engage with practitioners’ imagination of how systems can and should work. (shrink)

Many actors mobilize the cognitive, legal and technical tool-box of data protection when they discuss and address controversial issues such as digital mass surveillance. Yet, critical approaches to the digital only barely explore the politics of data protection in relation to data-driven governance. Building on governmentality studies and Actor-Network-Theory, this article analyses the potential and limits of using data protection to critique the ‘digital age’. Using the conceptual tool of dispositifs, it sketches an analytics of data protection and the emergence (...) of its configuration as ‘data protection by design and by default’. This exploration reminds us that governing through data implies, first and foremost, governing digital data. (shrink)

From ‘connecting the dots’ and finding ‘the needle in the haystack’ to predictive policing and data mining for counterinsurgency, security professionals have increasingly adopted the language and methods of computing for the purposes of prediction. Digital devices and big data appear to offer answers to a wide array of problems of (in)security by promising insights into unknown futures. This article investigates the transformation of prediction today by placing it within governmental apparatuses of discipline, biopower and big data. Unlike disciplinary and (...) biopolitical governmentality, we argue that prediction with big data is underpinned by the production of a different time/space of ‘between-ness’. The digital mode of prediction with big data reconfigures how we are governed today, which we illustrate through an analysis of how predictive policing actualizes between-ness as hotspots and near-real-time decisions. (shrink)

Fleur Johns argues that the contraposition of a ‘bottom-up’ approach of politics of prototypical technique rather than the ‘top-down’ politics of the master plan or normative principle no longer seems as straightforwardly radical as it appeared when James C Scott posited the value of local knowledge or métis against grand plans of high modernization, just over 20 years ago. This paper seeks to follow Johns’ call, ‘to capture and probe some of the effects of sensibility, rationality or style widely reproduced (...) in the details of development work’. It draws upon fieldwork in Nairobi to open up a discussion of a shift in sensibility from a ‘bottom-up’ or ‘postliberal’ approach to a framing of open-ended encounter. The paper critiques this imaginary of relational encounter by engaging contemporary work in critical black studies. It suggests that the problem of critique is that it reproduces the problems of governing imaginaries, continually seeking to rework the human subject via adaptive capacities, sensitivities to difference and openness to alterity, while leaving intact the coloniality of being, the antiblack world. (shrink)

Since the inception of recorded music there has been a need for standards and reliability across sound formats and listening environments. The role of the audio mastering engineer is prestigious and akin to a craft expert combining scientific knowledge, musical learning, manual precision and skill, and an awareness of cultural fashions and creative labour. With the advent of algorithms, big data and machine learning, loosely termed artificial intelligence in this creative sector, there is now the possibility of automating human audio (...) mastering processes and radically disrupting mastering careers. The emergence of dedicated products and services in artificial intelligence-driven audio mastering poses profound questions for the future of the music industry, already having faced significant challenges due to the digitalization of music over the past decades. The research reports on qualitative and ethnographic inquiry with audio mastering engineers on the automation of their expertise and the potential for artificial intelligence to augment or replace aspects of their workflows. Investigating audio mastering engineers' awareness of artificial intelligence, the research probes the importance of criticality in their labour. The research identifies intuitive performance and critical listening as areas where human ingenuity and communication pose problems for simulation. Affective labour disrupts speculation of algorithmic domination by highlighting the pragmatic strategies available for humans to adapt and augment digital technologies. (shrink)

How should we understand the surveillance state post Snowden? This paper is concerned with the relationship between increased surveillance capacity and state power. The paper begins by analysing two metaphors used in public post Snowden discourse to describe state surveillance practices: the haystack and the panopticon. It argues that these metaphors share a flawed common entailment regarding surveillance, knowledge and power which cannot accurately capture important aspects of state anxiety generated by mass surveillance in an age of big data. The (...) paper shows that the nature of big data itself complicates the power attributed to mass surveillance states by these metaphors and those who use them. Relying heavily on Ezrahi’s distinction between information and knowledge, the paper situates this argument concerning the state and anxiety borne of information overload in the context of literature that concerns the state and information management. Drawing primarily on James Scott’s work on legibility, it argues that the big data born of mass surveillance problematises the concept of information as empowering the state. Instead, understanding mass surveillance in an age of big data requires understanding the relationship between the surveillance state and information in terms of anxiety as well as power. (shrink)