Data Power Thatcher, Jim E; Dalton, Craig M
2022
eBook
Open access
In recent years, popular media have inundated audiences with sensationalised headlines recounting data breaches, new forms of surveillance and other dangers of our digital age. Despite their ...regularity, such accounts treat each case as unprecedented and unique. This book proposes a radical rethinking of the history, present and future of our relations with the digital, spatial technologies that increasingly mediate our everyday lives. From smartphones to surveillance cameras, to navigational satellites, these new technologies offer visions of integrated, smooth and efficient societies, even as they directly conflict with the ways users experience them. Recognising the potential for both control and liberation, the authors argue against both acquiescence to and rejection of these technologies. Through intentional use of the very systems that monitor them, activists from Charlottesville to Hong Kong are subverting, resisting and repurposing geographic technologies. Using examples as varied as writings on the first telephones to the experiences of a feminist collective for migrant women in Spain, the authors present a revolution of everyday technologies. In the face of the seemingly inevitable dominance of corporate interests, these technologies allow us to create new spaces of affinity, and a new politics of change.
In light of recent technological innovations and discourses around data and algorithmic analytics, scholars of many stripes are attempting to develop critical agendas and responses to these ...developments (boyd and Crawford 2012). In this mutual interview, three scholars discuss the stakes, ideas, responsibilities, and possibilities of critical data studies. The resulting dialog seeks to explore what kinds of critical approaches to these topics, in theory and practice, could open and make available such approaches to a broader audience.
With an estimated one billion smartphones producing over 5 petabytes of data a day, the spatially aware mobile device has become a near ubiquitous presence in daily life. Cogent, excellent research ...in a variety of fields has explored what the spatial data these devices produce can reveal of society, such as analysis of Foursquare check-ins to reveal patterns of mobility for groups through a city. In such studies, the individual intentions, motivations, and desires behind the production of said data can become lost through computational aggregation and analysis. In this commentary, I argue for a rethinking of the epistemological leap from individual to data point through a (re)seating of the reflexive, self-eliciting subject as an object for spatial big data research. To do so, I first situate current research on spatial big data within a computational turn in social sciences that relies overly on the data produced as a stand-in for the subject producing said data. Second, I argue that a recent shift within geography and cognate disciplines toward viewing spatial big data as a form of spatial media allows for study of the sociotechnical processes that produce modern assemblages of data and society. As spatial media, the spatial big data created through mobile device use can be understood as the data of everyday life and as part of the sociotechnical processes that produce individuals, data, and space. Ultimately, to understand the data of everyday life, researchers must write thick descriptions of the stories we tell ourselves about the data we give off to others.
Recent years have seen an explosion in the investment into and valuation of mobile spatial applications. With multiple applications currently valued at well over one billion U.S. dollars, mobile ...spatial applications and the data they generate have come to play an increasingly significant role in the function of late capitalism. Empirically based upon a series of interviews conducted with mobile application designers and developers, this article details the creation of a digital commodity termed ‘location.’ ‘Location’ is developed through three discursive poles: Its storing of space and time as digital data object manipulable by code, its spatial and temporal immediacy, and its ability to ‘add value’ or ‘tell a story’ to both end-users and marketers. As a commodity it represents the sum total of targeted marking information, including credit profiles, purchase history, and a host of other information available through data mining or sensor information, combined with temporal immediacy, physical location, and user intent. ‘Location’ is demonstrated to exist as a commodity from its very inception and, as such, to be a key means through which everyday life is further entangled with processes of capitalist exploitation.
•Countries are being remapped for their renewable energy generation potential.•The maps are used to attract and guide investment as part of the global land rush.•Solar & wind energy have different ...geographies than food crops, biofuels, or mining.•A closer engagement between political ecology and critical data studies is needed.•The World Bank’s Renewable Energy Resource Mapping Initiative is analyzed.
In the context of climate change and concerns about fossil fuels, territories around the world are being remapped for their renewable energy generation potential. The World Bank and other institutions dominated by the global North are urging countries, especially in the global South, to undertake such mapping. The resulting maps are shown to potential investors in efforts to accelerate and direct the rapidly growing flow of capital into the renewable energy sector. These representations of territory and the new patterns of investment and land use they facilitate and foreshadow engage core concerns of political ecology: who claims, uses, and controls rural lands and resources; how are competing claims contested and legitimated; and who benefits or suffers as new visions of development, accumulation, and ‘sustainability’ are inscribed upon the land and new aspects of ‘nature’ are drawn into circuits of capital.
We make two arguments in this paper. First, the dramatic expansion of renewable energy production from abiotic sources is an important but under-researched component of the global land rush, one that differs in key analytical ways from the agricultural and extractive sectors examined by most scholarship in that domain. Second, since powerful new visualizations are central to this expansion, there is an urgent need for closer engagement between political ecology and critical data studies to analyze their production, deployment, and effects. We support these arguments through analysis of examples drawn from the work of the Renewable Energy Resource Mapping Initiative of the World Bank’s Energy Sector Management Assistance Program.
Over the past several decades, GISystems and GIScience have become established and valorized within the field of geography and geographic education. With the recent explosion in daily use of devices ...producing spatial data, such as smartphones, has come a renewed call to broaden the purview of Critical GIS beyond the desktop and towards these new systems of capitalist accumulation. In this viewpoint, we argue that any re‐examination of the role of Critical GIS must also consider the political economy of geography and geographic education in which GISystems are used for research and taught. We explicate three registers at which GISystems function within geography: that of the individual educator, that of the GIS user, and that of the military‐industrial complex in which GISystems were and are developed.
La pauvreté de la théorie des SIG : poursuivre les débats sur l’économie politique des SIG
Au cours des dernières décennies, les SIG et la science de l'information géographique se sont établis et ont été valorisés dans le domaine de la géographie et de l'enseignement de la géographie. Depuis l'explosion récente de l'utilisation quotidienne des appareils produisant des données spatiales, par exemple les téléphones intelligents, un nouvel appel a été lancé pour élargir la vision critique des SIG au‐delà de l'ordinateur de bureau et vers ces nouveaux systèmes d'accumulation capitaliste. Dans cette perspective, nous soutenons que tout nouvel examen critique du rôle des SIG doit également tenir compte de l’économie politique de la géographie et de l'enseignement de la géographie dans laquelle les SIG sont utilisés pour la recherche et l'enseignement. Nous expliquons trois registres avec lesquels les SIG fonctionnent en géographie : celui de l'enseignant, celui de l'utilisateur et celui du complexe militaro‐industriel dans lequel les SIG ont été et sont développés.
Key Messages
The political economy of existing GISystems must be understood at three levels: the individual educator, the GIS user, and the military‐industrial complex.
We must ask ourselves what kinds of GIS specialists and cartographers we are producing for what kinds of jobs.
We must not simply write a perpetual near‐present; it is necessary to look beyond what data are simply easily accessible in our research.
Thinking Big Data in Geographyoffers a practical state-of-the-field overview of big data as both a means and an object of research, with essays from prominent and emerging scholars such as Rob ...Kitchin, Renee Sieber, and Mark Graham. Part 1 explores how the advent of geoweb technologies and big data sets has influenced some of geography's major subdisciplines: urban politics and political economy, human-environment interactions, and geographic information sciences. Part 2 addresses how the geographic study of big data has implications for other disciplinary fields, notably the digital humanities and the study of social justice. The volume concludes with theoretical applications of the geoweb and big data as they pertain to society as a whole, examining the ways in which user-generated data come into the world and are complicit in its unfolding. The contributors raise caution regarding the use of spatial big data, citing issues of accuracy, surveillance, and privacy.
PDF
