The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures & Their Consequences

“As Couldry (2014), Kitchin (2014) and Mosco (2014) have recently remarked, it is important to clarify whether what we are observing is an academic or a governmental turn to actually taking up Big Data as a heuristic – or if it is more a case of powerful institutions using the discourse or ‘myth’ of…”

“Uneinigkeit besteht hinsichtlich der Qualität des Wandels durch Digitalisierung; die Befunde changieren zwischen Neuheit und gradueller Veränderung (vgl. Brynjolfsson & McAfee 2014; Kitchin 2014).”

“The rapidly maturing “Internet of Things”—an extensively networked deployment of sensors and information technologies—opens new avenues for conceptualization and realization of cities that are efficient, sustainable, equitable, and livable (Townsend, 2013; Kitchin, 2014; Ratti and Claudel, 2016).”

“Huge amounts of data are searched and clustered to produce patterns of correlations between data and thus to ‘discover knowledge in databases’ (Hildebrandt and Gutwirth, 2008, Kitchin, 2014).”

“This view also assumes that the enhanced objectivity afforded by Big Data offers superior access to reality as ‘ the numbers speak for themselves ’ (Andersen 2008) and contribute to a much-celebrated ‘ new era of empiricism ’ (Kitchin 2014: 170).”

“Apprehending a data infrastructure as a ‘sociotechnical assemblage’ foregrounds its complex relational composition, not just as a technical system but a concatenation of heterogeneous elements—human, technical, epistemic, political—assembled together to achieve specific aims (Kitchin 2014).”

“These are data-driven applications that allow real-time data processing and access to resources without requiring physical infrastructure (Kitchin 2014).”

“The predominant user-centric approach seems little more than a re-branding of top-down technocratic efforts of datafication (Kitchin, 2014).”

“Organizations and institutions are key apparatuses of the data assemblage (Kitchin, 2014).”

“These atmospheres are then able to produce and remake the world in, and within, particular visions (Kitchin 2014): reshaping augmented layers of geographic information and the ways that we bring those geographies into being.”

“However, as Kitchin (2014) noted, data are never neutral or prima facie lead to positive outcomes.”

“Similarly network data, like all social data, are not simply “given” by actual phenomena, but are selectively harvested according to pre-defined notions and theories (Kitchin 2014: 2).”

“In terms of public administration, datafication entails imperatives to improve efficiency and make organizational decisions divorced from the biases of individual decision-makers, a clear echo of the nineteenth and twentieth century ameliorative bureaucracy (Beer 2016; Kitchin 2014a).”

“…but we might also note that there is undoubtedly an intensification in the scale of data over that time, particularly as commercial organisations have joined in with the state to increase the infrastructures, scope, accumulation and deployment of data (Ajana, 2013; Beer, 2016; Kitchin, 2014).”

“Moreover, many of these civic apps seek to make the work of government transparent, accountable and comparable, and also enable the public to become more informed about issues and facilitate public participation in the civic realm and foster social innovation (Kitchin, 2014).”

“Critical data studies generally critiques the widely held understanding of data as an objective set of facts that exist prior to ideology, politics, or interpretation (Kitchin, 2014).”

“For Rouvray and Berns, technological innovation – particularly in the form of ubiquitous computation, machine learning and the ‘Internet of Things’ – has brought a crucial shift in the way we make sense of the world: knowledge is no longer created about data but from data (see also Kitchin, 2014).”

“Hence apps are created as part of many smart city projects (Abella et al., 2015; Dutta et al., 2019; Kitchin, 2014; Pereira et al., 2016; Shwayri, 2019).”

“Importantly, these data assemblages are responsive, dynamic and lively, constantly reconfigured as new data are generated and datasets are combined in different ways (Andrejevic, 2013; Beer, 2013; Beer and Burrows, 2013; Kitchin, 2014; Lash, 2006; Lyon and Bauman, 2013).”

“There are a number of examples of the productive role of data/metrics within urban governance (in particular see Kitchin, 2014a); often via city websites that offer various trackers and/or dashboards.”

“As the Google/Apple contact-tracing collaboration reminds public authorities and scholars (Ilves 2020), the design and deployment of even seemingly basic data and computing infrastructures does not happen in a socio-material and economic vacuum (Kitchin 2014).”

“Ethical Issues for Big Data in Social Welfare Serious ethical concerns have been raised about the use of big data both generally (see Boyd & Crawford, 2012; Kitchin, 2014, Chap.”

“Data-driven discovery in mineralogy represents one aspect of the dynamic ‘‘open data movement” that has the potential to change the pace of scientific discovery [76,77].”

“Even as few practitioners focus on the ethics of spatial Big Data (Paul, 2013), popular (Marcus and Davis, 2014), academic (Kitchin, 2014a), and state (Executive Office of the President, 2014) sources are beginning to question both the efficacy and morality of Big Data.”

“This underpins what Kitchin (2014) refers to as the data revolution that is radically transforming data collection, storage and analysis practices.”

“Building on the critical theorizing on data assemblages by Rob Kitchin (2014), I will argue here that data are assemblages that are more-than-human ontologies that consist of the forces of sociopolitical relations.”

“These results also suggest that the politics and economics of open data (Kitchin, 2014) can have a significant impact on gazetteers, and thus on geographic analysis and automated data processing.”

“Arguably there is also a role for such methods in addressing the Big Data Revolution.”

“Critics argue that this is the default approach to deploying Smart City technologies and this view contributes to the anxiety (i.e., privacy, governance, responsiveness) surrounding smart cities and big data.”

“Kitchin (2014) describes how the manufacture of data is greatly linked to their use: databases are designed and built to hold certain kinds of data and enable certain kinds of analysis, and how they are structured has profound consequences as to what queries and analysis can be performed; their…”

“…much talk recently of ‘Big Data’ and its implications for both social research and for the social world itself – this is understandable given the scale of the rhetoric and the potency of their imagined implications (for a definition and outline of the Big Data phenomenon see Kitchin, 2014: 67–80).”

“HEIs aim to capitalize on growing troves of data that are increasingly exhaustive, fine-grained, combinable (that is, relational), extensible, and scalable in part because the data (and data-analysis tools) are widely available (Goff & Shaffer, 2014; Kitchin, 2014; Lane & Finsel, 2014; Laney, 2001).”

“Staff today operate in what Kitchin (2014) calls data assemblages.”

“In this line, scholars have not yet resolved the ethical issue of whether public tweets are by default public data (Kitchin 2014), and they caution against considering social media posts publicly available where user expectations of privacy are lacking (Franzke et al. 2020), In general, teachers…”

“In particular, Kitchin’s work on data infrastructures and its impacts on the production of code/space has provided valuable critiques of the ‘technological solutionism’ that has now taken over much of governance and planning of cities (Kitchin, 2014; Kitchin et al., 2015, 2016).”

“…and models, data analytics technologies utilize advances in information management and storage, data handling, modelling algorithms, machine intelligence and expert systems that can ‘automatically mine and detect patterns and build predictive models’ based on large datasets (Kitchin, 2014: 101).”

“In short, data do not exist independently of the instruments, practices and systems of knowledge used to generate, process and analyse them (Bowker, 2005; Gitelman and Jackson, 2013; Kitchin, 2014; Ribes and Jackson, 2013).”

“…spotlight (Hollands, 2008; Marvin et al., 2015; Picon, 2015), and emphasized how digital technologies such as sensors, dashboards and data are seen to potentially solve (or, at least, address) persistent urban problems (Kitchin, 2014a; Krivý, 2018; Murakami-Wood & Mack-innon, 2019; Picon, 2018).”

“The UK sought to resolve this conflict through creating an Open Government License (OGL) in 2010, enabling the release of census, administrative boundary and some topographic mapping products as open data (Kitchin, 2014).”

“The proliferation of mobile computing devices and everyday digital activity (social media and networking, team working platforms, communications, and so forth) leave behind a wealth of digital traces about the users and the tasks they perform (Kitchin, 2014).”

“It is for this reason that Big Data discourses often concern patterns and correlations rather than knowledge of causal processes (Amoore & Piotukh, 2016; Chandler, 2015; Kitchin, 2014; Mayer-Schonberger & Cukier, 2013; McKenna, 2016; Morozov, 2013).”

“Die vielen sozialen Einschreibungen in diese technischen Infrastrukturen werden zwar bisweilen erwähnt (z.B. bei Kitchin 2014, S. 21 ff.).”

“In this way, citizens have been tied to the state through various forms of data collection and analysis over time (Bowker 2008; Kitchin 2014).”

“…greatly’ (Mayer-Scho¨nberger and Cukier, 2013: 191), but, more importantly, because we (humans) and digital data (be they personal, meta-or derivative) are continuously entangled in socio-technical assemblages (Amoore, 2011; Aradau and Blanke, 2015; Dalton and Thatcher, 2014; Kitchin, 2014).”

“And how can theoretical propositions guide in asking the right questions (Crampton et al., 2013; Kitchin, 2013, 2014)?”

“We contrast this latent data to openly expressed and exhaust data (Kitchin, 2014).”

“Taking a primarily technical approach to the definition, Kitchin (2014) identified seven features of big data: huge in volume, high in velocity, diverse in variety, exhaustive in scope, finegrained in resolution, relational in nature, and flexible in both its extensionality and scalability.”

“The content produced every day by social media platform users is vast and caries the typical characteristics associated with big-data, such as high volume, velocity and variety in data (Kitchin, 2014; Laney, 2001).”

“As Rob Kitchin argues, data can ‘fundamentally change the practices and organisation of research – the questions asked, how they are asked, how they are answered, how the answers are deployed, who is conducting the research and how they operate as researchers’ (Kitchin, 2014, p. 24).”

“This knowledge has become possible due to the global adoption of mobile information and communication devices in the age of the Big Data, while human interactions through mobile devices create digital footprints of people in space and time (Kitchin 2014).”

“Making government data available has been seen as the government’s obligation (Kitchin, 2014) but also as an opportunity (Mayer-Schonberger & Cukier, 2013).”

“As such, higher education is part of the ‘data revolution’ and ‘data deluge’ (Kitchin, 2014) with many believing that more or big(ger) data is necessarily better data (Prinsloo et al., 2015).”

“The advent of ‘‘Big Data’’ in scholarship has provoked debate about the paradigm changes—or lack thereof—resulting from increases in the size and number of datasets available for research (Anderson, 2008; Hey et al., 2009; Kitchin, 2014a).”

“…than focusing exclusively on the products of quantification or datafication, these projects may be viewed in relational terms – as ‘data assemblages’ (Kitchin, 2014; Kitchin & Lauriault, 2018) or ‘media ensembles’ (Moats, 2017) – in order to examine who and what data witnessing can attend to and…”

“…(Manyika et al., 2011), not only as a means of increasing efficiency, but also “for leveraging value from a company’s activities and its 1At the time of writing this article, there were over 189,000 datasets available on www.data.gov. relationships with suppliers and consumers” (Kitchin, 2014).”

“Rather they are positioned as sociocultural enactments, the products of specific interactions between humans and nonhumans (Boellstorff, 2013; Kitchin, 2014; Kitchin and Lauriault, 2014).”

“(Kitchin, 2014: 136) These points highlight that data scientists, big data analysts and algorithmists work in specific disciplinary, professional and scientific contexts and a thought community with its own distinctive style of thinking, schema of perception, mode of expertise, specialist language,…”

“However, critical attentions in regards to big data are relatively recent (Gitelman 2013, Kitchin 2014b) and should be considered during the data lifecycle stages including storage, access, manage, analysis, mining and modeling (Yang et al. 2017b).”

“Timely, reliable, accurate and comprehensive data can be collected at a relatively lower cost and they have thus become increasingly available (Kitchin, 2014).”

“The availability of these massive and complex data sets, or big data, is changing the paradigms of research and innovation in diverse disciplines (Kitchin, 2014), among them computer science, the economy, bio-informatics, sociology and political science (boyd & Crawford, 2012).”

“The key business models for transactional data can be broken into three discrete areas: market segmentation, supply chain operations and risk analysis (Manyika et al. 2011, Ferguson 2014, Kitchin 2014).10 To better illustrate this, let us imagine a brief account of a contemporary transaction.”

“In addition to offering opportunities, digital big data also present significant methodological and interpretative challenges (Kitchin 2014).”

“…independently of ideas, techniques, technologies, systems, people, and contexts” and should be understood as a “complex sociotechnical assemblage” (Kitchin, 2014, p. 24), and as “a knot of social, political, economic and cultural agendas that is riddled with complications, contradictions and…”

“It seems no coincidence that ethnography should be denigrated just as it has been specifically identified as a research approach that urgently needs to be mobilised to help societies understand the symbolic violences of quantitative data cultures (Kitchin 2014).”

“socio-technological business model concepts has been recognized (Kitchin, 2014; Singaraju et al, 2016; Vatrapu, 2013).”