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

“…terms – one such assemblage ‘composed of a set of apparatus and elements that are variously scaled (e.g., from local organisations and materialities to dispersed teams, national and supranational laws, and global markets) but are nonetheless bound in a unique constellation’ (Kitchin, 2014b: 186).”

“In this sense, data has a representational dimension (see, e.g. Kitchin 2014), and is a conveyer of information.”

“These studies naturally raised concerns that LBSM data sets may not be accurate, objective, or representative of the entire population (Kitchin 2014).”

“These are examples of the conflation of data volume with insight (Kitchin, 2014) as addiction intensifies.”

“…(Hintz et al. 2019; Lyon 2017), or about decisions made on people’s right to work or consume based on the analysis of data they have no control over (Kitchin 2014), assume preexisting freedoms that the urban or migrant subaltern, always oversurveilled and controlled (Hall et al. 1978; Mattern…”

“On the one hand, it has been argued that big data allows a new form of doing science based solely on data processing, often referred to as data-driven science, which has the capacity of explaining everything through data analysis (Kelling and others 2009; Miller 2010; Kitchin 2014b).”

“…in opposition to the methodologically controlled navigation through terra incognita which characterizes scientific research processes, rather than based upon ‘hypotheses that are more widely tested, which in turn are used to build and refine a theory that explains them’ (Kitchin, 2014, p. 135).”

“In this data-intensive era, the global adoption of mobile information and communication devices and human interaction through these mobile devices create digital footprints of people, both in space and time [55,56].”

“Im Zuge der Digitalisierung exploriert der Österreichische Arbeitsmarktservice wie andere Organisationen auch, wie sich die eigenen Datenbestände unter den neuen technologischen Bedingungen nutzen lassen (Kallinikos et al. 2013; Kitchin 2014).”

“…curated and managed, staffed by dedicated and specialist personnel who are dealing with multiple depositors, diverse interlinked data sets, and varying formats, standards, protocols and technologies, and seek to add value and ensure continuity (Borgman, 2007; Lauriault et al., 2007; Kitchin, 2014).”

“The critiques of big data alluded to above have been explored elsewhere at greater length (e.g. Kitchin, 2014b; Lazer, Kennedy, King, & Vespignani, 2014) so in this Editorial we wish to position the contribution in relation to the big data backlash that has emerged in recent months (e.g.”

“Nonprofits were founded to advocate for open data, such as the Open Knowledge Foundation and Sunlight Foundation (Kitchin, 2014).”

“Novel big data sources have diverse characteristics (Kitchin 2014), whereas sources that provide information on people from spatial and temporal perspectives are also referred to as mobile big data (Poom et al. 2020).”

“Social media data are generally referred to as ‘big data’ (Crampton et al., 2013; Kitchin, 2014), and the volume of usergenerated data worldwide is overwhelming (Toivonen et al., 2019).”

“Narratives of data are crucial for control over information asymmetries (Kitchin, 2014), while data-driven narratives are important for addressing the risk of being subjected to asymmetry-driven algorithmic invisibility, or to put it more simply, the risk of being “ irrelevant ” to an algo-rithm,…”

“…raised questions about these claims, by highlighting the difficult and complicated tasks needed for the use of Big Data in the sciences (Leonelli, 2014a), the technical impossibility of many data-driven claims (Kitchin, 2014b) and the role of hypotheses in research based on Big Data (Ratti, 2015).”

“Such barriers include the narrow scope of data sets; limited access; poor data quality, veracity and fidelity; ill-defined lineage; poor interoperability; suspect analytics and ecological fallacies; and a weakly developed skills base and organisational receptiveness (Kitchin, 2014b).”

“…the growth and unexamined nature of these sorts of analytics, as they permeate professional practice, is creating a particular form of rationality, and potentially a new epistemological order (Kallinikos 2010; Kitchin 2014) and this needs explicit discussion to try to ensure beneficial effects.”

“Understanding the development of smart cities as ‘a set of interlocking discourses that justifies and sus-tains new developments and naturalises and reproduces their use’ (Kitchin, 2014: 113) is helpful in tracing their development.”

“There are no established metadata standards for open data and few guidelines about what to include, making them a wild west of localized quantification (Kitchin, 2014).”

“10 The advent of biobanking ’ s growing popularity at the beginning of the century was accompanied by an explosion in data management and storage capabilities that are now a prominent feature of contemporary society (the “ big data revolution ” (Kitchin, 2014)).”

“Anticipatory value is not just a form of performative value, but also relates to the economic opportunities that data afford.(14) Private companies, nation states, public institutions (health systems, universities, biobanks), and academic researchers are increasingly aware of the value accumulating within big datasets…”

“The widespread availability of open satellite imagery and the increased digitalisa - tion of our daily lives have led to the emergence of large ‘exhaust’ datasets (Kitchin 2014) that can be reused.”

“Over the past decade, ‘Big Data’ has been positioned as the indispensable mode of 21st century research across academia (Boyd and Crawford, 2012; Kitchin, 2014a).”

“New technical media and platforms capture nearly every aspect of everyday life in a wide variety of environments as data (Kitchin, 2014; Mayer-Sch € onberger and Cukier, 2013; Van Dijck 2014).”

“Capture is purposefully measured in surveys, sensors, etc. while digital exhaust is the by-product of a separate data generation process not centered around an application’s primary purpose (Kitchin, 2014).”

“…and citizen-centric models, recent scholarship on smart cities has coined a number of hybrid terms such as ‘socio-technical assemblages’ (Kitchin, 2014) or ‘technopublic assemblages’ (Cowley et al., 2018), which understand these spaces as comprising a heterogeneous collection of…”

“…places (Hjorth, 2011), issues of surveillance and the disciplined or quantified subject (Burrows, 2012; Dodge and Kitchin, 2005; Foucault, 1977; Kitchin, 2014; Van Dijck, 2014) or university students checking social media during lectures (Bundgens-Kosten and Preussler, 2013), this is not in…”

“Data relates to raw material produced by abstracting the world into categories, measures and other representational forms such as numbers, characters, symbols, images, etc. (Kitchin 2014a).”

“Kitchin (2014) echoes this, stating that attention has been drawn to data produced by state agencies as they have already been funded by the public purse.”

“While a number of scholars praise big data especially in relation to economic planning and policy-making (Kitchin, 2014; Kleine and Unwin, 2009), others point to its many limitations as well as the threats it poses to personal freedom and democracy (arora, 2016; Crawford and Schultz, 2014; O’Neil,…”

“But I also want to suggest that the data of both are ‘constitutive’ (Kitchin, 2014: 21) and ‘framing’ (Gitelman and Jackson, 2013: 5) within a much wider datalogical system of healthcare and intervention.”

“Finally, without wishing to revisit debates about what constitutes Big Data, in Kitchin’s influential writing on the topic he notes that ‘Big Data has existed in some domains, such as remote sensing, weather prediction, and financial markets, for some time . . . ’ (2014a: 2).”

“In our analysis, we are also informed by political economy, which is identified by Kitchin (2014) as an apparatus to interrogate the broader context in which a data assemblage emerges.”

“(Kitchin 2014: p. 80) showed that the rapid growth of data in society is due to the simultaneous development of different technologies, infrastructures, techniques and processes, but also their implementation and embedding in social practices, spaces, and businesses: “ This new knowledge…”

“Data are produced “ by abstracting the world into categories, measures and other representational forms — numbers, characters, symbols, images, sounds, electromagnetic waves, bits ” (Kitchin, 2014: 1).”

“The specific mechanisms through which such technologies may develop and the promised benefits may be delivered, however, remain vague (Greenfield 2013, Kitchin 2014b, p 163).”

“If CDS theorists are right to suggest that data are never raw, but always dependent on social contexts that render data meaningful (Kitchin, 2014: 20), then the question arises what kind of subject is needed to cook the data.”

“…political mobilization, from governance and fi nance to urban development and labor relations, it is hard to imagine a domain that has not been subject to the multifaceted implications of digital platforms (Beraldo and Milan, 2019; Dazzi, 2019; Hendrikse et al., 2021; Kitchin, 2014; Zuboff, 2019).”

“…in urban environments, and visions of CAVs are often part of, or at least very similar to, prevalent depictions of the smart city as entrepreneurial, efficient and frictionless (Kitchin 2014; Goodspeed 2015; Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2016); and Milton Keynes is one of the UK’s leading smart cities.”

“Our main concern is with electricity as Big Data and it is only with the arrival of digital devices, infrastructures and analytical capabilities that key Big Data qualities (Kitchin, 2014) begin to materialise.”

“There is much attention today towards the many radical implications of big data in cities (Allam and Dhunny, 2019; Bettencourt, 2013; Kitchin, 2014; Thakuriah et al., 2017), but less is said about what is more quotidian, and the role of the routine in the production of big data.”

“Technological development is sociotechnical in nature and data, as an abstraction [28, 55], is not given but created through human discretion [68] and shaped by power dynamics [62].”

“Telegram’s combination of channels and groups, its automated bot functions, and encrypted capabilities are ● Real-time data collection (Kitchin, 2014a) ● Data from mobile phones to analyze urban systems and improve their efficiency (Ratti et al., 2006; Townsend, 2000) ● Real-time monitoring of…”

“Themes were compared and grouped as follows: (1) sources of data under Kitchin’s [19] typology, (2) analytical techniques were inductively grouped under roles to policing (3) policing activities under Braga & Schnell’s [20] intervention dimensions (environmental, enforcement and community outreach)…”

“Critical research into datafication has also been pursued in infrastructure and data governance studies (Flyverbom, 2016; Just, 2018; Kitchin, 2014) concerned with issues of power, regulation and communication policy.”

“Educating future researchers to pursue the standards of transparency and openness of data and materials provide vast opportunities for the scientific progress (Kitchin, 2014).”

“BusOnAir’s REST API publicly exposes transit data by following the principles of the open data movement (Kitchin, 2014).”

“…I refer to data infrastructures—“institutional, physical and digital means for storing, sharing and consuming data across networked technologies” (Kitchin, 2014: 32)—in the sense of archives, repositories, and cyber-infrastructures (Kitchin and Lauriault, 2015), rather than server farms (e.g.…”

“Big Data is often defined in terms of increased velocity, volume, and variety: data have become superabundant, produced continuously by new sensors, devices, and platforms (Kitchin, 2014; Matzner, 2016).”

“Despite its widespread utility, data analysis is often perceived as a challenging field with a significant “entry barrier” (Jordan and Mitchell 2015; Cao 2017), typically requiring knowledge in areas such as statistics, data science, and computer science (Kitchin 2014).”

“While AQ channel trace data presents a promising opportunity to examine artefacts of patterns of interaction with AQ information, speci fi c ethical and interpretive issues warrant careful methodological consideration (Amoore, 2011; Kitchin, 2014; Neff et al., 2017).”

“Serious concerns have been raised about the practical problems associated with the processes of generating, extracting and analyzing data (boyd & Crawford, 2012; Bollier, 2010; Kitchin, 2014).”

“Yet these inquiries often focus on Big Data as an already-constituted object, and it is less common for scholarly research to examine the relationship between the production of data, digital forms of labor, and the value of those data (though see Beer and Burrows, 2013; Kitchin, 2014).”