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Frequent public uproar over forms of data science that rely on information about people demonstrates the challenges of defining and demonstrating trustworthy digital data research practices. This paper reviews problems of trustworthiness in what we term pervasive data research: scholarship that relies on the rich information generated about people through digital interaction. We highlight the entwined problems of participant unawareness of such research and the relationship of pervasive data research to corporate datafication and surveillance. We suggest a way forward by drawing from the history of a different methodological approach in which researchers have struggled with trustworthy practice: ethnography. To grapple with the colonial legacy of their methods, ethnographers have developed analytic lenses and researcher practices that foreground relations of awareness and power. These lenses are inspiring but also challenging for pervasive data research, given the flattening of contexts inherent in digital data collection. We propose ways that pervasive data researchers can incorporate reflection on awareness and power within their research to support the development of trustworthy data science.
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Seeking Liberation: Surveillance, Datafication, and Race
Critical data studies, a body of emergent research that draws on surveillance studies and other fields, investigates datafication, the increasing mediation of many forms of sociality by data-intensive, networked computation. Such research draws on well-trodden criticisms of the representational capacities of data and has recently offered the term “data justice” to direct this scholarly formation toward the harms of datafication. By failing to explicitly foreground the way that the capture and consultation of data constitutes a tactic by which the state sorts, controls, and limits the freedom of minoritized peoples, critical data studies substitutes an interest in describing forms of injustice for a commitment toward its undoing. I use McKittrick’s (2021) term “seeking liberation” to orient both surveillance studies and critical data studies scholarship away from mere description of the practices of data-intensive computation and surveillance and toward a shared project of justice for minoritized peoples.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2047255
- PAR ID:
- 10505355
- Publisher / Repository:
- Surveillance Studies Network
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Surveillance & Society
- Volume:
- 20
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1477-7487
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 413 to 419
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v20i4.15983
