digital research methods at #AoIR2018

I had a great day at a digital methods workshop run by Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Richard Rogers, Tim Highfield and Tama Leaver this week at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Montreal. Well, actually it was a workshop on social media research. Given the small matter of GIS as a digital research method, not to mention semiotics and political economy as part of the app walkthrough method, I might start a one-person campaign to get a bit more precision in the labelling here. However, that is my only niggle about the entire day, which was incredibly interesting and helpful and thought-provoking. Here are my take-aways:

• Tim started off by urging us to be experimental and innovative. He pointed out that much social media research has relied on API-based methods, but Twitter is really now the only platform that allows decent access via its API, and Tim’s sense is that wasn’t going to last. Richard Rogers repeated this: increasingly, there is limited or no access to data to social media data, data is being deleted and data is not being archived. Jean too urged us to go beyond the database model of research.
• another issue about social media data is that the media themselves keep changing. New features are added, old ones tweaked or removed. Instagram posts can be edited and comments added months after the original post. So how do you as a researcher keep up with those changes?  (Tim and Tama have a book coming out on Instragram – and Instagram has altered hugely since they started working on it, with Stories probably being the most significant change.)
• a crucial reminder from Richard Rogers: begin with your research questions and then figure out what metrics might work – don’t start with the method! And lots of the day focussed how to generate the answers to empirical questions. But of course there are, or should be, theoretical positions driving those empirical questions. All the methods we discussed were what Richard refers to as “forensic”: the detailed analysis of clues, big and small, to identify a truth (there’s an interesting parallel with the Forensic Architecture research agency here). But forensics have to achieve particular forms of evidentiary reliability and I did wonder what sorts of questions and answers might be co-generated digitally if we worked with a different term to describe a different kind of method: symptomatic? evocative? machinic?
• there are lots of resources for learning more about these methods: the residential schools run by the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam and the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology are standouts here but there are also some QUT MOOCs here. (There are lots of other summer schools too – I know about the Digital Humanities Summer School at Oxford as well as the Oxford Internet Institute’s – please add any you recommend in the comments box below.)
• and finally, some words. “Mouse over” as a verb – as in “if you mouse over this dropdown menu…” – and the adverbs “appification” and “platformification”. (They’re what’s happening to identity, apparently.) And quantiquali, or qualiquanti – when digital methods are used to generate data that is then analysed using qualitative methods, or vice versa. Which kind of sounds like mixed methods, so perhaps another prompt for a more radical rethink about ‘digital methods’.

Finally finally, a big thanks to the presenters for a great day.

seeing the city in digital times: a lecture

I gave a keynote lecture at the Neue Kulturgeographie XIV conference a couple of weeks ago, at the University of Bayreuth. My topic was ‘seeing the city in digital times’. I talked about the challenges of keeping cultural geography relevant as a critical project when so much visual culture is now digital, and I shared my recent work looking at how so-called ‘smart cities’are pictured on YouTube and Twitter.   You can hear my talk and see the presentation that accompanied it here.

Listen through til the end if you can (or indeed just skip to about an hour in) because I got some great questions afterwards.  It was a privilege to speak as such an energy-filled event – thankyou to my hosts Matt Hannah, Eberhard Rothfuss and Jan Hutta.

smart city talk

I took part a month or so ago in an event organised by Georgina Voss and Wesley Goatley.  It was part of their Ground Resistance project at Milton Keynes International Festival, and as well as George and Wesley the panel also included Naomi Turner and Ramon Amaro.  We were discussing how smart city data, design, algorithms and advertising make a lot of assumptions about the sorts of social life that happens in smart cities.

All our talks are now on Vimeo and you can acess Ramon’s here, Naomi’s here and mine here.  A video of the closing panel discussion is here.

so what would a smart city designed for women be like? (and why that’s not the only question to ask)

I came across yet another smart city event yesterday with a line-up of speakers that was heavily male-dominated: 38 men and 12 women.  I tweeted, “what difference does it make that men outnumber women speakers at a #smartcity event by 2 to 1?  Sam Kinsley replied and pointed out, quite rightly, that this wasn’t actually as bad as some other events claiming to interpret the contemporary city (for a really shameful example, see Emily Jackson’s post here about a day conference organised by an ESRC-funded research project without a single female speaker – I can’t help thinking that someone high up in the ESRC should have a quiet word with the organisers).

Nonetheless, it’s not great, and it’s part of what seems to be a widespread marginalisation of women among the voices discussing and defining the ‘smart city’. (Ayona Datta joined in the twitter conversation, suggesting some reasons why it happens. ) One day I will find the time and energy to do a proper analysis of the gender balance in the images attached to the tweets of the main smart city players, for example, as well as a headcount of the speakers at the main smart city beanoes, just to confirm the point.  In the meanwhile, after I’d read that event’s line-up of speakers and done just a tiny bit of counting, here a few thoughts.

I’m assuming that the overwhelming dominance of men in the smart sector does have a major impact: on what tech is designed and how, on how potential markets are perceived, on what data is collected and what even counts as data, on how the smart city is imagined and therefore built.  (There’s so much relevant literature  on how digital tech design reinforces various kinds of social differences that I’m just going to point to a useful website that summarises some of it here.)  That impact will be both on what social identities are (often) visualised and assumed (both masculine and feminine) and also on what identies are then enacted as the data or device is used.  It would be great though to see some research really work at that question and interrogate my answer (and another ESRC-funded project, led by my colleague Prof Parvati Raghuram, promises to contribute towards that).

But maybe a more interesting question is: how to put women into the smart city?  Ok, so that’s already problematic.  ‘Women’ are a hugely diverse group of course, who do a gazillion different things.

However, as social scientists, we also know that there are patterns of activity within those gazillions.  Women still do more domestic labour than men.  Women still do more childcare than men.  Women still earn less than men.  Women are still objectified as sex objects in demeaning ways.  So a smart city for women might, say, be focussed a lot more on transport apps that don’t assume that the traveller is one adult, but might allow options for adult(s)+children+(contents of a shopping trolley).  It might entail crowd-sourced mapping that pays as much attention to the various forms of childcare (breakfast clubs, nurseries, kindergartens, childminders, after-school-clubs, youth clubs) as it does to drinking venues (as Sarah Elwood and Agnieszka Leszczynski have argued here).  The tech of a smart city would assume and enable a wide and diverse range of social actions by people in all sorts of combinations and conditions.

But of course we also want to challenge those patterns, and many other inequalities too.  I’m currently touring a talk about corporate visions of smart cities and I often get asked about “bottom-up, participatory, critical alternatives” (a lot of assumptions going on there that should also be unpacked); the example of lot of questioners come up with are the many apps that allow women to log how safe they feel in particular locations and to send messages for help really easily in an emergency.  On the one hand, great.  City spaces are certainly not always easy for women to inhabit, and some apps make that even worse (again, Sarah Elwood and Agnieszka Leszczynski discuss this most excellently), so it’s fantastic that there are apps in response to that.  On the other hand, there’s something profoundly depressing – and disempowering – when the most frequent way women appear in smart cities is as the victims of violence.

So asking about putting ‘women’ into smart cities is maybe not the right question, or maybe not the only question to ask.  Not only does it erase the many differences among women, it also doesn’t always negotiate the line between ‘difference’ and ‘stereotype’ adroitly enough.

So maybe we also need a somewhat different agenda, which is more about moving between and against specific forms of difference via digital data and devices.  There are those all-too-familiar issues that ‘women’ face.  There are ways in which the design and use of digital devices can intensify those issues.  But other digital activity might have quite other effects.  In relation to those intensifications, for example, is there also something quite liberating, in some ways at least, to be mediated as a geolocated point in space, rather than as a visualised body encoded through gendered, classed, racialised and other ways of seeing?

Which suggests that, in a smart city, ‘women’ can be both: both embodied and a datapoint.  Among other things (a selfie, eg).  How then can ‘women’ be imagined, in a smart city?

This suggests that another approach to thinking about ‘women in a smart city’ would be to focus on how different social categories are constituted in the first place, when various things are done in cities with digital technologies.  That’s the sort of question asked by lots of sociotechnical scholars, of course.  But also by feminist scholars of data visualisations like Catherine D’Ignazio and the digital humanities like Johanna Drucker.  Their work focuses much more on the production of data in the first place and its problematic relation to social identities and the practices through which identities are enacted – data’s diversity, provisionality and unreliability, its uncertainty – and it focuses attention in particular on the process of turning data into something – a platform, an app – that enables certain social performances.  That is, it would be less focussed on ready-made categories of social difference and more on the processes of making data and making with data.

How would a mobility app or a city dashboard build that kind of data provisionality that into its interface?  I have no idea!  How would its users react?  Ditto!  But I would love to talk to interface designers about it.

Particularly because these are of course extremely sketchy and initial thoughts.  I hope to elaborate them in future posts on how smart cities are visualised in particular – but it would also be great to hear them raised too in some of those flashy smart city events.

smart cities and drone warfare: a shared visuality?

Geographer Derek Gregory was in Cambridge recently, delivering the Clare Hall (that’s a college, not a person) Tanner lectures.  Called ‘Reach from the sky: aerial violence and the everywhere war’, the two lectures were fantastic, a forensic account of the histories and geographies of drone warfare delivered with panache and rich visuals.  (Derek blogs about his work here.)

There were also three panellists responding to his lectures, journalist Chris Woods (check out his Airwars site), philosopher Gregoire Chamayou (author of Drone Theory) and legal scholar Jochen von Bernstorff, all also excellent.  Videos of both Derek’s lectures and their responses can be found here.

The first point to make – not a trivial one – is that at what, as the chair pointed out is one of the most prestigious lectures to be invited to deliver (at least according to Wikipedia), everybody without exception on the platform was a man.  And not only that, in the discussion time with the audience, the first 45 minutes were filled with men asking questions.  I was waving my hand NEXT TO THE WOMAN WITH THE MICROPHONE and the chair still contrived to avoid asking me to speak.  Finally, Chris Woods said he’d like to hear about drones from someone who wasn’t a man (thankyou, Chris) and I got to have my say.

So, what did I want to say?  Here’s an expanded version.

Well, Derek’s was a rich and nuanced account of drone warfare, embedding it in the historical geographies of aerial warfare more broadly.  One of Gregoire’s contributions was to say that there were also other contexts for understanding drones, not least the history of ‘counter-terrorism’, from urban police forces to colonial counter-insurgency operations.  But there is another context that kept occurring to me as Derek spoke: smart cities.

The link between drone warfare and smart cities isn’t that obvious on the face of it, but bear with me.  One of the reasons that drone warfare is increasingly acceptable to the states and organisations that conduct is that, as Derek described, it is embedded in a very specific set of spatialities, temporalities, visualities and subjectivities – and I would argue that many of those are shared with, or are at least very similar to, the rhetoric and practice of both drone warfare and smart cities.  Here’s a list of some of those similarities:

1 advocates of both smart cities and drone warfare share an absence of historical narrative so that their technologies can be seen as new, modern, better and more desirable.  (Which of course conveniently ignores various histories of failure, imprecision, rejection and unreliability.)

2 drone warfare and smart cities both claim to remove human actors from their practices.  This is often achieved via the generation of data (both smart cities and drone warfare convert (some) people into geolocated data in order to track them), and the execution of decisions on the basis of data.  There is thus a parallel between war being conducted by unmanned machines (drones) and smart cities being governed by databases and algorithms.

3 drone warfare and (many) smart cities are both managed through remarkably similar-looking command-and-control centres.

4 like drone warfare, smart cities rely on an elaborate cartographic and figurative visualisation in which the aerial view is central – and this appears in many of those command-and-control centres’ screens.

5 both are heavily masculinised fields of practice.  Derek is very good on this in the first lecture in relation to drones, and I’ve blogged previously about the dominance of men in smart policy, product design and marketing.  Derek also spoke at length about the ways in which drone warfare’s development was and is intimately bound up with (post)colonial power, and Gregoire underlined this too.

6 both smart cities and drone warfare are often resisted by the claim that they ‘dehumanise’ urbanism and war respectively (see point 2  above).  In drone warfare, not only are the victims of bombs delivered by drone rendered less-than-human (usually by being labelled ‘terrorists’ before being converted into geolocated data), but it is also argued that the men and women who control the drones are estranged and alienated by their work.  In smart cities, critics also complain that people are ‘reduced’ to data and that sentience is given to machines rather than people.  One of the things I found most useful in Derek’s lectures was the way he resisted this rhetoric by ‘peopling’ both the drones – which require a massive human as well as technical infrastructure to run – as well as their victims – as human agents embedded in complex societies.  Critics of smart cities tend to position the people/communities/inhabitants of cities against smart governance/corporations, as if the latter too aren’t run by people – which has various critical and theoretical ramifications, not all of which are helpful, I think.

Now clearly smart cities are not similar to drone warfare in the very fundamental sense that smart city tech is not designed to kill people.  And all those parallels that I have nonetheless proposed need nuancing of course.  Nonetheless, it’s interesting to speculate on what drives those similarities.  The patriarchal and racist “god-trick” of seeing everything from nowhere, dissected by Donna Haraway many years ago?  A deeply masculinist coding culture embedded in software corporations?  Nigel Thrift’s (2011) neoliberal, affective, “security-entertainment complex”?   A resilient scopic regime of surveillance, of the sort described by Nicholas Mirzoeff (2015)?

Whatever the answer, it’s a question that needs a lot more interrogation I think.  And in relation to smart cities, it’s one which won’t entirely be address using the current critical theoretical tools of data ownership and participatory design…

 

Thrift, Nigel. “Lifeworld Inc—and What to Do about It.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 1 (2011): 5–26.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. How To See The World. London: Pelican Books, 2015.

 

 

 

 

 

exhibitions visualising digital data

There seem to be a few exhibitions around at the moment – as well as one that ran for a few weeks and closed at the end of November, in Riga, called Data Drift – that look at the intersection of digital data and digital visualisations of various kinds.  Maybe there’re always these sorts of exhibitions around and I just haven’t noticed them, but if there aren’t, it’s kind of interesting that I found four in the past month or so.

One’s at Somerset House in London, focussing on data and called Big Bang Data, until the end of February.

Another is called Animated Wonderworlds at the Museum fur Gestaltung Schaudepot in Zurich.  It’s curated by Suzanne Buchan and runs til 10 January.  I was hoping to get to this one, but my plans were scuppered so I’ve had to make do with the exhibition catalogue and a YouTube video.  It’s focussed on animation rather than on digital data specifically but does include some data visualisations, and the catalogue has a great essay by Suzanne, which talks about just how pervasive digital animations are now.

And the third is at the Institute for Unstable Media (what a great name – though I guess all institutes are made of unstable media…) in Rotterdam.  Its title is Data in the 21^st Century and it’s on until 14 February, exploring the frictions between ‘data’ and ‘reality’, according to its homepage.

As I haven’t actually been to any of these shows, this is more of a hand-wave than a proper blog post.  Interesting, though, that there’s so much work by artists, designers and digital humanists (Lev Manovich features in all but Digital Wonderlands, I think) using visualisations to interrogate data.  The claim that data – especially the big data sets generated by so much of the digital infrastructure of everyday life now – is understood more easily if it’s visualised is one that’s made very often.  I’m not so sure.  As others (like Johanna Drucker) have worried, once data is visualised, certain questions about it are prioritised over others.  A visualisation (as Suzanne Buchan argues about animations) invite affective responses, they let us “see the unseeable”, to quote Suzanne, and we can get carried away into their beautiful, glowing worlds.  That can be a wonderful thing.  But it also makes the robustness of the data, and the process of visualisation (both the technical process and the labour process) much harder to see, in fact.  Making something visible always seems to entail making something else much less visible.

being provoked by an essay on ‘what is 21st century photography’

I commented in passing in my previous post on the freedom that a blogpost offers: to write more loosely and widely than you can in an academic paper.  And along comes an outstanding blog post – well, a blog essay really – that demonstrates that in spades.  The post is Daniel Rubenstein‘s ‘What is 21st Century Photography‘ and it’s on The Photographers’ Gallery website.  It’s racy, provocative, covers several centuries, is stuffed full of quotable aphorisms, and has a clear argument to make.

I think that argument is very interesting.  Its key claim is that:

in a post-Fordist society the locus of political agency and of cultural relevance has shifted from the object – as visually arresting as it might be – to the processes that (re)produce and distribute the object. Processes, however, by their own nature, are less visible and less representational than objects. For that reason, it seems to me that if photography mainly concerns itself with representations of objects in space, it is losing its relevance in a world in which speed, acceleration, distribution and self-replication acquire a significance that overshadows the visual appearance of spaces.

Which leads to probably my favourite line in the whole essay.  If a photograph is now something that is just occasionally assembled from a wave of data that continually shapes all kinds of visual forms – then, says Daniel: “it has little in common with prints in black frames – these coffins of photography”. ‘Coffins’.  Fab.

The post has lots of insights and pleasures then, though I wasn’t sure about the ‘invisible puppet masters’ who are our ‘real rulers’, and I did feel that its recuperation of photography in its very final line – “photography is not a stale sight for sore eyes, but the inquiry into what makes something an image. As such, photography is the most essential task of art in the current time” – was bit of a failure of nerve.  Maybe photography is just past it?

All this interesting provocation is in sharp distinction to what I was going to discuss on this post, which is Nicholas Mirzoeff’s new book on visual culture, modestly called How To See The World.  I was sent this by the publisher so I perhaps shouldn’t look a freebie too directly in the mouth… but.  The book is bit of a mess, I think.  It attempts the sweeping overview but there’s no clear analytical framework, let alone theory, to guide it, and there are also some quite irritating – well, to be frank, just plain wrong – generalisations.  One of which is that images now are all about time. (We know this because an artist made an artwork with lots of clocks in it, apparently.)  As for example Hito Steyerl, and many others, myself included, argue, it is absolutely necessary now to have a sense of the spatiality of (what is better understood as) visual data, as well as its temporality: its form as a swarm, population or wave; its immersivity; its materialisations; and its geometry as a network.  I think one of the difficulties in Mirzoeff’s book is actually that he remains fixed on images as the problematic rather than these sorts of spatialities that articulate their production and circulation and use, so that he flits from place to place, example to example, without thinking about they might (or might not) join up in some way.

But that’s my query to Daniel too: what are the geographies to his account?  Where does the data move, pause and decay?  How is it circulating, and with what effects in different places?  And how are places themselves being reconfigured in this process?

cultural analytics: to be continued

I spent last weekend at a workshop on ‘visual methods in cultural studies’, hosted by the Department of Urban Culture and the Institute of Cultural Studies at the Adam Mickiewicza University in Poznan, Poland.  It was interesting, and I got lots of pointers from Polish colleagues who approach cultural studies from the humanities rather than the social sciences.  One of them is the Software Studies Initiative site, hosted by Lev Manovich and oriented to/from the digital humanities.

It discusses what Manovich calls ‘cultural analytics’: working with big datasets (of images, in his case), to show differences in a dataset both visually and spatially.  As well as some theoretical discussion pieces (one of which claims that scholars no longer have to choose between depth and breadth in their methodology), there’s lots of hands-on advice for doing this sort of analytics, and even a software package to download and play with called ImagePlot.  (When did it become trendy for one-word titles to have two capital letters?)

a visualisation of a million black and white manga pages

Having got over my embarassment at not already knowing about this site, I immediately thought about using this package to analyse the digital visualisations that my current research project is examining.  These are visualisations of an urban redevelopment project currently under construction in Doha, Qatar.  There are probably millions of these visualisations, if you take into account all the different versions of every image made as the project has evolved since its initial design work in 2008.  Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, to run these through ImagePlot and get some sort of visual description of the lot: the colours, the tones, the hues, the saturation.  This would be interesting because a lot of effort and discussion seems to have gone on about getting these aspects of the images ‘right’: right in terms of accurately reflecting the light in Doha but also in terms of conveying the right sort of ‘atmosphere’ for the development.  ImagePlot would presumably allow us to show these colour qualities directly.

But even if cultural analytics makes the possibility of such an analysis real, there are still difficulties.  In this case, the database itself.  I don’t have access to all those images and I’m not sure I ever would because they are scattered across hundreds of servers and hard drives in the offices of architects, visualisers and developers.  So there still seems to be a crucial issue for big data analytics about access to data; and about the (dare I say it) representativeness of the data that you can get your hands on.

I look forward to delving deeper into the Software Studies Initiative site to learn more about this and – I’m sure – many other aspects of visual cultural analytics.