Скачать или смотреть SIAH Data Series 2022: Inequalities with Professor Helen Kennedy

The Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities (SIAH) Data Series 2022 explores how different research projects have engaged with pressing issues relating to data through the themes of citizen data literacies, data civics, and inequalities. The events will be online and are for University of Southampton colleagues. Each one-hour event will be led by project team researchers from with time for discussion.

Inequalities shape lives and lead to different data experiences, with already socially disadvantaged groups and people more likely to be discriminated against in data-driven systems. The relationship between inequality and datafication, therefore, requires our constant attention. A growing number of commentators are providing empirical detail about experiences of data-related inequality and discrimination (eg Eubanks 2018, Gangadharan 2020). On Living With Data, our research has highlighted how inequalities shape not only experiences of data uses, but also perceptions of them. For example, one of our surveys found that experiences of structural inequalities affect people’s feelings about everyday data uses. Our focus group research has surfaced inequalities that inform perceptions of datafication which are not widely discussed in data and inequalities literature, eg that relate to dis/ability. Our research has also highlighted how participants sometimes ‘decentre data’ to talk about things that matter to them, like fairness and in/equality. Or they imagine the experiences of structurally disadvantaged others in the face of data uses. In this paper, I present examples of the interesting and diverse ways in which inequalities surface across different Living With Data research, and I reflect on the kind of methodological orientation that is needed to centre inequalities in sociocultural research into datafication.

Helen Kennedy is Professor of Digital Society at the University of Sheffield where she directs the Living With Data programme of research. She is interested in how digital developments are experienced and how these experiences can inform the work of digital practitioners in ways that overcome inequalities. She researches perceptions of and feelings about datafication and the possibility of data-related agency. She is interested in things like trust, equity, justice, and what ‘the digital good’ might look like. Other current projects include Generic Visuals in the News and Patterns in Practice: cultures of data mining in science, education and the arts. Recent books include Data Visualization in Society (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and Post, Mine, Repeat: social media data mining becomes ordinary (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016).

Chaired by Dr Shelley Cobb (Film)