Critical Perspectives on Law, Technology & Society Reading Group

The Critical Perspectives on Law, Technology, and Society Reading Group will be reconvening for Lent on Tuesday January 22nd. As with last term, we’ll be meeting from 4pm to 5.30pm in the Beckwith Moot Court at the Faculty of Law.

On Tuesday we're looking at big data. We've provided you with a few readings to help get you thinking about what it is, what role it plays in new technologies and business models, what kinds of ideologies and assumptions are driving its production, gathering, and analysis, and what kinds of critical thinking can be applied to it as a phenomenon:

• Jose van Dijck, ‘Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology’ (2014) 12 Surveillance & Society 2;
• Francisco R Klauser and Anders Albrechtslund, ‘From self-tracking to smart urban infrastructures: towards an interdisciplinary research agenda on Big Data’ (2014) 12 Big Data Surveillance 2;
• danah boyd and Kate Crawford, ‘Critical Questions for Big Data’ (2012) 15 Information, Communication & Society;
• Rob Kitchin and Tracey Lauriant, ‘Towards Critical Data Studies: Charting and Unpacking Data Assemblages and Their Work’ (2015) The Programmable City Working Paper 2;
• Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns, ‘Algorithmic governmentality and prospects of emancipation’ (2013) 177 Réseaux 1.

A couple of questions that we'll be considering:

1) To what extent can a complex world be quantified?
2) What kinds of ideological assumptions underpin big data?
3) If data can be collected and analysed, does it follow that it should be collected and analysed?

Conveners: Dr Christopher Markou (Faculty of Law) and Dr Jennifer Cobbe (Department of Computer Science and Technology)