Helen Kennedy

Beyond anonymity, or future directions for internet identity research:

This article draws on empirical research into internet use by minority ethnic women to consider whether anonymity remains a useful focus for sociocultural studies of internet identities. The central argument of the article is that the time has come for internet identity research to reposition itself conceptually, to move away from a preoccupation with the generalized, enduring claim that internet identities are anonymous, multiple and fragmented-not only because, in some cases, online identities are continuous with offline selves, but also, more importantly, because common uses of the concept of anonymity are limited as starting points for carrying out analyses of internet experiences. In short, it argues that the terms of internet identity research are problematic, that contexts matter, and that studies of internet identities need to engage with and learn from ongoing debates within cultural studies which call into question the usefulness of the very concept of identity.

Perspectives on Sentiment Analysis

One of the consequences of the widespread use of social media is the equally widespread availability of all sorts of once intimate and private stuff: textual, visual, and affective. From this, a new form of labor arises: the mining of social media data. One type of social media data mining is sentiment analysis, the application of a range of technologies to determine sentiments expressed within social media about particular topics. This article maps out a range of emerging perspectives on sentiment analysis and argues that these sometimes-competing views need to be brought together, so that analyses of new socio-technical phenomena like sentiment analysis can be rich and rounded.

Cultural studies of data mining: Introduction:

Over the past 2 years, the total amount of data about everything from the humidity of shipping crates, toilet flushes in shopping malls or tweets about Justin Beiber exceeded the total amount yet recorded in human history – equivalent to a zettabyte of data or sextillion bytes and growing (Shaw, 2014). Given this, it is now axiomatic to claim that we are in the ‘age of big data’ and are witnessing a quantitative (and perhaps qualitative) ‘revolution’ (Lohr, 2012) in human knowledge, driven by accompanying forms of data mining and analytics. New analytical methods and businesses seeking to monetize this explosion of data emerge daily. Often offered in black-boxed proprietary form, these companies and their analytic methods promise to help us gain insight into public opinion, mood, networks, behaviour patterns and relationships. Data analytics and machine learning are also ostensibly paving the way for a more intelligent Web 3.0, promising a more ‘productive and intuitive’ user/consumer experience. Data analytics involve far more than targeted advertising, however; they envision new strategies for forecasting, targeting and decision-making in a growing range of social realms, such as marketing, employment, education, health care, policing, urban planning and epidemiology. They also have the potential to usher in new, unaccountable and opaque forms of discrimination and social sorting based not on human-scale narratives but on incomprehensibly large, and continually growing, networks of interconnections.

Data and agency

This introduction to the special issue on data and agency argues that datafication should not only be understood as the process of collecting and analysing data about Internet users, but also as feeding such data back to users, enabling them to orient themselves in the world. It is important that debates about data power recognise that data is also generated, collected and analysed by alternative actors, enhancing rather than undermining the agency of the public. Developing this argument, we first make clear why and how the question of agency should be central to our engagement with data. Subsequently, we discuss how this question has been operationalized in the five contributions to this special issue, which empirically open up the study of alternative forms of datafication. Building on these contributions, we conclude that as data acquire new power, it is vital to explore the space for citizen agency in relation to data structures and to examine the practices of data work, as well as the people involved in these practices.

Can the Web Be Made Accessible for People with Intellectual Disabilities

This article presents the findings of a research project that aimed to contribute to the social inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities (ID) in the World Wide Web (the Web). The Inclusive New Media Design (INMD) project brought together thirty-one Web designers and developers with twenty-nine people with intellectual disabilities to explore the best practice for building Web sites accessible to the ID community. Specifically, the project took accessibility techniques identified in ID accessibility research, and investigated what would (or would not) make it possible for Web professionals to implement them. This article suggests some tentative answers to the question of whether a fully accessible Web can be built, one that includes people with ID. While the article outlines simple steps that can be taken to facilitate accessibility for people at the mild end of the ID spectrum, it also highlights a number of barriers that exist to implementing ID accessibility guidance, most notably the power holders and decision makers with whom Web designers work, who may not share the designers’ commitment to accessibility.

Known or knowing publics? Social media data mining and the question of public agency

New methods to analyse social media data provide a powerful way to know publics and capture what they say and do. At the same time, access to these methods is uneven, with corporations and governments tending to have best access to relevant data and analytics tools. Critics raise a number of concerns about the implications dominant uses of data mining and analytics may have for the public: they result in less privacy, more surveillance and social discrimination, and they provide new ways of controlling how publics come to be represented and so understood. In this paper, we consider if a different relationship between the public and data mining might be established, one in which publics might be said to have greater agency and reflexivity vis-à-vis data power. Drawing on growing calls for alternative data regimes and practices, we argue that to enable this different relationship, data mining and analytics need to be democratised in three ways: they should be subject to greater public supervision and regulation, available and accessible to all, and used to create not simply known but reflexive, active and knowing publics. We therefore imagine conditions in which data mining is not just used as a way to know publics, but can become a means for publics to know themselves.

Technobiography: Researching Lives, Online and Off

This article is an argument for technobiography, a term coined in Cyborg Lives? Womens Technobiographies, a collection I coedited in 2001. I outline what technobiography is, and how, by allowing access to what it feels like to live certain digital experiences, it can contribute to building a comprehensive picture of cybercultural landscapes. If we want to understand lived experiences of the Internet, we need to study not only online, virtual representations of selves, but also lives and selves situated within the social relations of the consumption and production of information and communication technologies. Drawing on two technobiographical projectsÑone involving a group of black, working-class women returning to education with the aid of networked technologies and computer-mediated distance learning, and another exploring social relations in a digital multimedia production center -I indicate ways in which technobiography can contribute to this important project

The work that visualisation conventions do

ABSTRACT This paper argues that visualisation conventions work to make the data represented within visualisations seem objective, that is, transparent and factual. Interrogating the work that visualisation conventions do helps us to make sense of the apparent contradiction between criticisms of visualisations as doing persuasive work and visualisation designers’ belief that through visualisation, it is possible to ‘do good with data’ [Periscopic. 2014. Home page. Retrieved from http://www.periscopic.com/]. We focus on four conventions which imbue visualisations with a sense of objectivity, transparency and facticity. These include: (a) two-dimensional viewpoints; (b) clean layouts; (c) geometric shapes and lines; (d) the inclusion of data sources. We argue that thinking about visualisations from a social semiotic standpoint, as we do in this paper by bringing together what visualisation designers say about their intentions with a semiotic analysis of the visualisations they produce, advances understanding of the ways that data visualisations come into being, how they are imbued with particular qualities and how power operates in and through them. Thus, this paper contributes nuanced understanding of data visualisations and their production, by uncovering the ways in which power is at work within them. In turn, it advances debate about data in society and the emerging field of data studies.

NEW MEDIA'S POTENTIAL FOR PERSONALIZATION

Despite the growing maturity of new, interactive media, rhetoric about its possibilities and potentialities that abounded in its earliest days still endures. The growth of detailed and empirical work, which has sought to populate the digital landscape with grounded research calling into question this rhetoric, has not stopped new media debate from continuing to be shaped, in part, by the language of the potential. This paper is concerned with one aspect of new medias potential, personalization. It focuses on new medias proclaimed capacity to be adapted to meet the needs and desires of individual users. This is a trope that runs through much humanities and social sciences literature on new media and ICTs, yet despite recognition of the possibility of personalization offered by networked media technologies, there is very little grounded, empirical work on this subject in these fields. In order to address this absence, this paper compares an attempt to personalize new media web content on a two-year research endeavour entitled Project @pple with the rhetoric about the potentiality for personalization that new technologies offers. It aims to contribute to understandings of personalization by detailing the issues that arise when attempting to implement it. The argument of the paper is that the difficulties encountered on Project @pple suggest that, in real-life situations, characterized as they are by constraints and complexities, it is not always a straightforward process for personalization to cease to be potential and to become actual.

Subjective Intersections in the Face of the Machine

This article is a call to feminist science and technology studies (STS) to engage with debates about the intersectionality of gender with race and class in analyses of women’s relationships with their computers - these debates are well established in the broader field of gender studies, but comparatively absent from studies of gender and technology. Furthermore, in order to understand women’s many and varied technological relationships, it is necessary to explore the diverse ways in which individual women experience their gender, race and class in their relationships with their PCs. The article draws on the stories told by 14 working-class women from ethnic minority communities about the introduction of networked computers in their homes, to argue that we need to account for women’s subjective experiences of the identity intersections that take place in the face of the machine.