Jim Thatcher

Critical Data Studies: A Dialog on Data and Space

In light of recent technological innovations and discourses around data and algorithmic analytics, scholars of many stripes are attempting to develop critical agendas and responses to these developments (boyd and Crawford 2012). In this mutual interview, three scholars discuss the stakes, ideas, responsibilities, and possibilities of critical data studies. The resulting dialog seeks to explore what kinds of critical approaches to these topics, in theory and practice, could open and make available such approaches to a broader audience.

Data Colonialism Through Accumulation by Dispossession: New Metaphors for Daily Data

In recent years, much has been written on ‘big data’ in both the popular and academic press. After the hubristic declaration of the ‘end of theory’ more nuanced arguments have emerged, suggesting that increasingly pervasive data collection and quantification may have significant implications for the social sciences, even if the social, scientific, political, and economic agendas behind big data are less new than they are often portrayed. Compared to the boosterish tone of much of its press, academic critiques of big data have been relatively muted, often focusing on the continued importance of more traditional forms of domain knowledge and expertise. Indeed, many academic responses to big data enthusiastically celebrate the availability of new data sources and the potential for new insights and perspectives they may enable. Undermining many of these critiques is a lack of attention to the role of technology in society, particularly with respect to the labor process, the continued extension of labor relations into previously private times and places, and the commoditization of more and more aspects of everyday life. In this article, we parse a variety of big data definitions to argue that it is only when individual datums by the million, billion, or more are linked together algorithmically that ‘big data’ emerges as a commodity. Such decisions do not occur in a vacuum but as part of an asymmetric power relationship in which individuals are dispossessed of the data they generate in their day-to-day lives. We argue that the asymmetry of this data capture process is a means of capitalist ‘accumulation by dispossession’ that colonizes and commodifies everyday life in ways previously impossible. Situating the promises of ‘big data’ within the utopian imaginaries of digital frontierism, we suggest processes of data colonialism are actually unfolding behind these utopic promises. Amid private corporate and academic excitement over new forms of data analysis and visualization, situating big data as a form of capitalist expropriation and dispossession stresses the urgent need for critical, theoretical understandings of data and society.

Inflated Granularity: Spatial ‘Big Data’ and Geodemographics

Data analytics, particularly the current rhetoric around “Big Data”, tend to be presented as new and innovative, emerging ahistorically to revolutionize modern life. In this article, we situate one branch of Big Data analytics, spatial Big Data, through a historical predecessor, geodemographic analysis, to help develop a critical approach to current data analytics. Spatial Big Data promises an epistemic break in marketing, a leap from targeting geodemographic areas to targeting individuals. Yet it inherits characteristics and problems from geodemographics, including a justification through the market, and a process of commodification through the black-boxing of technology. As researchers develop sustained critiques of data analytics and its effects on everyday life, we must so with a grounding in the cultural and historical contexts from which data technologies emerged. This article and others (Barnes and Wilson, 2014) develop a historically situated, critical approach to spatial Big Data. This history illustrates connections to the critical issues of surveillance, redlining, and the production of consumer subjects and geographies. The shared histories and structural logics of spatial Big Data and geodemographics create the space for a continued critique of data analyses’ role in society.

Revisiting critical GIS

Even as the meeting ‘revisited’ critical GIS, it offered neither recapitulation nor reification of a fixed field, but repetition with difference. Neither at the meeting nor here do we aspire to write histories of critical GIS, which have been taken up elsewhere.1 In the strictest sense, one might define GIS as a set of tools and technologies through which spatial data are encoded, analyzed, and communicated. Yet any strict definition of GIS, critical or otherwise, is necessarily delimiting, carving out ontologically privileged status that necessarily silences one set of voices in favor of another.

Spatiality, Maps, and Mathematics in Critical Human Geography: Toward a Repetition With Difference

Quantitative and cartographic methods are today often associated with absolute, Newtonian conceptions of space. We argue that some such methods have not always been and need not be so allied. Present geographic approaches to relational space have been largely advanced through radical political economic and feminist thought. Yet we identify quantitative and cartographic methods (taking as exemplars a range of thinkers, some of whom were most prominent in the 1960s and 1970s) that can contribute to these approaches to relational space. We suggest neglected methods to revisit, new alliances to be forged with critical human geography and cultural critique, and possible paths to enliven geographical imaginations.

The Object of Mobile Spatial Data, the Subject in Mobile Spatial Research

With an estimated one billion smartphones producing over 5 petabytes of data a day, the spatially aware mobile device has become a near ubiquitous presence in daily life. Cogent, excellent research in a variety of fields has explored what the spatial data these devices produce can reveal of society, such as analysis of Foursquare check-ins to reveal patterns of mobility for groups through a city. In such studies, the individual intentions, motivations, and desires behind the production of said data can become lost through computational aggregation and analysis. In this commentary, I argue for a rethinking of the epistemological leap from individual to data point through a (re)seating of the reflexive, self-eliciting subject as an object for spatial big data research. To do so, I first situate current research on spatial big data within a computational turn in social sciences that relies overly on the data produced as a stand-in for the subject producing said data. Second, I argue that a recent shift within geography and cognate disciplines toward viewing spatial big data as a form of spatial media allows for study of the sociotechnical processes that produce modern assemblages of data and society. As spatial media, the spatial big data created through mobile device use can be understood as the data of everyday life and as part of the sociotechnical processes that produce individuals, data, and space. Ultimately, to understand the data of everyday life, researchers must write thick descriptions of the stories we tell ourselves about the data we give off to others.

You are where you go, the commodification of daily life through ‘location’

Recent years have seen an explosion in the investment into and valuation of mobile spatial applications. With multiple applications currently valued at well over one billion U.S. dollars, mobile spatial applications and the data they generate have come to play an increasingly significant role in the function of late capitalism. Empirically based upon a series of interviews conducted with mobile application designers and developers, this article details the creation of a digital commodity termed ‘location.’ ‘Location’ is developed through three discursive poles: Its storing of space and time as digital data object manipulable by code, its spatial and temporal immediacy, and its ability to ‘add value’ or ‘tell a story’ to both end-users and marketers. As a commodity it represents the sum total of targeted marking information, including credit profiles, purchase history, and a host of other information available through data mining or sensor information, combined with temporal immediacy, physical location, and user intent. ‘Location’ is demonstrated to exist as a commodity from its very inception and, as such, to be a key means through which everyday life is further entangled with processes of capitalist exploitation.

Critical Data, Critical Technology in Theory and Practice

D ata, its sources, analytics, and potential effects are at the center of recent popular, industry, and scholarly debates about knowledge, policy, identity, and everyday urban life. These debates have taken place across the academy, from geography to digital humanities, data science, media studies, and beyond. Researchers in these and other social science fields are increasingly engaging with new data infrastructures (Batty 2013; Marvin, Luque-Ayala, and McFarlane 2016; Pickren 2016), representational technologies (Hochman 2014), and analytic practices (Poorthuis et al. 2016) as they emerge in private industry (Thatcher 2014), academic research (Crawford and Finn 2014), and government agencies (Taylor and Schroeder 2015). In politics and industry, these related phenomena go by a variety of buzzwords, such as big data and smart cities (Kitchin 2014c, 2016; Datta 2016), that offer tantalizing promises of future social and economic growth and stability (Lohr 2012). In more recent critical investigations, early hubristic claims of the power of these new systems of data extraction, visualization, and analysis, such as Anderson’s (2008) now nearly decade-old, infamous claim of the “end of theory,” serve as shibboleths by which scholars situate themselves to evaluate actual data practices and effects (Thatcher 2016). Both promises and critiques of this new paradigm of data involve algorithmic analysis of heterogeneous data sets within currently underexamined contexts and social relations (Kitchin 2014a). This focus issue engages with this new paradigm from a variety of geographical perspectives emphasizing radical politics and broadly critical approaches to data analytics. Engaging data in these ways opens new, promising avenues for thought about and practices that incorporate such data. In this way, the section speaks not only to work in critical data studies but also to larger conversations around the ways in which technology mediates, saturates, and sustains late capitalist modernity (Graham 2005). Research to date raises more questions than answers about the use, interpretation, and meaning of these new forms of analysis and data as well as their relationship to broader sociopolitical and economic processes (cf. Crampton 2015; Crampton, Roberts, and Poorthuis 2014; Kitchin 2014b). Researchers suggest a series of prompts that indicate an incipient approach to data studies (boyd and Crawford 2012; Barnes 2013; Burns 2015) and call for additional scholarship in the area (Kitchin 2014a; Schroeder 2014). Addressing these questions, the articles in this issue focus on questions such as these: Is a radical politics possible through new data sources and analytics? What assumptions, exclusions, contradictions, and possibilities do data analytics espouse and promote? What epistemological and ontological commitments arise from data-driven science? How have these commitments shaped the knowledges produced by and through the technological systems in question? Building on earlier calls for critical studies of data (Dalton and Thatcher 2014; Dalton, Taylor, and Thatcher 2016), this focus issue explores and evaluates critical approaches to data, analytics, and new spatial technologies in a common forum. Due to its history of engagement with the spatial constitution of knowledge and power, geography as a field has a unique opportunity to shape the growing dialogues around critical data studies. From technological redlining (Thatcher 2013; Dalton and Thatcher 2015) to humanitarianism and development (Burns forthcoming), to oft-unconsidered gendered nature of spatial information production (Stephens 2013), the spatial component of data influences what can be done and what can be known through it (Kwan 2002; Elwood 2010). In this quickly evolving body of research, scholars treat new data and analytics as partial and incomplete lenses through which we view social processes (boyd and Crawford 2012; Gabrys 2016). Such an approach emphasizes issues around epistemology, ontology, and knowledge production,

Data Derives: Confronting Digital Geographic Information as Spectacle

Digital data informs, shapes, and defines our lives and choices. Smartphones, credit cards, official records, and surveillance systems feed data to companies and governments that collect, aggregate, and combine it to constitute what is colloquially known as ‘big data.’ In such systems, individuals who create the data transform into quantitative abstractions that stand in for them amidst global systems of capital. Data, then, is becoming spectacle in two ways: first, as a site for speculative investment by corporate actors like Google, Apple, and Facebook; and then again as the analysis of data reproduces itself as a centre of attention for the individual who produced it, often as geotargeted advertising, credit ratings, and location-based services. In such systems, the very turn-by-turn directions that guide us through urban space have become sites of speculative investment and separation through spectacular data. In this chapter, we explore the separation of people from the spectacle of their digital geographic data and thus spaces in their lives. Doing so builds upon nascent critical discourses in critical data studies and critical GIS that approach data as contingent, contested constructs and extends those critiques to open new possibilities for the production of situations. Specifically, we propose a counter-move to spectacularised data: the data derive, a playful, yet critical exploration of the points, contours and currents of digital geographic data. Drifting through data provides a promising alternative way to engage the subject positions, limits, and critical possibilities of big data.

Evolving technology, shifting expectations: cultivating pedagogy for a rapidly changing GIS landscape

Abstract As humans and natural processes continuously reshape the surface of the Earth, there is an unceasing need to document and analyze them through the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The public is gaining more access to spatial technologies that were once only available to highly trained professionals. With technological evolution comes a requirement to transition traditional GIS training for the next generation of GIS professionals. Traditional GIS combined with non-traditional GIS (i.e. mobile and location media) and CyberGIS educational materials could attract new and diverse students into Geography departments while informing the next generation of geospatial tool builders and users. Here we pose an applied pedagogical framework for teaching cutting-edge GIS material to diverse student populations with varying levels of technological experience and professional goals. The framework was developed as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) CyberGIS Fellows program and was applied as a course template at the University of Washington Tacoma’s Master’s of Science in Geospatial Technologies. We chart how the framework developed into a cyclical structure from our original conceptualization as a hierarchy. This changed the epistemological orientation accommodating the shifting technological terrain of the GIS landscape to improve the skills of those driving the machines.