Compromised Data From Social Media to Big Data

by Elmer, Greg; Langlois, Ganaele; Redden, Joanna

• ISBN13: 9781501306518
• ISBN10: 1501306510
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2015-07-30
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

There has been a data rush in the past decade brought about by online communication and, in particular, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, among others), which promises a new age of digital enlightenment. But social data is compromised: it is being seized by specific economic interests, it leads to a fundamental shift in the relationship between research and the public good, and it fosters new forms of control and surveillance.

Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data explores how we perform critical research within a compromised social data framework. The expert, international lineup of contributors explores the limits and challenges of social data research in order to invent and develop new modes of doing public research. At its core, this collection argues that we are witnessing a fundamental reshaping of the social through social data mining.

Author Biography

Ganaele Langlois is Assistant Professor at York University, Canada, and Associate Director of the Infoscape Centre for the Study of Social Media, Ryerson University, Canada. Her research focuses on new media theory, software studies and technoculture.

Joanna Redden is Assistant Professor of Critical Media Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada. Her work investigates how digital technologies influence political, media, and protest practices specifically as related to poverty, inequality, and governance.

Greg Elmer is Bell Globemedia Research Chair and Director of the Infoscape Centre for the Study of Social Media at Ryerson University, Canada. His research and teaching focus on new media and politics, theories and methods in social media studies, surveillance theory, and media globalization.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Compromised Data – Greg Elmer, Ryerson University, Canada; Ganaele Langlois, York University, Canada

Part 1. Data, Power and Politics

2. Big Data as System of Knowledge: Investigating Canadian Governance - Joanna Redden, University of Calgary, Canada

3. Look at the Man Behind the Curtain: Computational Management in “Spontaneous” Citizen Political Campaigning - David Karpf, George Washington University, USA

4. The London Riots and the Simulation of Sociality through Data Mining Research - Ingrid M. Hoofd, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Part 2. Data Limit(ed)

5. Easy Data, Hard Data? Twitter Research and the Politics of Social Media Data - Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

6. Reverse Engineering Twitter – Robert Gehl, University of Utah, USA

7. Scraping the Web - Greg Elmer and Ganaele Langlois

Part 3. Alt-Data

8. Automate or Perish: Affective Algorithms and Staging 'Haunted Data' - Lisa Blackman, Goldsmiths University, UK

9. A Contribution to the Political Economy of Self-archiving – Yuk Hui, Leuphana University, Germany

10. Mapping Movements - Social Movement Research and Big Data: Critiques and Alternatives- Sky Croeser and Tim Highfield, Curtin University, Australia

11. Social Media/Data Activism – Alessandra Renzi, Northeastern University, USA, and Ganaele Langlois, York University, Canada

References
Index