Understanding Datafication

Independent Project: Critical Analysis of a Data Science Project

Coursework for IM939: Data Science Across Disciplines: Principles, Practice and Critique

For more than last forty years, Stephen Wolfram has deployed, invented, and developed a wide range of innovative and novel projects that include computational intelligence platforms like Mathematica, Wolfram Physics, Wolfram|Alpha and a full-scale computational language like Wolfram Language (Wolfram, n. d.). In this continuation of introducing new thoughts and dimensions in this very field, his Data Science of the Facebook World project perhaps had an underlying motivation of unfolding the science imbedded in the trajectories of the social lives of human beings (Wolfram, 2013). This project is an effort to critically engage with data collection, analytical methods, and produced insights of this data science project by consulting a few relevant literatures of behavioral studies and critical data science. In my essay, I echoed with what Gitelman (2013) proposes in general, Data Science of the Facebook World can be imagined as just another data science project which limitedly represents human behavioral trajectories in social network platforms, such as Facebook.

Outcome:

Submitted Essay: Can Facebook World be a Mirror of Real Life? A critique of the Data Science of the Facebook World project

Independent Project: Practical Data Science/ Machine Learning Project

Coursework for IM939: Data Science Across Disciplines: Principles, Practice and Critique

This work first explores the current scenario of internet access across the world using multiple visualisation methods. Next, by applying K-means clustering, it categorises 213 countries of the world into three clusters based on their historical trend in increasing access to the internet for their population during the last 29 years. The results show that that the current global internet inequality is severe and some of the countries in the world are historically remaining in disadvantaged positions. The paper self-explains that that analytical and visualisation techniques in data science are not always flawless, rather they can reproduce further inequality. Finally, it argues that the findings from this analysis could be useful to understand the emerging notion of global data divide.

Outcome:

Submitted Essay: Talking Digital Divide Using Data Science Techniques

Independent Project: Understanding Data Colonialism

Coursework for IM902: Approaches to the Digital

This work first explores how datafication manipulates and dominates over existing social and cultural norms, beliefs, and values through constant surveillance, platform imperialism and knowledge making in contemporary society to establish hegemony over datafied subjects. Next, it explains how these subjects also undergo complex and gradual psychological process of alienation by distorted identity, psychic problems, and constructed invisibility facilitated by datafication. Finally, it shows how datafication process dehumanise people within the colonial regime of data through its classification tendency, discrimination, and imbedded racism. These three themes taken together illustrate the extent of interior damage of the subjects who are colonised by data. This framework can be useful to understand the phenomenon of datafication as an independent colonial process and to realise the violence data colonialism and the suffering of datafied subjects at the same time. The concepts of hegemony, alienation and dehumanisation have been instrumental to understand the historical colonialism, this paper suggests that the same three theoretical scaffoldings can be applied in a new form to understand Data colonialism although these two colonial regimes are, of course, contextually different

Outcome:

Submitted Essay: Datafication as Colonial Process: Looking through the Interiority of Datafied Subjects

Independent Project: Understanding Platformisation and Data Politics

Coursework for QS906: Big Data Research: Hype or Revolution?

This work explores the impact of Facebook mediated fake news in countries from global south is distinct, in many cases more violent than western countries. Second, it points out the underrepresentation of these impacts in global scholarly discussions around fake news. Therefore, global south population are being subjected to double harm, first by the Facebook and fake news, and second by the politics of knowledge-making around Facebook and fake news. It also shows that political, ethical, and legal discussions towards addressing this issue are also missing out the nuances from those countries. This will eventually harm the overall scholarly efforts engaging with Fake News, Facebook, and Big Data. As a result, countries of global south will not effectively benefit from it, if this stream of knowledge finally becomes able to make any kind of visible improvement of Facebook’s (and Meta’s) AI algorithm and business model in coming future.

Outcome:

Submitted Essay: Facebook, Fake News, and Fanatics: Politics of Truth Making in the Global South