Alongside my research on housing and lending dynamics, I have found it necessary to become involved in the burgeoning field of critical data studies. The genesis for this inquiry was a series of curious encounters when working with different presentations of data: public vs. private, curated vs. non, high resolution vs. low, and so on.
My current research in this area is a critical interrogation of the concept of big data and its place in the urban milieu. In this work, three separate examples from housing market data are used to illustrate the underappreciated ways that proprietary mobilizations of data were implicated in the last major financial crisis. In this way, the presently hegemonic ideal of an asocial big data and the concordant "end of theory" are complicated and historicized. This project is currently in the write-up phase, and will be ready for submission to a journal by the end of this year.
Associated work products:
Martyn, K.P., and Bosman, M.M. (2019E). “Revolution or restructuring? Remaking the city through big data” (in progress).