## ****Final Presentation****: Critical Inquiry + R&D Project ## ****Curating Data**** #### By Lasse Utoft Vindbjerg --- ### **Agenda** * ##### R&D Project: Tree of knowledge * ##### Critical "Inquiry A: questioning the aura of truth and objectivity tied to data * ##### Critical Inquiry B: the political and societal consequence of a ~~big-tech~~ data driven society * ##### Questions --- #### **R&D Project:** Tree of (Curating Data) Knowledge ##### [Furter Exploration: Link](https://kinopio.club/curating-data-research-and-development-project-by-lasse-utoft-vindbjerg-So_wHRa8LMQwVkTw7czT2)  --- #### **Critical Inquiry "A"** (1) > Questioning the aura of truth and objectivity tied to data * ##### inspired mainly by Druckers notion of "Capta" (Drucker, 2011, p. 16) * ##### acknowledging the humanistic and interpretative sphere of data’s conception, categorization, storage, and visualization. * #### recognizing that data cannot “speak for themselves, but are always, inherently, speaking from a particular position” (Kitchin, 2014, p. 135) ---- #### **Critical Inquiry "A" (2)** * ##### Bruno Latour: the notion of “blackboxing” or “punctualisation” which holds that “any specification [of an] an entity (such as a device or a person) entails the substitution of a network by a point” (Prout, 1996, p. 201) * ##### understanding the curation of data as a network of entities, encompassing both humans and non-humans, one can critically investigate the conception of data as something that is captured by humans in a specific and co-dependent setting or environment. ---- #### **Critical Inquiry "A" (3): WHY?** * ##### Data is continously becoming more important and impactful in our world. * ##### while ... data is becoming more ambigious and hard to understand other than as a "point" of a network. > I find it crucial that the processes and people that surround data curation are made more visible in a world that is still building a stronger dependance on data and its abilities. --- #### **Critical Inquiry "B" (1)** > questioning the political and societal consequence of a ~~big-tech~~ data driven society * ##### the simultaneous development of data driven societies where governments are reliant on big-tech for their power, knowledge and innovations in technology, and more specifically data curation. * ##### the distortion of curating data knowledge that is between public and private actors (NetCompany, Trifork, Google & Apple API) * ##### "data are manifested and situated within complex and contested political economies and, at the same time, they are used to shape such debates and regimes" (Kitchin, 2014, p. 16) ---- #### **Critical Inquiry "B" (2)** * ##### "power and knowledge directly imply one another" (Foucault, 1991, p. 27) * ##### the power-position “is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the 'privilege', acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions” (Foucault, 1991, p. 26). * ##### Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, and similar big-tech corporations as the dominant power and producer of data curation knowledge. * ##### "It is by means of their technical expertise that data corporations are becoming necessary passage points in health and medicine, and all other sectors of society that are undergoing digitalization. (Sharon, 2020, p. 18)" ---- #### **Critical Inquiry "B" (3): WHY?** * ##### Googlization of government? Big-tech colonisation of goverment? * ##### "a datafied welfare system will consolidate Big Tech companies as institutions essential to the basic functioning of the state and society [...] called *data colonialism*" (Magalhães & Couldry, 2021, p. 1)" > ##### What happens when private corporations gains significance in matters that citizens usually saw placed firmly inside the representative, democratic borders? (Albrechtslund, 2020, p. 290f) --- ## **Thank you for listening!**