Category Archives: information

Call for paper: Data driven cities? Digital urbanism and its proxies

Leave a reply

We are organising a special issues on data-driven cities. You can find more details below and we look forward to your proposals.

 

Tecnoscienza. Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies

SPECIAL ISSUE

“DATA DRIVEN CITIES? DIGITAL URBANISM AND ITS PROXIES”

Guest editors:

Claudio Coletta (Maynooth University)

Liam Heaphy (Maynooth University)

Sung-Yueh Perng (Maynooth University)

Laurie Waller (Technische Universität München)

Call for papers:

In the last few decades, data and software have become an integral part of urban life, producing a radical transformation of social relations in cities. Contemporary urban environments are characterised by dense arrangements of data, algorithms, mobile devices, and networked infrastructures. Multiple technologies (such as smart metering, sensing networks, GPS transponders, CCTV, induction loops, and mobile apps) are connected with numerous processes (such as institutional data management, data brokering, crowdsourcing, and workflow management), in order to provide sustainable, efficient, and integrated city governance and services. Accordingly, big data and algorithms have started to play a prominent role in informing decision-making and in performing the spatial, material, and temporal dimensions of cities.

Smart city initiatives undertaken globally are characterised by highlighting the purported benefits of partly automating management of public services, new forms of civic engagement enabled by digital infrastructures, and the potentials for innovating policy and fostering economic development.

Yet, contributions within STS, Critical Data Studies, Geography, Sociology, Media Studies and Anthropology have contested the neutral and apolitical nature of (big) data and the ahistorical, aspatial, homogenizing vision of cities in favour of an understanding that recognizes the situated multiplicity of actual digital urbanism. The politics of data, data analytics and visualizations perform within specific urban and code assemblages embodying specific versions of real-time and anticipatory governance. At the same time, these studies highlight the risks of dataveillance as well as the corporatisation of governance and technocratic solutionism which, especially coupled with austerity regimes, seem to reinforce inequalities while influencing people’s lives out of the public grasp. Within this context, vested interests interact in a multi-billion global market where corporations, companies and start-ups propose data-driven urban solutions, while public administrations increasingly delegate control over citizens’ data. Also, public institutions and private companies leverage the efforts of open data movements, engaged civic communities and citizen-minded initiatives to find new ways to create public and economic value from urban data.

The aim of this special issue is therefore to encourage critical and transdisciplinary debates on the epistemological and ontological implications of actual data-driven urbanism: its uncertain, fragile, contested, conflicting nature; the different forms of performing and making sense of the urban environment through data and algorithms; the different ways to approach the relationship between data, software and cities; the urban and code assemblages that are produced.

To what extent cities are understandable through data? How do software and space work in urban everyday life and urban management? How do data and policies actually shape each other? What forms of delegation, enrolment and appropriation take place?

We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions critically addressing the following (non-exhaustive-list-of) topics:

– urban big data, city dashboards;

– data analytics and data brokering;

– IoT based urban services;

– predictive analytics and anticipatory governance;

– civic hacking, open data movements;

– privacy, security and surveillance in data-driven cities;

– crowd, mobility and traffic management;

– sensors, monitoring, mapping and modelling for urban facilities;

– digitization of built environment.

 

Deadline for abstract submissions: June 30th, 2016

Abstracts (in English) with a maximum length of 1000 words should be sent as email attachments to redazione@tecnoscienza.net and carbon copied to the guest editor at datadrivencities@tecnoscienza.net. Notification of acceptance will be communicated by July 2016.

Deadline for full submissions: October 15th, 2016.

Submissions (in English with a maximum length of 8000 words, including notes and references) can be made via the Journal’s submission system at www.tecnoscienza.net and an electronic copy of the article should be sent to redazione@tecnoscienza.net. The papers will be subject to a blind peer refereed review process. The special issue is expected to be published in 2017.

For further information about the special issue, contact the guest editors at datadrivencities@tecnoscienza.net.

For further information about the Journal please visit the Journal’s web site at http://www.tecnoscienza.net.

Claudio, Liam, Sung-Yueh and Laurie

Reflecting upon hackathons by their participants

Leave a reply

Thomas James Lodato and Carl DiSalvo give a good overview of what hackathons are in their recent article:

Hackathons are rapid design and development events at which volunteer participants come together to conceptualize, prototype, and make (mostly digital) products and services.

Coupling with the rapid pace of conceptualising a product or service, prototyping and making do with limited time and resources during the event, is the competition with other teams for the prizes, ranging from cash rewards to a spot in an incubator programme that could potentially transform the initial idea at a hackathon into a startup success.

We often see coverage of the winning teams, their ideas and sometimes their presentations before the judging panel. However, we do not necessarily know how participants reflect upon their own experiences, problems they encounter along the way and adjustments to their goals and strategies under time pressure.

In this blogpost, we try to give a glimpse of these aspects by asking participants how and what they did in the Global Data Fest/Smart City Hackathon which took place in Dublin between 6 – 8 March, 2015. The videos were taken before the teams presented their ideas to the judges, which means they did not know who were going to win and thus the conversation was not about their ‘winning experiences’. Instead, the videos are about how they took into account of all sorts of challenges and the advice they received from the mentors to finish their project. In doing so, we also wish to create cultural memory for the participants and for one the various pursuits of transforming Dublin into a smart city.

Here they are!

Project: Life Tracking

Project: EmuLUX

Project: CityBuzz

Project: BikeRack

Project: Bintel

Project: BedCount

We thank the participants and also David Prendergast from Intel, who also gave a talk for our seminar series, for making the videos happen.

Sung-Yueh

Call for paper: 4S/EASST track on Data-driven Cities? Digital urbanism and its proxies

Leave a reply

We are organising a track for the 4S/EASST conference this year in Barcelona. Please consider submit an abstract to our track on “Data-driven cities? Digital urbanism and its proxies“. Deadline for submission is 21 February 2016, so there is still time! More details about the track and how to submit:

Short description
The track explores the digital, data-driven and networked making of urban environment. We welcome contributions in various formats: presentations, audio, video and photographic accounts, as well as performances and live demonstrations of public interfaces and software tools for urban analysis.

Abstract
How do software and space work in urban everyday life and urban management? How do data and policies actually shape each other? What forms of delegation, enrollment and appropriation take place?

Contemporary urban environments are characterised by dense arrangements of data, algorithms, mobile device, networked infrastructures. Multiple technologies (such as smart metering, sensing networks, GPS, CCTV, induction loops, mobile apps) are connected with multiple processes (such as institutional data management, data brokering, crowdsourcing, workflow management), aiming to provide sustainable, efficient, integrated city governance and services.

Within this context, vested interests interact in a multi-billion global market where corporations, companies and start-ups propose data-driven urban solutions, while public administrations increasingly delegate control over citizens’ data. Also, public institutions and private companies leverage the efforts of open data movements, engaged civic communities and citizen-minded initiatives to find new ways to create public and economic value from urban data.

However, the making of digital and data-driven urbanism is uncertain, fragile, contested, conflicting. The track intends to stimulate the debate on: the different forms of performing and making sense of the urban environment through data and algorithms; the different ways to approach the relationship between data, software and cities.

We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions critically addressing the following (non-exhaustive-list-of) topics:
– urban big data, dashboards, data analytics and brokering;
– IoT based urban services and governance;
– civic hacking, open data movements;
– privacy, security and surveillance in data-driven cities;
– crowd, mobility and traffic management;
– sensors, monitoring, mapping and modelling for urban facilities;
– digitization of built environment.

To Submit:
Go to the webpage of the track, click on “Propose paper“, and you will be directed to the abstract detail and submission page.

Paper proposals should include: a paper title (no more than 10 words); author/co-authors; a short abstract (maximum 300 characters including spaces) and a long one (up to 250 words). The long abstract will be shown on the web and the short one is what will be displayed in the conference programme.

For more details about submission, please visit http://www.sts2016bcn.org/call-for-papers/

Organizers:
Claudio Coletta (NIRSA, Programmable City), claudio.coletta@nuim.ie
Liam Heaphy (NIRSA, Programmable City), liam.heaphy@nuim.ie
Sung-Yueh Perng (NIRSA, Programmable City), sung-yueh.perng@nuim.ie
Laurie Waller (TUM, MCTS), l.waller@tum.de

If you have any question about the track, please do not hesitate to contact us. We look forward to receiving your abstracts!

Book Launch – 'Locative Social Media: Place in the Digital Age' by Leighton Evans

Leave a reply

The Programmable City Project invites all interested parties to the launch of:

Locative Social Media: Place in the Digital Age

By Leighton Evans

The book will be launched by:

Professor Mark Boyle, Department of Geography/Director, NIRSA, Maynooth University

6pm, Monday 31st August 2015

The Phoenix Building, North Campus, Maynooth University

Reception to follow

Please RSVP to nirsa@nuim.ie by Friday 28th August

locative social media

Locative Social Media offers a critical analysis of the effect of using locative social media on the perceptions and phenomenal experience of lived in spaces and places. It includes a comprehensive overview of the historical development of traditional mapping and global positioning technology to smartphone-based application services that incorporate social networking features as a series of modes of understanding place. Drawing on users accounts of the location-based social network Foursquare, a digital post-phenomenology of place is developed to explain how place is mediated in the digital age. This draws upon both the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and post-phenomenology to encompass the materiality and computationality of the smartphone. The functioning and surfacing of place by the device and application, along with the orientation of the user, allows for a particular experiencing of place when using locative social media termed attunement, in contrast to an instrumentalist conception of place.

Reviews

“Locative Social Media is a fine book that is theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded. In it, Leighton Evans develops a rigorous post-phenomenology of location-based social media, and explores how mood or orientation, embodied practices involving mobile technology use, and the data-infused environment, are all ‘co-constitutive of place’.” – Rowan Wilken, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Health, Arts and Design, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

“In this book, Leighton Evans accomplishes something very ambitious: a deep theoretical reflection on the phenomenology of place experience as it occurs in the context of physical/digital interactions, interwoven with a thorough empirical account of situated use of location-based social networks. Evans’ study of Foursquare users details complex place-related agencies in the age of what he calls a ‘computationally infused world’, including gathering, mapping, bridging, broadcasting, reputation management and building social capital. His findings resonate with and holistically consolidate the state of the art of interdisciplinary investigations of locative social media. The most impressive achievement in this book, however, is how the empirical evidence builds the basis for an exciting conceptual revisitation of the phenomenology of place; Evans proposes an original ‘digital post-phenomenology of place’ that connects key aspects of situated socio-technical systems: from embodied practices, to new and emergent mappings, occurrences and representations enabled by code and by locative infrastructures.” – Luigina Ciolfi, Reader in Communication in the Cultural Communication and Computing Research Institute, Sheffield Hallam University, UK

“Transporting Heidegger from the Black Forest to the urban Foursquare-world, Leighton Evans discusses the persistently collective nature of space and place in digital culture. This important study opens different ways how location based social networks function to frame space for us but also how users participate in this process of defining belonging. Evans’ book addresses algorithmic situations as digital post-phenomenology of place; the book is a valuable research text for scholars and students in media, sociology and cultural studies of technology.” – Jussi Parikka, Professor of Technological Culture and Aesthetics, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK

For more information, please visit: http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/locative-social-media-/?K=9781137456106

Event – Privacy: gathering insights from lawyers and technologists

Leave a reply

privacy-law-highlightThe roundtable event ‘Privacy: Gathering insights from lawyers and technologists’ is scheduled for Wednesday 1st July 2015. The Event will be held at the Phoenix Building, North Campus, Maynooth University and has been organised by faculty at the University in conjunction with the British and Irish Law Education and Technology Association.

The event will bring technologists, legal practitioners, technology companies and academics together in order to address the common issues faced by the different parties. The goal is to facilitate the communication of differing perspectives in an effort to formulate a unified approach to developing privacy issues.

Confirmed speakers for the event are:

Keynotes
Dara Murphy, TD – Minister for European Affairs and Data Protection.
Helen Dixon – Data Protection Commissioner of Ireland.

Confirmed speakers for the first session of the event, “Privacy in a digital world: notions and understandings of privacy in a digital infrastructure”, are:

Confirmed speakers for the second session of the event, “The Right to be Forgotten, demystified…”, are:

  • Ronan Kennedy, Lecturer in Law, National University of Ireland, Galway.
  • Dr Michael Lang, Lecturer in Information Systems, National University of Ireland, Galway.
  • William Malcolm, Senior Privacy Counsel, Google
  • Rob Corbet, Technology and Innovation Lawyer, Arthur Cox
  • Eoin O’Dell, Associate Professor, School of Law, Trinity College Dublin

For further information and tickets to the event, please visit the project webpage or contact the organisers Maria Murphy or Leighton Evans.

Open data talks at Dublinked event

Leave a reply

On Thursday two members of the ProgCity team – Rob Kitchin and Tracey Lauriault – presented at the Open Data Summit organized by Dublinked.  Rob presented a paper entitled ‘Open data: An open and shut case’ (see below for slides) and Tracey presented a paper entitled ‘The open data landscape in Ireland.’  It was an excellent event and hopefully the slides of the other talks will be put online as there was a lot of useful insight shared during the presentations and discussion.