The Programmable City submitted the following to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform public consultation on the Open Data Licence for the Government of Ireland.
Open Data Licence Submission
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The Impact of the Data Revolution on Official Statistics: Opportunities, Challenges and Risks
This morning Rob Kitchin presented a keynote talk at the New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics conference in Brussels. The presentation examined the potential impact of the unfolding data revolution – big data, open and linked data, data infrastructures, and new data analytics – on the production of official statistics and the work of national statistical institutions. The slides that accompanied the talk are below.
CFP: Technological imaginaries and the production of space
Conference of Irish Geographers 2015, Queens University Belfast, 21-24 May 2015
This session aims to think through the complex relationship between space and technology. The proliferation of smart phones and city-scale embedded devices is reshaping homes, work places and cities. Rather than focus explicitly on how technologies might autonomously and automatically produce such spaces, our focus is the broader imaginaries which pre-empt and prefigure sociotechnical systems. We are interested in submissions that explore how space is produced or performed through contested relationships between technologies, imaginaries and situated practices. This might mean, on the one hand, to approach technologies by reflecting on cultural representations or utopian visions of the future. On the other hand, imaginaries might be understood through the ways communities, social groups or initiatives think about already existing technologies. We are open to a broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches.
Contributions may respond to various topics, including but not limited to urban planning, surveillance, emergency response, energy management, sustainable transportation or everyday consumption and mobility. The following questions might be addressed:
- what kinds of urban futures are being imagined and what are the technologies mobilised for such imaginaries?
- how are technologies evoked as a solution to contemporary problems or perceived threats?
- what space-times are evoked or rearranged?
- what forms of resistance to dominant visions are being practiced or displayed?
- how are politics articulated within utopian and dystopian imaginations?
- how are the coupling of bodies, technologies and data imagined, planned and enacted?
- how is human and nonhuman agency perceived and practiced in relation to technological imaginaries?
Potential contributors are free to contact us prior to submission of their abstract. Contact email: james.white.2014@nuim.ie.
Abstracts must be submitted online at the Conference of Irish Geographers website.
Deadline: March 20, 2015.
Two 3 year postdoc posts on The Programmable City project
We’re recruiting! We are seeking two postdoctoral researchers to work on the Programmable City project to (1) unpack data assemblages, and (2) examine big data industry and smart cities.
These posts will complement the existing research team.
Post 1: Unpacking a data assemblage, including the associated technological stack
Adopting a critical data studies approach, this researcher will examine in depth, and compare and contrast, two data assemblages, mostly likely operating in the public sector. The aim is to gain a detailed conceptual and empirical understanding from a social sciences perspective of how data infrastructures are on the one hand technically assembled (through a technical stack composed of hardware, networks, software, algorithms, data, interfaces) and operated using a set of technical and social practices, and how their production and operation is socially, politically, legally and economically framed. The empirical research will consist primarily of ethnographic work within organisations, along with in-depth interviews with key actors and stakeholders.
Post 2: Big data industry and smart cities
This researcher will, on the one hand, examine in depth the development of big data industries in Dublin and Boston, examining the big data ecosystem (including big data analytics and data brokers) and its associated discursive regime, and on the other, examine how big data are being mobilised and deployed within smart city initiatives as part of big data assemblages. The aim is to gain a detailed conceptual and empirical understanding of the development and use of big data and big data analytics within the private and public sector to complement existing project work on open data, and how big data are being deployed in practice in cities and any associated consequences. The empirical research will consist primarily of in-depth interviews with key actors and stakeholders and one and two case studies of urban big data initiatives.
There will be some latitude to re-jig these projects in negotiation with the principal investigator in order to fit the interests, expertise and experience of the appointed researchers.
Full details can be found on the Maynooth University vacancies page (labelled
Post Doctoral Researcher x 2 – NIRSA).
Mark Maguire – Counter-terrorism in Airports/Cities
On February 25th 2015, Mark Maguire visited the Programmable City Project and delivered a seminar on counter-terrorist techniques that are increasingly becoming (or have become) techno-scientific processes.
The talk was extremely well received, and offers a detailed, critical and timely appraisal of current developments in counter-terrorism.
Video: ProgCity at Smart City Expo and Congress
In November 2014 members of the Programmable City team visited the Smart City Expo and Congress in Barcelona. The organisers have now posted up videos of all of the sessions on their YouTube channel. Together they make interesting viewing for anyone interested in understanding what is happening with regards to creating smart cities. Rob Kitchin and Gavin McArdle presented a paper at the Congress (below) entitled, ‘Dublin Dashboard: Open and real-time data and visualizations for citizens, government and companies’.