New paper: Small data, data infrastructures and big data

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The first Programmable City Working Paper has been published on SSRN, written by Rob Kitchin and Tracey P. Lauriault, and concerns the relationship between small and big data, the scaling-up of small data into data infrastructures, and how to conceptualize and make sense of such infrastructures.

Small data, data infrastructures and big data

Abstract
The production of academic knowledge has progressed for the past few centuries using small data studies characterized by sampled data generated to answer specific questions.  It is a strategy that has been remarkably successful, enabling the sciences, social sciences and humanities to advance in leaps and bounds.  This approach is presently being challenged by the development of big data.  Small data studies will, however, continue to be important in the future because of their utility in answering targeted queries.  Nevertheless, small data are being made more big data-like through the development of new data infrastructures that pool, scale and link small data in order to create larger datasets, encourage sharing and re-use, and open them up to combination with big data and analysis using big data analytics.  This paper examines the logic and value of small data studies, their relationship to emerging big data and data science, and the implications of scaling small data into data infrastructures, with a focus on spatial data examples.  The final section provides a framework for conceptualizing and making sense of data and data infrastructures.

Key words: big data, small data, data infrastructures, data politics, spatial data infrastructures, cyber-infrastructures, epistemology

Download the paper

Seminar: Coding Play/Crafting Code in the City

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Happy new year and welcome back!

We will be having our first seminar in the new year (2nd in the seminar series). This time, we have invited Andrea Magnorsky (Organisor and Co-founder of GameCraft and BatCat Games) and Aphra Kerr (Sociology, NUI Maynooth) to give talks on “Coding Play/Crafting Code in the City“. Looking forward to seeing you here!

Time: 16:00 – 18:00, Wednesday, 15 January

Venue: Boardroom, 2nd Floor, John Hume Building, North Campus, NUI Maynooth

Speaker bios:

Andrea Magnorsky is Senior software developer with many years of experience building a variety of products, including CRM, eCommerce, Financial, and Video Games. She is an advocate of test-driven development, and object-oriented design principles, as well as a part time lecturer on Games Programming. She is organisor and Co-founder of GameCraft Foundation which organises weekend game jams both in Ireland and internationally and co-founder of BatCat Games. BatCat Games are currently working on Honorbound, a 2D, side-scrolling beat ‘em up game focused on combat in a feudal Japanese setting. Their first game P-3 Biotic is a space shooter available on PC from GetIrishGames.ie.

Aphra Kerr is senior Lecturer and researcher in social studies of technology and media. She also teaches courses on games and play, and culture and everyday life. She has extensive research experience on the production, use and regulation of digital media, especially digital games, SNS (social networking sites) and animation, as well as the changing nature of broadcasting in the digital age. Her current research projects include ‘Cultural Production in the Digital Age’ (NSF funded network) and she is currently writing ‘Global games and transnational work’ (book under contract). For the past ten years she has been involved in running gamedevelopers.ie, a community voluntary website for the games industry in Ireland.

ProgCitySeminar2-poster-aphra kerr

Code/Space book reviews

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Code spaceRob Kitchin and Martin Dodge’s book ‘Code/Space’, published by MIT Press, is the focus of a book review round-table in the journal Dialogues in Human Geography.  The reviews are by Paul Adams, Aharon Kellerman, Sam Kinsley and Mark Wilson.  The authors then respond and reflect on the book in a short piece, ‘Code/space and the nature, production and enrolment of software‘.

Other reviews of the book include:

  • Taylor Shelton’s review in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(1): 247-49.
  • Mike Batty’s review in Computational Culture, 1 December 2011.
  • Gwilym Eades’s review in Cartographica, 47(2): 140-1.
  • Francis Harvey’s review in IJGIS, March 2012.
  • Matthew Wilson’s review in Cultural Geographies, 19(3): 418-19.
  • Matthew Zook’s review in Regional Studies, 46(8): 1105-06.
  • Peter Adey’s review in the Journal of Transport Geography, 26: 177-76.

Big data and human geography forum

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A forum on big data and human geography has just been published in Dialogues in Human Geography 3(3), November 2013.  It includes a paper by Rob Kitchin on the opportunities, challenges and risks of big data to geographic scholarship.  Here’s a full list of contributions:

Mark Graham and Taylor Shelton: Geography and the future of big data, big data and the future of geography, pp. 255-261,

Rob Kitchin: Big data and human geography: Opportunities, challenges and risks, pp. 262-267

Evelyn Ruppert: Rethinking empirical social sciences, pp. 268-273

Michael Batty: Big data, smart cities and city planning, pp. 274-279

Michael F Goodchild: The quality of big (geo)data, pp. 280-284

Sean P Gorman: The danger of a big data episteme and the need to evolve geographic information systems, pp. 285-291

Sandra González-Bailón: Big data and the fabric of human geography, pp. 292-296

Trevor J Barnes: Big data, little history, pp. 297-302

Webinar: Data derived from Traditional Knowledge and Cybercartography

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On Wednesday, 11th of December, Tracey P. Lauriault, a post doctoral researcher on the Programmable City Project led a webinar with the Canadian Federal Government GeoConnections program on the topic of legal issues with traditional knowledge and cybercartography in the Canada’s North.

The webinar discussed the results of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Funded Partnership Development Grant entitled Mapping the Legal and Policy Boundaries of Digital Cartography led by Dr. R. Fraser Taylor of the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre (GCRC), Carleton University, and Dr. Teresa Scassa of the Faculty of Law, Centre of Law, Technology and Culture (CLTS) at the University of Ottawa, including the Canadian Internet Public Policy Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) and GeoConnections.

The issues presented were:

· Traditional Knowledge (TK) and cybercartography;
· The complexities of Intellectual Property rights and TK;
· Challenges and possible solutions with regard to Western law and TK;
· The role of collaborative relationships in cybercartography in the North.

While this work was not part of the Programmable City Project, it does demonstrate the nuanced issues related to the production of data, in this case the uneasy relationship between the protection of traditional knowledge and western concepts of law, especially intellectual property law which protects creative works produced by individuals while traditional knowledge grounded in communities that are collectively owned cannot benefit from these protections.

A French version of the Webinar will be presented by Lauriault on Friday, Dec. 13.