Tag Archives: data infrastructures

Data and the City Workshop

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The Programmable City Project is hosting a two day invite-only workshop on the relations between data and the city.  The Data and the City Workshop will take place on August 31st and September 1st 2015 and will bring together 20 invited experts in the field and the ProgCity team.  A description of the workshop and the agenda are below with links to some of the papers to be presented that are already available online:

There is a long history of governments, businesses, science and citizens producing and utilising data in order to monitor, regulate, profit from, and make sense of the urban world.  Data have traditionally been time-consuming and costly to generate, analyze and interpret, and generally provided static, often coarse, snapshots of phenomena.  Recently, however, we have entered the age of big data with data related to knowing and governing cities increasingly become a deluge; a wide, deep torrent of timely, varied, resolute, and relational data.  This has been accompanied by an opening up of state data, and to a much lesser degree business data, and the production of volunteered geographic information.  As a result, evermore aspects of everyday life — work, consumption, travel, communication, leisure — and the worlds we inhabit are being captured as data and mediated through data-driven technologies.   This data revolution has produced multiple challenges that require critical and technical attention — how best to produce, manage, analyze, and make sense of big and open data, data infrastructures and their consequences with respect to urban governance and everyday life. The workshop will examine such critical and technical issues across the five thematic areas of: critically framing data, data infrastructures and platforms, data models and the city, data analytics and the city, ethical and political issues.

 Data and the City Workshop Agenda

 31st August 2015

Session 1/Welcome

10.00-10.30

Moderator: T. Lauriault

1.1 Rob Kitchin, Introduction & Data-driven, networked urbanism

Session 2

Critically Framing Data

10.30-12.30

Moderator: T. Lauriault

2.1 Jim Thatcher & Craig Dalton – Provenance and Possibility: thoughts towards a schema for urban data

2.2 Evelyn Ruppert – Where are data citizens?

2.3 Jo Bates – Data cultures, power and the city

Session 3

Data Infrastructures & Platforms

13.30-15.30

Moderator: L. Evans

3.1 Till Straube – Situating Data Infrastructure

3.2 Martijn de Waal – Understanding the City Through Urban Data

3.3 Tracey Lauriault – Ontologizing the City, From Old School National Cartographic Infrastructure toward a Rules Based Real-World Object Oriented National Database

Session 4

Data Analytics and the City

16.00-18.00

Moderator: S-Y. Perng

4.1 Gavin McArdle & Rob Kitchin – Improving the Veracity of Open and Real-Time Urban Data

4.2 Chris Speed – Blockchain City: Spatial, Social And Cognitive Ledgers

4.3 Muki Haklay – Beyond Quantification: A Role For Citizen Science And Community Science In A Smart City

1st September 2015

Session 5

Data Models and the City

10.00-12.00

Moderator: L. Heaphy

5.1 Pouria Amirian- Service Oriented Design and Polyglot Binding for Efficient Sharing and Analysing of Data in Cities

5.2 Mike Batty – Data about Cities: Redefining Big, Recasting Small

5.3 Jo Walsh – Putting Out Data Fires; life with the OpenStreetMap DWG

Session 6

Data Issues

13.00-15.00

 Moderator: C. Coletta 

6.1 David Wood – Smart City, Surveillance City:  human flourishing in a data-driven urban world

6.2 Francisco Klauser, Till Paasche, Ola Söderström – Michel Foucault and the smart city: power dynamics inherent in contemporary governing through code

6.3 Teresa Scassa – Crime Data and Analytics: Accounting for Crime in the City

Session 7

15.30-17.00

Moderator: R. Kitchin

7.1 Discussion/Wrap-up

The Impact of the Data Revolution on Official Statistics: Opportunities, Challenges and Risks

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NTTS 2015This 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.

 

New Paper: Towards Critical Data Studies: Charting and Unpacking Data Assemblages and Their Work

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Rob Kitchin and Tracey Lauriault have just published the second Programmable City Working Paper – Towards Critical Data Studies: Charting and Unpacking Data Assemblages and Their Work. It is a pre-print of a chapter written for the book, Geoweb and Big Data, edited by Joe Eckert, Andy Shears and Jim Thatcher, to be published by University of Nebraska Press.

Abstract
The growth of big data and the development of digital data infrastructures raises numerous questions about the nature of data, how they are being produced, organized, analyzed and employed, and how best to make sense of them and the work they do. Critical data studies endeavours to answer such questions. This paper sets out a vision for critical data studies, building on the initial provocations of Dalton and Thatcher (2014). It is divided into three sections. The first details the recent step change in the production and employment of data and how data and databases are being reconceptualised. The second forwards the notion of a data assemblage that encompasses all of the technological, political, social and economic apparatuses and elements that constitutes and frames the generation, circulation and deployment of data. Drawing on the ideas of Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking it is posited that one way to enact critical data studies is to chart and unpack data assemblages. The third starts to unpack some the ways that data assemblages do work in the world with respect to dataveillance and the erosion of privacy, profiling and social sorting, anticipatory governance, and secondary uses and control creep. The paper concludes by arguing for greater conceptual work and empirical research to underpin and flesh out critical data studies.

Key words
big data, critical data studies, data assemblages, data infrastructures, civil liberties

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