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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Critical Data Studies has come of age as a vibrant, interdisciplinary field of study. Taking data as its primary analytical focus, the field theorises the nature of data; examines how data are produced, managed, governed and shared; investigates how they are used to make sense of the world and to perform practical action; and explores whose agenda data-driven systems serve.
This book is the first comprehensive A-Z guide to the concepts and methods of Critical Data Studies, providing succinct definitions and descriptions of over 400 key terms, along with suggested further reading. The book enables readers to quickly navigate and improve their comprehension of the field, while also acting as a guide for discovering ideas and methods that will be of value in their own studies.
Critical Data Studies is essential reading for students and scholars from across the sciences, social sciences and humanities, as well as those who work with data professionally who want to extend and enrich their conceptual and practical understanding of data and their use.
This will be available as an Open Access book.
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Seitenzahl: 454
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
How to use this book
A–Z of Critical Data Studies
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Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
How to use this book
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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Critical Data Studies
An A to Z Guide to Concepts and Methods
Rob Kitchin
polity
Copyright © Rob Kitchin 2025
The right of Rob Kitchin to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is also available in an Open Access edition, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6654-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024942683
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
The writing of this book was conducted as part of the ‘Data Stories: Telling Stories About and With Planning and Property Data’ project, funded by a European Research Council grant (101052998). The text draws on a wide, interdisciplinary literature, as well as the various books (e.g., The Data Revolution, Data Lives, Researching Digital Life) and the numerous papers I have (co)written relating to data. With respect to my own sources, I have rewritten any material included. The open access publication of the book has been funded by the European Research Council and Maynooth University Library. Many thanks to Hugh Murphy, the Deputy University Librarian, for his support. I am grateful for members of the Data Stories project research team – Juliette Davret, Oliver Dawkins, Danielle Hynes, Carla Maria Kayanan and Sam Mutter – as well as an anonymous reviewer for reading and providing feedback on the initial draft manuscript. Many thanks to Mary Savigar, Stephanie Homer and Neil de Cort at Polity Books for commissioning the book and shepherding it through review and publication, and to Tim Clark for copyediting the manuscript. I am grateful to Laurie Frick for providing permission to use her data art ‘Earth’ from the Imagined Time series (2009) for the book cover. To view more of her work visit www.lauriefrick.com and @lauriefrick on Instagram.
Introduction
Data are incredibly important in today’s contemporary world. They form the basis for scientific progress, constitute the evidence for social policy and business decisions, underpin the workings of management and governance, and have become a major economic asset, with data markets and data services forming a significant component of the world’s economy. Yet, until recently, data received relatively little scrutiny. Traditionally, data have been treated as neutral, unproblematic measures that form the building blocks for information and knowledge or form the input for computation. While data were critical for answering scientific questions and essential for digital systems to work, attention was focused on what the data were being used for, and rarely the data themselves. If data were the focus of attention, it was usually in relation to data quality, data access or some technical aspect of their production, management, and use. This started to change two decades ago. Increasing datafication, the rise of big data and open data, and the proliferation of data infrastructures and data-driven systems and their mediation of all aspects of everyday life, led to data becoming the central focus of analysis for scholars across a number of disciplines (e.g., Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, Geography, Anthropology, Philosophy, Library and Archive Studies, and Data Science). Importantly, these studies did not treat data in a commonsensical way, but rather sought to critically interrogate their nature and the politics, praxes, and implications of their production and use.
In 2014, these studies were identified as a new field of academic enquiry and labelled as Critical Data Studies (CDS) (Dalton and Thatcher, 2014). CDS is an umbrella term to describe the collection of scholars and their work that take data as their primary research object (Iliadis and Russo, 2016; Richterich, 2018; Hepp et al., 2022; Kitchin, 2022). CDS theorises the nature of data, how they are produced and shared, the institutional and infrastructural apparatus assembled to manage and govern the data lifecycle, how data are used to make sense of the world and to perform practical action, and examines whose agenda data and data-driven systems serve. CDS never takes data and their use at face value, but actively reflects on and questions data forms, processes, and purposes, and considers what is at stake when data are produced and deployed to create knowledge, manage society, derive business value, and perform numerous other tasks.
Philosophically, CDS is rooted in a number of schools of thought that sit under the umbrella of critical social theory, such as feminism, poststructuralism, structuralism, and critical realism. These ways of thinking actively question the epistemology and methodology of the scientific method and centre questions of politics and power in the production of knowledge, and in understanding how social and technical processes work in practice to create the world in which we live. Methodologically, CDS most often uses qualitative methods to examine the politics and praxes of data work, but it also uses quantitative methods, though it does so using a post-positivist framing, such as those adopted within feminist data science, critical GIS or radical statistics. The aim is to produce reflexive and situated knowledges about and with data.
CDS has expanded rapidly since being named as a new field. Thousands of papers and dozens of books that take data as their core focus have now been published across disciplines. A new journal, Big Data & Society was founded in 2014, which acts as a key site of dissemination, and there are regularly organised international conferences such as Data Power and Data Justice, along with dozens of other singular, themed conferences and workshops. Numerous concepts have been developed to make sense of the nature of data and the contemporary data-driven world, and a diverse set of methods have been created and utilised. Intellectually, through its unique constellation of new, borrowed and adapted concepts and methods, and institutionally, through its academic endeavours, CDS has come of age as a vibrant, interdisciplinary field.
The principal aims of this book are threefold. First, to produce a comprehensive (but not exhaustive) mapping of the conceptual and methodological terrain of CDS. To that end, the book identifies the present state-of-play, providing succinct definitions and descriptions of 413 key terms, along with suggested further reading. Second, to provide a pedagogic resource that enables students and researchers to look up terms that might be used in the classroom or in publications but in a way shorn of a detailed explanation of their meaning. The entries are designed to quickly orientate and improve the reader’s comprehension of a term and to point to sources that provide more information. Third, the book acts as a guide for discovering ideas, concepts, and methods that might be of value for students and researchers in their own studies and analysis. By browsing or following the trail of cross-references, the reader is introduced to new ways to think about and approach data-related phenomena and issues.
Many of the concepts discussed in the book are still in their infancy, and the methods in an experimental phase: they are far from being fully developed and grounded on a strong empirical basis. In part then, a number of concepts that hold promise for sense-making, but require further theoretical and empirical exploration and explication, are identified. As such, the book hints at a potential roadmap for CDS research for the next decade and beyond. No doubt, some of the concepts will prove to be stickier than others, becoming a key means through which to understand data and their uses, and adopted as a fundamental part of the CDS lexicon, whereas others will fail to gain traction and be discarded and replaced with new terms or ideas. Many of the concepts and methods detailed have a wider usage across other fields and disciplines and their inclusion reveals how interdisciplinary and porous CDS is conceptually and methodologically; here, they are discussed specifically in relation to their definition and use within CDS.
Hopefully the book provides a useful guide to how data and our present data-driven world are being made sense of and researched, and the entries will enrich your knowledge, inform your own data practices, and aid your studies.
References
Dalton, C. and Thatcher, J. (2014) ‘What does a critical data studies look like and why do we care?’, Society & Space blog, 19 May, www.societyandspace.org/articles/what-does-acritical-datastudies-look-like-and-why-do-we-care
Hepp, A., Jarke, J. and Kramp, L. (2022) ‘New perspectives in Critical Data Studies: The ambivalences of data power – An introduction’, in Hepp, A., Jarke, J. and Kramp, L. (eds), New Perspectives in Critical Data Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 1–23.
Iliadis, A. and Russo, F. (2016) ‘Critical data studies: An introduction’, Big Data & Society, 3(2): 1–7.
Kitchin, R. (2022) The Data Revolution: A Critical Approach to Big Data, Open Data, and Data Infrastructures. Second edition. Sage, London.
Richterich, A. (2018) The Big Data Agenda: Data Ethics and Critical Data Studies. University of Westminster Press, London.
How to use this book
Rather than consisting of a narrative overview of Critical Data Studies (CDS), with the discussion organised in a set of related chapters, this book adopts a dictionary-style format and is structured alphabetically as 413 separate entries. Each entry provides a definition and description of a concept or method that is employed within CDS, along with cross-references to other entries (marked in italics) that detail related information. Following the established practice for dictionary-style entries, the source material used is not extensively cited. Instead, readers are pointed to key reference texts that will expand their comprehension of the term and its focus. Further reading is only suggested for entries where there is active debate and/or a much more extensive literature related to the issue or topic. Beyond the 413 full entries, a number of the headwords simply cross-reference to other synonymous terms; they have been included as a headword as they are common terms that a reader might search for.
It is not expected that a reader will work their way through the book from A to Z. Rather, the reader can dip in-and-out of the text, searching for specific terms as required, or they can browse to discover ideas, concepts, methods, issues, and phenomena they might not otherwise encounter. Whether dipping in-and-out or browsing, the cross-referencing in each entry can be followed, enabling the reader to create their own path through the material. Meandering along a trail of cross-references allows related additional insights to be gained and facilitates the widening and deepening of the reader’s knowledge of the field. A small number of the cross-references do not exactly match the target headword; for example, aggregated might be italicised to point to aggregation or preserve to point to preservation. This has been done to avoid constructing convoluted sentences to ensure that the exact headword is used; hopefully, the headwords that these non-exact cross-references point to are obvious. Another mode of navigation is to use the index to find all entries that discuss particular terms.
